You say "can't be possible that there are some really incompetent parents out there"
But OP said "Most parents who care also have no clue how to help."
Kind of a big difference.
And anyway you're still wrong. Saying "some" is really exaggerating. The intersection of parents who are "really incompetent" and parents who care and are very interested in helping is pretty small I'd say.
Hmm.. school days are already shorter than workdays so either the parent works part time already or there's already a babysitting service involved. If kids stay an extra hour 4 days a week, that's an extra hour of work 4 days a week. Or an hour less of babysitting 4 days a week.
Being as charitable as I can, I'm thinking maybe he meant improvements to the file manager for photos music and docs. I seriously doubt they're trying to reinvent e.g. openoffice.
Perhaps it's more like the way file managers all handle thumbnails these days, and extending that to stuff like full-text search for documents, or "sounds like" search for music, etc. His comment about "basic utilities, that are more part of the OS than..." makes me think it's some non-ui stuff, like a framework for applications to plug into.
If an unlicensed doctor messes up an operation and now you need four more operations and years of drugs to recover, then the cost of the condition for which you sought treatment has been massively increased.
Yes, in that hypothetical. But you're pulling that out of thin air. You can't use it as an argument.
Anyone can make stuff up: if an unlicensed doctor performs an operation flawlessly and charged you 90% less, then clearly it's cheaper and superior to licensing.
What a reasonable person does in this situation is work with what's given. By itself, the cost of an individual service, without respect to the effect on the rest of society, will increase if there are stringent regulatory requirements related to that service. That's just blatantly obvious... you know, because if it were cheaper, then you wouldn't *need* regulations.
Liberals would argue that in nearly all cases the value increase significantly exceeds the cost increase so much so as to create an over-all massive cost decrease (my example shows one case where this happens). And this analogy only shows the DIRECT cost of that value reduction, the indirect costs are orders of magnitude more. Bad doctors mean much longer times off-sick from work. Meaning much higher risk of being unemployed at the end of it. That's months or years of income lost which is ALSO a cost of not licensing the service, it's lost productivity to your employer either way, it's a massive cost to the economy.
Again, all of that is made up. It also assumes that the alternatives available are "fully licensed" and "totally unregulated with horrible quality." What about stuff like Underwriters Labratories, an "Independent, not-for-profit product safety testing and certification organization." In a dark and scary world where light bulbs were not tightly regulated by the government, couldn't you vote with your wallet and be like "Well I'm not buying light bulbs unless they're tested by this third party that has a good reputation."
I would imagine for something important like surgery it would happen almost immediately. Now I have a choice. If I need a heart transplant, I'll go to an expensive doctor just like now. If I have a broken finger and I need some pain medication and a splint, well guess what it's not going to cost $1800 for a trip to the ER. I'll go to the hedge witch down the street for $50, no insurance required.
Didnt your grandmother tell you "preventing is better than cure" ?
Harsh punishment might stop known wrongdoers from repeating their actions, but its not going to stop people from being in the situation where they would consider "turning bad".
Yes but the idea is to prevent the next group of people from turning bad.
If people feel like they are part of society, they wont harm it, and go to great lengths to protect it.
Societies get divided up based on race, class, and religion. The more that is done to stoke tensions, the stronger the divisions become. But that includes when liberal politicians instigate class warfare by talking about "the rich" (as if they're some monolithic bloc) stealing from "the poor". A lot of the explanation and justification I'm seeing presented on behalf of the rioters is going right along with that. They're not trying to heal society or ease conflict, they're just trying to make "the rich" into the bad guys to give them an excuse to do whatever they want.
Think back to your school days. The bullies were usually the ones that weren't really the brightest, were they?
They were average. I certainly wouldn't call them dumb.
Now imagine not one bully in a class of 20, but about 30 bullies in a class of 35. Why so many? Well, not because they are inherently dumber. But because they spent a good deal of their primary educational years learning the language so they could understand at all what is being taught.
Those are some really pessimistic numbers. You think
1. More than 85% of the kids in these rioting neighborhoods didn't learn English until halfway through school and 2. A very high (95%+) percent of those ESL students turn into bullies
That's really far-fetched. You might have a case about the language for the parents, but I don't think so with the kids. I've tutored some young immigrant children in English, they learn the language very quickly. They certainly don't waste half their childhood not understanding what's going on in school. Older kids have problems, especially boys, but hey that's getting back to genetics, which you really can't do anything about. If someone has a hard time learning the language, let's not even waste our time on them.
I am firmly convinced that someone isn't "born a criminal", and I do want to offer their kids at least a hand up for a better life and a way to get out of the ghetto.
No of course not but many people have so many negative factors in their lives that nothing you do, including taking them away and putting them in foster homes, is going to change the outcome. They're damaged goods in a sense. You would have to expend massive resources to help 1 out of 10 people escape. 90% of the money is wasted and could be put to better use. Instead of trying to turn every poor uneducated person into an engineer how about creating job options that are realistic for them. You can't tell me that a majority of people on welfare or engaged in criminal enterprise couldn't
1. Learn and then teach English and other basic integration skills to adult immigrants 2. Clean streets and other public areas to improve everybody's (including their own) quality of life 3. Work on infrastructure projects like digging ditches or repairing roads 4. Do many of the jobs that illegal immigrants do in the US such as gardening and lawn care 5. Take care of animals at shelters or help with farm work 6. Help at nursing homes, food banks, etc
It's all a matter of how you spend what resources you have. You can try to force them through the same round peg that everybody else goes through in school, which is doomed to failure for most of them, or you can adapt and come up with a more realistic multi-generational plan that puts them in subsidized but societally useful roles until they are naturally ready to integrate.
People see defense and entitlements as the two big things we need to examine, but really education belongs there too. We spend more tax money on education than we do on defense. It's a big chunk of every state's budget. But if people paid less to their states, they could pay more to the federal government, so I see it as relevant.
I like the way you put it, actually... "even more ill-educated adults." The fact is there will always be a large number of uneducated people, assuming a realistic level of commitment to education (i.e. we're not going to have 90% of the workforce involved in education so there's 2 teachers per child).
Maybe it would be better to save money on education, increase the number of uneducated people, and use the money to develop economic roles for those uneducated people. I mean I'm just guessing here. The millions of adults who don't speak or write well even though they grew up here, the millions who can't do basic math, the millions who lack common sense and make really poor decisions over and over... well if we cut the education spending in half, those people wouldn't be any dumber and I suspect the numbers wouldn't increase a whole lot, but we'd have a ton of money to put them to work on infrastructure projects, cleaning projects, and so on.
In most of the videos I've seen there's no hate, except when they're directly confronting the police. Most of the looters appear to be having a great time. They're not fighting with each other, nobody's being trampled or beaten. I see young girls walking around with shopping bags smiling, people working together to break into stores, etc.
Sounds like a lot of self inflicted problems. When you say "It is actually someone else's fault", in all the points you brought up the "someone else" is the person's neighbor.. and for their neighbor, the someone else is the first guy.
And their plan of action is to destroy their own community even more. You know, some people just can't be helped. There will always be criminals.
If we found an intelligent subspecies of dolphin that could communicate with us, would you immediately be like "oh kill them all because they might take over the world?"
They are mostly to blame because they were unwilling to compromise with the other groups
That's not true, they were willing to compromise about how much to cut and what to cut. I believe they also said they would pass a tax increase in exchange for a balanced budget amendment. In what sense are they unwilling to compromise?
I also think it's not true that the tea party is the only group that wants to seriously cut spending--everybody wants to cut spending.
That's what they claim, but when I say "serious" I mean "cut enough that there's a realistic plan for a balanced budget, and not 40 years from now." NOBODY is proposing that, except the Tea Party.
Unfortunately, too, the market collapse makes spending cuts especially harmful right now
Yes, true, but the thing is there's no political will to cut when times are good, and then there's fear of cutting when times are bad. It has to be done sometime though. We're already living beyond our means and our costs are only going up with the aging population.
Entitlement programs and a bigger EITC would actually help the economy and probably produce a net tax benefit right now.
I'm no expert (and I don't think anybody really is) but I don't see why giving the poorest people more money would help more than giving more money to, say, me (or taking less money from me). Sure they'll spend it all. Well if that's the goal just direct deposit your increase into Proctor and Gamble's accounts, and make a few charitable donations to Walmart too.
I know Europe has different employment laws so maybe you're right from your perspective, and there may be similar things with some unions here, but in reality a lot of people can be fired in one second.
Even so a budget isn't a hiring contract. If congress says "Next year we're building a new school" that doesn't mean they already have a contract with a construction company and they already hired 20 teachers who are just sitting around waiting for it to be built.
I've been working since I was 16, that was 1968. Worked my way through college.
Okay so you started off at a 6.4% tax. I started off at a 15.3% tax.
Again, what exactly do you feel entitled to? Obviously you didn't pay enough into the system to pay for the benefits that you'll soon be taking or they wouldn't have had to ever increase the tax rate.
Tell me, why should government have "borrowed" from SS
It borrowed from SS so that SS contributions could earn some interest, otherwise we'd have to pay even more. I hate SS but even I understand that decision. You can't put all the money in a vault and let it sit there for 50 years earning no interest.
and why should it have anything to do with the budget?
Simple, it takes up 15% of my paycheck. Taxes compete with each other. If we cut SS to 10% there would be 5% more to pay other areas of the government.
It comes down to this. Would I rather pay 25% to the irs and 15% to the ssa, or 30% to the irs and 10% to the ssa. Well I get more out of the government services provided right now than I expect to get from social security, which will either have benefits cut to realistic amounts (before I retire of course) or have even bigger tax increases.
I don't vote party, I vote candidate. My voting history in Presidential elections:
I didn't mean that, I was just reacting to your characterization of the tea party. I didn't know what to make of the tea party but now I support it 100%. Finally there is a group that is willing to make painful cuts for a better, sustainable, realistic future. Calling them all dimwitted is like calling everybody who votes democrat poor and stupid.
Today the CEO makes four hundred times what the lowest paid employee earns! It isn't the middle class that's greedy, it's the rich. We just want to make ends meet. They want MORE MORE MORE.
So what's the solution? You don't change people's income through taxes. If you tax them 90% they still "make" 400 times more, they just keep less of it. But the other people still make 400 times less. They're not magically getting raises just because you taxed the CEO. What did that accomplish? It's just destructive class warfare.
Yeah military spending needs to be cut, but social security and medicare need to be cut more. Well, medicare doesn't need to be cut so much as health care costs need to be brought under control.
People typically ignore the cost of education which is mostly borne by the states. That needs to be massively cut.
Expenses over and above income are debts, unless I'm missing something basic and need more caffeine.
1. The government write a contract with someone saying "Give me $100 and in 10 years I will give you $101 back." That's a public debt, a legal debt in the name of the public.
2. The government writes a budget that says "Next year we're spending $100 on roads, even though we only have $50 of actual income devoted to it.. we'll borrow the rest." That's not a debt, it's a projection. The next year comes and they say, "We changed our minds, we're spending $50 on roads." That's not a default, it's a change of budget.
If spending through budget or appropriation is legislated, and it is over income and requires taking on debt, it would then be authorized by law and meet the wording of the 14th Amendment.
The debt itself would be covered under the 14th amendment. If the debt weren't taken on because the budget was changed, the original budget would not be covered.
As far as SS goes, the law that created SS in the first place mandates the spending. That is why it is called an "entitlement".
By my strict reading (and IANACL), all Entitlements would have to be paid regardless.
What are you reading? Just doing a quick search leads me to:
Many people believe that Social Security is an "earned right." That is, they think that because they have paid Social Security taxes, they are entitled to receive Social Security benefits. The government encourages that belief by referring to Social Security taxes as "contributions," as in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act. However, in the 1960 case of Fleming v. Nestor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers have no legally binding contractual rights to their Social Security benefits, and that those benefits can be cut or even eliminated at any time.
The government doesn't have the entire GDP as income so what are you trying to compare??
It's like saying "Yeah the company I work for makes $45 million annually, so even though I only make $60k/year I should get a $90 million mortgage no problem."
It's not my fault that every damn candidate is a corporate cock sucker.
If only. Then we might have some real economic growth in this country.
In reality we have assholes like Obama going around "taking on" (as in, fighting) one industry after another. Fuck the banks, we hate banks and all their money and high paying jobs! Yeah we're going to take on the banks!
And the oil companies, screw them! Who needs money and jobs and tax revenue? We're taking them on, whose ass wants a kick!?
Fuck insurance companies! They do nothing useful, they just employ a bunch of people! Goddamn I hate them, we're taking them on!
Political posturing and the political circus has contaminated sound judgement in the US.
If deciding how to spend tax revenue isn't a central, complex political issue, what IS? You think there's some obvious "sound judgment" that everybody intuitively knows but it's been covered up by master politicians?
You are sitting on a multi-billion dollar fleet...
The fact that the only spending problems you pointed out are related to the military makes you sound really biased. A credible solution is going to involve cuts everywhere.
But not all expenses are public debts, so what does that have to do with the 14th amendment and all this hullabaloo?
What the democrats are calling a default, like not sending out social security checks, is not an ACTUAL default, because the government doesn't actually owe anybody social security via a financial contract. In fact you can look on the ssa.gov website and they will tell you, the money you pay them is not in any way yours anymore and you are not entitled to get it back. Your money goes to pay others' benefits. You know, like welfare.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of job are you hiring for? I'm assuming these people didn't go to homeschooled college.
You say "can't be possible that there are some really incompetent parents out there"
But OP said "Most parents who care also have no clue how to help."
Kind of a big difference.
And anyway you're still wrong. Saying "some" is really exaggerating. The intersection of parents who are "really incompetent" and parents who care and are very interested in helping is pretty small I'd say.
Hmm.. school days are already shorter than workdays so either the parent works part time already or there's already a babysitting service involved. If kids stay an extra hour 4 days a week, that's an extra hour of work 4 days a week. Or an hour less of babysitting 4 days a week.
What's the big problem?
There are 4 school days per week, but each day is longer. How are they cutting down on education?
Being as charitable as I can, I'm thinking maybe he meant improvements to the file manager for photos music and docs. I seriously doubt they're trying to reinvent e.g. openoffice.
Perhaps it's more like the way file managers all handle thumbnails these days, and extending that to stuff like full-text search for documents, or "sounds like" search for music, etc. His comment about "basic utilities, that are more part of the OS than..." makes me think it's some non-ui stuff, like a framework for applications to plug into.
The NY Times article that your source is based on has been discredited:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-truth-about-ges-tax-bill/2011/04/05/AFZm0L9C_story.html
If an unlicensed doctor messes up an operation and now you need four more operations and years of drugs to recover, then the cost of the condition for which you sought treatment has been massively increased.
Yes, in that hypothetical. But you're pulling that out of thin air. You can't use it as an argument.
Anyone can make stuff up: if an unlicensed doctor performs an operation flawlessly and charged you 90% less, then clearly it's cheaper and superior to licensing.
What a reasonable person does in this situation is work with what's given. By itself, the cost of an individual service, without respect to the effect on the rest of society, will increase if there are stringent regulatory requirements related to that service. That's just blatantly obvious... you know, because if it were cheaper, then you wouldn't *need* regulations.
Liberals would argue that in nearly all cases the value increase significantly exceeds the cost increase so much so as to create an over-all massive cost decrease (my example shows one case where this happens). And this analogy only shows the DIRECT cost of that value reduction, the indirect costs are orders of magnitude more. Bad doctors mean much longer times off-sick from work. Meaning much higher risk of being unemployed at the end of it. That's months or years of income lost which is ALSO a cost of not licensing the service, it's lost productivity to your employer either way, it's a massive cost to the economy.
Again, all of that is made up. It also assumes that the alternatives available are "fully licensed" and "totally unregulated with horrible quality." What about stuff like Underwriters Labratories, an "Independent, not-for-profit product safety testing and certification organization." In a dark and scary world where light bulbs were not tightly regulated by the government, couldn't you vote with your wallet and be like "Well I'm not buying light bulbs unless they're tested by this third party that has a good reputation."
I would imagine for something important like surgery it would happen almost immediately. Now I have a choice. If I need a heart transplant, I'll go to an expensive doctor just like now. If I have a broken finger and I need some pain medication and a splint, well guess what it's not going to cost $1800 for a trip to the ER. I'll go to the hedge witch down the street for $50, no insurance required.
Didnt your grandmother tell you "preventing is better than cure" ?
Harsh punishment might stop known wrongdoers from repeating their actions, but its not going to stop people from being in the situation where they would consider "turning bad".
Yes but the idea is to prevent the next group of people from turning bad.
If people feel like they are part of society, they wont harm it, and go to great lengths to protect it.
Societies get divided up based on race, class, and religion. The more that is done to stoke tensions, the stronger the divisions become. But that includes when liberal politicians instigate class warfare by talking about "the rich" (as if they're some monolithic bloc) stealing from "the poor". A lot of the explanation and justification I'm seeing presented on behalf of the rioters is going right along with that. They're not trying to heal society or ease conflict, they're just trying to make "the rich" into the bad guys to give them an excuse to do whatever they want.
Think back to your school days. The bullies were usually the ones that weren't really the brightest, were they?
They were average. I certainly wouldn't call them dumb.
Now imagine not one bully in a class of 20, but about 30 bullies in a class of 35. Why so many? Well, not because they are inherently dumber. But because they spent a good deal of their primary educational years learning the language so they could understand at all what is being taught.
Those are some really pessimistic numbers. You think
1. More than 85% of the kids in these rioting neighborhoods didn't learn English until halfway through school and
2. A very high (95%+) percent of those ESL students turn into bullies
That's really far-fetched. You might have a case about the language for the parents, but I don't think so with the kids. I've tutored some young immigrant children in English, they learn the language very quickly. They certainly don't waste half their childhood not understanding what's going on in school. Older kids have problems, especially boys, but hey that's getting back to genetics, which you really can't do anything about. If someone has a hard time learning the language, let's not even waste our time on them.
I am firmly convinced that someone isn't "born a criminal", and I do want to offer their kids at least a hand up for a better life and a way to get out of the ghetto.
No of course not but many people have so many negative factors in their lives that nothing you do, including taking them away and putting them in foster homes, is going to change the outcome. They're damaged goods in a sense. You would have to expend massive resources to help 1 out of 10 people escape. 90% of the money is wasted and could be put to better use. Instead of trying to turn every poor uneducated person into an engineer how about creating job options that are realistic for them. You can't tell me that a majority of people on welfare or engaged in criminal enterprise couldn't
1. Learn and then teach English and other basic integration skills to adult immigrants
2. Clean streets and other public areas to improve everybody's (including their own) quality of life
3. Work on infrastructure projects like digging ditches or repairing roads
4. Do many of the jobs that illegal immigrants do in the US such as gardening and lawn care
5. Take care of animals at shelters or help with farm work
6. Help at nursing homes, food banks, etc
It's all a matter of how you spend what resources you have. You can try to force them through the same round peg that everybody else goes through in school, which is doomed to failure for most of them, or you can adapt and come up with a more realistic multi-generational plan that puts them in subsidized but societally useful roles until they are naturally ready to integrate.
Yeah that's a given, it has to be done right.
People see defense and entitlements as the two big things we need to examine, but really education belongs there too. We spend more tax money on education than we do on defense. It's a big chunk of every state's budget. But if people paid less to their states, they could pay more to the federal government, so I see it as relevant.
I like the way you put it, actually... "even more ill-educated adults." The fact is there will always be a large number of uneducated people, assuming a realistic level of commitment to education (i.e. we're not going to have 90% of the workforce involved in education so there's 2 teachers per child).
Maybe it would be better to save money on education, increase the number of uneducated people, and use the money to develop economic roles for those uneducated people. I mean I'm just guessing here. The millions of adults who don't speak or write well even though they grew up here, the millions who can't do basic math, the millions who lack common sense and make really poor decisions over and over... well if we cut the education spending in half, those people wouldn't be any dumber and I suspect the numbers wouldn't increase a whole lot, but we'd have a ton of money to put them to work on infrastructure projects, cleaning projects, and so on.
Where did so much hate and anger come from?
In most of the videos I've seen there's no hate, except when they're directly confronting the police. Most of the looters appear to be having a great time. They're not fighting with each other, nobody's being trampled or beaten. I see young girls walking around with shopping bags smiling, people working together to break into stores, etc.
Sounds like a lot of self inflicted problems. When you say "It is actually someone else's fault", in all the points you brought up the "someone else" is the person's neighbor.. and for their neighbor, the someone else is the first guy.
And their plan of action is to destroy their own community even more. You know, some people just can't be helped. There will always be criminals.
What makes you think those two goals are any different?
1. Punish the wrongdoers very harshly
2. People won't want to cause social disruption that results in harsh punishment for themselves
If we found an intelligent subspecies of dolphin that could communicate with us, would you immediately be like "oh kill them all because they might take over the world?"
They are mostly to blame because they were unwilling to compromise with the other groups
That's not true, they were willing to compromise about how much to cut and what to cut. I believe they also said they would pass a tax increase in exchange for a balanced budget amendment. In what sense are they unwilling to compromise?
I also think it's not true that the tea party is the only group that wants to seriously cut spending--everybody wants to cut spending.
That's what they claim, but when I say "serious" I mean "cut enough that there's a realistic plan for a balanced budget, and not 40 years from now." NOBODY is proposing that, except the Tea Party.
Unfortunately, too, the market collapse makes spending cuts especially harmful right now
Yes, true, but the thing is there's no political will to cut when times are good, and then there's fear of cutting when times are bad. It has to be done sometime though. We're already living beyond our means and our costs are only going up with the aging population.
Entitlement programs and a bigger EITC would actually help the economy and probably produce a net tax benefit right now.
I'm no expert (and I don't think anybody really is) but I don't see why giving the poorest people more money would help more than giving more money to, say, me (or taking less money from me). Sure they'll spend it all. Well if that's the goal just direct deposit your increase into Proctor and Gamble's accounts, and make a few charitable donations to Walmart too.
I know Europe has different employment laws so maybe you're right from your perspective, and there may be similar things with some unions here, but in reality a lot of people can be fired in one second.
Even so a budget isn't a hiring contract. If congress says "Next year we're building a new school" that doesn't mean they already have a contract with a construction company and they already hired 20 teachers who are just sitting around waiting for it to be built.
I've been working since I was 16, that was 1968. Worked my way through college.
Okay so you started off at a 6.4% tax. I started off at a 15.3% tax.
Again, what exactly do you feel entitled to? Obviously you didn't pay enough into the system to pay for the benefits that you'll soon be taking or they wouldn't have had to ever increase the tax rate.
Tell me, why should government have "borrowed" from SS
It borrowed from SS so that SS contributions could earn some interest, otherwise we'd have to pay even more. I hate SS but even I understand that decision. You can't put all the money in a vault and let it sit there for 50 years earning no interest.
and why should it have anything to do with the budget?
Simple, it takes up 15% of my paycheck. Taxes compete with each other. If we cut SS to 10% there would be 5% more to pay other areas of the government.
It comes down to this. Would I rather pay 25% to the irs and 15% to the ssa, or 30% to the irs and 10% to the ssa. Well I get more out of the government services provided right now than I expect to get from social security, which will either have benefits cut to realistic amounts (before I retire of course) or have even bigger tax increases.
I don't vote party, I vote candidate. My voting history in Presidential elections:
I didn't mean that, I was just reacting to your characterization of the tea party. I didn't know what to make of the tea party but now I support it 100%. Finally there is a group that is willing to make painful cuts for a better, sustainable, realistic future. Calling them all dimwitted is like calling everybody who votes democrat poor and stupid.
Today the CEO makes four hundred times what the lowest paid employee earns! It isn't the middle class that's greedy, it's the rich. We just want to make ends meet. They want MORE MORE MORE.
So what's the solution? You don't change people's income through taxes. If you tax them 90% they still "make" 400 times more, they just keep less of it. But the other people still make 400 times less. They're not magically getting raises just because you taxed the CEO. What did that accomplish? It's just destructive class warfare.
Yeah military spending needs to be cut, but social security and medicare need to be cut more. Well, medicare doesn't need to be cut so much as health care costs need to be brought under control.
People typically ignore the cost of education which is mostly borne by the states. That needs to be massively cut.
Expenses over and above income are debts, unless I'm missing something basic and need more caffeine.
1. The government write a contract with someone saying "Give me $100 and in 10 years I will give you $101 back." That's a public debt, a legal debt in the name of the public.
2. The government writes a budget that says "Next year we're spending $100 on roads, even though we only have $50 of actual income devoted to it.. we'll borrow the rest." That's not a debt, it's a projection. The next year comes and they say, "We changed our minds, we're spending $50 on roads." That's not a default, it's a change of budget.
If spending through budget or appropriation is legislated, and it is over income and requires taking on debt, it would then be authorized by law and meet the wording of the 14th Amendment.
The debt itself would be covered under the 14th amendment. If the debt weren't taken on because the budget was changed, the original budget would not be covered.
As far as SS goes, the law that created SS in the first place mandates the spending. That is why it is called an "entitlement".
By my strict reading (and IANACL), all Entitlements would have to be paid regardless.
What are you reading? Just doing a quick search leads me to:
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5776
Many people believe that Social Security is an "earned right." That is, they think that because they have paid Social Security taxes, they are entitled to receive Social Security benefits. The government encourages that belief by referring to Social Security taxes as "contributions," as in the Federal Insurance Contribution Act. However, in the 1960 case of Fleming v. Nestor, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that workers have no legally binding contractual rights to their Social Security benefits, and that those benefits can be cut or even eliminated at any time.
In America everyone is a private interest. We're not state owned slaves yet.
there is a significant difference between saying "we spend less" and "we just dont pay, even if we are obliged"
I don't get it. If Congress passes a budget with major spending cuts, they *aren't* obliged to pay any longer. What's the problem?
Do you think Congress has some kind of financial contract with the past/future about spending?
The government doesn't have the entire GDP as income so what are you trying to compare??
It's like saying "Yeah the company I work for makes $45 million annually, so even though I only make $60k/year I should get a $90 million mortgage no problem."
It's not my fault that every damn candidate is a corporate cock sucker.
If only. Then we might have some real economic growth in this country.
In reality we have assholes like Obama going around "taking on" (as in, fighting) one industry after another. Fuck the banks, we hate banks and all their money and high paying jobs! Yeah we're going to take on the banks!
And the oil companies, screw them! Who needs money and jobs and tax revenue? We're taking them on, whose ass wants a kick!?
Fuck insurance companies! They do nothing useful, they just employ a bunch of people! Goddamn I hate them, we're taking them on!
Political posturing and the political circus has contaminated sound judgement in the US.
If deciding how to spend tax revenue isn't a central, complex political issue, what IS? You think there's some obvious "sound judgment" that everybody intuitively knows but it's been covered up by master politicians?
You are sitting on a multi-billion dollar fleet...
The fact that the only spending problems you pointed out are related to the military makes you sound really biased. A credible solution is going to involve cuts everywhere.
But not all expenses are public debts, so what does that have to do with the 14th amendment and all this hullabaloo?
What the democrats are calling a default, like not sending out social security checks, is not an ACTUAL default, because the government doesn't actually owe anybody social security via a financial contract. In fact you can look on the ssa.gov website and they will tell you, the money you pay them is not in any way yours anymore and you are not entitled to get it back. Your money goes to pay others' benefits. You know, like welfare.