I can make assertions without citations to back it up too.
Here you go. From the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Percent Change in Real GDP. The rates of return per term for Presidents are:
Carter 12.0% Reagan 1st Term 11.2% Reagan 2nd Term 14.7% GHWB 7.8% Clinton 1st Term 13.8% Clinton 2nd Term 17.3% GWB 1st Term 9.9% GWB 2nd Term 4.8%
Reagan Both Terms 28.8% Clinton Both Terms 34.4% GWB Both Terms 16.3%
Note that Carter's rate of return per term was better than every Republican except Reagan's second term.
By what metric are we measuring the growth of the economy?
Real GDP growth. No weird measures here. Also notice how growth was much larger in the higher taxes years of Clinton than in the low taxes years of Reagan.
The government is taxing and spending much more money.
US Total Government expenditures as percentage GDP in 2013 are the same as they were in 1991.
I'm sure that people on food stamps, unemployment, welfare, and other government assistance is much higher.
No shit Sherlock. We are in the middle of a recession. The number of people on welfare, food stamps and government assistance goes up during recessions. That is what they are there for.
This cannot continue, therefore it will not.
First, it can continue since expenditure in all of those items is negligible in terms of GDP. Second, don't worry. It won't continue since we will at some point pull out of this recession and the number of claimants will drop rapidly. In fact they already started to do so.
The hammer of reality WILL fall.
Careful dude, you are now entering tin foil hat territory.
So let's see: I give you facts contrary to your beliefs, you then make up some alternate explanation for which you have no evidence and then conclude "you don't know any more than I do".
What I'm saying is very clear: Romney loves tax breaks when they help him and loathes them when they help the poor. And contrary to your assertion, economic theory and practice has proven that aid to the unwillingly unemployed boosts the economy while Reaganomics doesn't.
Here's something that will shock you: the economy grew faster during the Carter years than during the Reaganomics years.
You are grasping at straws when confronted with a reality contrary to your beliefs. And yes most of the money stays in the Red States which is why the supposedly "small government" republicans fight tooth and nail to keep the money flowing.
He moved $100 million in IRA money (i.e. government subsidized funds who are supposed to fund your retirement) to a tax haven. Did he rally against such ridiculous subsidy when he was a candidate? of course not. Instead he complained about the unemployed freshly fired worked for collecting food stamps so that his family won't starve.
Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
Except that the biggest recipients of government largesse are Red States (look it up). So much for your "easily-bought" assumptiony.
I also have the expectation of the government spending my tax dollars in things that benefit the general population instead of tax breaks to Mitt Romney so he can stash his $100 million retirement fund in a tax heaven in the Bahamas (again look it up).
You've been paying too much attention to Mitt Romney and not enough to the facts. The war in Iraq alone would have been enough to put men on Mars ten times over.If that didn't suffice tax breaks to millionaires and corporations alone would too.
Yet, your proposal to put men on Mars is to remove health insurance from the sick. Boy has his country ever lost its way!
As opposed to industry that treats you so kindly the morning after when they hand you your pink slip?
Let me FTFY:
This is why you need to keep all powerful organizations in check. Business are kept in check by the government, and in turn, the government is kept in check by the people when they exercise their democratic rights.
It also was overloaded with fresh-undergraduate talent. However some tasks require a substantial number of people with significant experience, yet Microsoft only rarely went after them. In at least some cases the sole reason they hired talent was to silence them (Mark Russinovich I'm looking at you) not to benefit from them.
Their search engine effort is notorious for the lack of inside experts, and the person in charge is, as best as I understand, a non-techie.
Our governments certainly lied but they did not know what Saddam had. Not until there were US/UK boots on the ground did we really know one way or the other.
Sorry, but no. Many other foreign countries had a look at the evidence and they voted "no WMD". Only US lapdogs went along (coalition of the willing), everyone else took a pass. So people were able to tell "one way or another".
GM was brought down more by bad quality cars than anything else. Sure, unions didn't help, but unions in Germany are equally strong and their car manufacturers seem to have no problem thriving.
A former manager of GM described the culture as one in which they would merrily spend $100M in an ad campaign for a new car but couldn't get themselves to spend $0.15 in a better rear light bulb which was much needed.
Instead, we have the same company with the same problems just waiting for the same conditions to happen again.
Say what? Management was replaced and contracts were heavily renegotiated and unions lost lots of power. These are big changes and GM is a new company. Still not enough commitment to quality but many of its biggest problems are gone.
those are exactly the sort of things frequently made from deeply undistinguished jug or box wines.
Try making sangria once from a $20 bottle of rioja, orange juice, lime juice and a touch of brandy. You'd be surprised how much you can tell the difference, even if you are not a regular wine drinker.
I love it how the press reports this result as if the family tree had a single root.
A family tree has two parents, four grandparents eight grandparents, etc. Out of the 2^n ancestors in the n-generation, two branches standout, one the fully male one carrying the Y chromosome and the other the fully maternal line, carrying mitochondrial DNA. There are good mathematical reasons why such lines come to be dominated by a few individuals over the centuries if not millenia yet the press makes it sound like Warren Beatty was alive 100K years ago fathering each and every one of us. As someone else pointed out, if somehow I became Will Chamberlain and happened to father 10K daughters but no male offspring, the Y chromosome line would makes it look like I ws never there though in practice I'd be the (grand) daddy of half of New York within a few generations.
Of course, otherwise Mr. Mintzberg would not be a professor in an MBA program. What he claims (among many other things) is that MBA programs should take as input essentially only managers mid-career, not kids fresh out of school like they often do today.
There is plenty of talk about efficiency, though.. but that is a necessity for a business to survive.
The problem is that most people hear efficiency and they think cost cutting. For example, while Subway was busy finding the cheapest meat substitutes to sell you as ham Quiznos moved in taking a few billion of Subways market share.
Sometimes the most efficient thing to do is to go upscale (think BMW, Apple, Rolex). In my experience, very few MBAs seem to be aware of this simple fact.
Yet most people get a degree and can't write a freaking linked list from scratch
You must be interviewing near the bottom of the barrel then. Usually my potential hires tend to conk out a bit higher in the "code this" part of the interview.
This might pretty much kill Mir. By the time is released Wayland will likely have taken over and even if Mir is better it will be a case of "too little, too late".
Henry Mintzberg has data that shows MBAs tend to correlate with negative traits. This means that an MBA at the very least starts with a "higher probability of not being a good employee", so now they have to prove that they are better than the norm.
MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.
You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.
His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.
Of course, it is the GOP sole characteristic to not look up facts. The rest of the political spectrum (from the middle all the way to the far left) may have many flaws, but ignoring facts and figures is not one of them.
Here are the figures for you, straight out of Wikipedia:
Currently, you can't do that because you're taxed to death,
The US has the lowest tax rate of all developed countries. So right there your argument is already wrong.
and the government has given monopoly control to a handful of healthcare giants.
I don't know where you get this from and it is really funny to see how hard you strive to pin a clear failure of the free market (healthcare is not a freely traded good) on your big government bugaboo.
Clearly you've reached a conclusion first (big government is always bad) and now you are forcing the facts into it.
I don't want big government but nor do I want small government. I want government of just the right size to provide (1) decent public education to all (equality of opportunity, not outcome), (2) decent public infrastructure, (3) enough defense that we can be secure in the world (but not so much that we can go in expeditions to Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction), (4) healthcare to all since a civilized country does not let sick or hungry people die and (5) enough police that I can go to the corner store without fear of being mugged.
If you look at the list above, government is too small for all of those except (3). Those are facts. The rest is ideology.
Slashdot Mirror
I can make assertions without citations to back it up too.
Here you go. From the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Percent Change in Real GDP. The rates of return per term for Presidents are:
Carter 12.0%
Reagan 1st Term 11.2%
Reagan 2nd Term 14.7%
GHWB 7.8%
Clinton 1st Term 13.8%
Clinton 2nd Term 17.3%
GWB 1st Term 9.9%
GWB 2nd Term 4.8%
Reagan Both Terms 28.8%
Clinton Both Terms 34.4%
GWB Both Terms 16.3%
Note that Carter's rate of return per term was better than every Republican except Reagan's second term.
By what metric are we measuring the growth of the economy?
Real GDP growth. No weird measures here. Also notice how growth was much larger in the higher taxes years of Clinton than in the low taxes years of Reagan.
The government is taxing and spending much more money.
US Total Government expenditures as percentage GDP in 2013 are the same as they were in 1991.
I'm sure that people on food stamps, unemployment, welfare, and other government assistance is much higher.
No shit Sherlock. We are in the middle of a recession. The number of people on welfare, food stamps and government assistance goes up during recessions. That is what they are there for.
This cannot continue, therefore it will not.
First, it can continue since expenditure in all of those items is negligible in terms of GDP. Second, don't worry. It won't continue since we will at some point pull out of this recession and the number of claimants will drop rapidly. In fact they already started to do so.
The hammer of reality WILL fall.
Careful dude, you are now entering tin foil hat territory.
So let's see: I give you facts contrary to your beliefs, you then make up some alternate explanation for which you have no evidence and then conclude "you don't know any more than I do".
Carry on with your made up beliefs.
What I'm saying is very clear: Romney loves tax breaks when they help him and loathes them when they help the poor. And contrary to your assertion, economic theory and practice has proven that aid to the unwillingly unemployed boosts the economy while Reaganomics doesn't.
Here's something that will shock you: the economy grew faster during the Carter years than during the Reaganomics years.
You are grasping at straws when confronted with a reality contrary to your beliefs. And yes most of the money stays in the Red States which is why the supposedly "small government" republicans fight tooth and nail to keep the money flowing.
He moved $100 million in IRA money (i.e. government subsidized funds who are supposed to fund your retirement) to a tax haven.
Did he rally against such ridiculous subsidy when he was a candidate? of course not. Instead he complained about the unemployed freshly fired worked for collecting food stamps so that his family won't starve.
Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
Except that the biggest recipients of government largesse are Red States (look it up). So much for your "easily-bought" assumptiony.
I also have the expectation of the government spending my tax dollars in things that benefit the general population instead of tax breaks to Mitt Romney so he can stash his $100 million retirement fund in a tax heaven in the Bahamas (again look it up).
You've been paying too much attention to Mitt Romney and not enough to the facts. The war in Iraq alone would have been enough to put men on Mars ten times over.If that didn't suffice tax breaks to millionaires and corporations alone would too.
Yet, your proposal to put men on Mars is to remove health insurance from the sick. Boy has his country ever lost its way!
This is why you don't get in bed with government.
As opposed to industry that treats you so kindly the morning after when they hand you your pink slip?
Let me FTFY:
This is why you need to keep all powerful organizations in check. Business are kept in check by the government, and in turn, the government is kept in check by the people when they exercise their democratic rights.
and that there seems to been a bit of a disagreement as to whether they should even be snapping that photo.
That's a joke son. You can hear it clearly in the recording that it was meant in jest/snarky-remark.
the absolute occurrence is still small enough (~ 1/20)
It is 1/20 for each defective gene you carry, so the final probability ends up being much higher.
It also was overloaded with fresh-undergraduate talent. However some tasks require a substantial number of people with significant experience, yet Microsoft only rarely went after them. In at least some cases the sole reason they hired talent was to silence them (Mark Russinovich I'm looking at you) not to benefit from them.
Their search engine effort is notorious for the lack of inside experts, and the person in charge is, as best as I understand, a non-techie.
Our governments certainly lied but they did not know what Saddam had. Not until there were US/UK boots on the ground did we really know one way or the other.
Sorry, but no. Many other foreign countries had a look at the evidence and they voted "no WMD". Only US lapdogs went along (coalition of the willing), everyone else took a pass. So people were able to tell "one way or another".
but free from the yoke of union blackmail
GM was brought down more by bad quality cars than anything else. Sure, unions didn't help, but unions in Germany are equally strong and their car manufacturers seem to have no problem thriving.
A former manager of GM described the culture as one in which they would merrily spend $100M in an ad campaign for a new car but couldn't get themselves to spend $0.15 in a better rear light bulb which was much needed.
Instead, we have the same company with the same problems just waiting for the same conditions to happen again.
Say what? Management was replaced and contracts were heavily renegotiated and unions lost lots of power. These are big changes and GM is a new company. Still not enough commitment to quality but many of its biggest problems are gone.
those are exactly the sort of things frequently made from deeply undistinguished jug or box wines.
Try making sangria once from a $20 bottle of rioja, orange juice, lime juice and a touch of brandy. You'd be surprised how much you can tell the difference, even if you are not a regular wine drinker.
I love it how the press reports this result as if the family tree had a single root.
A family tree has two parents, four grandparents eight grandparents, etc. Out of the 2^n ancestors in the n-generation, two branches standout, one the fully male one carrying the Y chromosome and the other the fully maternal line, carrying mitochondrial DNA. There are good mathematical reasons why such lines come to be dominated by a few individuals over the centuries if not millenia yet the press makes it sound like Warren Beatty was alive 100K years ago fathering each and every one of us. As someone else pointed out, if somehow I became Will Chamberlain and happened to father 10K daughters but no male offspring, the Y chromosome line would makes it look like I ws never there though in practice I'd be the (grand) daddy of half of New York within a few generations.
Nobody is as cynical about scientists and scientific institutions and their desire to frighten government into giving them money than I am.
I agree, the tendency to exaggerate problems by scientists has reached the state of a crisis. Soon we won't know what to believe anymore!!
This is why I am applying for an urgent grant to study the effect of made up crises on academic research.
Proof? Look at mortality rates from simple wounds prior to antibiotics.
Oh, BS. How often do you need antibiotics after a simple wound? Personally I don't think I've ever had.
Read the book will ya?
There is no reason a person cannot be both.
Of course, otherwise Mr. Mintzberg would not be a professor in an MBA program. What he claims (among many other things) is that MBA programs should take as input essentially only managers mid-career, not kids fresh out of school like they often do today.
There is plenty of talk about efficiency, though.. but that is a necessity for a business to survive.
The problem is that most people hear efficiency and they think cost cutting. For example, while Subway was busy finding the cheapest meat substitutes to sell you as ham Quiznos moved in taking a few billion of Subways market share.
Sometimes the most efficient thing to do is to go upscale (think BMW, Apple, Rolex). In my experience, very few MBAs seem to be aware of this simple fact.
Yet most people get a degree and can't write a freaking linked list from scratch
You must be interviewing near the bottom of the barrel then. Usually my potential hires tend to conk out a bit higher in the "code this" part of the interview.
This might pretty much kill Mir. By the time is released Wayland will likely have taken over and even if Mir is better it will be a case of "too little, too late".
Henry Mintzberg has data that shows MBAs tend to correlate with negative traits. This means that an MBA at the very least starts with a "higher probability of not being a good employee", so now they have to prove that they are better than the norm.
MBAs on paper are supposed to teach you a lot of useful things. In practice most students walk away with one thing in their mind: how to cut costs to a minimum even if it drives the business to the ground so long as they collect their bonus before it does so.
You can read all about it from Henry Mintzberg who is a Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University, and has spent the last two decades trying to fix the present MBA mess.
His book "Managers not MBAs" is a must read for anyone thinking about hiring an MBA.
Did you actually try to look up the numbers?
Of course, it is the GOP sole characteristic to not look up facts. The rest of the political spectrum (from the middle all the way to the far left) may have many flaws, but ignoring facts and figures is not one of them.
Here are the figures for you, straight out of Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP
Currently, you can't do that because you're taxed to death,
The US has the lowest tax rate of all developed countries. So right there your argument is already wrong.
and the government has given monopoly control to a handful of healthcare giants.
I don't know where you get this from and it is really funny to see how hard you strive to pin a clear failure of the free market (healthcare is not a freely traded good) on your big government bugaboo.
Clearly you've reached a conclusion first (big government is always bad) and now you are forcing the facts into it.
I don't want big government but nor do I want small government. I want government of just the right size to provide (1) decent public education to all (equality of opportunity, not outcome), (2) decent public infrastructure, (3) enough defense that we can be secure in the world (but not so much that we can go in expeditions to Iraq which had nothing to do with 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction), (4) healthcare to all since a civilized country does not let sick or hungry people die and (5) enough police that I can go to the corner store without fear of being mugged.
If you look at the list above, government is too small for all of those except (3). Those are facts. The rest is ideology.