So the Republicans are responsible for pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into making loans to poor minorities that couldn't afford them? Who was in charge of the House financial services committee again?
The bill wasn't 600 pages, it was 1,073. The Democrats initially promised that it would be made available online for at least 48 hours before it was voted on, however, they lied, and voted on it less than 12 hours after it was presented to the Representatives. To read the bill, it would have required reading about two and a half pages a minute from the time they received the bill until the vote. The bottom line is, the Democrats rushed it through so nobody would have a chance to read it.
Specter is a RINO. If it wasn't for him, the bill wouldn't have passed. And this isn't a tax cut, it's a tax deferral. If the Republicans wanted the bill to pass, they would have voted for it. You can't spin it the other way.
Not a single Republican in the House voted for this. Only the 3 RINOs in the Senate voted for this. The House Minority Leader threw the bill on the floor of the House after calling the Democrats out for breaking their promise to provide 48 hours to review the bill. Just out of curiosity, how many of the 1,073 pages have you read in the ~36 hours the bill has been available? Did you notice all the handwritten changes.
That invasion was vastly more popular than this stimulus bill. While the Iraq war resolution was supported by a bipartisan coalition of 215 Republicans (6 against) and 82 Democrats (126 against) in the House, and 48 (1 against) Republicans and 29 Democrats (21 against) in the Senate, the Stimulus bill was supported by no house republicans, and only 3 RINO Senators. Even Bill Clinton supported the war in Iraq.
And if the Stimulus bill was really designed to "secure the financial health & fiscal saftey of it's own nation", perhaps the Democrats would have kept their word and given the American people, or at least the representatives that had to vote on the bill, the 48 hours that were promised to review the 1,073 page document. With Representatives calling the bill a joke on the floor of the House and the minority leader insisting that no one could have possibly read the bill since it would have required reading 2.5 pages a minute from the time the bill was made available until the vote, this partisan bill is a rather disgusting abuse of power and is likely to fail. The Democrats have already begun to backpedal from the text "creating jobs" to the more sinister "saving or creating jobs", primarily because the latter avoids the potential for accountability. After all, as long as somebody has a job, it was saved by the bill. Where would they be without it? 500 Million Americans would lose their jobs.
According to the estimate produced by the Congressional Budget Office, the total cost for the `stimulus` bill that the Democrats just forced through is going to be about $3.27 Trillion over the next ten years. In comparison, that's more than the entire projected cost of the Iraq War according to the Washington Post. If you really believe that Democrats spend less than Republicans, I would encourage you join the rest of us in reality.
This is also why they have such a very good memory for what they can and can't eat, and only try a small amount the first time. If they get sick they just have to wait it out basically, and hope they survive. This is why surviving rats learn very well to be careful, and remember insanely well what made them sick.
If you ever eat bad seafood, you'll quickly understand that humans do much the same thing. I haven't been able to even smell mussels for years.
At one point in my life, my sister had two cats. I happened to be at her house when a bat managed to get inside. One of the cats was vaulting off of the furniture trying to catch the bat in midair, while the other was terrified and couldn't run away fast enough. I think the appropriate advice is that your mileage may vary, as you've said.
It's only going to get worse. Obama has people convinced he'll give them cars, houses, and new jobs. Here are actual questions he fielded at his latest town hall:
I have an urgent need, unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and place to live in, we it need urgent, and housing authority have two years waiting on this thing and we need something more than a vehicle and parks to go to. We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.
Usually what happens is when you apply for governmental assistance, they say, well, you make too much money. How -- if you go from making $3,000 a year, a month, to $1,100 a month, how are you able to take care of your families, why can't we have that be automatic, that goes along with your unemployment tenure that you can get government assistance, that's an automatic for you.
Mr. President, I'm currently a student at Edison State College in my second semester. And, okay, I've been at the same job, which is McDonald's, for four-and-a-half years because of the fact that I can't find another job. Now, with the fact that I've been there for as long as I've been there, do you have any plan or any idea of making one that has been there for a long time receive any better benefits than what they've already received?
Now that every idiot feels as though it's the governments responsibility to take care of them, this situation is going to degenerate rapidly.
At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the total work force or 11,385,000 people, were unemployed. Although farmers themselves technically were not unemployed, drastic drops in farm commodity prices resulted in farmers losing their lands and homes to foreclosure.
My math may be off, but I believe that 1982 occurred between now and the 1930's. According to Bloomberg, that recession was worse than this recession.
The economy will shrink at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter and at a 2 percent pace in the first quarter of 2009, nearly twice prior estimates, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists led by Jan Hatzius wrote yesterday in a note. That would be the biggest back-to-back contraction since 1982.
Only drama-queen democrats are insisting that this is the worst recession we've had since the 30's.
Because we are, dumbass. We have sky high debt and unemployment, and we can't count on the rest of the world to bail us out like Japan in the 90's.
Unemployment is just over 7%. During the great depression it was 25%. In the early 80's it was nearly 10%. The unemployment rate has been higher than it is here at least since 1996 in France, is the sky falling there?
Sometimes speed is more important than accuracy. For example, the other day I wanted to confirm that my assumption about the purpose of water towers was accurate, so I looked up water towers in Wikipedia. Had I had to use primary sources, the research would have never been done, and I would have never learned anything because I wouldn't have bothered. It really doesn't matter if the information is a bit inaccurate. After all, wasn't there an article not that long ago that suggested that Wikipedia is more accurate than print encyclopedia's anyway?
Can that private school kick out the non-performing kids or the ones with poor discipline?
Poor performing students, including those with learning disabilities or other special needs, would be pulled out of classes they were having trouble in and taught individually. The majority of the time even the slow ones wouldn't have problems, but when they started to fall behind, it was the teachers responsibility to identify the issue, and have them pulled from the class to receive the extra attention that they needed for that particular material. Once they were caught up, they would rejoin the class. The class as a whole never fell behind, and nobody ever failed a grade the entire time I was there (admittedly years and years ago now), because they would work with you individually until you were ahead.
As far as discipline problems go, there weren't really a whole lot of those. The teachers were quite adept at inventing interesting punishments that discouraged such activities. My personal favorite was having the student to be punished collect the blazers of everyone in the class, then report to the gym teacher where they would ride the stationary bike for 20 minutes wearing all of the blazers (this still goes on according to my nephew). If you spend enough days sitting in class looking and smelling like an asshole, you won't want to be one anymore after a while. Of course, the ultimate disciplinary measure was the conduct referral, which amounted to little more than an official note home that had to be signed by a parent and returned. The assumption being, of course, that the parents could level a far greater punishment than the school ever could.
I think the solution for the public schools is to stop treating children, and their parents, like infants. If you can't behave, expect to be punished or removed, and having to work to get back in. If you do nothing to discipline or work with your children, perhaps they shouldn't be your children anymore.
Private schools can cherry pick students and avoid ones that add costs or just difficulties. Consider the cost of one student with moderate learning disabilities. It will be a hell of a lot more expensive to educate them than to than it will be to educate a healthy student.
While that's true, it wasn't the situation in this case. About 5-10% of the students were slow or otherwise learning disabled, and were sent to the school specifically because of the additional programs for students with special needs. Basically, they would be removed from classes they had trouble with and taught one on one. The special needs teachers would work with the same set of students from the time they entered school in Kindergarten, until the time they left. This personalized attention seemed to be quite effective. Along the same lines, the principal knew each student and their parents by name and personally delivered the report cards at the end of each marking period to every single student (this took days), discussing their performance.
There is no better return on investment than money spend educating children. None. You're talking about the future of this country, literally. If there is a problem then you fix the problem, you don't ignore it.
That's not true, frankly. This article goes into some detail about why college educations aren't particularly worth it.
The fact of the matter is that the state spends nearly five times more per student than private education costs, yet delivers significantly worse results. The solution doesn't involve continuing to dump more and more resources into a broken system.
I just took a look at the private school I attended. Kindergarten tuition is now $8,310, grades 1-8 is $7,630 and high school is $11,690. That gives you a total of $116,110 for K-12 education. The school receives no federal or state tax dollars, and is better than every single public school, and most of the private schools, in the state.
At the very least it's absolutely pathetic that the state manages to spend five times as much money, for poor results.
I hate to be the one to have to break it to you, but somebody has to steer the ship. The fact of the matter is that most people are not good at leading, and are not good at making correct business decisions. A company without people in a leadership position would quickly falter because resources would be unevenly applied.
This is regularly seen in companies run by engineers. What generally happens is that the engineers believe that they can handle everything, after all they're certainly intelligent enough to handle any job in the office, so they don't hire a sales force or support staff. What ends up happening is that the very smart, very highly paid engineers spend a great deal of time on menial office tasks and sales, which results in the product being of excellent quality, but behind schedule and over budget with no public awareness.
How many hours until the environmentalists do the back of the envelope calculation and realize that powering the entire country with solar would require massive areas of land, causing an incredible amount of environmental damage. People like you are the reason it takes so long to build nuclear plants. Join the rest of us in reality, and stop holding the country back.
Slashdot Mirror
So the Republicans are responsible for pressuring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into making loans to poor minorities that couldn't afford them? Who was in charge of the House financial services committee again?
The bill wasn't 600 pages, it was 1,073. The Democrats initially promised that it would be made available online for at least 48 hours before it was voted on, however, they lied, and voted on it less than 12 hours after it was presented to the Representatives. To read the bill, it would have required reading about two and a half pages a minute from the time they received the bill until the vote. The bottom line is, the Democrats rushed it through so nobody would have a chance to read it.
The President doesn't set the budget, congress does. And this Democrat congress is spending like it's going out of style.
Specter is a RINO. If it wasn't for him, the bill wouldn't have passed. And this isn't a tax cut, it's a tax deferral. If the Republicans wanted the bill to pass, they would have voted for it. You can't spin it the other way.
I thought Democrats didn't believe in trickle down economics.
Not a single Republican in the House voted for this. Only the 3 RINOs in the Senate voted for this. The House Minority Leader threw the bill on the floor of the House after calling the Democrats out for breaking their promise to provide 48 hours to review the bill. Just out of curiosity, how many of the 1,073 pages have you read in the ~36 hours the bill has been available? Did you notice all the handwritten changes.
unpopular invasion of a foreign country
That invasion was vastly more popular than this stimulus bill. While the Iraq war resolution was supported by a bipartisan coalition of 215 Republicans (6 against) and 82 Democrats (126 against) in the House, and 48 (1 against) Republicans and 29 Democrats (21 against) in the Senate, the Stimulus bill was supported by no house republicans, and only 3 RINO Senators. Even Bill Clinton supported the war in Iraq.
And if the Stimulus bill was really designed to "secure the financial health & fiscal saftey of it's own nation", perhaps the Democrats would have kept their word and given the American people, or at least the representatives that had to vote on the bill, the 48 hours that were promised to review the 1,073 page document. With Representatives calling the bill a joke on the floor of the House and the minority leader insisting that no one could have possibly read the bill since it would have required reading 2.5 pages a minute from the time the bill was made available until the vote, this partisan bill is a rather disgusting abuse of power and is likely to fail. The Democrats have already begun to backpedal from the text "creating jobs" to the more sinister "saving or creating jobs", primarily because the latter avoids the potential for accountability. After all, as long as somebody has a job, it was saved by the bill. Where would they be without it? 500 Million Americans would lose their jobs.
If you think the Democrats are going to allow government to shrink, you must be high. Wars end, but entitlements never do.
According to the estimate produced by the Congressional Budget Office, the total cost for the `stimulus` bill that the Democrats just forced through is going to be about $3.27 Trillion over the next ten years. In comparison, that's more than the entire projected cost of the Iraq War according to the Washington Post. If you really believe that Democrats spend less than Republicans, I would encourage you join the rest of us in reality.
This is also why they have such a very good memory for what they can and can't eat, and only try a small amount the first time. If they get sick they just have to wait it out basically, and hope they survive. This is why surviving rats learn very well to be careful, and remember insanely well what made them sick.
If you ever eat bad seafood, you'll quickly understand that humans do much the same thing. I haven't been able to even smell mussels for years.
At one point in my life, my sister had two cats. I happened to be at her house when a bat managed to get inside. One of the cats was vaulting off of the furniture trying to catch the bat in midair, while the other was terrified and couldn't run away fast enough. I think the appropriate advice is that your mileage may vary, as you've said.
Tell that to the Democrats.
It's only going to get worse. Obama has people convinced he'll give them cars, houses, and new jobs. Here are actual questions he fielded at his latest town hall:
I have an urgent need, unemployment and homelessness, a very small vehicle for my family and place to live in, we it need urgent, and housing authority have two years waiting on this thing and we need something more than a vehicle and parks to go to. We need our own kitchen and our own bathroom. Please help.
Usually what happens is when you apply for governmental assistance, they say, well, you make too much money. How -- if you go from making $3,000 a year, a month, to $1,100 a month, how are you able to take care of your families, why can't we have that be automatic, that goes along with your unemployment tenure that you can get government assistance, that's an automatic for you.
Mr. President, I'm currently a student at Edison State College in my second semester. And, okay, I've been at the same job, which is McDonald's, for four-and-a-half years because of the fact that I can't find another job. Now, with the fact that I've been there for as long as I've been there, do you have any plan or any idea of making one that has been there for a long time receive any better benefits than what they've already received?
Now that every idiot feels as though it's the governments responsibility to take care of them, this situation is going to degenerate rapidly.
How about this, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/unempl71.html.
At the height of the Depression in 1933, 24.9% of the total work force or 11,385,000 people, were unemployed. Although farmers themselves technically were not unemployed, drastic drops in farm commodity prices resulted in farmers losing their lands and homes to foreclosure.
My math may be off, but I believe that 1982 occurred between now and the 1930's. According to Bloomberg, that recession was worse than this recession.
The economy will shrink at a 3.5 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter and at a 2 percent pace in the first quarter of 2009, nearly twice prior estimates, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists led by Jan Hatzius wrote yesterday in a note. That would be the biggest back-to-back contraction since 1982.
Only drama-queen democrats are insisting that this is the worst recession we've had since the 30's.
The 25% figure I quoted didn't include people that had stopped seeking work. Nice try though, the sky still isn't falling.
Because we are, dumbass. We have sky high debt and unemployment, and we can't count on the rest of the world to bail us out like Japan in the 90's.
Unemployment is just over 7%. During the great depression it was 25%. In the early 80's it was nearly 10%. The unemployment rate has been higher than it is here at least since 1996 in France, is the sky falling there?
Get some perspective.
Sometimes speed is more important than accuracy. For example, the other day I wanted to confirm that my assumption about the purpose of water towers was accurate, so I looked up water towers in Wikipedia. Had I had to use primary sources, the research would have never been done, and I would have never learned anything because I wouldn't have bothered. It really doesn't matter if the information is a bit inaccurate. After all, wasn't there an article not that long ago that suggested that Wikipedia is more accurate than print encyclopedia's anyway?
Can that private school kick out the non-performing kids or the ones with poor discipline?
Poor performing students, including those with learning disabilities or other special needs, would be pulled out of classes they were having trouble in and taught individually. The majority of the time even the slow ones wouldn't have problems, but when they started to fall behind, it was the teachers responsibility to identify the issue, and have them pulled from the class to receive the extra attention that they needed for that particular material. Once they were caught up, they would rejoin the class. The class as a whole never fell behind, and nobody ever failed a grade the entire time I was there (admittedly years and years ago now), because they would work with you individually until you were ahead.
As far as discipline problems go, there weren't really a whole lot of those. The teachers were quite adept at inventing interesting punishments that discouraged such activities. My personal favorite was having the student to be punished collect the blazers of everyone in the class, then report to the gym teacher where they would ride the stationary bike for 20 minutes wearing all of the blazers (this still goes on according to my nephew). If you spend enough days sitting in class looking and smelling like an asshole, you won't want to be one anymore after a while. Of course, the ultimate disciplinary measure was the conduct referral, which amounted to little more than an official note home that had to be signed by a parent and returned. The assumption being, of course, that the parents could level a far greater punishment than the school ever could.
I think the solution for the public schools is to stop treating children, and their parents, like infants. If you can't behave, expect to be punished or removed, and having to work to get back in. If you do nothing to discipline or work with your children, perhaps they shouldn't be your children anymore.
Private schools can cherry pick students and avoid ones that add costs or just difficulties. Consider the cost of one student with moderate learning disabilities. It will be a hell of a lot more expensive to educate them than to than it will be to educate a healthy student.
While that's true, it wasn't the situation in this case. About 5-10% of the students were slow or otherwise learning disabled, and were sent to the school specifically because of the additional programs for students with special needs. Basically, they would be removed from classes they had trouble with and taught one on one. The special needs teachers would work with the same set of students from the time they entered school in Kindergarten, until the time they left. This personalized attention seemed to be quite effective. Along the same lines, the principal knew each student and their parents by name and personally delivered the report cards at the end of each marking period to every single student (this took days), discussing their performance.
Promote != Provide.
There is no better return on investment than money spend educating children. None. You're talking about the future of this country, literally. If there is a problem then you fix the problem, you don't ignore it.
That's not true, frankly. This article goes into some detail about why college educations aren't particularly worth it.
The fact of the matter is that the state spends nearly five times more per student than private education costs, yet delivers significantly worse results. The solution doesn't involve continuing to dump more and more resources into a broken system.
The problem is the government and the parents.
I just took a look at the private school I attended. Kindergarten tuition is now $8,310, grades 1-8 is $7,630 and high school is $11,690. That gives you a total of $116,110 for K-12 education. The school receives no federal or state tax dollars, and is better than every single public school, and most of the private schools, in the state.
At the very least it's absolutely pathetic that the state manages to spend five times as much money, for poor results.
I hate to be the one to have to break it to you, but somebody has to steer the ship. The fact of the matter is that most people are not good at leading, and are not good at making correct business decisions. A company without people in a leadership position would quickly falter because resources would be unevenly applied.
This is regularly seen in companies run by engineers. What generally happens is that the engineers believe that they can handle everything, after all they're certainly intelligent enough to handle any job in the office, so they don't hire a sales force or support staff. What ends up happening is that the very smart, very highly paid engineers spend a great deal of time on menial office tasks and sales, which results in the product being of excellent quality, but behind schedule and over budget with no public awareness.
Hopefully enough that they'll do something about it.
How many hours until the environmentalists do the back of the envelope calculation and realize that powering the entire country with solar would require massive areas of land, causing an incredible amount of environmental damage. People like you are the reason it takes so long to build nuclear plants. Join the rest of us in reality, and stop holding the country back.