Yes, it's entirely likely that tax income would have slowed in 2000, and we would be back to deficit spending.
But that doesn't change the fact that he immediately reduced taxes and immediately increased spending and almost immediately started two wars.
Oh, and let's not forget Medicare Part D.
Strangely enough, I do feel that Bush gets a bad rap for some stuff. Some of the tax cuts were probably a good idea in a recession, and it's not his fault that the internet bubble burst.
The problem is that he started all that before before the recession. And did several things that were obviously bad to anyone who actually knew anything about economic, but the Republican still live in crazy trickle-down universe where tax cuts for the rich help the economy.
And, of course, there's the fucking OWNERSHIP SOCIETY garbage that happened under him, encouraging everyone to get a house, and the fact he utterly ignored banks running wild and committing massive fraud at a never-before-seen level with the ownership of said houses. (I'm not talking about the making of the loans, which is more subjective fraud. I'm talking about actual documentation fraud. If you don't know I mean, google 'MERS fraud'.)
Essentially, if you want to argue that the US economy was in the tank before Bush took office, you have to operate on the premise that it was in the tank the entire time, and that fact was just hidden by the fact that everyone was borrowing. This is, incidentally, the belief I ascribe to.
So the recession isn't Bush's fault, but the fact he, instead of actually fixing it, continue to hide it under a mountain of easy consumer debt, while doing nothing that could possible reverse it like discourage outsourcing or whatever, until the entire goddamn thing blew up in 2007 when the easy debt went away, is his fault.
Not really; if it is an FDIC insured bank (and most banks and credit unions are), then a bank "bailout" is the feds coming in and either paying off those accounts or recapitalizing the bank. They generally chose to recapitalize the bank. The bankers usually get fired.
That's not normally called a 'bank bailout'. That's actually the opposite of a bank bailout...it's a bank collapse.
FDIC insurance isn't really bailing out the bank, it's bailing out the customers, 99.99% of them who had no idea their bank was run by criminals and/or idiots. (And, luckily, it doesn't cost the government anything, as the bank paid insurance premiums.)
The Wall Street Investment banks are in a different league. The U.S. should have a policy of, over time, picking off those bankers and busting up those banks.
I agree with you. Pick them off when they least expect it.
As they're walking down a street, a sniper on a building takes careful aim...
About the only way new money can be introduced in his fashion is by using it to buy Government securities, which it never redeems, and thus has inserted new currency into circulation. Unfortunately though, that technically means that introducing new money requires governmental debt, although I don't believe those bonds are normally considered part of the national debt.
No, you're looking at it backwards. Securities are IOUs.
That's the opposite of government debt, or, rather, it's how government debt exists. The government sells a security, and now has cash, which it can use to buy things.
It's like if you want something from a vending machine, you can't buy it with an IOU. You have to borrow money from someone else, aka, 'sell them an IOU', and then you have cash to buy stuff. Later, they come back with that IOU, and you have to pay them off.
Now replace 'you' with 'the government' and 'IOU' with 'government securities'. (And the IOU has a specific time period on it, and has gained some interest during that.)
If it didn't have a deficit, it wouldn't be selling securities, but the security aren't causing the deficit, they're enabling it.
I don't have any idea what any of this has to do with getting new money in circulation, or anything about how that works. I guess they could give out new money when the securities are redeemed. (Although if they can do that I don't understand why not just use the printed money to buy the thing in the first place and skip all those middle steps.)
Both Medicare and Social Security have taken in more than they've made. In fact, they've reduced the debt because the government can borrow from them instead of from outside, and thus not pay interest.
I would really like you to respond to that, but I suspect you won't, because it would break that crazy world view in your head.
The deficit is due to two things: Fighting wars, and continuing to lower taxes for no discernible reason. That's it. That's all. That's the end of everything. There is no more discussion.
For instance, after Bush barred seniors from going to Canada/Mexico to appease the drug industry, he and Ted Kennedy (I think) pushed Medicare Part D to appease the huge senior lobby.
Wow, delusional much? Ted Kennedy supported a Medicare bill at that time, true, but it was completely replaced by the pharmaceutical industry give-away the Republicans invented, which he ended up voting against.
And is this surprising in a country where most government workers (including Army, USPS, many suburban Teachers depending on their local contracts, etc) work 20-25 years and can then retire on half pay and full health insurance the rest of their lives. How many private sector jobs let you start at 18 and quit with by 43? Yeah.
First of all, no teacher can start working at 18 unless you're living in crazy land where teachers don't need degrees. Secondly, teachers are paid by the state, not the Federal government, so could hardly be causing the Federal debt. And by 'some suburban teachers', you actually mean 'some teachers in the superrich parts of the country'. The fact a local government has more money than it knows what to do with so shovels it to teachers is not even vaguely related to the debt.
Likewise, USPS is not tax supported, so it's a rather interesting concept that it could be causing the debt. USPS pays wages out of postage it takes in. You can bitch about their wages only if you want to complain stamps cost too much. (And stamps are, incidentally, about half the cost of other first world countries...USPS is efficient.)
So, your complaint is that we're paying veterans too much? That after only 25 years of being shot at they can retire?
The back and forth in this thread really just shows that a "free market" is an illusory concept. It is useful to a limited degree, but you have to keep in mind that it is not possible in real life.
It's not a very useful concept when used to argue we should remove trade barriers, which it is used all the time to do so.
That, right there, is the real problem. It's not that corporations can make special deals with governments, there is functionally no way for any country to stop other countries from doing that. There is no way to solve that problem, ergo, that can't really be the problem. If houses you build keep falling down, the problem to investigate is not gravity.
The solvable problem is that they then can continue to operate and sell in the US while not paying any taxes here.
We need to get rid of the idea of 'corporate' taxes where profit can mysteriously move from place to place and they pay taxes somewhere we've never heard of. (And they're way to easy to avoid altogether.)
We should tax them when they pay workers, in the location those workers are. We should tax them when they sell goods, in the location those goods are sold. (Or, easier, when those goods are imported.) We should tax their capital and real estate, in the location that capital and real estate is. We should tax their corporate dividends, in the location that stockholders live.
Fuck asking where the company, an entity that is an artificial creation, 'lives'. Tax the things that physically exist where they actually are and tax the money going in and out where it's actually going in and out.
Although the health systems in Europe differ greatly between countries the vast majority of Europeans are flabbergasted about the opposition there seems to be against proper health care in the USofA.
In American, people are afraid of the government attempting to help them. People riot in the streets because the government wants to tax the rich and corporations, and give them health care.
In Europe, the government is afraid of the people lynching them for not helping them. People riot in the streets because the government wants to allow people to work 50 hours a week.
A large amount of Americans are total fucking idiots.
I'm sorry to have to say it, and I hate playing into the 'the left hates America' meme, because I really don't, it's one of the few countries actually founded for the purpose of liberty(1), but there is a large proportion of Americans who are total fucking brainwashed idiots, and a media operated by large corporations that are only too happy to give them voice.
1) Despite the fact that same-said idiots have tried to pretend it was founded on 'less taxes'.
Your analyze starts off correct, but then goes into crazy-land.
The fact that employers are going to drop insurance coverage doesn't really have jack shit to do with anything at all....they'll just drop it, and that will be it.
There is no way to get from there to 'people won't be able to buy insurance' and 'the government won't be able to cover it'.
I swear, you're living in some weird alternate universes where businesses can cover a specific cost, but neither individuals or the government can do it. What the fuck is this, Bladerunner?
Sheesh. What a stupid analysis of the situation.
Likewise, your 'death panels' is idiotic. Yes, we will continue to have those as health insurance companies act as a totally surrealistic choice of 'middle man'. And that might, indeed, get worse after they become unable to remove people from their rolls, and try to keep up the same level of profits, so have to deny more services
But it has nothing to do with America not being able to afford health care. It's because we've decided to operate in what is possibly the stupid retail system that has ever existed in the entire history of humanity. I am not exaggerating in the slightest amount: We pay companies a set amount of money to provide what we need, and they have to give us what we 'need' but nothing more, and they decide what it is we 'need'.
That is literally so stupid as to be incomprehensible. It's like threatening criminals with hookers and blow. It's like giving money to a banking industry that blew up the economy...wait, bad example.
This is one of those beliefs that, if you hold it, you have to bend your entire mind in half to avoid thinking about just how stupid the entire fucking 'health insurance' concept is as a premise. 'The less service they provide, the more money they make. The less service the provide, the more people die. Ergo, the more people die, the more money they make.' It's one of those things where the major design flaw is hidden by the trivial design flaws.
What does one call an alliance between government and the rich designed to screw over every one else while distracting us with useless baubles like "free health care"?
Considering that business hate the health care bill because it now means that people won't be stuck at their job, unable to leave, because they'll lose their insurance, I'm not sure why you decided it was 'useless'.
Granted, it's a huge giveaway to one business, the health insurance industry(1), but it actually directly harms the creeping fascism (Which is the word you were looking for) we've been living under, simply because it decouples insurance and employment.
It's interesting how businesses generally didn't like the bill, except for a few high tech companies and whatnot, despite the fact that providing insurance for workers is becoming a huge cost of doing business, and the inability to compete with other countries is part of that. But they're rather have crippling costs if that means they have wage slaves who, if they leave, risk bankrupcy for any minor sickness, so cannot leave.
Lack of worker mobility has always been a goal of the 'free market'. In their ideal world, everyone would have one job choice and either work there or die. They're just better at hiding this than 100 years ago, where they'd have the police assault people for daring not to work.
1) It's going to be funny to see what happens when republicans, who want to 'repeal the bill', get into office. The health care bill consists of two parts...the wildly popular parts like disallowing pre-existing conditions, allowing everyone to buy insurance...and the corporate parts like requiring everyone to buy insurance.
If they repeal it all, or just the first part, they...take away insurance for kids with cancer. Yeah, that will play well. If they just repeal the later, health insurance companies go bankrupt. (Which is way too nice for them. Health insurance companies should exit history with their CEO's head on a pike as a warning.)
It's going to be interesting, I think I'll go out and help the tea party chant 'repeal the bill' for shits and giggles.
I wish the Democrats were smarter and willing to play chicken, because I feel the Republicans are going to 'try' to repeal the later, and 'fail' because of the Democrats. It would possibly be the funniest goddamn thing to happen in history if the Democrats said 'Hey, good idea', and started to pass it.
Sure, using a TV as a monitor has been easy since HDTV became common starting in 2006, but home theater PCs are still a rarity for some reason.
I am often baffled by this.
In fact, I'm baffled by the fact someone hasn't come out with a thing that plugs into the USB port and second DVI output on a computer, and works wirelessly to another box, which you plug in HDMI with sound (A USB sound card is built in.) into your HDTV, and has some USB ports for keyboard and mouse and IR receiver. And it has a toggle button on both the output box and the USB device, so you can switch it with just a press either at the computer or the TV. Switching it would, by default, flip the video over.
A slightly more expensive version could come with a wireless keyboard and mouse (Whether or not these wireless things are transmitting to the computer, or to the box and then the computer, is to be determined later.) and remote in the box.
Yes, yes, you could build something like this using wireless USB, but it's much pricier than it actually should cost, considering you need to buy a USB video card, which is rather shitty anyway. Something like this could just transmit straight video over one frequency, using an actual high-quality video card in the computer, and use wireless USB on another frequency.
At some point, when wireless USB becomes more common, the transmitter can stop doing that itself, too, and perhaps drop the USB hub from the other end also. Perhaps even have sound input instead of a USB sound card, so doesn't worry about wireless USB at all...computers would just be expected to have it, and you'd put a hub at your TV. It would come with some app that, when launched via hotkey, switches video and audio devices, so you press a key on either keyboard to switch.
I've looked it up, and for some reason HDMI extenders apparently cost $200, which is quite insane. This whole thing shouldn't cost more than $100, or with wireless USB $150.
Incidentally, the reason I'm thinking like this is because I do it...except I do it with wires. (And I'm using S-Video, because I have an SDTV.) One USB cable, one S-Video cable, both run 20 feet.
To fund health care or mass transit or research and development into clean, renewable energy sources, or simply to ensure that all Americans have adequate food and housing, and that all children are well-educated, are liberal fantasies.
The real joke is, some of those are cheaper. The health care bill is calculated to save the government money. A public option would have saved even more.
Actually, that's not a very funny joke at all.
All 'progressive' stuff must pay for itself. Social security pays for itself. (It even has it's own taxes, which is why suggesting to cut it to 'save money' should automatically disqualify someone from holding political office. You cannot turn money 'saved' from social security into general revenue, and hence it cannot pay for other programs.)
But that's not all. Medicare pays for itself. It's insurance. People buy it, and get health care. It's currently spending more than it takes in, because of absurdly rising medical costs, but as it stored all extra money it was collecting over the years, it will remain in the black for another decade.
That's right, both Medicare and Social Security have taken in more than they've spent. The taxes for them have outweighed the spending on them.
Hell, those two programs have objectively reduced the debt, because the government can and does borrow from them instead of the public, and doesn't have to pay interest. (Strangely enough, people have taken the fact the government owes Social Security a large amount as a way to claim it will 'break' and thus we shouldn't use it. What. The. Fuck?)
But those programs are what need 'cutting' to keep us in the black.
Which, of course, cannot actually work, unless we continue taxing people for those things without having them receive them, which is a rather interesting way to run a government. Hey, I know how to save money...let's keep operating the post office, but not deliver mail. I'm sure people won't mind paying for nothing.
The goddamn deficit reduction committee even suggested cutting social security, although it was forced to explain that wouldn't actually reduce the deficit at all.
Wars, OTOH, are free and we can have as many of them as we want.
My first thought was actually handing out retractable batons that did that, but I realized that's cost weight and you'd have to get them back, neither of which is a good idea.
I suspect there's somewhere on a seat that already has a pole with a weight at the end, so doesn't need to telescope, and needs very little modification to be detachable.
When I said armrest, I was thinking of the ones on a flight I was on that were two pads, a front one and a back one. If the front one could be slide forward and come off, and a hypothetical pole that attached it to the back pad came with it, you would have almost a cricket bat. A round end, and a paddle on the other. Hit someone with the edge of that and they're in serous trouble.
While longer is better somewhat, at some point it becomes counterproductive. I wouldn't want to have an actual baseball bat, for example, that would often be too long to swing.
Indeed, and the 'security' aspect is nonsense, as long as actual current military positions aren't being leaked.
There is no reason to keep anything secret about a finished military operation. Black out the names and the base of operations or whatever, but the actual after action report should be 99.99% public.
Some vague reference to keeping 'policies' and 'capabilities' secret is nonsense...if someone is actually fighting a war with us, they're probably already figured out our 'policies' and 'capabilities', and they sure as hell know whatever the report is going to say, because they were there.
The same is true for current kidnappings and piracy (Somali pirates, etc). If the World could decide that paying off such people was now illegal and special forces would be deployed in all instances there would be some casualties but ultimately it would stop them doing it!
I've actually seriously suggested this for all hostage situations.
Someone took hostages? Give them exactly five minutes to release everyone. That's it. Five minutes. You are not negotiating. If they release them, they will arrested. If they do not release them, they will be killed, regardless of what hostages they have. (Killed in self-defense, that is. I'm not suggesting any extra-legal solutions here, just that they will be stormed with guns blazing.)
Then do it. Sure, do it with caution and try to save everyone you can, but if someone is holding a gun to someone's head, shoot them anyway. If they're using human shields, shoot through them.
Do it again.
Do it again.
...and around that point the people who would be planning to take hostages suddenly decide, um, maybe that's not a useful plan.
And almost NO ONE WILL EVER TAKE A HOSTAGE AGAIN. A few people will forget, or panic, and take a hostage, and you remind them a) you're not going to give them anything or let them leave, and b) they have exactly five minutes to stop that....they've seen the news and know what happens at the five minute mark.
If we assume that one out of five hostage situations go bad anyway, statistically, you came out ahead after the first fifteen situations didn't happen, or were resolved when the hostage taker, when given the five minute warning, gave up.
What I've suggested they do it make the arms, or some other part, of the seats detachable.
Aka, give everyone a ten pound club. See how well someone with a boxcutter does against that.
And the nice thing is it works to take people down, but you can't hold it to their throat. Well, you can, but it's no more useful than your hands. It only works to hurt people, not hold them hostage. It's not even particularly good at killing people, just hurting them.
'In the event of an water landing, your seat can be used a flotation device. In the event of a hijacking, your armrest can be used as a baseball bat.'
We seem so ready to use our military and economic power at the drop of a hat in instances where it doesn't matter, but when we actually have reason to go to war, we pussy-foot around and try not to offend anyone.
I understand where you're coming from, but I see too many people say 'We're too nice during war'. Well, no, we really aren't. We're trying to kill the people we're trying to kill, which is much easier if we aren't also killing random people who will, surprise, get annoyed at that and fight back.
Saying it like that, like we need to 'get tough', is not actually helpful. What we need to do is fight much much smaller military actions.
For example, with Afghanistan, we should have calmly and definitively said 'If there is an al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in two week, we will attack it.'.
Instead, believe it or not, Afghanistan actually wasn't sure what was going on until we got the resolution through the UN. And even then there's no reason we had to go about it that way, we could have just said 'Sure, we're technically invading you, but stay out of our way and we'll leave you be.'
But, instead, we spent like three months getting rid of al Qaeda, and almost a decade attempting to run a goddamn country instead of letting the Taliban (who are not our country's enemy and just made one very stupid choice that they are unlikely to do again) have it back.
Part of this works the other direction. we must not threaten countries we don't intend on attack. Like Iran, which we've been threatening for a decade for no fucking discernible reason (They've never threatened or even possibly pose any threat to us.), so if we actually do want to threaten them, I have no idea how they're supposed to know that.
As threatening other countries is actually a war crime, there's that, too, although apparently we've decided that war crimes are okay for the US to commit if we really want to.
We should be obliterating our enemies and leaving everyone else the fuck alone.
If we leave everyone else the fuck alone, pretty soon we won't have military enemies at anywhere but the national scale. People do not attempt to kill you unless the risk of getting killed is worth something.
And at this point, national military enemies are non-existence for the US. No one is going to attack us, it would suicidal and nonsensical.
We'll have economic 'enemies', but that's just another word for competitors.
Not that people would even know who a soldier was even if they saw them.
'Hello? US embassy? There was a battle on Main Street two hours ago, can you tell me the names of the soldiers involved in it? And their unit and ID numbers, if you can. Why? Oh, I'm going to track them down and kill them. Thanks, I'll hold.'
Of course they're different. And not even 'terrorists', just 'extremist nutjobs' who 'hate the US'.
They exist in a hypothetical world where we pulled out of the Middle East! That was the premise of the question.
So I pointed out that even after we pull out of the Middle East, there will be people who still hate us for very good reasons, because we were there and, you know, killed a bunch of people.
I'd be very worried if TSA was basing policies on the premise we'd just withdrawn from the Middle East. That would be surreal.
For a fraction of the cost of what we spend on keeping the Middle East subjugated, we don't need a 'Manhattan Project'.
We could just build a thousand Hoover Dams.
Cost of Hoover Dam in 2008 dollars: $690 million.
Cost of War in Iraq: $740 billion
Note I'm not saying that's ideal, dams cause all sorts of environmental problems if we're not careful. (less than war, though) Also, we couldn't actually build that many dams.
Alternately, we could purchase 740 billion watts of solar panels at the current cost of $1 a watt. (Actually, we'd probably end up spending 1/10th that once we started building at that scale.)
Which is, in fact, almost exactly how much electricity we use at max. (I have no idea where we would put those panels, though.)
Or we could just build 100 nuclear power plants.
Seriously, if we have the amount of money we're spending on war to throw around, we don't even need to invent 'new technology'...we could hurl epically massive amounts of the old tech at it and it would be far cheaper than war.(1)
Of course, corporations don't pay the cost of their wars for oil. They manage to get the US taxpayer to do it for them.
Well, we'd still need new tech for cars, but if we weren't subsiding oil prices by war, oil would cost $40 dollars a gallon and no one would seriously consider using it for anything, so the new tech would happen pretty automatically.
1) And you'll notice that I only included Iraq, not Afghanistan, which was also caused by oil, although move indirectly...al Qaeda exists because we prop up the Saudi royal family and that the US and Soviet Union fought over the Middle east for decades. Without our idiotic meddling in the region, I don't know what the region would be like, but they'd be unlikely to be attacking a superpower on the other side of the world.
The absurd luck was that they didn't hit it lower, causing it to come crashing down before anyone could get out of the building or out of the area.
Buildings do not work that way. Hitting the WTC lower wouldn't have made it come down faster, at least not automatically. The lower you get, the stronger it was. It's even possible it would have taken longer, or even allowed firefighters to put it out, at least for one of the buildings.
Now, hitting it lower would have trapped more people.
There is, however, a pretty good reason they couldn't hit it lower: New York was in the way. You can't just go flying a airplane however you want it...other buildings do exist.
Next time it could be 2 guys who kill 10,000.
Next time two guys attempt to hijack an airplane, they better hope there's an air marshal on board to arrest them.
Or they are liable to be lynched as they're attempting to figure out how to get through the reinforced cockpit door.
The next time two guys kill 10,000 people, they'll do it by launching a dozen canisters of mustard gas using an old mortar into the Superbowl.
and e) presumably rapists would just move elsewhere.
And probably other problems also. To quote Douglas Adams, 'The fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws'.
The fundamental design flaws in the 'airplane security', the fact it is utter nonsense and cannot possible do what it is intended to do, are hidden by the superficial design flaws, like the fact people can walk on airplanes with 12 inch razor blades while the TSA is looking at their genitalia.
Keeping razor blades off an airplane is idiotic, because any idiot can sharpen their comb or whatever. The TSA's complete inability to actually keep razor blades off is distracting us from the fact it's a pretty stupid thing to actually want.
As was pretty easy to figure out, I was responding to 'We could pull out of the Middle East tomorrow and return to a 1930s era isolationism and there would still be some extremist nutjob that would find a reason to hate us.'
Ergo, I was talking about the 'extremist nutjobs' we left behind in the Middle East. Many of whom we did blow up their house and kill their family.
No one was talking about existing terrorists at all. Strictly speaking, no one was talking about terrorists at all, at least not in that sentence.
We were talking about 'extremist nutjobs' who 'find a reason' to hate the US...like we killed their family, those incredibly petty people.
Perfectly normal hatred would be hating the very specific people who blew up your house and family, hating everyone who shares the same race or nationality as the people who blew up your house and family is what defines an "extremist nutjob".
So when a soldier, in the employ of an army, does something that he was ordered to that seriously harms you...your problem should be with that soldier? Really?
Not the people who gave him those orders, which are, ultimately, the people of the United States?
I can see how some people would emotionally think that way, but that's the emotional thinking, the logical thinking, the non-nutjob thinking, is 'If he hadn't done that the guy next to him would have. The people giving the orders are the problem.'
Also, the deaths-per-terrorist frequency distribution is uneven; the two planes that hit the towers did much, much more killing than the other two planes.
Yeah, and it's something that wouldn't happen anymore with airplanes.
Strictly speaking though, the entire thing was incredibly inefficient at killing people. Even if the ratio was closer to 1 terrorist per 300 murders, that's pretty easy to pull off with, I dunno, a movie theater on Harry Potter opening night.
We like to pretend 'they killed a lot of people', but they only did so with a really large amount of terrorists, proportionally.
No, it was absurd luck on the part of the US. The towers were hit well before their peak daily occupancy. Had they been at peak, not only would there have been more people there to be killed by the impact and aftermath, the evacuation would have been much more slow and congested, meaning many many more people would have still been inside the buildings when they collapsed.
And the terrorists were lucky because the buildings collapsed, which was my point. That was not a foregone conclusion.
The limiting factor is the number of terrorists there; the smaller targets are ineffective unless it's made up for by high volume.
Yup. It's why you'll never see IEDs here. Blowing up a single car? That's a lot of work.
This assumes the point of terrorists is to kill people, which isn't entirely correct. There are a lot of low-kill strategies that could cause all sorts of problems, like multiple-DC-sniper-ish attacks launched randomly...but they don't even have the people to do those.
The most isolation we could safely manage today would be to stay out of ground wars. We'd *still* have at least 3/4 of the navy we do now, because that's needed to keep international trade going, and none of the other countries both willing and able to do that are trustworthy.
I think you took 'return to a 1930s era isolationism' a little bit too literally.
No one has any problem with what the navy is doing. The only people the navy is harassing is pirates, and no one likes pirates.
'Staying out of ground wars', or, more specifically 'Not fucking starting ground wars in the first place' would be entirely enough.
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Yes, it's entirely likely that tax income would have slowed in 2000, and we would be back to deficit spending.
But that doesn't change the fact that he immediately reduced taxes and immediately increased spending and almost immediately started two wars.
Oh, and let's not forget Medicare Part D.
Strangely enough, I do feel that Bush gets a bad rap for some stuff. Some of the tax cuts were probably a good idea in a recession, and it's not his fault that the internet bubble burst.
The problem is that he started all that before before the recession. And did several things that were obviously bad to anyone who actually knew anything about economic, but the Republican still live in crazy trickle-down universe where tax cuts for the rich help the economy.
And, of course, there's the fucking OWNERSHIP SOCIETY garbage that happened under him, encouraging everyone to get a house, and the fact he utterly ignored banks running wild and committing massive fraud at a never-before-seen level with the ownership of said houses. (I'm not talking about the making of the loans, which is more subjective fraud. I'm talking about actual documentation fraud. If you don't know I mean, google 'MERS fraud'.)
Essentially, if you want to argue that the US economy was in the tank before Bush took office, you have to operate on the premise that it was in the tank the entire time, and that fact was just hidden by the fact that everyone was borrowing. This is, incidentally, the belief I ascribe to.
So the recession isn't Bush's fault, but the fact he, instead of actually fixing it, continue to hide it under a mountain of easy consumer debt, while doing nothing that could possible reverse it like discourage outsourcing or whatever, until the entire goddamn thing blew up in 2007 when the easy debt went away, is his fault.
Not really; if it is an FDIC insured bank (and most banks and credit unions are), then a bank "bailout" is the feds coming in and either paying off those accounts or recapitalizing the bank. They generally chose to recapitalize the bank. The bankers usually get fired.
That's not normally called a 'bank bailout'. That's actually the opposite of a bank bailout...it's a bank collapse.
FDIC insurance isn't really bailing out the bank, it's bailing out the customers, 99.99% of them who had no idea their bank was run by criminals and/or idiots. (And, luckily, it doesn't cost the government anything, as the bank paid insurance premiums.)
The Wall Street Investment banks are in a different league. The U.S. should have a policy of, over time, picking off those bankers and busting up those banks.
I agree with you. Pick them off when they least expect it.
As they're walking down a street, a sniper on a building takes careful aim...
About the only way new money can be introduced in his fashion is by using it to buy Government securities, which it never redeems, and thus has inserted new currency into circulation. Unfortunately though, that technically means that introducing new money requires governmental debt, although I don't believe those bonds are normally considered part of the national debt.
No, you're looking at it backwards. Securities are IOUs.
That's the opposite of government debt, or, rather, it's how government debt exists. The government sells a security, and now has cash, which it can use to buy things.
It's like if you want something from a vending machine, you can't buy it with an IOU. You have to borrow money from someone else, aka, 'sell them an IOU', and then you have cash to buy stuff. Later, they come back with that IOU, and you have to pay them off.
Now replace 'you' with 'the government' and 'IOU' with 'government securities'. (And the IOU has a specific time period on it, and has gained some interest during that.)
If it didn't have a deficit, it wouldn't be selling securities, but the security aren't causing the deficit, they're enabling it.
I don't have any idea what any of this has to do with getting new money in circulation, or anything about how that works. I guess they could give out new money when the securities are redeemed. (Although if they can do that I don't understand why not just use the printed money to buy the thing in the first place and skip all those middle steps.)
Both Medicare and Social Security have taken in more than they've made. In fact, they've reduced the debt because the government can borrow from them instead of from outside, and thus not pay interest.
I would really like you to respond to that, but I suspect you won't, because it would break that crazy world view in your head.
The deficit is due to two things: Fighting wars, and continuing to lower taxes for no discernible reason. That's it. That's all. That's the end of everything. There is no more discussion.
For instance, after Bush barred seniors from going to Canada/Mexico to appease the drug industry, he and Ted Kennedy (I think) pushed Medicare Part D to appease the huge senior lobby.
Wow, delusional much? Ted Kennedy supported a Medicare bill at that time, true, but it was completely replaced by the pharmaceutical industry give-away the Republicans invented, which he ended up voting against.
And is this surprising in a country where most government workers (including Army, USPS, many suburban Teachers depending on their local contracts, etc) work 20-25 years and can then retire on half pay and full health insurance the rest of their lives. How many private sector jobs let you start at 18 and quit with by 43? Yeah.
First of all, no teacher can start working at 18 unless you're living in crazy land where teachers don't need degrees. Secondly, teachers are paid by the state, not the Federal government, so could hardly be causing the Federal debt. And by 'some suburban teachers', you actually mean 'some teachers in the superrich parts of the country'. The fact a local government has more money than it knows what to do with so shovels it to teachers is not even vaguely related to the debt.
Likewise, USPS is not tax supported, so it's a rather interesting concept that it could be causing the debt. USPS pays wages out of postage it takes in. You can bitch about their wages only if you want to complain stamps cost too much. (And stamps are, incidentally, about half the cost of other first world countries...USPS is efficient.)
So, your complaint is that we're paying veterans too much? That after only 25 years of being shot at they can retire?
The back and forth in this thread really just shows that a "free market" is an illusory concept. It is useful to a limited degree, but you have to keep in mind that it is not possible in real life.
It's not a very useful concept when used to argue we should remove trade barriers, which it is used all the time to do so.
That, right there, is the real problem. It's not that corporations can make special deals with governments, there is functionally no way for any country to stop other countries from doing that. There is no way to solve that problem, ergo, that can't really be the problem. If houses you build keep falling down, the problem to investigate is not gravity.
The solvable problem is that they then can continue to operate and sell in the US while not paying any taxes here.
We need to get rid of the idea of 'corporate' taxes where profit can mysteriously move from place to place and they pay taxes somewhere we've never heard of. (And they're way to easy to avoid altogether.)
We should tax them when they pay workers, in the location those workers are. We should tax them when they sell goods, in the location those goods are sold. (Or, easier, when those goods are imported.) We should tax their capital and real estate, in the location that capital and real estate is. We should tax their corporate dividends, in the location that stockholders live.
Fuck asking where the company, an entity that is an artificial creation, 'lives'. Tax the things that physically exist where they actually are and tax the money going in and out where it's actually going in and out.
Although the health systems in Europe differ greatly between countries the vast majority of Europeans are flabbergasted about the opposition there seems to be against proper health care in the USofA.
In American, people are afraid of the government attempting to help them. People riot in the streets because the government wants to tax the rich and corporations, and give them health care.
In Europe, the government is afraid of the people lynching them for not helping them. People riot in the streets because the government wants to allow people to work 50 hours a week.
A large amount of Americans are total fucking idiots.
I'm sorry to have to say it, and I hate playing into the 'the left hates America' meme, because I really don't, it's one of the few countries actually founded for the purpose of liberty(1), but there is a large proportion of Americans who are total fucking brainwashed idiots, and a media operated by large corporations that are only too happy to give them voice.
1) Despite the fact that same-said idiots have tried to pretend it was founded on 'less taxes'.
Your analyze starts off correct, but then goes into crazy-land.
The fact that employers are going to drop insurance coverage doesn't really have jack shit to do with anything at all....they'll just drop it, and that will be it.
There is no way to get from there to 'people won't be able to buy insurance' and 'the government won't be able to cover it'.
I swear, you're living in some weird alternate universes where businesses can cover a specific cost, but neither individuals or the government can do it. What the fuck is this, Bladerunner?
Sheesh. What a stupid analysis of the situation.
Likewise, your 'death panels' is idiotic. Yes, we will continue to have those as health insurance companies act as a totally surrealistic choice of 'middle man'. And that might, indeed, get worse after they become unable to remove people from their rolls, and try to keep up the same level of profits, so have to deny more services
But it has nothing to do with America not being able to afford health care. It's because we've decided to operate in what is possibly the stupid retail system that has ever existed in the entire history of humanity. I am not exaggerating in the slightest amount: We pay companies a set amount of money to provide what we need, and they have to give us what we 'need' but nothing more, and they decide what it is we 'need'.
That is literally so stupid as to be incomprehensible. It's like threatening criminals with hookers and blow. It's like giving money to a banking industry that blew up the economy...wait, bad example.
This is one of those beliefs that, if you hold it, you have to bend your entire mind in half to avoid thinking about just how stupid the entire fucking 'health insurance' concept is as a premise. 'The less service they provide, the more money they make. The less service the provide, the more people die. Ergo, the more people die, the more money they make.' It's one of those things where the major design flaw is hidden by the trivial design flaws.
What does one call an alliance between government and the rich designed to screw over every one else while distracting us with useless baubles like "free health care"?
Considering that business hate the health care bill because it now means that people won't be stuck at their job, unable to leave, because they'll lose their insurance, I'm not sure why you decided it was 'useless'.
Granted, it's a huge giveaway to one business, the health insurance industry(1), but it actually directly harms the creeping fascism (Which is the word you were looking for) we've been living under, simply because it decouples insurance and employment.
It's interesting how businesses generally didn't like the bill, except for a few high tech companies and whatnot, despite the fact that providing insurance for workers is becoming a huge cost of doing business, and the inability to compete with other countries is part of that. But they're rather have crippling costs if that means they have wage slaves who, if they leave, risk bankrupcy for any minor sickness, so cannot leave.
Lack of worker mobility has always been a goal of the 'free market'. In their ideal world, everyone would have one job choice and either work there or die. They're just better at hiding this than 100 years ago, where they'd have the police assault people for daring not to work.
1) It's going to be funny to see what happens when republicans, who want to 'repeal the bill', get into office. The health care bill consists of two parts...the wildly popular parts like disallowing pre-existing conditions, allowing everyone to buy insurance...and the corporate parts like requiring everyone to buy insurance.
If they repeal it all, or just the first part, they...take away insurance for kids with cancer. Yeah, that will play well. If they just repeal the later, health insurance companies go bankrupt. (Which is way too nice for them. Health insurance companies should exit history with their CEO's head on a pike as a warning.)
It's going to be interesting, I think I'll go out and help the tea party chant 'repeal the bill' for shits and giggles.
I wish the Democrats were smarter and willing to play chicken, because I feel the Republicans are going to 'try' to repeal the later, and 'fail' because of the Democrats. It would possibly be the funniest goddamn thing to happen in history if the Democrats said 'Hey, good idea', and started to pass it.
Sure, using a TV as a monitor has been easy since HDTV became common starting in 2006, but home theater PCs are still a rarity for some reason.
I am often baffled by this.
In fact, I'm baffled by the fact someone hasn't come out with a thing that plugs into the USB port and second DVI output on a computer, and works wirelessly to another box, which you plug in HDMI with sound (A USB sound card is built in.) into your HDTV, and has some USB ports for keyboard and mouse and IR receiver. And it has a toggle button on both the output box and the USB device, so you can switch it with just a press either at the computer or the TV. Switching it would, by default, flip the video over.
A slightly more expensive version could come with a wireless keyboard and mouse (Whether or not these wireless things are transmitting to the computer, or to the box and then the computer, is to be determined later.) and remote in the box.
Yes, yes, you could build something like this using wireless USB, but it's much pricier than it actually should cost, considering you need to buy a USB video card, which is rather shitty anyway. Something like this could just transmit straight video over one frequency, using an actual high-quality video card in the computer, and use wireless USB on another frequency.
At some point, when wireless USB becomes more common, the transmitter can stop doing that itself, too, and perhaps drop the USB hub from the other end also. Perhaps even have sound input instead of a USB sound card, so doesn't worry about wireless USB at all...computers would just be expected to have it, and you'd put a hub at your TV. It would come with some app that, when launched via hotkey, switches video and audio devices, so you press a key on either keyboard to switch.
I've looked it up, and for some reason HDMI extenders apparently cost $200, which is quite insane. This whole thing shouldn't cost more than $100, or with wireless USB $150.
Incidentally, the reason I'm thinking like this is because I do it...except I do it with wires. (And I'm using S-Video, because I have an SDTV.) One USB cable, one S-Video cable, both run 20 feet.
To fund health care or mass transit or research and development into clean, renewable energy sources, or simply to ensure that all Americans have adequate food and housing, and that all children are well-educated, are liberal fantasies.
The real joke is, some of those are cheaper. The health care bill is calculated to save the government money. A public option would have saved even more.
Actually, that's not a very funny joke at all.
All 'progressive' stuff must pay for itself. Social security pays for itself. (It even has it's own taxes, which is why suggesting to cut it to 'save money' should automatically disqualify someone from holding political office. You cannot turn money 'saved' from social security into general revenue, and hence it cannot pay for other programs.)
But that's not all. Medicare pays for itself. It's insurance. People buy it, and get health care. It's currently spending more than it takes in, because of absurdly rising medical costs, but as it stored all extra money it was collecting over the years, it will remain in the black for another decade.
That's right, both Medicare and Social Security have taken in more than they've spent. The taxes for them have outweighed the spending on them.
Hell, those two programs have objectively reduced the debt, because the government can and does borrow from them instead of the public, and doesn't have to pay interest. (Strangely enough, people have taken the fact the government owes Social Security a large amount as a way to claim it will 'break' and thus we shouldn't use it. What. The. Fuck?)
But those programs are what need 'cutting' to keep us in the black.
Which, of course, cannot actually work, unless we continue taxing people for those things without having them receive them, which is a rather interesting way to run a government. Hey, I know how to save money...let's keep operating the post office, but not deliver mail. I'm sure people won't mind paying for nothing.
The goddamn deficit reduction committee even suggested cutting social security, although it was forced to explain that wouldn't actually reduce the deficit at all.
Wars, OTOH, are free and we can have as many of them as we want.
My first thought was actually handing out retractable batons that did that, but I realized that's cost weight and you'd have to get them back, neither of which is a good idea.
I suspect there's somewhere on a seat that already has a pole with a weight at the end, so doesn't need to telescope, and needs very little modification to be detachable.
When I said armrest, I was thinking of the ones on a flight I was on that were two pads, a front one and a back one. If the front one could be slide forward and come off, and a hypothetical pole that attached it to the back pad came with it, you would have almost a cricket bat. A round end, and a paddle on the other. Hit someone with the edge of that and they're in serous trouble.
While longer is better somewhat, at some point it becomes counterproductive. I wouldn't want to have an actual baseball bat, for example, that would often be too long to swing.
Indeed, and the 'security' aspect is nonsense, as long as actual current military positions aren't being leaked.
There is no reason to keep anything secret about a finished military operation. Black out the names and the base of operations or whatever, but the actual after action report should be 99.99% public.
Some vague reference to keeping 'policies' and 'capabilities' secret is nonsense...if someone is actually fighting a war with us, they're probably already figured out our 'policies' and 'capabilities', and they sure as hell know whatever the report is going to say, because they were there.
The same is true for current kidnappings and piracy (Somali pirates, etc). If the World could decide that paying off such people was now illegal and special forces would be deployed in all instances there would be some casualties but ultimately it would stop them doing it!
I've actually seriously suggested this for all hostage situations.
Someone took hostages? Give them exactly five minutes to release everyone. That's it. Five minutes. You are not negotiating. If they release them, they will arrested. If they do not release them, they will be killed, regardless of what hostages they have. (Killed in self-defense, that is. I'm not suggesting any extra-legal solutions here, just that they will be stormed with guns blazing.)
Then do it. Sure, do it with caution and try to save everyone you can, but if someone is holding a gun to someone's head, shoot them anyway. If they're using human shields, shoot through them.
Do it again.
Do it again.
And almost NO ONE WILL EVER TAKE A HOSTAGE AGAIN. A few people will forget, or panic, and take a hostage, and you remind them a) you're not going to give them anything or let them leave, and b) they have exactly five minutes to stop that....they've seen the news and know what happens at the five minute mark.
If we assume that one out of five hostage situations go bad anyway, statistically, you came out ahead after the first fifteen situations didn't happen, or were resolved when the hostage taker, when given the five minute warning, gave up.
What I've suggested they do it make the arms, or some other part, of the seats detachable.
Aka, give everyone a ten pound club. See how well someone with a boxcutter does against that.
And the nice thing is it works to take people down, but you can't hold it to their throat. Well, you can, but it's no more useful than your hands. It only works to hurt people, not hold them hostage. It's not even particularly good at killing people, just hurting them.
'In the event of an water landing, your seat can be used a flotation device. In the event of a hijacking, your armrest can be used as a baseball bat.'
We seem so ready to use our military and economic power at the drop of a hat in instances where it doesn't matter, but when we actually have reason to go to war, we pussy-foot around and try not to offend anyone.
I understand where you're coming from, but I see too many people say 'We're too nice during war'. Well, no, we really aren't. We're trying to kill the people we're trying to kill, which is much easier if we aren't also killing random people who will, surprise, get annoyed at that and fight back.
Saying it like that, like we need to 'get tough', is not actually helpful. What we need to do is fight much much smaller military actions.
For example, with Afghanistan, we should have calmly and definitively said 'If there is an al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in two week, we will attack it.'.
Instead, believe it or not, Afghanistan actually wasn't sure what was going on until we got the resolution through the UN. And even then there's no reason we had to go about it that way, we could have just said 'Sure, we're technically invading you, but stay out of our way and we'll leave you be.'
But, instead, we spent like three months getting rid of al Qaeda, and almost a decade attempting to run a goddamn country instead of letting the Taliban (who are not our country's enemy and just made one very stupid choice that they are unlikely to do again) have it back.
Part of this works the other direction. we must not threaten countries we don't intend on attack. Like Iran, which we've been threatening for a decade for no fucking discernible reason (They've never threatened or even possibly pose any threat to us.), so if we actually do want to threaten them, I have no idea how they're supposed to know that.
As threatening other countries is actually a war crime, there's that, too, although apparently we've decided that war crimes are okay for the US to commit if we really want to.
We should be obliterating our enemies and leaving everyone else the fuck alone.
If we leave everyone else the fuck alone, pretty soon we won't have military enemies at anywhere but the national scale. People do not attempt to kill you unless the risk of getting killed is worth something.
And at this point, national military enemies are non-existence for the US. No one is going to attack us, it would suicidal and nonsensical.
We'll have economic 'enemies', but that's just another word for competitors.
Not that people would even know who a soldier was even if they saw them.
'Hello? US embassy? There was a battle on Main Street two hours ago, can you tell me the names of the soldiers involved in it? And their unit and ID numbers, if you can. Why? Oh, I'm going to track them down and kill them. Thanks, I'll hold.'
This is a pretty stupid premise to start with.
We gave them their independence in exchange for the right to build a canal. Seems like a fair trade to me.
Jesus Christ, the lack of knowledge buuuurns.
They have a NATIONAL HOLIDAY on the day that they finally rebelled against the bogus treaty we pretended they signed over the Canal Zone.
Of course they're different. And not even 'terrorists', just 'extremist nutjobs' who 'hate the US'.
They exist in a hypothetical world where we pulled out of the Middle East! That was the premise of the question.
So I pointed out that even after we pull out of the Middle East, there will be people who still hate us for very good reasons, because we were there and, you know, killed a bunch of people.
I'd be very worried if TSA was basing policies on the premise we'd just withdrawn from the Middle East. That would be surreal.
Are you not even paying attention here?
For a fraction of the cost of what we spend on keeping the Middle East subjugated, we don't need a 'Manhattan Project'.
We could just build a thousand Hoover Dams.
Cost of Hoover Dam in 2008 dollars: $690 million.
Cost of War in Iraq: $740 billion
Note I'm not saying that's ideal, dams cause all sorts of environmental problems if we're not careful. (less than war, though) Also, we couldn't actually build that many dams.
Alternately, we could purchase 740 billion watts of solar panels at the current cost of $1 a watt. (Actually, we'd probably end up spending 1/10th that once we started building at that scale.)
Which is, in fact, almost exactly how much electricity we use at max. (I have no idea where we would put those panels, though.)
Or we could just build 100 nuclear power plants.
Seriously, if we have the amount of money we're spending on war to throw around, we don't even need to invent 'new technology'...we could hurl epically massive amounts of the old tech at it and it would be far cheaper than war.(1)
Of course, corporations don't pay the cost of their wars for oil. They manage to get the US taxpayer to do it for them.
Well, we'd still need new tech for cars, but if we weren't subsiding oil prices by war, oil would cost $40 dollars a gallon and no one would seriously consider using it for anything, so the new tech would happen pretty automatically.
1) And you'll notice that I only included Iraq, not Afghanistan, which was also caused by oil, although move indirectly...al Qaeda exists because we prop up the Saudi royal family and that the US and Soviet Union fought over the Middle east for decades. Without our idiotic meddling in the region, I don't know what the region would be like, but they'd be unlikely to be attacking a superpower on the other side of the world.
The absurd luck was that they didn't hit it lower, causing it to come crashing down before anyone could get out of the building or out of the area.
Buildings do not work that way. Hitting the WTC lower wouldn't have made it come down faster, at least not automatically. The lower you get, the stronger it was. It's even possible it would have taken longer, or even allowed firefighters to put it out, at least for one of the buildings.
Now, hitting it lower would have trapped more people.
There is, however, a pretty good reason they couldn't hit it lower: New York was in the way. You can't just go flying a airplane however you want it...other buildings do exist.
Next time it could be 2 guys who kill 10,000.
Next time two guys attempt to hijack an airplane, they better hope there's an air marshal on board to arrest them.
Or they are liable to be lynched as they're attempting to figure out how to get through the reinforced cockpit door.
The next time two guys kill 10,000 people, they'll do it by launching a dozen canisters of mustard gas using an old mortar into the Superbowl.
Yes, but luckily criminals are often idiots.
and e) presumably rapists would just move elsewhere.
And probably other problems also. To quote Douglas Adams, 'The fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws'.
The fundamental design flaws in the 'airplane security', the fact it is utter nonsense and cannot possible do what it is intended to do, are hidden by the superficial design flaws, like the fact people can walk on airplanes with 12 inch razor blades while the TSA is looking at their genitalia.
Keeping razor blades off an airplane is idiotic, because any idiot can sharpen their comb or whatever. The TSA's complete inability to actually keep razor blades off is distracting us from the fact it's a pretty stupid thing to actually want.
As was pretty easy to figure out, I was responding to 'We could pull out of the Middle East tomorrow and return to a 1930s era isolationism and there would still be some extremist nutjob that would find a reason to hate us.'
Ergo, I was talking about the 'extremist nutjobs' we left behind in the Middle East. Many of whom we did blow up their house and kill their family.
No one was talking about existing terrorists at all. Strictly speaking, no one was talking about terrorists at all, at least not in that sentence.
We were talking about 'extremist nutjobs' who 'find a reason' to hate the US...like we killed their family, those incredibly petty people.
Perfectly normal hatred would be hating the very specific people who blew up your house and family, hating everyone who shares the same race or nationality as the people who blew up your house and family is what defines an "extremist nutjob".
So when a soldier, in the employ of an army, does something that he was ordered to that seriously harms you...your problem should be with that soldier? Really?
Not the people who gave him those orders, which are, ultimately, the people of the United States?
I can see how some people would emotionally think that way, but that's the emotional thinking, the logical thinking, the non-nutjob thinking, is 'If he hadn't done that the guy next to him would have. The people giving the orders are the problem.'
Also, the deaths-per-terrorist frequency distribution is uneven; the two planes that hit the towers did much, much more killing than the other two planes.
Yeah, and it's something that wouldn't happen anymore with airplanes.
Strictly speaking though, the entire thing was incredibly inefficient at killing people. Even if the ratio was closer to 1 terrorist per 300 murders, that's pretty easy to pull off with, I dunno, a movie theater on Harry Potter opening night.
We like to pretend 'they killed a lot of people', but they only did so with a really large amount of terrorists, proportionally.
No, it was absurd luck on the part of the US. The towers were hit well before their peak daily occupancy. Had they been at peak, not only would there have been more people there to be killed by the impact and aftermath, the evacuation would have been much more slow and congested, meaning many many more people would have still been inside the buildings when they collapsed.
And the terrorists were lucky because the buildings collapsed, which was my point. That was not a foregone conclusion.
The limiting factor is the number of terrorists there; the smaller targets are ineffective unless it's made up for by high volume.
Yup. It's why you'll never see IEDs here. Blowing up a single car? That's a lot of work.
This assumes the point of terrorists is to kill people, which isn't entirely correct. There are a lot of low-kill strategies that could cause all sorts of problems, like multiple-DC-sniper-ish attacks launched randomly...but they don't even have the people to do those.
The most isolation we could safely manage today would be to stay out of ground wars. We'd *still* have at least 3/4 of the navy we do now, because that's needed to keep international trade going, and none of the other countries both willing and able to do that are trustworthy.
I think you took 'return to a 1930s era isolationism' a little bit too literally.
No one has any problem with what the navy is doing. The only people the navy is harassing is pirates, and no one likes pirates.
'Staying out of ground wars', or, more specifically 'Not fucking starting ground wars in the first place' would be entirely enough.