For a while it really irked me that these kids were picked before me, when I felt I was more qualified, but I eventually got over it when they dropped out of my program.
It irks me that borderline-retarded compulsive liars are taking valuable spaces in a school from people who are probably smarter and more hardworking than them. What the US system of higher education admissions currently says, more or less, is that how rich your parents are matters at least as much as how capable you are, and that's not the way things ought to work in a society that's not supposed to have a hereditary aristocracy. Among other things, it would be quite possible in this situation to end up with idiots running your businesses and political institutions while much smarter folks end up having to spend their time installing toilets.
And this argument's not about me or my opportunities: I was lucky enough to have family wealth on my side, and capable enough to have very good grades and test scores on my side.
I'm not talking about the human consequences, I'm talking about the natural consequences with no human intervention required.
For instance, if anyone had actually pressed the proverbial nuke button, nuclear winter would probably have done in the capitalists and communists alike. In this case, the amount of ash and dust spewed into the atmosphere would probably take out a large portion of the crop-growing capacity, causing massive famine at best. Another way of putting it: They won't be saying "Oh, oops, sorry, our mission failed", because (a) they won't be capable of talking to anyone, and (b) there's nobody left for them to talk to. When you're talking doomsday scenarios, it often doesn't matter who's to blame or who "won".
Then they're probably dead too. It's the same as the problem of blowing up the USSR with nukes: Even if you succeed, you have nasty consequences to deal with afterwords.
That sword is only double-edged if you believe 'the crowd' would be keen on identifying legitimate protesters as much as they are in identifying rioters.
What about 'the crowd' identifying people who weren't there at all but happened to knock up somebody's sister a few years back?
That would prove nothing except that they'd paid off the Russians to take pictures of the secret NASA sound stage and pawn them off as coming from the moon.
The Apollo conspiracy theorists don't even acknowledge the pictures of the stuff the various Apollo crews left on the moon taken by just about everyone with the necessary equipment here on Earth, so what makes you think they'd believe these?
Walking is great, but most suburbs were built around the car and thus aren't very walkable communities.
Which leads to an inevitable conclusion: Don't live out in the suburbs if you want to have a low carbon impact.
Especially if you're single, the one choice you can make that will have a gigantic impact on your CO2 emissions is living very close to your work, or at least close to your work via public transit. Even without the environmental benefits, it often gives you an hour of your life back every day. If you have a family, this obviously gets more complicated, but it's still something to think about.
I don't know why that doesn't incentivize kids today to do anything (beyond voting for Obama, which doing nothing).
Because we did something (e.g. on Feb 15, 2003, we with the help of the old peacenik guard held what was probably the largest peaceful protest in human history), and the powers that be simply ignored it. They ignored it so thoroughly that hardly anyone even remembers that it even happened. You seem like an activist-type, and it sounds like even you forgot about it.
You see, the establishment learned lessons from the 1960's, but they weren't the lessons that the protesters and most decent people would have wanted them to learn (like not invading countries, not killing civilians, not shooting at college kids, giving people a sense of economic fairness, holding powerful people to the same laws as powerless people, etc). Some of the lessons they learned were: 1. Keep TV cameras as far away from protesters as possible. (See: "Free Speech Zones") 2. Use agents provocateurs embedded in protests to justify police crackdowns (See: Seattle 1999, Philadelphia 2004, Toronto 2010, etc, etc). Encourage the more radical anarchist groups to use violence to make it easier to portray all protesters as violent anarchists. 3. Don't use lethal weapons, use non-lethal weapons. So instead of shooting people with live ammo, shoot them with rubber bullets. Or turn sonic cannons on them. Or turn laser weapons on them (in development). Don't use tear gas anymore - they know how to handle that. 4. Make reporters part of the establishment, so they won't report negative things about you. For instance, Cenk Uygur on this phenomenon at MSNBC.
I could go on, but the point is that they're very sophisticated about media management these days, so the chance of getting lots of images of white middle-class kids getting beaten or killed at the hands of police on TV screens around the country is virtually nil. I've been at significant protests outside events, and the news coverage was such that you wouldn't have known the protest even happened.
We've tried protests. We've tried elections. We've tried global networking. None of them have accomplished their goals in the US (they helped our Egyptian and Tunisian friends quite a bit though). Serious rebellion would be horrific and doomed for failure. I'm out of options, how about you?
"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
With telecom, the libertarian solution simply doesn't work.
Basic micro-econ depends on the idea that if the price of a good goes too high, more sellers enter the market to take advantage of the higher profits, which lowers the price due to competition, so the price returns to equilibrium. Equally important, if the price goes too high, buyers get priced out of the market and stop buying the service.
However, with telecom, new sellers can't enter the market without regulations to support them. A new seller in the telecom market will not be able to get in - any established competitor (call them BS&S) won't make peering agreements at reasonable costs (because the value of the peering agreement is much greater to the newcomer than BS&S), which means any customers of the new guy won't be able to reach the vast majority of people with phones, which means nobody will become a customer, so the newcomer quickly goes out of business. Therefore, the government adds in a regulation requiring peering agreements at the cost of setting up the pipe between the peers. But now the newcomer has to get a signal from their switches to the customer, which means they have to either run lines to all of its customers (while BS&S can use the lines already there), or lease access to the lines from BS&S, who will charge a high enough price that the newcomer can't offer a lower price than BS&S, so the newcomer can't get any customers and goes out of business. So the government adds another regulation requiring BS&S to lease line access at cost.
And you also have a situation where BS&S refuses to serve rural customers, or charge ridiculous prices to do so, because it's much more expensive to run a line out to them. The rural citizens complain that it's unfair that they have to pay $300 a month for phone service while city folk get it for $30. So the government adds another regulation saying that all competitors must sell the same service to all customers at the same price. But that means that the newcomer who's trying to enter the market by undercutting BS&S on price can't manage in a rural area because the cost of getting to the more remote customers is too high to make anything on it. So now the government has to differentiate between competitors who are required to serve rural customers at the same price as city folk from competitors that don't because they're newcomers.
And the story continues, but the point is that governments don't just write regulations for the heck of it, and most of the telecom regulations exist for a reason.
and so if you insist on policing what essentially amounts to nothing more than conversation in a bar -- then guess what, people can and will go else where.
There are some important differences between online discussion and random conversation in a bar: 1. There's a record of what you said, lasting essentially forever. 2. With a few prompt subpoenas, it's likely that the computer you posted from can be tracked down, and thus you can be tracked down. 3. You aren't assumed to be drunk.
Now, that's not an issue with most discussion, but if it were a post describing, say, a detailed plan for a terrorist attack, the various government agencies would probably make the effort to track you down.
Human genes can be legally patented, according to a Federal Appeals court.
Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
This isn't because Linux is technically a bad choice, and definitely not because it's more expensive (TCO arguments were pretty close to bogus when they first came out, and have become steadily more bogus as more techies have become familiar with Linux). It's because markets for operating systems don't operate in the way that standard microeconomics tells you it ought to.
The 2 big reasons are: 1. The person making the decision about which OS to install typically is not the person using the computer. 2. Apple, Google, and Microsoft in particular have shown no qualms about using their market power to force their customers to use only their products. For instance, over the last couple of years any company that was selling both Linux and Windows 7 netbooks has dropped their Linux lines. That doesn't look to me like spontaneous market forces.
I like Linux, I use Linux both at work and at home, I think it's far superior to MS Windows and has some advantages over OS X as well. But that doesn't mean it's going to become the dominant OS any time soon.
Re:Why does every story about US politics....
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Corporate backers aren't the will of the majority of Americans, they're the will of the very small minority of Americans with a large amount of wealth.
If we assume that having over 50% of the stock of a corporation pretty well determines what the corporation will do, then corporations collectively answer to at most 2-3% of the American population (see this study based on 2007 distribution, if anything stocks are more concentrated now).
What the politicians answering corporate backers rather than the will of the people means is that if 95% of the population wants a measure to pass, but the 2-3% who control major corporations want it to be defeated, it will be defeated, and vice versa. And this isn't a hypothetical: Most of the measures that Elizabeth Warren was planning for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had the support in polls of something like 85-90% favorability, and she couldn't get the job to push them through, much less make them a reality.
I'd say you've paid him quite a complement, but to supplement your point, I'd say any difficulties are simply an acute problem, and not a sine of things to come.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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Actually, the primary point of Medicare Part D was to give large sums of government cash to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. If it really had been about giving prescription drugs to elderly folks as cheaply and efficiently as possible, they would have had government rather than insurance company bureaucrats managing the plans (Medicare spends far less in paperwork and administration than private insurers), and would have allowed Medicare to negotiate the prices they would pay on prescription drugs just like they do for any of the other services they fund.
Re:Why does every story about US politics....
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they report the news in ways that look good for the Democrats
If that's what they're trying to do, they're astoundingly incompetent.
Polls (such as Gallup) currently put approval rating of Democrats and Republicans at about 30%. That means that right now we actually have a plurality of voters that disapprove of both major parties but have nowhere to go.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Car loans are pretty stupid
Not always, just usually.
An example where they aren't totally stupid (and I admit I'm justifying my own behavior here, but it's very relevant): I took on a new job that was in a location I couldn't easily get to by bus or public transit, and the employer had made it clear that a requirement of the job was to be able to make it into the office at any time of day in case of emergencies. In order to afford the car to get to that job, I took on a loan which meant that the car cost me about $800 more in interest than it would have without the loan, but with the car I was able to take on a job that made me $8,000 a year more than my previous job after taxes. In other words, the benefits of the purchase with the loan far outweighed the extra cost of the loan.
Now, that doesn't mean that all car loans are a good idea. If you're buying a car and could afford to buy it outright, you should almost always do so. But if you can't afford to buy it outright, sometimes the benefits outweigh the cost of the loan.
What you absolutely shouldn't do is go for the most expensive car you can possibly get based on the size monthly payment. You should be doing the math to figure out not just what you can afford month-to-month but also what the interest is going to cost you overall.
Re:Why does every story about US politics....
on
Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 3, Insightful
...sound like it is a battle between common sense or good ideas, and Republicans?
Well, yes, but it's not that much of a mystery why they do so. The role of the Republicans in US political theater is to be so crazy that the Democrats sound sane by comparison. Then the Democrats make a 'compromise' that consists of about 95% of what the Republicans said they wanted, and 5% of what the Democrat's corporate backers wanted, and 0% of what Americans wanted. Then the Democrats go to the TV cameras and explain that this was the best deal they could make, which the Republicans go to Fox News and cheer about their triumph of will. (What made the recent health care law different was that in that case it was about 75% of what the Democrat's corporate backers wanted, and only 25% of what the Republican corporate backers wanted.)
Any idea that the US government is representing the will of the American people is an illusion.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 5, Insightful
So if you're trying to balance a budget...
That's where you went wrong in your analysis. The Republican Party has absolutely no interest in balancing the budget. This has been shown time and time again: For instance, when George W Bush took office with a slight budget surplus if you count Social Security (which you probably shouldn't), he immediately cut taxes to put the budget in a hole.
Based solely on their actions when in power, this is what the Republican Party really believes in: 1. Cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans. That's why, if you're somebody who makes their living off of investments, you pay a 15% capital gains tax, whereas if you make considerably less by working you pay a 25% income tax and a 12% FICA tax. Thanks to their actions, the tax rates are the lowest they've been since at least the 1940's. 2. Neutering or completely getting rid of any government agency that could serve as a check on corporate power. They would love to live in a world without the EPA, OSHA, MSHA, NLRB, or the SEC. 3. Getting rid of anything that smacks of aid to the poor and downtrodden. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, food stamps, housing assistance, and minimum wages all come under that category. 4. Expanding the 'national security' portion of government as much as possible, preferably with large no-bid contracts for their family, friends and business associates. They like being able to spy on anybody and everybody, starting wars that they don't need to start, and taking over Latin American countries with little or no military forces to speak of.
I'm no supporter of Democrats either, but one of the biggest myths out there is the idea that the Republicans want to balance the budget when it's abundantly clear they have no intention of doing so.
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For a while it really irked me that these kids were picked before me, when I felt I was more qualified, but I eventually got over it when they dropped out of my program.
It irks me that borderline-retarded compulsive liars are taking valuable spaces in a school from people who are probably smarter and more hardworking than them. What the US system of higher education admissions currently says, more or less, is that how rich your parents are matters at least as much as how capable you are, and that's not the way things ought to work in a society that's not supposed to have a hereditary aristocracy. Among other things, it would be quite possible in this situation to end up with idiots running your businesses and political institutions while much smarter folks end up having to spend their time installing toilets.
And this argument's not about me or my opportunities: I was lucky enough to have family wealth on my side, and capable enough to have very good grades and test scores on my side.
I'm not talking about the human consequences, I'm talking about the natural consequences with no human intervention required.
For instance, if anyone had actually pressed the proverbial nuke button, nuclear winter would probably have done in the capitalists and communists alike. In this case, the amount of ash and dust spewed into the atmosphere would probably take out a large portion of the crop-growing capacity, causing massive famine at best. Another way of putting it: They won't be saying "Oh, oops, sorry, our mission failed", because (a) they won't be capable of talking to anyone, and (b) there's nobody left for them to talk to. When you're talking doomsday scenarios, it often doesn't matter who's to blame or who "won".
Then they're probably dead too. It's the same as the problem of blowing up the USSR with nukes: Even if you succeed, you have nasty consequences to deal with afterwords.
That sword is only double-edged if you believe 'the crowd' would be keen on identifying legitimate protesters as much as they are in identifying rioters.
What about 'the crowd' identifying people who weren't there at all but happened to knock up somebody's sister a few years back?
That would prove nothing except that they'd paid off the Russians to take pictures of the secret NASA sound stage and pawn them off as coming from the moon.
The Apollo conspiracy theorists don't even acknowledge the pictures of the stuff the various Apollo crews left on the moon taken by just about everyone with the necessary equipment here on Earth, so what makes you think they'd believe these?
Walking is great, but most suburbs were built around the car and thus aren't very walkable communities.
Which leads to an inevitable conclusion: Don't live out in the suburbs if you want to have a low carbon impact.
Especially if you're single, the one choice you can make that will have a gigantic impact on your CO2 emissions is living very close to your work, or at least close to your work via public transit. Even without the environmental benefits, it often gives you an hour of your life back every day. If you have a family, this obviously gets more complicated, but it's still something to think about.
The kind of people that want power over overs in their free time are not the kind of people who are good at using that power productively.
Yeah, instead they're busy playing cricket. Those damned bowlers, busy taking wickets!
I don't know why that doesn't incentivize kids today to do anything (beyond voting for Obama, which doing nothing).
Because we did something (e.g. on Feb 15, 2003, we with the help of the old peacenik guard held what was probably the largest peaceful protest in human history), and the powers that be simply ignored it. They ignored it so thoroughly that hardly anyone even remembers that it even happened. You seem like an activist-type, and it sounds like even you forgot about it.
You see, the establishment learned lessons from the 1960's, but they weren't the lessons that the protesters and most decent people would have wanted them to learn (like not invading countries, not killing civilians, not shooting at college kids, giving people a sense of economic fairness, holding powerful people to the same laws as powerless people, etc). Some of the lessons they learned were:
1. Keep TV cameras as far away from protesters as possible. (See: "Free Speech Zones")
2. Use agents provocateurs embedded in protests to justify police crackdowns (See: Seattle 1999, Philadelphia 2004, Toronto 2010, etc, etc). Encourage the more radical anarchist groups to use violence to make it easier to portray all protesters as violent anarchists.
3. Don't use lethal weapons, use non-lethal weapons. So instead of shooting people with live ammo, shoot them with rubber bullets. Or turn sonic cannons on them. Or turn laser weapons on them (in development). Don't use tear gas anymore - they know how to handle that.
4. Make reporters part of the establishment, so they won't report negative things about you. For instance, Cenk Uygur on this phenomenon at MSNBC.
I could go on, but the point is that they're very sophisticated about media management these days, so the chance of getting lots of images of white middle-class kids getting beaten or killed at the hands of police on TV screens around the country is virtually nil. I've been at significant protests outside events, and the news coverage was such that you wouldn't have known the protest even happened.
We've tried protests. We've tried elections. We've tried global networking. None of them have accomplished their goals in the US (they helped our Egyptian and Tunisian friends quite a bit though). Serious rebellion would be horrific and doomed for failure. I'm out of options, how about you?
I'm Simon Wimpleblode, and so's my wife!
Or as the late great Douglas Adams put it:
"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further
grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard
might get in. Got any gin?"
With telecom, the libertarian solution simply doesn't work.
Basic micro-econ depends on the idea that if the price of a good goes too high, more sellers enter the market to take advantage of the higher profits, which lowers the price due to competition, so the price returns to equilibrium. Equally important, if the price goes too high, buyers get priced out of the market and stop buying the service.
However, with telecom, new sellers can't enter the market without regulations to support them. A new seller in the telecom market will not be able to get in - any established competitor (call them BS&S) won't make peering agreements at reasonable costs (because the value of the peering agreement is much greater to the newcomer than BS&S), which means any customers of the new guy won't be able to reach the vast majority of people with phones, which means nobody will become a customer, so the newcomer quickly goes out of business. Therefore, the government adds in a regulation requiring peering agreements at the cost of setting up the pipe between the peers. But now the newcomer has to get a signal from their switches to the customer, which means they have to either run lines to all of its customers (while BS&S can use the lines already there), or lease access to the lines from BS&S, who will charge a high enough price that the newcomer can't offer a lower price than BS&S, so the newcomer can't get any customers and goes out of business. So the government adds another regulation requiring BS&S to lease line access at cost.
And you also have a situation where BS&S refuses to serve rural customers, or charge ridiculous prices to do so, because it's much more expensive to run a line out to them. The rural citizens complain that it's unfair that they have to pay $300 a month for phone service while city folk get it for $30. So the government adds another regulation saying that all competitors must sell the same service to all customers at the same price. But that means that the newcomer who's trying to enter the market by undercutting BS&S on price can't manage in a rural area because the cost of getting to the more remote customers is too high to make anything on it. So now the government has to differentiate between competitors who are required to serve rural customers at the same price as city folk from competitors that don't because they're newcomers.
And the story continues, but the point is that governments don't just write regulations for the heck of it, and most of the telecom regulations exist for a reason.
I disagree that complete anonymity is an essential liberty.
The US Supreme Court has consistently disagreed with you, notably in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995).
and so if you insist on policing what essentially amounts to nothing more than conversation in a bar -- then guess what, people can and will go else where.
There are some important differences between online discussion and random conversation in a bar:
1. There's a record of what you said, lasting essentially forever.
2. With a few prompt subpoenas, it's likely that the computer you posted from can be tracked down, and thus you can be tracked down.
3. You aren't assumed to be drunk.
Now, that's not an issue with most discussion, but if it were a post describing, say, a detailed plan for a terrorist attack, the various government agencies would probably make the effort to track you down.
In Ben's day, anonymity like this wasn't possible.
Oh yes it was: Common Sense was published anonymously, and authorship of the Federalist Papers was kept quite secret until Alexander Hamilton's death.
Now we see the down-modding inherent in the system!
Human genes can be legally patented, according to a Federal Appeals court.
Now, the difference here is that the genes are isolated from the body as a whole, but it seems like we're not too far from being in breach of patent every time we get it on.
This isn't because Linux is technically a bad choice, and definitely not because it's more expensive (TCO arguments were pretty close to bogus when they first came out, and have become steadily more bogus as more techies have become familiar with Linux). It's because markets for operating systems don't operate in the way that standard microeconomics tells you it ought to.
The 2 big reasons are:
1. The person making the decision about which OS to install typically is not the person using the computer.
2. Apple, Google, and Microsoft in particular have shown no qualms about using their market power to force their customers to use only their products. For instance, over the last couple of years any company that was selling both Linux and Windows 7 netbooks has dropped their Linux lines. That doesn't look to me like spontaneous market forces.
I like Linux, I use Linux both at work and at home, I think it's far superior to MS Windows and has some advantages over OS X as well. But that doesn't mean it's going to become the dominant OS any time soon.
Corporate backers aren't the will of the majority of Americans, they're the will of the very small minority of Americans with a large amount of wealth.
If we assume that having over 50% of the stock of a corporation pretty well determines what the corporation will do, then corporations collectively answer to at most 2-3% of the American population (see this study based on 2007 distribution, if anything stocks are more concentrated now).
What the politicians answering corporate backers rather than the will of the people means is that if 95% of the population wants a measure to pass, but the 2-3% who control major corporations want it to be defeated, it will be defeated, and vice versa. And this isn't a hypothetical: Most of the measures that Elizabeth Warren was planning for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had the support in polls of something like 85-90% favorability, and she couldn't get the job to push them through, much less make them a reality.
Yes, that ambiguity also led to reasonably silly Marriage Registry Office sketch by Monty Python.
I'd say you've paid him quite a complement, but to supplement your point, I'd say any difficulties are simply an acute problem, and not a sine of things to come.
Actually, the primary point of Medicare Part D was to give large sums of government cash to insurance and pharmaceutical companies. If it really had been about giving prescription drugs to elderly folks as cheaply and efficiently as possible, they would have had government rather than insurance company bureaucrats managing the plans (Medicare spends far less in paperwork and administration than private insurers), and would have allowed Medicare to negotiate the prices they would pay on prescription drugs just like they do for any of the other services they fund.
they report the news in ways that look good for the Democrats
If that's what they're trying to do, they're astoundingly incompetent.
Polls (such as Gallup) currently put approval rating of Democrats and Republicans at about 30%. That means that right now we actually have a plurality of voters that disapprove of both major parties but have nowhere to go.
Car loans are pretty stupid
Not always, just usually.
An example where they aren't totally stupid (and I admit I'm justifying my own behavior here, but it's very relevant): I took on a new job that was in a location I couldn't easily get to by bus or public transit, and the employer had made it clear that a requirement of the job was to be able to make it into the office at any time of day in case of emergencies. In order to afford the car to get to that job, I took on a loan which meant that the car cost me about $800 more in interest than it would have without the loan, but with the car I was able to take on a job that made me $8,000 a year more than my previous job after taxes. In other words, the benefits of the purchase with the loan far outweighed the extra cost of the loan.
Now, that doesn't mean that all car loans are a good idea. If you're buying a car and could afford to buy it outright, you should almost always do so. But if you can't afford to buy it outright, sometimes the benefits outweigh the cost of the loan.
What you absolutely shouldn't do is go for the most expensive car you can possibly get based on the size monthly payment. You should be doing the math to figure out not just what you can afford month-to-month but also what the interest is going to cost you overall.
...sound like it is a battle between common sense or good ideas, and Republicans?
Well, yes, but it's not that much of a mystery why they do so. The role of the Republicans in US political theater is to be so crazy that the Democrats sound sane by comparison. Then the Democrats make a 'compromise' that consists of about 95% of what the Republicans said they wanted, and 5% of what the Democrat's corporate backers wanted, and 0% of what Americans wanted. Then the Democrats go to the TV cameras and explain that this was the best deal they could make, which the Republicans go to Fox News and cheer about their triumph of will. (What made the recent health care law different was that in that case it was about 75% of what the Democrat's corporate backers wanted, and only 25% of what the Republican corporate backers wanted.)
Any idea that the US government is representing the will of the American people is an illusion.
So if you're trying to balance a budget ...
That's where you went wrong in your analysis. The Republican Party has absolutely no interest in balancing the budget. This has been shown time and time again: For instance, when George W Bush took office with a slight budget surplus if you count Social Security (which you probably shouldn't), he immediately cut taxes to put the budget in a hole.
Based solely on their actions when in power, this is what the Republican Party really believes in:
1. Cutting taxes on the wealthiest Americans. That's why, if you're somebody who makes their living off of investments, you pay a 15% capital gains tax, whereas if you make considerably less by working you pay a 25% income tax and a 12% FICA tax. Thanks to their actions, the tax rates are the lowest they've been since at least the 1940's.
2. Neutering or completely getting rid of any government agency that could serve as a check on corporate power. They would love to live in a world without the EPA, OSHA, MSHA, NLRB, or the SEC.
3. Getting rid of anything that smacks of aid to the poor and downtrodden. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, TANF, food stamps, housing assistance, and minimum wages all come under that category.
4. Expanding the 'national security' portion of government as much as possible, preferably with large no-bid contracts for their family, friends and business associates. They like being able to spy on anybody and everybody, starting wars that they don't need to start, and taking over Latin American countries with little or no military forces to speak of.
I'm no supporter of Democrats either, but one of the biggest myths out there is the idea that the Republicans want to balance the budget when it's abundantly clear they have no intention of doing so.