If you look at job creation and when the stimulus ended, there's a clear drop in job creation showing that stimulus was working.
Correlation does not prove causation. Any number of things could produce a drop in job creation. The first two that come to mind that happened around the same period were the enactment of Obamacare as well as the debt ceiling debacle. Both have major negative influences over business, by scare factor alone (we're seeing it again with the fiscal cliff).
Bush had a surplus and a reasonably strong economy given to him and he turned it into massive deficits and the greatest recession since the Depression.
Intellectually dishonest. Or you're just nuts. Presidents don't cause recessions. Foolish banks and over-leveraged property owners do.
Obama is slowly working us out of that, though without literally *any* help from the GOP.
Funny how they'll hold the country hostage to get millionaires a tax cut, but when Obama says give the little guy a significant cut, they oppose it.
Also funny how Obama will hold the country hostage to stick it to the rich, yet when it comes to the payroll tax cut (additional spending that passed on HIS watch), he's intransigent. You're nuts if you think Republicans are the only ideologs unwilling to budge.
Google 'Bikini Graph' to see what Bush left Obama. We were losing 700,000+ jobs A MONTH at the end of Bush's term. In short order we had stopped that loss and started growing again, albeit slowly.
*sigh* Please stop pretending the economy moves solely at the discretion of the president. You look intellectually dishonest at best, and like an outright ass at worst. Obama was exceedingly lucky to inherit a situation that could only improve (the US was practically at rock bottom when he took over -- ANY president in that situation could "show improvement" over a 4 year period -- if you don't think this is true, just look at the average length of time any recession has lasted, as well as the recovery that followed -- what happened here wasn't magic, it was normal market ebb and flow). And if you wanna talk straight numbers on the recovery, this is the slowest and most anemic recovery we've had from a recession since the Great Depression. So as a yardstick on whether the "stimulus" worked, I'd say it's not looking rosy.
Your own chart misses the point. The OP spoke of "spending", not of the "deficit" -- the chart refers to deficit relative to GDP. It also stands in stark contradiction to most Democrat talking points:
- With the exception of the housing collapse, the deficit shrank for the majority of Bush's 2 terms (2001-2009)
- The two major factors Dem chalk up to being responsible for the deficit are the Iraq War, beginning in 2003, and the Bush Tax cuts (in 2001) -- yet if we once again look at the chart, the chart following each of these activities is one of declining deficit (prior to the housing collapse)
You can't have your cake and eat it too on this chart -- namely, you can't accuse Bush of being a big spender when the chart says otherwise -OR- or can't claim Obama isn't a big spender just because the chart points upwards. Either they both were big spenders, neither were big spenders, or this chart is irrelevant to "spending". Personally, I believe it's irrelevant to spending, because the state of the economy isn't something the president can simply dictate. Sometimes you're benefiting from a dotcom boom -- sometimes you're suffering from a housing collapse. "Spending", on the other hand, you can talk about in a vacuum. And Bush and Obama BOTH are _huge_ spenders relative to previous presidents.
The Dems generally want Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security kept out of the regular budget, and not means tested.
...except when they're looking to lower taxes on poor people and the middle class...
Talk about having your cake and eating it too -- "we need to give poor people a tax break and they already pay no income taxes...hrm, let's just reduce their payroll tax burden" -- a few years later... "we need to figure out what spending is absorbing all our tax dollars -- we seem to be spending alot on social programs...NO! That's not part of the budget!"
You mean due to some variation of desertification (the destruction of arable land) which is still a more serious problem than current climate change dangers.
That could be a boon in disguise for all we know. Deserts are gold mines for solar power.
. Thirty years ago they formed only a tiny fraction of climate change skeptics. Today they're the bulk of the climate change skeptics.
You don't think that maybe you're just using ancillary data to paint an inaccurate picture? There's far more dialogue now than there was 30 years ago about the topic, and the loudest and most persistent ARE the crazies (on both sides).
Poor example. Canada has far more in common with capitalist principles than it does with social. It's in the top 5 of the economic freedom index. The regulation at the federal level over there is very small -- their entire healthcare system for instance is implemented at the province level. And they survived because they didn't over-leverage their borrowing and spending.
When you see a game like Grimloack that both GOG and Steam has Steam nearly always has it cheaper, and of course on the sales its not even close, the last sale where i saw they both had it GOG was selling the game for $7, steam for $3.
Maybe it's because you're only renting the game on Steam whereas you're buying it on GOG. I'll pay $4 not to rely on external servers.
A more apt analogy would be if that someone purchased your product (or looked at it in the store), and then opened up a shop selling the same product for cheaper (presumably because he didn't have any R&D cost). I am not necessarily saying that is right or wrong, but if you need to "inflate" the moral dilemma to make your point, well, that says quite a bit about your point already...
How much meteor insurance do you have on your house?
Many home insurances cover practically all "acts of God", so to speak. And why shouldn't it? What's the point of having home insurance if there's caveats that prevent you from ever using it?
Meaning Social Security has an infinitely better track record than the fascist for-profit retirement accounts you would force workers to join.
Except that it doesn't....It has never kept up with inflation, poorly tracks population growth, doesn't track life extension, and is horribly invested. It continues to grow as a percentage of GDP every single year and people like continue to turn a blind eye to it.
Banks can and have pissed away the retirement funds and pensions of millions of people.
Cite? That's called theft.
You want to force everyone to buy into their shitty 401k's when that money can go up in smoke in the next asset bubble to come along, but dismantle the system that has never missed a payment or cracked a nest egg.
Long term investing is immune to bubbles, particularly life cycle investing.
Are you? You're arguing a one-time payroll tax cut is the status quo when that's obviously not the case.
Who gives a shit WHAT the status quo is? You just acted like Social Security lives in some kind of budgetary bubble where it is isolated from all other budgetary matters. My example, one time or not, proves that is not the case. We are taxed by some amount to pay for things. The government spends some amount to pay for things. How it is allocated on a tax form does not change the fact that it's the same freakin' pool of money.
Phew, and I thought you were smarter than pond scum. Yes, they come out of your taxes - you payroll taxes. Now, try to keep up, but that would be the "dedicated revenue stream" that I was referring to.
Are you like willfully dense? Obama JUST gave everyone a "payroll tax cut" for the specific purpose of stimulating the economy and/or giving everyone a tax break. This tax cut had NOTHING to do with the amount of spending or required funds of the Social Security program. And as a result, the Social Security shortfall is even LARGER than it was prior to this year. That shortfall is being covered by the GENERAL BUDGET -- this is why people continue receiving social security checks even after we shaved a significant chunk off the incoming revenue by cutting their social security TAXES. You're seriously deluded if you think you can treat the "income/expense" of Social Security and the "income/expense" of "all other government functions" as different entities that exist in some kind of mystical void. NO ONE, including every politician since the beginning of fucking time, has treated them as such. In fact, the Social Security fund has REGULARLY been raided to pay for whatever pet projects or budget shortfalls they were having at the time (and vice versa)
Nonsense. How many times have Social Security recipients been screwed out of their retirement by the government?
It's happening right now -- every single pitched idea to "solve" the Social Security (and Medicare as well) problem involves either reducing benefits or pushing back the age at which you can receive benefits. If I went my whole life planning for a certain level of money to be available at a specific time of my life, and some jackass decided to just arbitrarily move the yardstick, that's seriously impacting my life.
You realize you're contradicting yourself, right? Once you force the worker to hand over a portion of his income to an investment bank - which is textbook fascism, btw - then the bank is free to piss away your money. And what happens if the bank goes bankrupt, as all the major banks would have done by 2009 if they hadn't been bailed out by the feds?
The banks don't own your money, and the common man is FDIC insured against loss (to a level that pretty much fully covers everyone except millionaires)
Maybe you could follow your own advice, as Social Security has nothing to do with the Federal Budget, as it has it's own dedicated revenue stream.
Phew, and I thought it came out of my taxes. It's a good thing Social Security expenditure is decreasing too -- I mean it had to have decreased because my payroll taxes decreased for the past year. It's so fantastic that some a budget item lives in a vacuum like that such that we can ignore it entirely in the greater picture of the budget. Maybe a few decades down the road, when mandatory spending is 150% of GDP, you'll get your head out of your ass.
1. The government would effectively control the entire stock market, by being able to put trillions of dollars into anything it wanted to. The opportunities for corruption are giant and obvious.
If you believe this is true, why isn't the government cornering the market with the Thrift Savings Plan, which serve as a 401k for all federal employees? Secondly, it is braindead easy to limit the vehicles of investment if such a road were pursued (namely index funds).
2. Social Security wouldn't be insulated from all of the bumps in the markets, and would experience massive losses exactly at the time that their recipients need the help the most.
If we implemented Lifecycle funds (also as implemented in the TSP 401k), yes it IS insulated from all the bumps of the market (as long as the market doesn't tank for a 30-40 year period, at which time I'd say we have bigger problems on our hands). When people need their funds the most, they'll already be sitting in low risk assets that aren't affected by market movement.
ne of the things that unfortunately did not happen with the Obamacare debate was to really address deep down on the issues surrounding public health policy and rooting out the real issues that are causing health care costs to go up faster than inflation, thus becoming a major area of spending for everybody involved
Are you really surprised? It goes down this way every time an entitlement discussion goes down. Dems couldn't give a damn about costs _or_ the impact on the economy/jobs market -- they just want to make sure everybody gets their free cake. That's why children got extended benefits as did the pre-existing condition market and so on and so forth. He had no intention of doing anything to reduce costs -- if he did, he would have been talking to and/or compromising with Republicans. Thank god Clinton had the sense to find some middle ground with Republicans -- else Welfare would be a budgetary mess now as well.
"Means testing" turns earned benefits into social welfare, and then people like yourself will be demanding that we eliminate welfare.
Except it's not earned benefits because he has no ownership over them at all. The government could end the program, change the rules, go insolvent, or do any manner of things to fuck over the retiree because it isn't his money -- it's a check from the government. This is why many are pushing for mandatory retirement accounts instead, because then at least the money would be YOURS and the government couldn't raid it to pay for their own petty personal crusades. If it's going to be left the way it is, it should be a welfare program, because it's far too poorly designed to stand up as a long-term retirement plan (socking money away into assets that can't even keep up with inflation over a 40 year period is a terrible way to invest for your future).
I'm being lazy and not googling it, but I thought he was talking about putting social security money into the stock market. I also thought I remembered hearing that had he done that, in hindsight with the recession, some retirees might be doing better, but most would have seen a significant decrease in their funds already, as opposed to social security still continuing.
As with all things, if it was implemented in a retarded way, that was possible. In truth, if Lifecycle funds were implemented, none of the imminent retirees would have been impacted because all their funds would be sitting in safe low risk investments. And everybody else would have recovered their losses as the market bounced back (just look at the stock market today). It was a great idea, except that scaremongerers on the left made everybody believe "the Republicans are out to get your benefits!!!", the same way they're doing in current reform attempt dialogue. And so we will NEVER see any real reform in the system.
Except R isn't interested in compromise.
For example, way back when Obama started with redoing health care, he invited the Republicans to participate and said "Lets start with the plan from one of YOUR people, John McCain." The response was that that plan was unacceptable and that they wouldn't participate AT ALL.
Please find less biased sources of news. What actually went down couldn't have been farther from the truth. If you want the truth, you follow the moderates (like Olympia Snowe for instance, who originally voted FOR the healthcare bill in initial committee, but quickly grew frustrated as the size of scope of the bill spiraled out of control and no one wanted to continue discussing it). What actually happened (and was flat out stated in the press by Dems) is that they believed in 2008 that they had a "mandate" delivered by the people to avoid Republican ideas at all costs (remember the "your policies fucked the country, now we get to drive" rhetoric Obama continually spewed?) This "mandate" concept is happening yet again, where now Obama seems to think the people want him to be a stickler for fucking the rich: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/11/14/obama-signals-hes-firm-on-raising-taxes-for-wealthiest-americans-obama-signals-hes-firm-on-raising-taxes
Slashdot Mirror
Incorrect.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-may-come-close-to-2020-greenhouse-gas-emission-target
Why not? It's apparently the sole dinstiguishing feature between "good healthcare" and "bad healthcare"
#sarcasm
Correlation does not prove causation. Any number of things could produce a drop in job creation. The first two that come to mind that happened around the same period were the enactment of Obamacare as well as the debt ceiling debacle. Both have major negative influences over business, by scare factor alone (we're seeing it again with the fiscal cliff).
Intellectually dishonest. Or you're just nuts. Presidents don't cause recessions. Foolish banks and over-leveraged property owners do.
He doesn't WANT any help from Republicans. Once again, like his first term, that stubborn jackass thinks he has some kind of "mandate" from the populace to ignore all Republican input/suggestions. Moderate Olympia Snowe couldn't deal with him. Neither could Boehner: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/obama-vs-boehner-who-killed-the-debt-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&
Also funny how Obama will hold the country hostage to stick it to the rich, yet when it comes to the payroll tax cut (additional spending that passed on HIS watch), he's intransigent. You're nuts if you think Republicans are the only ideologs unwilling to budge.
*sigh* Please stop pretending the economy moves solely at the discretion of the president. You look intellectually dishonest at best, and like an outright ass at worst. Obama was exceedingly lucky to inherit a situation that could only improve (the US was practically at rock bottom when he took over -- ANY president in that situation could "show improvement" over a 4 year period -- if you don't think this is true, just look at the average length of time any recession has lasted, as well as the recovery that followed -- what happened here wasn't magic, it was normal market ebb and flow). And if you wanna talk straight numbers on the recovery, this is the slowest and most anemic recovery we've had from a recession since the Great Depression. So as a yardstick on whether the "stimulus" worked, I'd say it's not looking rosy.
Your own chart misses the point. The OP spoke of "spending", not of the "deficit" -- the chart refers to deficit relative to GDP. It also stands in stark contradiction to most Democrat talking points:
- With the exception of the housing collapse, the deficit shrank for the majority of Bush's 2 terms (2001-2009)
- The two major factors Dem chalk up to being responsible for the deficit are the Iraq War, beginning in 2003, and the Bush Tax cuts (in 2001) -- yet if we once again look at the chart, the chart following each of these activities is one of declining deficit (prior to the housing collapse)
You can't have your cake and eat it too on this chart -- namely, you can't accuse Bush of being a big spender when the chart says otherwise -OR- or can't claim Obama isn't a big spender just because the chart points upwards. Either they both were big spenders, neither were big spenders, or this chart is irrelevant to "spending". Personally, I believe it's irrelevant to spending, because the state of the economy isn't something the president can simply dictate. Sometimes you're benefiting from a dotcom boom -- sometimes you're suffering from a housing collapse. "Spending", on the other hand, you can talk about in a vacuum. And Bush and Obama BOTH are _huge_ spenders relative to previous presidents.
...except when they're looking to lower taxes on poor people and the middle class...
Talk about having your cake and eating it too -- "we need to give poor people a tax break and they already pay no income taxes...hrm, let's just reduce their payroll tax burden" -- a few years later... "we need to figure out what spending is absorbing all our tax dollars -- we seem to be spending alot on social programs...NO! That's not part of the budget!"
Oh, the irony. 20 years is short term noise, but 150 years is somehow significant in a planet whose climate is measured in eons.
That could be a boon in disguise for all we know. Deserts are gold mines for solar power.
You don't think that maybe you're just using ancillary data to paint an inaccurate picture? There's far more dialogue now than there was 30 years ago about the topic, and the loudest and most persistent ARE the crazies (on both sides).
Poor example. Canada has far more in common with capitalist principles than it does with social. It's in the top 5 of the economic freedom index. The regulation at the federal level over there is very small -- their entire healthcare system for instance is implemented at the province level. And they survived because they didn't over-leverage their borrowing and spending.
So did the fucker in the US.
Maybe it's because you're only renting the game on Steam whereas you're buying it on GOG. I'll pay $4 not to rely on external servers.
Sounds like Gamestop. And more power to them.
Many home insurances cover practically all "acts of God", so to speak. And why shouldn't it? What's the point of having home insurance if there's caveats that prevent you from ever using it?
Except that it doesn't....It has never kept up with inflation, poorly tracks population growth, doesn't track life extension, and is horribly invested. It continues to grow as a percentage of GDP every single year and people like continue to turn a blind eye to it.
Cite? That's called theft.
Long term investing is immune to bubbles, particularly life cycle investing.
Who gives a shit WHAT the status quo is? You just acted like Social Security lives in some kind of budgetary bubble where it is isolated from all other budgetary matters. My example, one time or not, proves that is not the case. We are taxed by some amount to pay for things. The government spends some amount to pay for things. How it is allocated on a tax form does not change the fact that it's the same freakin' pool of money.
Are you like willfully dense? Obama JUST gave everyone a "payroll tax cut" for the specific purpose of stimulating the economy and/or giving everyone a tax break. This tax cut had NOTHING to do with the amount of spending or required funds of the Social Security program. And as a result, the Social Security shortfall is even LARGER than it was prior to this year. That shortfall is being covered by the GENERAL BUDGET -- this is why people continue receiving social security checks even after we shaved a significant chunk off the incoming revenue by cutting their social security TAXES. You're seriously deluded if you think you can treat the "income/expense" of Social Security and the "income/expense" of "all other government functions" as different entities that exist in some kind of mystical void. NO ONE, including every politician since the beginning of fucking time, has treated them as such. In fact, the Social Security fund has REGULARLY been raided to pay for whatever pet projects or budget shortfalls they were having at the time (and vice versa)
It's happening right now -- every single pitched idea to "solve" the Social Security (and Medicare as well) problem involves either reducing benefits or pushing back the age at which you can receive benefits. If I went my whole life planning for a certain level of money to be available at a specific time of my life, and some jackass decided to just arbitrarily move the yardstick, that's seriously impacting my life.
The banks don't own your money, and the common man is FDIC insured against loss (to a level that pretty much fully covers everyone except millionaires)
Phew, and I thought it came out of my taxes. It's a good thing Social Security expenditure is decreasing too -- I mean it had to have decreased because my payroll taxes decreased for the past year. It's so fantastic that some a budget item lives in a vacuum like that such that we can ignore it entirely in the greater picture of the budget. Maybe a few decades down the road, when mandatory spending is 150% of GDP, you'll get your head out of your ass.
If you believe this is true, why isn't the government cornering the market with the Thrift Savings Plan, which serve as a 401k for all federal employees? Secondly, it is braindead easy to limit the vehicles of investment if such a road were pursued (namely index funds).
If we implemented Lifecycle funds (also as implemented in the TSP 401k), yes it IS insulated from all the bumps of the market (as long as the market doesn't tank for a 30-40 year period, at which time I'd say we have bigger problems on our hands). When people need their funds the most, they'll already be sitting in low risk assets that aren't affected by market movement.
Oh, so we _aren't_ taxed on Social Security and it isn't a budget item? Phew -- for a second there, I thought we had a real spending problem.
Are you really surprised? It goes down this way every time an entitlement discussion goes down. Dems couldn't give a damn about costs _or_ the impact on the economy/jobs market -- they just want to make sure everybody gets their free cake. That's why children got extended benefits as did the pre-existing condition market and so on and so forth. He had no intention of doing anything to reduce costs -- if he did, he would have been talking to and/or compromising with Republicans. Thank god Clinton had the sense to find some middle ground with Republicans -- else Welfare would be a budgetary mess now as well.
Except it's not earned benefits because he has no ownership over them at all. The government could end the program, change the rules, go insolvent, or do any manner of things to fuck over the retiree because it isn't his money -- it's a check from the government. This is why many are pushing for mandatory retirement accounts instead, because then at least the money would be YOURS and the government couldn't raid it to pay for their own petty personal crusades. If it's going to be left the way it is, it should be a welfare program, because it's far too poorly designed to stand up as a long-term retirement plan (socking money away into assets that can't even keep up with inflation over a 40 year period is a terrible way to invest for your future).
As with all things, if it was implemented in a retarded way, that was possible. In truth, if Lifecycle funds were implemented, none of the imminent retirees would have been impacted because all their funds would be sitting in safe low risk investments. And everybody else would have recovered their losses as the market bounced back (just look at the stock market today). It was a great idea, except that scaremongerers on the left made everybody believe "the Republicans are out to get your benefits!!!", the same way they're doing in current reform attempt dialogue. And so we will NEVER see any real reform in the system.
Unsurprisingly enough, it's the exact same way we determine the "correct" distribution of money.
Please find less biased sources of news. What actually went down couldn't have been farther from the truth. If you want the truth, you follow the moderates (like Olympia Snowe for instance, who originally voted FOR the healthcare bill in initial committee, but quickly grew frustrated as the size of scope of the bill spiraled out of control and no one wanted to continue discussing it). What actually happened (and was flat out stated in the press by Dems) is that they believed in 2008 that they had a "mandate" delivered by the people to avoid Republican ideas at all costs (remember the "your policies fucked the country, now we get to drive" rhetoric Obama continually spewed?) This "mandate" concept is happening yet again, where now Obama seems to think the people want him to be a stickler for fucking the rich: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/11/14/obama-signals-hes-firm-on-raising-taxes-for-wealthiest-americans-obama-signals-hes-firm-on-raising-taxes
You want to see compromise? See what length Boehner took to TRY to make a debt deal happen and then look at how easily Obama undid months of effort by attempting to move the goalposts at the last minute: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/magazine/obama-vs-boehner-who-killed-the-debt-deal.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Read that and then tell me the Republicans are the only ones who have a compromise problem.