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Lockheed To Furlough 3,000 On Monday, Layoffs Also Kicking In
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Lockheed employees are the latest casualty in the government shutdown, with the defense contractor announcing Friday it plans to furlough 3,000 workers on Monday. But what they didn't mention is they are laying off workers too, says a Lockheed source on the hush-hush. Lockheed, of course, isn't the only defense contractor taking it on the chin. Other contractors include United Technologies, which has furloughed 2,000, and BAE Systems which cut 1,000."
They want to make you think that if you don't give them what they want then you'll suffer for it. Legal extortion from the ring masters.
Defense spending needs to be reduced, but this bullshit isn't the way to do it. If anything these shenanigans are going to end up costing the American taxpayer more.
Your (dipshit) Congress in action.
Looking for those "qualified Americans"that you can't find?!
Well, heeerrrre they are!
And they have have been working on much more advanced technology than your dipshit advertising/push/ïnterests/ or whatever the buzz word is for basically saying "we're advertizing shit"; which is what everything I have seen in the Valley is selling.
These guys can do everything you want.
But here is the catch - they have been paid well, they are Americans, and they know their worth.
So what's it gonna be?!
Didn't think so. You are all a bunch of lying hypocrites. Fuck You!
I hope we get Eisenhower era level of income taxes - you sacks of shit.
Fire one million.
ObamaCare is indeed "the law of the land," as its supporters keep saying, and the Supreme Court has upheld its Constitutionality.
Actually, the Supreme Court noted that two sections, the Individual Mandate and the Medicaid expansion that burdened states were unconstitutional. They upheld the former only. The latter was severed from the law despite the Supreme Court having no constitutional authority to do so (they've done this before, the precedent is some time ago).
(I got layed off today. There my Hope and Change right up my ass.)
Shortly for me. But I was close to end of season anyway. I'm dubious that the government shut down will fix anything, but if it does curb the harm of Obamacare, it will be worth losing my job.
News for nerds? I don't think so. What's happened to slashdot lately? All kinds of political (and biased) posts.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
Lockheed gets to lay off a bunch of employees while blaming the government even though the government shutdown doesn't actually affect them. That's brilliant PR. Now the employees will be angry at the government for shutting down instead of Lockheed executives laying off thousands of people in order to pad their own back pockets.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
I knew a guy who had worked at Lockheed. He gave me a sample of Lockheed humor. He said, "Lockheed working gloves" and put his hands in his pockets. Then he said "Lockheed salute" and shrugged his shoulders. I think he had a few other examples but those are the only ones I remember. I think I read somewhere that Michael Milken, the junk bond guy, liked Lockheed because no matter what they did, the Gov't was sure to bail them out.
Bravo for laying this all out so clearly, and my heartfelt condolences for being laid off. I would add one thing: that Congress, like any parliament or legislature, is designed to be inefficient. A king or dictator is much faster at implementing new policies; a bicameral legislature is supposed to fight itself and the magistrates who execute the law. Putting the power of the purse into the hands of the lower, larger, rabble-aligned and both frequently and directly elected (remember, the Senate was not originally) chamber was the Founder's way of ensuring that fights like this would happen and keep the government from running efficiently. The House especially was intended to check the administration; that's why they control the money. Now, if only the Senate would do its job and check the military...
You are correct but you're still an idiot. Now that you are unemployed and have no healthcare and potentially have pre-existing conditions, you better hope and pray for a change in attitude from the remainder of the House majority. A few days of slow business didn't get you layed off - it was going to happen anyways, this just happened to be a convenient time to do so.
So where does that leave you? COBRA for a few months if you're lucky under existing law and then you get to be a single person (or family) negotiating with a multinational insurance corporation. Have you done that before? If not I'll tell you a trick, lube up real good before you go begging, cause you're going to need it.
OTOH come Jan 1st, you'll get to join up with millions of others just like you and with your combined negotiating power you will be able to get a much much better deal, better in fact than any Corporate plan. Better because you will be paying less than what you plus the Corp would pay (yes they pay for some percentage of the policy, the individual typically pays less than 50%, depending on the size of the group).
Don't be an idiot. Realize that economies of scale are real and that group plans are better than individual plans, regardless of who manages the group enrollment policy.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
That was an awful lot of words built up on one fundamental, crippling flaw.
The House has the right to initiate budgets, as you say. But those budgets must be agreed to by the Senate and (barring a 2/3rd majority) the President.
If your stance is that the Senate and President must accept whatever the House gives them, then why do we even have a Senate or Executive?
Every cloud has its silver lining. This is an opportunity, not that anyone's brave or smart enough to take it. The last time the British government had this sort of shut down was 1975. The Queen fired parliament. It never happened again. Take your chance now to send a message that doing their job of keeping the government running is more important than the partisan ideological bullshit. Fire congress. Sure, you'll just get some other batch of corrupt ass-hats, but you won't regret having the new batch at least knowing there will be some accountability if they fuck shit up again.
The US political system is deliberately designed to create gridlock. The philosophy is that the less government can do, the better. Obviously nothing is idiot proof. Yelling about how one side is evil and the other good, while the other side takes the same tone is just part of the plan. Eventually though someone involved is supposed to be mature enough to ensure the essential stuff happens.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I am sure there are some excellent rebuttals that will be coming your way... many on a technical/procedural level that I will not attempt. I will however, give you an example that shows the absurdity of this line of thinking.
When/if Democrats/Libertarians get in power of the House, you have basically stated that they are allowed to "defund" any part of the government they wish. Don't like drone strikes, just defund it. Don't like the whole damn military, just defund it. Don't like national parks, just defund it. Don't like border patrol, just defund it. Don't like the FBI/CIA/NASA/etc., just defund it. Don't like a single program within any of those agencies, just defund it.
You have basically created an end-around to the entire democratic process and made the House the most powerful group of people in the country. Screw the Senate, the Executive branch, the Judicial branch and the People... it's all up to the House to decide what is law; after all if they don't like, just defund it.
Where is the check of power on the House?
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
He's PROBABLY right as it gets when it comes to lunacy like this.
* Democrats or Republicans, most of the USA general public understand by now, that they're more-or-less the SAME (run by lobbyist big money)... that's all I have to say about it.
(Sometimes, we as "the people" have to set examples with what little power we have available, & that's really ONLY votes - IF you can trust that, that is).
APK
P.S.=> He even corrected his mistake, but the point's still there... apk
And I was just about to start testing my control system for my democrat-seeking missile system! Oh well, guess I'll just have to go be a male stripper now. If the money's good enough, I might just keep doing that once the government gets rolling again. I guess no one really wanted this democrat-seeking missile system anyway!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
you have a right to fight for your passions
but if your passion is to defund badly needed healthcare reform, you're wrong
and you will lose
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You just lost your job thanks to a bunch of tea party freaks and you still support them! How much of a fucking retard can you be? You support the tea party but work for the government in a non-essential capacity! You fucking idiot! Tell me who is in favor of "reduced government"? Looks like you just got reduced, bitch. Have fun being unemployed you fucking loser.
Looks like you're wrong. (I'm not shocked.)
62-year milestone: Fuel tops list of U.S. exports
2011 (through October)
1. Fuel: $73.4 billion.
2. Aircraft: $70.8 billion.
3. Motor vehicles: $39.6 billion.
4. Vacuum tubes: $37.1 billion.
5. Telecommunications equipment: $33.2 billion.
But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution....
Except when I disagree with how they are exercising their powers, then they are shutting down the government.
Good, their work is best done by private contractors anyway.
Private entities rarely, if at all, focus a majority of their efforts into pure research, unlike the national labs. Funding pure research, which is one of the few actions that the US Government at least does halfway correctly, is ultimately essential if we are to progress the state of the art and thus create new fields and products that are ripe for commercialization.
The Senate and the veto power of the President are the checks on the House's ability to defund programs. They can refuse to pass or can veto budgets that the House passes. That's exactly what's happening. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. The Constitution is not a blueprint for efficiency; it's a set of rules for political warfare designed to keep the politicians at each others' throats so that they're less able to choke the people instead. The government works as intended when the House, Senate, President, and Supreme Court are all trying to undermine each other and build their own power, because the people who designed the government didn't trust human nature to provide in perpetuity the kind of leaders who would observe moderation and remain within the bounds set upon them. The Founders knew that power attracts the ambitious, and that the only way to check ambition was to pit the ambitious against one another.
The Democrats (except for the fringe left) aren't going to try to defund the NSA or drones (Obama arguably makes too much use of both to give up either willingly), but one could imagine the libertarians (the fringe more-or-less right) doing so if they ever went mainstream, and that would be in accord with the system of checks and balances. The Senate and the President could try to stop them, and eventually the administration shuts down unless a compromise is reached. This weakens all parties involved and shows the people that their leaders are more interested in ambition than service, and that large swaths of the government are truly nonessential. The people, outraged at their leaders' incompetence and the waste of money that goes into nonessential functions, should then rabidly demand more efficient service for less tax money; that's the cue to kick out the incumbents. Once upon a time that happened, but the people have lost their ambition.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is keeping track and can report to congress about the damage they are doing. Oh.. Wait... http://www.bls.gov/
Yeah, lets get rid of non-essential services like the FDA so we can have mass poisoning of baby food like in China! Let freedom ring, brother!
Oakridge National Laboratory is also laying off some of their employees as well. By laying off I don't mean temporarily kicking them to the curb until the shutdown is done and over with but actually telling them to find another job. I've heard that NASA is doing the same thing but I can't confirm that one.
the conspiracy nuts are going to go nuts over that the shutdown is looking more and more like a bankruptcy than just squibbling over some political issues.
credit rating should suffer.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It's funny you put that at the top because you just fucking demonstrated it. Everyone's at fault, but there is one group holding government hostage to defund something that's not even part of the spending bill. ACA is already funded, and the house is trying to undo that funding at the threat of shutting down the government.
Your post was nothing but a bunch of horseshit partisan politics and I hope you enjoy your layoff. You have been clearly sucking on the government tit. You are exactly the kind of government spending we need to cut.
OP is a republican operative cut and pasting GOP talking points, just google a few lines of his post...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/04/who_shut_down_the_government_120206.html
But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution.
That's not even close to the point of division of powers. The point is to keep a check on one branch's overall power. The president can't execute a law that was found unconstitutional by the supreme court even though he's the "executor", and really he shouldn't be able to just "ignore" implementations of a law either. Likewise, the legislature, after passing a law, can't (or shouldn't) be able to sabotage a law surreptitiously. The right thing to do would be to pass a new law repealing obamacare (oh how they've tried) in accordance with the *spirit* of the constitution. What you're implying is that they can just say "well we have to approve the funding so we're going to exploit that to compensate for our true lack of power in this case".
It's a shame you posted anonymously, because this is one of the clearest posts on the article. You are absolutely correct that the republican controlled house is operating fully within the extent of the law. Nonetheless, the republicans are still using ethically and morally questionable tactics to get what they want. They are no better than the Democrats who are unwilling to play ball.
You should read up on game theory. It might change your perspective. Particularly Nash equilibrium.
95 Americans have won Nobel Prizes in Medicine. That's about half of all such prizes awarded over the entire planet.
It seems to me that the chief US export is life.
An interesting tidbit - Obamacare is apparently going forward (check Google news if you don't believe me.)
How could this be since the money is still being held up, as the house has refused to fund it?
Well the answer is that the stuff in the budget that the House approves isn't all the money that the government is authorized to spend. Some things are funded in multiyear chunks for example and can therefore continue to utilize the money allocated to them while the House/Senate/Pres discuss this year's budget.
Obama care is one of these. The ask from the House was not to remove funding for Obama care from the budget they were voting on. That would have been one thing. The House was/is holding the budget hostage against the president/senate agreeing to delay implementation of Obama care by 12 months.
That to me is a whole different thing then if the money for Obama care was in the stack that the house was approving, and they said, "we don't approve this piece over here". Obamacare got funded when the original vote passed the House. What the house is doing is the legislative equivalent of saying "Dat's a nice goverment you have over there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it.... mehaps if you delay Obamacare we could provide some protection to ensure nothing unfortunate happens to it."
And I'm very sorry you got laid off today. That sucks rocks.
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives
It says no such thing. You're confusing it with raising revenue. From Article I, Section 7:
All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.
But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion.
As does the senate, and least in a negative sense, the president via his veto power. What's your point?
You cannot blame other people for not giving you everything you want.
So the House cannot blame other people for passing Obamacare. I agree.
we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to
No, we know that two factions are controlling the situation. All the House has to do is pass a budget that funds Obamacare.
unless the Republicans get their side of the story out
Cry me a river. Those poor Republicans and their victim complex - they're so misunderstood! What's the most popular news channel in America? Oh, that's right, Fox News. What a shame that they won't present the Republican side of the story.
But the budget isn't the time to fight things. The way to get a law changed isn't to say "Let's stop paying for the law!" but rather to change the law. The ACA can be repealed, just as it was introduced. That is the right way. However there isn't the votes for that.
What's worse is that there IS the votes to pass the budget in a straight up and down vote but the leadership won't let it happen. That's why people are, rightly, calling "taking hostage". The unmodified budget could and should pass a vote, but they won't let it go to vote because they are mad. A minority trying to force things on a majority.
I also can 100% support the president in saying "No we won't make concessions," because it is in the same vein as "Never negotiate with terrorists." If they can get away with whatever they want just by threatening a shutdown, then that'll happen every single time.They continue to force more and more radical agendas saying "Do this or we shut things down!" No, no negotiation when you play hostage with the budget. Do it right or fuck off.
At least not easily. Unlike a parliamentary system, there's no dissolution option. The vote happens once every 2 years for 1/3rd of the house. There is no clause to speed that up. Some individual states could execute a recall or other sort of ousting on their representatives but it depends on the state law and would require the voters to organize it.
So part of congress can get fired in 2014, and very well may, but not before then, at least not easily. The executive can't dissolve congress.
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
A bill won't get to a House vote if Speaker Boehner doesn't allow it. Despite majority support for such a measure, Boehner unilaterally refuses to put a clean CR to an up-or-down vote.
Whether ObamaCare is good, bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion.
Where does "right of the House" end and "prerogative of the Speaker" begin?
Vacuum Tubes ? Really ? Aside from guitar / bass amplifiers and hi end stereo equipment who uses vacuum tubes ? And $37.1 billion ? Who knew
Another day closer to redwood heaven
Well then, if you think human life is valuable you should be thankful that the US helped to defend the world from the real monsters. The US and its allies didn't defend themselves empty handed.
The Black Book of Communism - The review from American Enterprise.
The Soviet Story - trailer (You should probably watch the entire thing some day.)
A Portrait of Stalin: Secret Police
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Now that you are unemployed and have no healthcare
If the GP was truly "laid off", then he might not have any company-provided health care.
OTOH, if he was "furloughed" (as I and the majority who are no longer working because of the shutdown were), then he still has health care.
The exchanged opened a few days ago, October 1, not January 1 of next year.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
No, the supreme court found the Individual Mandate constitutional. They also found the Medicaid expansion constitutional, what they found unconstitutional was the part that penalized states who didn't implement it. That was the part stripped. Which is why some states chose not to implement it, even though the federal government was paying for it.
Funny thing about the supreme court- they may have no authority to cancel part of a law, but they also have no authority to say a law is constitutional or not. They took that authority onto themselves, as part of Marbury v Madison. If they hadn't done so, there would be no power capable of determining that and Congress would be able to pass and the president enforce any law, Constitutional or not (for a great example, see the Alien and Sedition acts of the early 1800s). The right to cancel part of a law is pretty much necessary to do that job- if a bill has a tiny portion that's illegal, it's much closer to what Congress wanted to cancel part of it than all of it. If Congress then wants to tweak or get rid of the law in response they have that power. Two flaws in the Constitution that we've patched without official amendment.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
There actually are ways to try and get around Boehner. See http://blogs.rollcall.com/218/breaking-democrats-to-discharge-gop-bill-to-end-shutdown/?pos=ebn
It's going to require about 20 republicans to break off the horde, but that's actually a possibility at this time.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Aside from guitar / bass amplifiers and hi end stereo equipment who uses vacuum tubes ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavity_magnetron
You're welcome.
"Since we cannot read minds, we cannot say who -- if anybody -- 'wants to shut down the government.' But we do know who had the option to keep the government running and chose not to. The money voted by the House of Representatives covered everything that the government does, except for ObamaCare."
No need to read minds, just read a newspaper like the conservative Washington Examiner from July when they were pushing for it as a GOP tactic, headline:
"Republicans are willing to shut down government to stop fraudulent Obamacare subsidies".
http://washingtonexaminer.com/morning-examiner-republicans-are-willing-to-shut-down-government-to-stop-fraudulent-obamacare-subsidies/article/2533356
Acting like there's some question of who's to blame is ridiculous. In addition, we know that there are votes in the House to pass a full-funding bill right now but the GOP leadership won't allow the vote to occur. (See "discharge petition" in the House below):
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/05/us-usa-fiscal-idUSBRE98N11220131005
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Ah yes, the both sides do it argument. How quaint. There is only one party here that is using questionable tactics. The democrats are correct to refuse to play this game. Do you really want to set a precedent where whoever is in charge of the house can defund anything they want by holding the economy and government hostage? They holding the value of the dollar hostage. It might be that outsiders might decide they want a more stable currency than the U.S. dollar. Then we will be up shit creek. Obama has been bending backwards trying to appease these clowns. They only are trying it again because they thought it worked last time. Now they are backed in a corner because they thought the democrats would cave.
for what it's worth, a large part of what our defense industry does is pry money out of the hands of the super wealthy and spread it around the economy.
The decision to pry money from the super wealthy, and the decision of what to spend that money on are two disjoint decisions. For instance, we could still tax the rich, and then instead of spending a billion dollars on a single B-2 bomber, we could spend $11,000 each to improve every single one of the 88,000 elementary schools in America. Which of those two expenditures would be more likely to improve the long term strength and security of our country?
bwaaaahahahahah!
First, China is hardly a socialist country. They've been embracing significant capitalistic practices for over a decade now. You can tell, because of all the rich chinese factory owners.
You buy from people that poison you ALL THE TIME. People shop at WalMart, despite the evils they do. I bet all of your clothing is made in China right now. I bet the car you drove to work was probably chinese made. If it was assembled here, the PARTS surely were made in China. And every time you do so, you KILL American manufacturing, the American wage, the American worker..... Did you eat fast food recently? The meat's from South America, where the rain forest is being slashed to grow cows for McDonalds. Did you bike to work? No? You drove? You probably used Middle Eastern oil to do it. Your house is probably heated with natural gas(fracking) or electricity(generated with nuke, natural gas, or coal burning).
Take your libertarian pipe dream somewhere else. People poison themselves all the time, and they LOVE IT. Where they DON'T love it, they're probably stuck in a monopoly or the companies are in collusion to avoid competition. How much do you REALLY love your cable company? You're free to leave.... Oh wait, you only have maybe one other choice, if you're lucky.
Yeah. go take more economics classes. Your econ101 mindset isn't going to cut it in the real world. The real world is full of collusion, monopolies, outsourcing, trade practices, corruption, etc. And there's not a DAMN THING you can do about it by yourself, and the people next to you are too comfortable or brainwashed to care.
It's too bad about all the people getting laid off, but these companies have exported too much "defense equipment" used to "defend freedom and democracy" in the Middle East already. The American invasion machine must shut down.
Signature intentionally left blank.
any policy purchased on the exchanges don't take affect until January 1.
--- If it's worth doing, it's worth doing in Perl!
This just goes to show you that such organizations are actually governmental.
2011 (through October)
1. Fuel: $73.4 billion.
2. Aircraft: $70.8 billion.
3. Motor vehicles: $39.6 billion.
4. Vacuum tubes: $37.1 billion.
5. Telecommunications equipment: $33.2 billion.
Does "Fuel" include re-exports? With US dollars being the de-facto currency for oil exchange, there's an awful lot of oil that's sold by US companies that never even touched US soil.
And vacuum tubes ? In 2011?
Aren't we ready for transistors soon?
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
Except that Obamacare is already fully funded and isn't subject to yearly budgetary allocations, since there is no money that is given to it on a yearly basis by the government. This is why you see that the exchanges opened up to people on October 1st, even though the rest of the government shutdown, because it is already fully funded separately, and thus not subject to the whims of the House, excepting for the complete overturning/modification of it via a new law that needs to get past the House, the Senate, and a possible Presidential veto, which the last 48 times the House attempted to do so have failed...
Perhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt, creating a danger of default. Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.
Even if the debt ceiling is not lifted, that only means that government is not allowed to run up new debt. But that does not mean that it is unable to pay the interest on existing debt.
Really? Better check your "facts" on that. Social Security will have a bill of $12 billion due on the 10/23, and interest on bonds of $6 billion on 10/31. Both of those exceed the daily tax income, which means the government will not have enough in the bank on that day to pay the bill due that day, which means they default....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
So who pays for the money that the federal government is handing out? Nothing is "free" but as with most propaganda we are hearing, you refuse to discuss who is actually paying the bills for welfare (and yes, free health care counts as welfare).
I agree with you pointing out that the lay-off was just convenient, but the rest is the same lines of crap we keep hearing on TV media which are based on lies.
Deregulation is what started to screw up the insurance industry, and the proper fix should have been to re-implement regulation and not have a Government take over. The same can be said with Banking, and utilities.
All the money that was printed and handed out to people by the Government has not helped the economy, it has put us on the path to fascism/authoritarian Government. Repeating the party propaganda won't change that, it will only help facilitate a delusion that we are still a Constitutional Republic.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Perhaps the biggest of the big lies is that the government will not be able to pay what it owes on the national debt, creating a danger of default. Tax money keeps coming into the Treasury during the shutdown, and it vastly exceeds the interest that has to be paid on the national debt.
I'm not a bankruptcy lawyer, so I don't know whether creditors would consider a country to be in default if it paid interest on its loans, but reneged on promises to its citizens for things like Medicare and Social Security.
What I do know, is that if the American government kept paying Chairman Mao his usury, while cutting off Grandma's health care, then that government would be finished. Putting rich commies ahead of poor seniors is about the surest form of political suicide I can imagine.
The Senate passed it's own budget as well. Obviously the two were different and they were supposed to sit down and work out the differences. Boner refused to appoint anyone to the committee to do this - 18 times over something like 7 months. He forced this train wreck to occur and if he were to ALLOW a clean budget bill to hit the floor in the House it would be passed - but he refuses. I hope he's the first one kicked out the door.
The commercial with the baby crying? Yeah, that's him alright. Worse? These guys are in for a penny already, they are going to dig in their heels rather than admit they fucked up and played chicken with jobs.
The sad thing is that the response to you about health care is EXACTLY right. In your position right now you get COBRA for a few months and it might or might not be expensive. then try negotiating your own healthcare, I know some who have tried and WOW was it an eye opener! But the new healthcare law could provide you with insurance as low as $50 a month if the numbers I heard today are correct. You want to shit on that and bitch? Wow....
Oh and sorry to hear about the loss of your job. I had dinner tonight with someone who was also let go as were many others in her small company. Seems that they cannot keep these folks on with zippy income coming in from their contracts. There will be many others if this keeps up. Lockheed has furloughed 3K people and expects to furlough many more each week, they have no choice. You guys here can laugh and make stupid comments about a Govt contractor losing money but just wait until it's someone you know or it turns out that something you care about is canned. Even if they funded things tomorrow many many companies are taking it in the shorts and WILL be damaged. There's going to be a trickle effect from that and it WILL hit folks who don't work for these companies - wait and see.
Remember that it was the asshats in the House who did this, who played chicken, who REFUSED to work out differences in order to force this game. If I were the president I wouldn't negotiate on this one bit nor would I budge. They are trying to hold the nation hostage and for him to change anything would be a sign of weakness and we'd be seeing this every budget cycle whenever some jackass had some pet thing he wanted done. F 'em, come next election I WILL be making sure that jerks like this aren't elected in my area - no one wants these kinds of games. The law was passed, upheld, and now they want to cry? Tough.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
how is a non government company that is going though a natural shrinking (fuck we got computers in our tanks, done move on) shilling jobs at the most convenient excuse the democrats fault?
May not be the kind of the vacuum tubes you are talking abut. May be it's a vacuum tube like in FoodSaver® The #1 Vacuum Sealing System. People all over the world want their food fresh, don't they?
Your assuming the 11k actually makes it down to each elementary school. And then your assuming that because it does, it will have some sort of long term beneficial effect. Your wrong on both counts. The US spends more on education per pupil then just about any other country in the world and we have shit results from it. Until the educational/unionization/bureaucratic complex is dealt with, more money wont make any difference in our schools.
Yea, actually it does. We buried ourselves in debt so the free world wouldnt have to be subjugated so we should get something in return.
Where is the check of power on the House?
It doesn't have to be that way, it's an artifact of the way laws were passed. If a funding source had been included in the law when it was passed, then the funds could continue to come in, even without the approval of the current house.
Which, ironically, is why Obamacare will continue to be funded even though the House throws its biggest tantrum possible. Because it already has a source of funding.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Really... when was the last time Lockheed delivered a project on time and/or on budget?
This is a company with a distinguished history of pillaging the federal government. After all, why charge $10 for a pencil sharpener if you can charge $10,000. Just quote $5 and then show up late complaining that the guy who quoted the deal was fired for underbidding and you'll need another $10,000 to deliver it because of the extra costs involved in cleaning up the first guy's cock up.
Hope the government stays closed long enough for Lockheed to go tits up.
I particularly like the piece about Obama being gay whose male lovers were shot before he was elected.
You know, posting that you liked a comment that you posted in the first place is just bad form...
The war is winding down and Lockheed isn't getting as much of the defense pie as they were expecting. The whole drone thing isn't something they were ready to exploit.
Lots of defense contractors are laying people off. So many of them reported this to the government in fact, that hte government asked them to delay the firings because it would show up in the unemployment stats.
I can only cynically assume that the contractors assumed that now would be an okay time to terminate excess labor.
They've been talking about doing this for over a year.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Companies making military hardware bring in tens of billions of $, but have no issue firing people to save a few thousand per year? This is what the celebration of egoism brings about.
Here is the trick.
No one will actually cut spending. most of what the government spends money on isn't pork projects. It isn't entitlements. Sure the government might spend $50 billion on pork projects but out of trillions that is saying they went out to eat a lot.
The Social security is a ponzi scheme where they stole money out of for decades and now the bill is due so the politicians are still losing money that way.
The problem is the government cut taxes several times but they can't cut spending. So the wealthy got tax breaks but anyone earning less than $150,000 a year gets screwed.
Mit Rommeny pays less in taxes than someone earning $150,000 a year. the top 5% control something stupid like 90% of the income yet only pay taxes on 20% of that total. yet they bitch and moan they pay too much. but they only pay taxes on 20% of their income whereas if you are earning less than $250,000 then you are paying taxes on 100% of your income.
that is the problem. the trick is everyone in congress is in that group.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I'd agree historically, but today defense pries money from the hands of the middle class and spend it on the upper-middle class and wealthy, which I guess you just said too.
There is a larger picture here though :
Keynesianism works. Economic activity is increased when the resources are distributed more evenly because this increases the chance that any given person has the resources to do any given thing they might wish to do.
But Keynesianism is just a hack as implemented. What's actually goes on is : Technology reduces the need for work. So money gets wasted on make work, like most management, administration, law enforcement, finance, defense, etc. Eventually we start running out of easily justifiable make work though, creating a recession. Keynesianism gets interpreted as "avoid recession by making more make-work, even less justifiable make work".
What happens when our culture internalizes the need to make stupid make work? Well, we squander hundreds of billions on defense, law enforcement, Wall St., etc. And our justifications for all this make-work lauds them so highly that real work like education, healthcare, bridge repair, etc. get neglected. All this Keynesian spending on make-work creates way too much corruption, distorts needs, etc.
So we must eliminate all this make-work : Cut defense back to pre-WWII levels. Cut law enforcement back to 1960s levels. Just fyi, law enforcement is the only category of discretionary spending that increased as a share of GDP since 1972. It caused an enormous portion of our national debt. Reduce bureaucracy across the board. etc.
Won't that throw the economy into chaos? Not if you simultaneously shorten the working week and remove most exempt categories from FLSA. You still spread the money around, but you do so by pushing people to spend more time away from work.
We're already doing this through facebook, slashdot, etc., which turn people's work hours into play hours, but that's a pretty stupid way to do it. In particular, people cannot really work on hobbies that benefit the world if they're spending so much time in the office.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Correct me if I'm wrong, but budgets themselves are meaningless as far as funding the government goes. What actually counts are funding bills for the individual major departments of the federal government. To my knowledge, it was only the house that went through the effort of sending those real funding bills to the senate where the senate tabled them. The house ignored this because that is what they are supposed to do....for the legitimate funding process to work, the senate needs to take up the house bills, modify them as they see fit, and then send back to house - if both chambers are roughly in agreement, then for each bill the congress selects a comittee to merge both bills into one and then have both chambers approve the resulting merged department budget. So, if I'm following this correctly, the senate actually hasn't done anything necessary to fund the government this year....except to request that the house avoid doing any work and pass a combined bill that funds all departments at the inflated budgets agreed several years ago when democrats had the super majority and a major stimulus was passed minus some meager spending cuts/sequester the house did manage to get through during the last debt increase vote... That hardly seems responsible... I can't see how the senate can legitimately complain at all about the house if the above is true.
Great link! Now if only they would make more nixie tubes. They make cool clocks.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Nobody with a brain thinks state healthcare is "free", but most civilised people in every civilised country excepting The USA recognise that state healthcare is both more efficient, cheaper, and fairer than private insurance. Many people, myself included, also recognise that private health insurance, while more expensive, less efficient and less fair, offers better coverage, and so elect to have private insurance in addition to our state provided universal health care.
It's a very American way to look at fairness, a way that no other country shares, to view it as fair that if you are born with an illness or disease, or are unfortunate enough to be out of work or between jobs at the onset of a disease that you should just die.
A system that provides healthcare in a non-discriminatory manner can only be provided by government. How else would you do it? force health insurance companies to insure patients and cover pre-existing illness? No one would sign up for insurance until they had a serious illness. That spells disaster for an insurance company who operates on the principle that the well subsidise the sick. The only options then are discriminatory health cover, where the uninsured sick are left without option, as practiced in the US, and universal cover, as practiced in every other civilised country in the world.
And it's beginning to look like you guys aren't really that civilised.
The US spends more on education per pupil then just about any other country in the world and we have shit results from it. Until the educational/unionization/bureaucratic complex is dealt with, more money wont make any difference in our schools.
*Citation required*
I would argue the reverse. The US spends vastly different amounts of money per pupil depending on the community that they live in. Where I grew up, the property values were prohibitively high as well as the taxes. As a result, I was privileged to attend great public schools. http://www.greatschools.org/connecticut/easton/ 15 miles away in the Bridgeport, CT are some of the worst schools. http://www.greatschools.org/connecticut/bridgeport/
You appear to hate unions, but not lack of funding. The greatest programmer alive grew up in the "educational socialism" that is europe and seems to agree that educational quality in the US is a regional thing instead of a national thing https://plus.google.com/+LinusTorvalds/posts/J1NCgKQi55X
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
True - they must originate the bills (which is why this "The Senate must send us a budget" is a load of crap. However, spending bills, to become law must pass both houses and thus the Senate has an equal say in what gets funded. If the House refuses to come to an agreement on spending with the Senate then nothing gets passed. So in the end, it's a handful of R's in the House that have royally screwed things up.
As people start discovering what the Tea Party's position really means to them, the reasonable R's will figure out a way to move forward without them.
(I got layed off today. There my Hope and Change right up my ass.)
I feel your pain. I am in same boat, and am sick and tired of the Tea Party R's acting like the whiny kid who wants to take his ball and bat home because he can't have his way. The real R's need to solve it like we did on the playground - give them a good wedgie and get on playing like big boys and girls.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You know you can't cancel murders out with medicine?
I mean, it's great and all, but it's *totally* not germane to the point. You could coherently argue that the US didn't actually murder and things were just and all that, but it's extremely irrelevant to argue that the US isn't exporting death by pointing at medicine. That's like saying there aren't starving people in the world because there's so many overweight people.
I can only imagine that you saw something vaguely negative about your home country and couldn't help but fall over yourself saying the exact opposite.
That something you get in return is not "the right to be arseholes". The sentence you gave, right there, is exactly why there's so many negative stereotypes about Americans. Jesus Christ, that's arrogant buffoonery.
Besides, you got "not being subjugated" in return, right? Either they threatened to subjugate the free world and you stopped it and therefore you benefitted, or they didn't really threaten to subjugate the free world, or you weren't really free.
Iraq wasn't subjugating the free world, though it was certainly subjugating a nonfree world. Afghanistan -- yes. You were hardly the only participants, but you were some of the biggest ones. Kudos. Gives you literally no right to be an asshole.
Next time someone calls you an asshole, either apologize or argue that you aren't an asshole. Don't argue that you have a right to be one, because fuck you.
Many defense contractors do not work on weapons projects. My job, prior to a week ago, was designing secure radios and comms for troops. Many of my co-workers performed Cyber Incident Response for both the gov't as well as private companies, and every single civilian as well as contractor is now sitting at home. So on top of sequestration, which forced 20% of my co-workers out, we now have the shutdown. Remember this: In the state of Maryland, every civilian job is supported by 6 other, indirect workers, including contractors. This will impact unemployment and consumer confidence (would you buy a house or a car if you were sitting at home and not working).
No, the supreme court found the Individual Mandate constitutional.
Again, they did not. They upheld it despite finding it unconstitutional.
Funny thing about the supreme court- they may have no authority to cancel part of a law, but they also have no authority to say a law is constitutional or not.
It's an obvious implied power. What's the point of having a supreme court deciding matters of law, when they can't consider the most fundamental aspects of law and how they apply, namely, the Constitution? Deciding to cancel part of a law which Congress gave no provision for doing so is usurping the power of Congress.
Youre losing your job because you're stupid
No, I'm losing my job because there is no business.
Gov't is a tool, and a powerful one. The wealthy and well connected will use that tool for themselves. You're not going to be able to stop them. 2000 years of human history pretty much proves that. The only question is are you going to pick up the tool and use it yourself?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
And the members of the house were supposed to be up for election every -2- years and be proportional to the number of constituents to make sure that power stayed squarely with the people. Somehow, both the length of a term got extended and the number of congressmen got capped which limited the power of the people.
And the Constitution isn't a suicide pact either.
This kind of deadlock is a flaw, because literally the only way the people get to weigh in is at an election every two years. In other countries, failing to make a budget to run the government would trigger another election.
No such thing. They found it constitutional. Sorry if you dislike that, but they did.
Funnily enough, its not even the first time its done so. In 1798 Congress required all active sailors to purchase private health insurance. That too was found constitutional.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/
So is overriding only a small part of a large law as unconstitutional. Finding they have 1 power without the other is ridiculous.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Study: US Education Spending Tops Global List
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
The US spends more on education per pupil then just about any other country in the world and we still don't know the difference between your and you're.
Thanks, I checked out the study mentioned in that article and for the life of me in the 404 pages, I could not find anything that compared educational spending by country in its contents. http://www.oecd.org/edu/eag2013%20(eng)--FINAL%2020%20June%202013.pdf
However I did find this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_on_education_(%25_of_GDP) which certainly does not put us at the top of education spenders.
All that stuff's still going to get built, it'll just end up costing us more money because the contractors will bill us for delay related costs. Some clouds just don't have a silver lining.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lockheed does many more things that just build weapons.
They also build communication satellites, provide IT services for both military and civilian government and Healthcare
Well you could look for your self I guess.
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/what-we-do.html
Those 3,000 could be any employee assigned to a non essential position on an of dozens of federal contracts. not related to weapons.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
You think this is a GAME?
Just based on the definition of the word, it should. Take Alaska for an example (pretend it's a foreign country, not too hard for most). The gasoline that goes in the cars at the oil fields travels thousands of miles to be refined in the lower-48 and get shipped back up. So it was an "oil" import and "fuel" export, from the perspectie of the lower-48. Given that the USA has it peak oil, it seems reasonable that we'd have more capacity for refining than we can use for our falling production.
And the report was a 62 year report. We shipped a lot of vacuum tubes in that time.
Learn to love Alaska
Yep, the House, as the Representatives closest to the people, having the power over taxes and appropriations is completely by design. If the people want to vote in folks who run on a platform of defunding the CIA or whatever, that's the way the system was designed!
That's why if the People want them to do something else, they're the ones that have to run for re-election every 2 years.
If the Senate or the President didn't want these government programs/agencies to lose funding without any new appropriations bills, then they shouldn't have passed the currently applicable laws causing that to happen. Some things are considered essential, but these things (about 20%) are not.
If you want to appropriate money for them, then negotiate with the other people who are part of that process and work something out, rather then loudly proclaiming that you won't approve the bills passed by the House to fund things unless they still include your pet project.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I've noted that there's little substantiating the orders to make life hard on people. So, are people making up the orders because they don't like the politics? Are the people being quoted doing so openly (I've had family in government jobs, federal, state and local, and I think they all had a clause that being "politically active" is grounds for termination (because the lower levels are supposed to be non-political)? Or is Obamacare being swift-boated? Someone paying non-employees to call up papers claiming to be employees and telling about how they are spending more to close things than keeping them open costs, and how they were ordered to harass the public and make life hard?
Or did the Republican senators "secretly" place such orders? The very ones that rushed out to the closed monument to apologize for "Obama's actions" and promise swift action to get them in the monument? You'd think one of the biggest PR firms on the planet could have thought that one up.
Because the one question I haven't seen asked is "who told you?" It's always been accepting them at their word, as if it's to be expected.
Learn to love Alaska
The harm of obamacare? Are you that brainwashed by Ted Craze already? Can you point to some instances from non-partisan sources that demonstrate that it is harming anyone? Can you demonstrate that if it's harming anyone that its causing more harm than good? Thanks ill be waiting.
I'm not cancelling out one with the other. That's some warped idea of yours.
I am pointing out the chief export is life, not death.
Look what another great American, Norman Borlaug did. Half of the world's food supply is the result of his work. His biography is titled "The Man Who Saved A Billion Lives". That actually is an understatement.
Then of course there is D A Henderson. Why he hasn't won the the Nobel Peace Price I have no idea. He merely led the effort to eradicate smallpox.
Face it. If it weren't for America the world would be a starving mess wracked with disease, and over-run with tyranny.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
No such thing. They found it constitutional.
Why do you keep insisting that? They found both the individual mandate and the state Medicaid mandate to be unconstitutional by a majority of the justices. This is a matter of record.
The former was determined as such by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. But Roberts despite that opinion upheld that aspect with the other four justices. Similarly, the state Medicaid mandate was found unconstitutional by all but two justices, Ginsberg and Sotomayor, but there was considerable disagreement on what to do about it.
So is overriding only a small part of a large law as unconstitutional. Finding they have 1 power without the other is ridiculous.
This is obviously wrong.For the power of judicial review, the Supreme Court is that. It is the highest court which can rule on matters of law. If they can't rule on matters of the Constitution then no one can - else that other group would be a higher court than the Supreme Court which is not allowed by the Constitution.
In other words, deciding whether laws and actions of the federal government are compatible with the Constitution has to be a necessary power of the Supreme Court because no one else can have that power.
In comparison, severability is a legislative matter. When parts of the law are overturned, Congress can describe how that occurs. And there are good reasons for this such as determining how a law should decompose, should it cease working in its entirety.
For example, if a law should have a benefit and cost for a group and one or the other is determined unconstitutional, then the law now has either a naked benefit or cost without the balance of the original law. There it is intended to be fully implemented. A partial implementation breaks the intent of Congress.
Congress can always pass a new law to reimplement the intent of the old law in a more lawful manner. There's no need for the Courts to exercise severability. So that's a second difference between judicial review and severability.
That's why I think judicial review is a fundamental power of the Supreme Court, but the ability to severe portions of law is not. They are, as I noted originally, upsurping the power of Congress and performing legislative actions for which they have not been granted authority.
the House [...] are allowed to "defund" any part of the government they wish.
Actually, that's correct. And if the Senate and President approve it, it's defunded.
Way back when, Bill Clinton normalized relations with Vietnam. There were those in this country who thought this was a bad thing to do. They complained to their representatives. Now, their Representatives don't really have a say in this matter--that's up to the President and the Senate. So they refused to allow money for an embassy to be built. Perfectly legit thing to do. It survived the Senate and President and for the first few years of normalized relations, there was no US Embassy in Vietnam.
Where is the check of power on the House?
It is in the Senate and President, who have to approve these things as well. Eventually, there was a US Embassy built in Vietnam.
The concept, of course, is that all involved will work together, give and take, and eventually come up with an appropriate budget. This is not happening due to procedural issues in the House. A few years ago, the speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, created what is known as the "Hastert Rule" that basically said that a bill will come to the floor only if it has support of a majority of the majority party. Thus, any attempts to bring a so-called "Clean" budget resolution up for a vote are being blocked because it is quite possible that a majority of the majority party would not support it.
what a load of horseshit propaganda you've swallowed. the USA has caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents in the past 15 years alone. we use the UN to mass murder african villages to clear the way for oil lines. we have the largest prison population in the world because prison is big business; half the people are in there for victimless crimes. we have the "war on drugs" to feed that prison system and keep the prices high while our CIA moves billions of dollars of opiates to fund their global terror campaigns and murder.
I know an American man who won the Nobel Peace prize, and then was revealed to be a warmonger, and then on the anniversary of 9/11 announced the beginning arming of America's enemy Al Qaeda and affiliated groups in Syria. One homocidal psychopath puppet in the pocket of large corporations negates 95 medical nobel prizes
Looks like you are wrong (I'm not shocked). Those are five year totals for year ending 2012, in which weapons pop up in several of your categories so are invisible. $40 billion in arms exported in 2012. $656 billion spent on "defense" (wars of choice department). nice try.
Because you're 100% wrong. Show me where in the majority opinion it says that. You can't, because it doesn't. And it's the majority opinion that states what is and isn't constitutional. There is no such thing as the supreme court ruling that something is unconstitutional but allowed- its either constitutional or it is overturned. No third path.
As for your opinions on the power of the court- sorry. If you want to argue that they don't have the ability to strike down part of the law because it isn't in the Constitution, then you have to argue they don't have the ability at all. If they can strike down all of it, then there's no reason they can't strike down part. Either you're going to play strict constructionist or not.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Because you're 100% wrong. Show me where in the majority opinion it says that. You can't, because it doesn't. And it's the majority opinion that states what is and isn't constitutional. There is no such thing as the supreme court ruling that something is unconstitutional but allowed- its either constitutional or it is overturned. No third path.
Well, then it is unfortunate for your worldview that we're discussing a counterexample to that.
As for your opinions on the power of the court- sorry. If you want to argue that they don't have the ability to strike down part of the law because it isn't in the Constitution, then you have to argue they don't have the ability at all.
Don't be silly. If Congress provides a severability clause, then the Supreme Court has a means to strike down part of a law. I just pointed out that Obamacare didn't have such a clause.
Once again, no proof. Please point me out where in the majority opinion it states that. You can't, because you're completely wrong.
As for being silly- your entire argument supports me. You say that throwing out a part of a law is counter to the will of Congress. Throwing out a whole law is even more so. If the part of the law found unconstitutional is a minor part of it, it's closer to the will of Congress to toss out that part than the whole thing. That's what the SCOTUS has to balance. The idea that they should throw out months of Congress's work because of a problem with a minor part of it is utterly asinine, and has NEVER been a constraint on SCOTUS. If your view is that SCOTUS should attempt to not overrule the will of Congress, then the ability to strike parts of a law is absolutely necessary. This is hardly the first time they've done so, and won't be the last.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Huh. You have me thinking, AC.
That sinking feeling deep in your gut when you KNOW you screwed up bad summed up with: {head desk} {head desk}
Vacuum fluorescent displays, flash tubes, argon lamps, the magnetron in every microwave oven, klystrons in accelerators, radio, microwave and radar transmitters, traveling wave tubes in satellites, and let's not forget nuclear weapon triggers. I guess gas lasers would also fall into this category.
How is that list in any way useful? % of GDP is totally meaningless in the face of the wildly varying GDPs represented.
I'm an ex-Air force R&D engineer, and I worked most of my career developing vacuum tube equipment.
Now, you will notice that you have an S-band power oscillator vacuum tube in your kitchen right now. But what the government uses is mostly big, high power linear beam amplifier tubes like traveling wave tubes and klystrons. You need lots of power to run long-range radars for air traffic control and weather. Also, transmitting data from orbit. The typical radar TWT weighs more than you do, costs over $200K, and puts out hundreds of kilowatts of peak power.
I still have one guitar amp that uses tubes, but SS is the way to go, and that's been proven by articles in Electronic Design magazine (can't find the article right now, it was last year sometime). The people who like the tube sound actually like the output transformer sound.
Once again, no proof.
I hate it when people can't be bothered to do simple research. From the collection of opinions for the ruling, it states exactly what I claimed. First, that individual mandate was determined as unconstitutional by Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and Alito. The dissenting opinion of the last four starts on page 126. Roberts's opinion is first referred to on page 2 where he states that the individual mandate isn't backed by either the commerce or the "necessary and proper" clauses.
Similarly, the opinions on the state medicaid program are in there with only two justices supporting the program.
I find it rather annoying how the matter can be a statement of record, easily found on the web, and yet still be questioned by the ignorant.
You say that throwing out a part of a law is counter to the will of Congress. Throwing out a whole law is even more so.
You obviously don't get it. Congress can always pass the law again in a modified form that addresses the Supreme Court's concerns. By allowing the Supreme Court to decide what law is valid and not, without direction from Congress is to allow the Supreme Court to upset political compromises and subvert the written will of Congress. There is no balance here. The Supreme Court never was given the power to make law.
If your view is that SCOTUS should attempt to not overrule the will of Congress, then the ability to strike parts of a law is absolutely necessary.
This is a non sequitur since striking parts of a law is just as clear an overruling of Congress as reversing the whole law is.
Your proof is invalid. Roberts found it isn't valid under the commerce clause. He found that it WAS constitutional under Congress's authority to tax. That means it's Constitutional. See page 4 of your own link, section 4: "CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to Part IIIâ"C, concluding that the individual mandate may be upheld as within Congressâ(TM)s power under the Taxing Clause" Therefor it's constitutional.
Thanks for playing. Seeing as you can't even read your own sources, I'm going to stop arguing with you- you'll obviously accept any excuse to continue to believe what you want to believe.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Your proof is invalid. Roberts found it isn't valid under the commerce clause. He found that it WAS constitutional under Congress's authority to tax.
He also found that it wasn't a tax. There is an opinion by five of the justices, including Roberts that determined the tax wasn't a tax for the purposes of a bit of legislative law.
Further, what's the constitutional justification for the individual mandate. The Ninth Amendment prevents federal activities which aren't expressly allowed. Just because the federal government can create new taxes of a form allowed by the Constitution still by this amendment requires them to have a reason for doing so such as the Commerce or the "Necessary and Proper" clauses. Roberts didn't provide such a reason.
I note you fail to question the state medicaid mandate. I guess that just fell off your radar once it was shown that you were wrong here.
Thanks for playing. Seeing as you can't even read your own sources, I'm going to stop arguing with you- you'll obviously accept any excuse to continue to believe what you want to believe.
And then we have the face-saving retreat. It remains despite your feeble arguments to the contrary that the Obamacare law was found unconstitutional in two different ways and that the Supreme Court chose an unconstitutional means for upholding the majority of the law. I bothered to look up the court arguments and all I got was a bit of worthless backtalk. Thanks for playing.
I proved you wrong. He found it legal as a tax. It's in black and white, I even quoted the part. And you're still trying to deny it. That takes a special level of obtuseness, I'm actually kind of impressed.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Realize that economies of scale are real and that group plans are better than individual plans
These are two separate issues. Economies of scale are real, but that has nothing do with with group vs individual plans.
For example, fifty individuals need insurance. They each go to an insurance company and get individual plans. The average cost per person is $x.
Now let's instead say those very same fifty individuals happen to work for the same company, and they collectively go to an insurance company to get a group plan. The average cost per person is $y.
From the perspective of the insurance company, the same economy of scale applies. It's the same fifty people, and yet, without fail, $y < $x.
Are you suggesting the administrative overhead of handling fifty individual policies versus one group policy with fifty members accounts for the cost difference? No, let's be honest here. It's because insurance companies know they have individuals by the balls, and they will charge what the market will bear. When it's your wellbeing on the line, the market will bear quite a bit.
Sidebar: what would happen if fifty unemployed, self-employed, and/or 1099 (contracted) persons got together and formed an LLC, S-Corp, or some other business entity, solely for the purpose of seeking group insurance rates? They'd all be "salaried employees" of said business, with an annual salary of $0 each, with employer-provided healthcare benefits (where the employer paid 0% of the premium). I know small businesses don't get a break with insurers until they hit the fifty employee mark (at least in my state), but are there any other requirements (maybe revenue) that would need to be met? Does anyone know if an approach like this could possibly help get individuals access to health insurance at group rates?
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
No one will actually cut spending. most of what the government spends money on isn't pork projects. It isn't entitlements. Sure the government might spend $50 billion on pork projects but out of trillions that is saying they went out to eat a lot.
The Social security is a ponzi scheme where they stole money out of for decades and now the bill is due so the politicians are still losing money that way.
The problem is the government cut taxes several times but they can't cut spending.
I agree with you on the need to cut spending, and not a trivial amount like the $50billion that you mention. Percentage-wise, cutting $50billion from the federal budget is like a household making $50,000 figuring out how to spend $700 less next year.
So the wealthy got tax breaks but anyone earning less than $150,000 a year gets screwed.
Mit Rommeny pays less in taxes than someone earning $150,000 a year. the top 5% control something stupid like 90% of the income yet only pay taxes on 20% of that total. yet they bitch and moan they pay too much. but they only pay taxes on 20% of their income whereas if you are earning less than $250,000 then you are paying taxes on 100% of your income.
that is the problem. the trick is everyone in congress is in that group.
Back when Mitt Romney was running for President, his 2011 tax forms showed an effective tax rate of 14.6%. I just ran a tax estimator here: http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/tax-planning/1040-form-tax-calculator.aspx for a gross income of $150,000, Married filing jointly, with 2 dependents. Taking the standard deduction with no other credits, it estimated a tax of $22,408, or 14.94%.
Granted, 14.94% is larger than 14.6%, but not outrageously so. Our mythical family of 4 would also do much better if they could claim a 10% charitable donation like the Romneys, or the mortgage and/or student loan interest of a typical family.
That being said, I'm right there with you about your feelings of the social security ponzi and our Congress that's so lousy it has an approval rating teetering around 10%.