So, you're saying "just shut up and do all these green things we tell you to, pay your carbon taxes and offsets and inflated energy bill - and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we know what's best?"
Fair enough, but I could make the same argument from the other side: So you're saying "just close your eyes and don't worry about it, and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we can confidently tell you that climate change is nonsense put forth by greedy hippies trying to steal your money."
Well, if you're gonna be rolling the dice, maybe it's better not to bet the entire farm on the outcome.
Seriously, what's wrong with taking the warnings at face value, and prepare for the possibilities? That would seem to be the prudent course of action, rather than throwing all these resources at trying to change the outcome with some really expensive policies that have only a slim chance of working anyway.
The worst part of the whole "CO2 is pollution" mantra is that if just a portion of the vast resources and lobbying went into stopping things that we already know are harmful pollutants, we could implement some real positive change. But of course Monsanto and ADM won't allow us to reduce phosphorous run-off in any meaningful way, so Chesapeake Bay will continue its slow death. And of course we can't worry about what RoundUp and pesticides are doing to our soil and food supply when we've got polar bears and melting ice to worry about.
I wish we remembered, since Darwinism is still misused to tragic ends. Socioeconomic Darwinism is still flaunted among the extreme libertarian/Randian/. crowd, even if it is a dire fallacy which lead to some serious negative consequences. those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Except they don't call it "Socioeconomic Darwinism", they call it "Capitalism", and it actually has a pretty good history of improving living standards and prosperity. It works because when, for instance, big, inefficient, companies that - say, make cars - encounter changing conditions and are unable to adapt, they die out and then the smaller, more nimble companies take over resources and begin to prosper.
No one would ever try to stop this natural process of letting the big, inefficient dinosaurs die off so that the smaller and more adaptable could fill the void. I mean, that would be crazy, right?
Huh? Do what? Ha ha - oh, sure, they're gonna build Volgas or something I guess! Seriously? Wow.
So, you're saying "just shut up and do all these green things we tell you to, pay your carbon taxes and offsets and inflated energy bill - and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we know what's best?"
I predict that this will work out at least as good as when the "experts" said "just shut up and give us your money to invest - the market will work just like we say it will." And when the "experts" said "just shut up and eat what we tell you and avoid these things we tell you and you will be healthy and live to 100"...
I would say that it is just as important to question the self-appointed experts in any field as it is to defer to their wisdom on the topic. Trusting the "Educators" with public education hasn't improved the public schools, either.
No, they didn't accept knowingly forged SSNs. There is only one legal way to check an SSN prior to hire without violating equal opportunity laws - and that is by paying a background check company to run every potential hire (if you only run one race you are in for trouble according to the auditor I spoke with). And even that only works well if the SSN and name are mismatched.
Okay, I've lost my mod points, but I had to respond to this so I could correct this misinformation.
Apparently, too few people have heard of "e-verify". This is how employers are supposed to check whether or not a new hire is legitimately allowed to work in the US. It's free, quick, simple, and secure. It doesn't store or maintain any information about who checked what, it just gives the verification. Some SSNs used by illegal workers are shared around and they often have hundreds of names all under the same SSN.
There was an executive order that was supposed to require Federal contractors to use e-verify for all their new hires, but it's been suspended for now, and it looks like the whole system will go off-line at the end of September, because it has a sunset date and the current administration seems to want it to go away, even as a voluntary program.
As it stands now, it looks like about 300,000 of the jobs that the stimulus bill is supposed to create will actually be filled by illegal immigrants. That seems a little unfair, considering they could have gone to some of the Americans laid off, or the many immigrants that are here following the rules, and are probably also struggling in the bad economy.
Are you kidding me, a couple of McDonald's dollar menu hamburgers is far cheaper than anything you would make yourself. I would make the burger myself because the quality and taste are far better.
Nope. A pound of hamburger is about $2, depending on quality (how lean do you suppose that McDonalds beef is?), and a bag of 8 buns can be had for about 99 cents. So that's $3 and you can make 4 "quarter pound" burgers. Of course, the dollar menu burgers aren't quarter pounders, they are probably about 1/2 that. The processed cheese food they put on the "mcdouble" is pretty cheap, too, so if you want that pick up a 12-slick pack and you're still talking 1/2 the price of McD's "dollar" menu.
Save even more since you're not paying taxes. Most states add extra tax for "prepared foods". Around here that's 10.5%. Food at the grocery store is completely exempt from sales tax.
So, yea, eating crap is still cheaper when you prepare it yourself.
No way they will go after Google. Eric Schmidt is a member of the Bilderberg Group, and other executives have ties with them and with the Trilateral Commission.
Obama will never allow any interference with their plans.
Bah! All the good courses are for law enforcement. Then again, if you're part of a "militia", there doesn't seem to be any reason you can't get training from them. Facilities close by, too!
It's also critical data for detecting patterns in drug interactions. And the government already has the other personal information. But I guess we won't let facts get in the way of an insane conspiracy theory.
But you aren't presenting facts - you're telling a lie. I'd assume you're a DEA agent trying to spread disinformation, but the DEA is very up-front about what the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program is used for, so that just makes you flamebait.
They don't need that data anyway. The only thing it's used for is to inform the DEA of people that might be abusing prescription drugs (yea, like Limbaugh). So, good riddance.
The real issue is that the state (and all the others, BTW) is collecting all this personal information on their citizens and storing it in a database that is vulnerable to attack by identity thieves. It's one of the problems with all of these "citizen tracking" systems (like, for instance, Real ID). It's an unnecessary government intrusion that collects personal information for tracking its citizens, and providing them the ability to use citizens' own information against them. The excuse is always for "security". Well, you see now how good the government is at security.
Just wait until they have all your health records in an electronic health record database. It'll be available to everyone, everywhere. Authorized personnel only, of course. Yea, right.
You'll never fix the school system if you keep allowing them to blame parents. It's one of the two excuses the administrators use to explain away their failings (the other being that they don't have enough funding, even though the funding keeps going up without improving results).
The fact is, kids don't all learn the same way, but they act like they should. And teachers don't like to teach, so they give the kids a bunch of materials to do on their own and expect the parents to do the actual teaching. There is certainly something to the argument that some parents, well, shouldn't be parents. But that's a much smaller percentage than the number of kids that aren't being educated in school. Teachers expect a couple of things from parents:
Make sure they do the work the teachers send home.
Put them on Ritalin if they are bored in class.
Ritalin (and other chemical fixes being used) are basically the school's way of making sure the quick learners sit still while the others in the class try to catch up. These kids are bored, and try to fill their time with something more challenging. It's not that ADHD doesn't exist, but most of the kids drugged into submission would actually be fine if they were challenged academically. Instead they're expected to sit quietly for 6 hours a day while never being required to think.
The worst part is when parents try to actually get active in their child's education. Guess what? The teachers always ask for this, but it's never what they want. Try to challenge what is being taught, or even ask questions about the curriculum or teaching methods, and suddenly parents are the enemy. They are "interfering" with the "educators". And of course they know what's best - they are the professionals, right? Parents just aren't "qualified".
While a kid's environment has a lot to do with their capacity to learn, the failure of the public school system has a lot more to do with the environment created by teachers and administrators in the school. The good ones can set up a school in even the worst neighborhood and succeed in education children. Unfortunately, the system is very poor at rewarding that.
What I'd like is a reasoned discussion about what is working and what isn't. I'd argue saying limit the course work to what matters is a pretty complex suggestion. So, what do we see as valid? What is the mission of schools? Who gets to decide?
Well to get to that point, you've got to challenge the current system, where the schools have a monopoly on education for most parents, and the incentives are only to raise perceptions so as to improve lobbying efforts for greater funding. Innovations in this kind of bureaucratic system consists of tiny movements of self-motivated heroes who struggle to make a small difference for a few kids while the system the vast majority to wallow in a system that will cause them more harm than good.
Parents without the means to provide private education for their children will lie to administrators to get their children enrolled in a better school nearby. The over-paid administrators in that district pay "enforcement officers" to check to make sure children in the "better" school really live in the district their parents said they did. If not, they are sent back to the acknowledge failure school where even the meager education they were getting is not available.
Why not let the money follow the child? It would be the parents that decide what's working, and they would decide in a way everyone understands: by sending their children (and education funding) to the school they like. That would pressure every school to do better. That's the system in most of Europe. Children are not required to go to specific schools because they live there - they can go to any school they want, and the student funding follows them.
This is not unfair to certain districts, and some would claim, and it is not unfair to send money to private schools instead of the public system. It's the same money, and it's the kids we want to educate. Should we be more concerned about protecting teachers and school administrators, or is it the education of the children we are worried about?
I use a Logitech VX Nano mouse with my laptop. The precision is exceptional and the wireless range is ridiculously good (it uses 2.4Ghz). Battery life on 2 x AAA is decent also.
I'll second that on the VX Nano. I love mine. The tiny USB connector is a plug-it-in-and-forget-about-it, it's so small. The old large adapters were always getting in the way, in danger of getting bent or broken, etc. I don't use the side-to-side scroller much, but it's very handy when you want it.
As to the Mighty Mouse, I do like it when working with the Mac. The tracking seems perfect to me. It uses more batteries than the Nano, but it's not battery-hungry or anything, the Nano just runs forever. The problem with the Mighty Mouse is that after about a year and a half the little button in the middle quit working both ways (it'll scroll up but not down). I haven't had the Nano that long (have they even been out that long), but my other Logitech mice have never failed.
What the big stink anyway...the earth has only had ice at its poles for about 30% of its existence. It comes and goes with or without humans and has for millennium. Some are being a tad arrogant to think the human can affect such a chaotic large system.
This is because the people who designed your local busing system are morons.
Yea, government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, those same morons will be in charge of designing this new whiz-bang high-speed rail, too, except with more corrupt politicians and contractors involved.
I predict a massive money pit that will yield a few very expensive and unreliable trains, called "high-speed" because they defined it down to 80 MPH, that nobody rides because they're such a hassle.
The real problem here is that the law is basically an attempt to circumvent the fundamental principals of the Constitution, which was written to limit the powers of the Federal government. The founders didn't trust government, and sought to mitigate the necessary evil of having a government at all by restricting it to some very specific powers.
The 16th amendment gave the Feds all kinds of new power, so that's what they always use to try things like controlling behavior (a power they really shouldn't have). So whenever they pass a law offering a "tax credit", people sit around going "hmmm... how can we get some of that?" And why not? That's what people do. The more of your money goes to taxes, the greater the motivation to limit your liability or to have some benefit from government giveaways.
Same thing with all government handouts. About 40% of the budget of Medicaid and Medicare is spent on fraud. 40%. Because if people can get something for free, they will. Some will find legal ways (like these paper companies), and others don't care whether it's legal or not (like people that commit Medicare and welfare fraud).
So the real problem is $3.8 trillion of government spending. It attracts corruption, fraud, waste, opportunists, and everything else bad that people keep complaining about. And the 535 or so deciding how to spend that money aren't really very interested in being very diligent with it, because it's other people's money - so who cares about a few billion wasted here or there?
Repeal the 16th amendment, institute very strict term limits, hold the Federal government to the Constitution, and these problems would go away.
OK, I am in no way pro-Obama (I voted Libertarian). I also think that a 25 trillion debt is horrifyingly insane. Having said that, we'd deal with it as a country the same way my wife and I deal with having a mortgage that's more than we earn in a year.
You are the 2nd person to make this analogy, so let me just point out why it's false.
First, GDP is not federal government income. It's everybody's income. So for now, you not only owe $200,000 on your mortgage, you also owe $70,000 for the national debt. That's for the $11 trillion that is owed right now.
Put another way, the annual service on the debt (the amount of interest paid each year) was $455 billion in 2008, from revenues of about $2.5 trillion. So if the debt doubles, we'll be paying at least a trillion dollars for the interest payments, leaving only about $1.5 trillion for running the government, paying for medicare/medicaid (growing), social security (growing a lot), defense, transportation, everything. Oh - and that new universal healthcare system everybody's screaming for. Of course that assumes that interest rates remain around 1 - 1.5% like they were in 2008 (very unlikely).
So... NOW do you see the problem?
And in case you're thinking that increasing taxes on "the rich" will take care of all that additional revenue that's needed, according to the CBO, in order to raise an additional $1 trillion, you need to raise taxes significantly on everyone making more than $42,000/year. Unfortunately, that won't even cover the current $1.8 trillion deficit.
This country needs healthy dissent to thrive, but the right wing seems to be overflowing with dissent that is downright deranged. Hold Obama's feet to the fire when he fouls up on things like warrantless wiretapping or bank bailouts, stay away from this stupid bullshit.
It's only disappointing to those naive enough to think a big difference would happen overnight. To the small minority of us who understand how politics work, it is business as usual. The reality is that change only works at the speed of bureaucracy.
There seem to always be 2 responses to every criticism of Obama:
Don't be impatient, these are big changes that take time
These current problems are due to 8 years of Bush policies
Obama even uses them himself. Unfortunately they just don't hold water. If Bush's excessive spending is such a problem, how is spending 3 times as much making an improvement at all? So if Bush left a $700 billion dollar deficit, that makes it okay to expand it to a $1.8 trillion dollar deficit? This just all sounds like childish excuses and finger-pointing to me.
There will be no change. None that will help anyone but the bankers and wallstreet, anyway, while the people of the US are sold down the river.
At the current rate of spending, the US will have a national debt of $23 trillion in 10 years. That's 100% of GDP (assuming there won't be more contraction.
How do you deal with a debt that's 100% of GDP? You can't. Your currency is trash, your economy crashes, and your country is doomed. It may already be too late.
Mod parent up plse. He refers correctly to the type of brainwashing the way the Bush administration has pursuid the last 8 years. Off course there are still a number of elements present that continue this style up to today.
You mean like the Obama elements?
"Profound economic emergency"
"[could] turn a crisis into an irreversible catastrophe"
"paralysis" and "disaster"
"the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life."
"...but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis...."
Slashdot Mirror
So, you're saying "just shut up and do all these green things we tell you to, pay your carbon taxes and offsets and inflated energy bill - and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we know what's best?"
Fair enough, but I could make the same argument from the other side: So you're saying "just close your eyes and don't worry about it, and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we can confidently tell you that climate change is nonsense put forth by greedy hippies trying to steal your money."
Well, if you're gonna be rolling the dice, maybe it's better not to bet the entire farm on the outcome.
Seriously, what's wrong with taking the warnings at face value, and prepare for the possibilities? That would seem to be the prudent course of action, rather than throwing all these resources at trying to change the outcome with some really expensive policies that have only a slim chance of working anyway.
The worst part of the whole "CO2 is pollution" mantra is that if just a portion of the vast resources and lobbying went into stopping things that we already know are harmful pollutants, we could implement some real positive change. But of course Monsanto and ADM won't allow us to reduce phosphorous run-off in any meaningful way, so Chesapeake Bay will continue its slow death. And of course we can't worry about what RoundUp and pesticides are doing to our soil and food supply when we've got polar bears and melting ice to worry about.
I wish we remembered, since Darwinism is still misused to tragic ends. Socioeconomic Darwinism is still flaunted among the extreme libertarian/Randian /. crowd, even if it is a dire fallacy which lead to some serious negative consequences. those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.
Except they don't call it "Socioeconomic Darwinism", they call it "Capitalism", and it actually has a pretty good history of improving living standards and prosperity. It works because when, for instance, big, inefficient, companies that - say, make cars - encounter changing conditions and are unable to adapt, they die out and then the smaller, more nimble companies take over resources and begin to prosper.
No one would ever try to stop this natural process of letting the big, inefficient dinosaurs die off so that the smaller and more adaptable could fill the void. I mean, that would be crazy, right?
Huh? Do what? Ha ha - oh, sure, they're gonna build Volgas or something I guess! Seriously? Wow.
Okay... um... Nevermind.
So, you're saying "just shut up and do all these green things we tell you to, pay your carbon taxes and offsets and inflated energy bill - and everything will be fine. We're the experts and we know what's best?"
I predict that this will work out at least as good as when the "experts" said "just shut up and give us your money to invest - the market will work just like we say it will." And when the "experts" said "just shut up and eat what we tell you and avoid these things we tell you and you will be healthy and live to 100"...
I would say that it is just as important to question the self-appointed experts in any field as it is to defer to their wisdom on the topic. Trusting the "Educators" with public education hasn't improved the public schools, either.
No, they didn't accept knowingly forged SSNs. There is only one legal way to check an SSN prior to hire without violating equal opportunity laws - and that is by paying a background check company to run every potential hire (if you only run one race you are in for trouble according to the auditor I spoke with). And even that only works well if the SSN and name are mismatched.
Okay, I've lost my mod points, but I had to respond to this so I could correct this misinformation.
Apparently, too few people have heard of "e-verify". This is how employers are supposed to check whether or not a new hire is legitimately allowed to work in the US. It's free, quick, simple, and secure. It doesn't store or maintain any information about who checked what, it just gives the verification. Some SSNs used by illegal workers are shared around and they often have hundreds of names all under the same SSN.
There was an executive order that was supposed to require Federal contractors to use e-verify for all their new hires, but it's been suspended for now, and it looks like the whole system will go off-line at the end of September, because it has a sunset date and the current administration seems to want it to go away, even as a voluntary program.
As it stands now, it looks like about 300,000 of the jobs that the stimulus bill is supposed to create will actually be filled by illegal immigrants. That seems a little unfair, considering they could have gone to some of the Americans laid off, or the many immigrants that are here following the rules, and are probably also struggling in the bad economy.
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company!
Are you kidding me, a couple of McDonald's dollar menu hamburgers is far cheaper than anything you would make yourself. I would make the burger myself because the quality and taste are far better.
Nope. A pound of hamburger is about $2, depending on quality (how lean do you suppose that McDonalds beef is?), and a bag of 8 buns can be had for about 99 cents. So that's $3 and you can make 4 "quarter pound" burgers. Of course, the dollar menu burgers aren't quarter pounders, they are probably about 1/2 that. The processed cheese food they put on the "mcdouble" is pretty cheap, too, so if you want that pick up a 12-slick pack and you're still talking 1/2 the price of McD's "dollar" menu.
Save even more since you're not paying taxes. Most states add extra tax for "prepared foods". Around here that's 10.5%. Food at the grocery store is completely exempt from sales tax.
So, yea, eating crap is still cheaper when you prepare it yourself.
Well... Duh!
No way they will go after Google. Eric Schmidt is a member of the Bilderberg Group, and other executives have ties with them and with the Trilateral Commission.
Obama will never allow any interference with their plans.
Not exactly taking over the world, but still holding their own.
Bah! All the good courses are for law enforcement. Then again, if you're part of a "militia", there doesn't seem to be any reason you can't get training from them. Facilities close by, too!
It's also critical data for detecting patterns in drug interactions. And the government already has the other personal information. But I guess we won't let facts get in the way of an insane conspiracy theory.
But you aren't presenting facts - you're telling a lie. I'd assume you're a DEA agent trying to spread disinformation, but the DEA is very up-front about what the Prescription Drug Monitoring Program is used for, so that just makes you flamebait.
They don't need that data anyway. The only thing it's used for is to inform the DEA of people that might be abusing prescription drugs (yea, like Limbaugh). So, good riddance.
The real issue is that the state (and all the others, BTW) is collecting all this personal information on their citizens and storing it in a database that is vulnerable to attack by identity thieves. It's one of the problems with all of these "citizen tracking" systems (like, for instance, Real ID). It's an unnecessary government intrusion that collects personal information for tracking its citizens, and providing them the ability to use citizens' own information against them. The excuse is always for "security". Well, you see now how good the government is at security.
Just wait until they have all your health records in an electronic health record database. It'll be available to everyone, everywhere. Authorized personnel only, of course. Yea, right.
You'll never fix the school system if you keep allowing them to blame parents. It's one of the two excuses the administrators use to explain away their failings (the other being that they don't have enough funding, even though the funding keeps going up without improving results).
The fact is, kids don't all learn the same way, but they act like they should. And teachers don't like to teach, so they give the kids a bunch of materials to do on their own and expect the parents to do the actual teaching. There is certainly something to the argument that some parents, well, shouldn't be parents. But that's a much smaller percentage than the number of kids that aren't being educated in school. Teachers expect a couple of things from parents:
Ritalin (and other chemical fixes being used) are basically the school's way of making sure the quick learners sit still while the others in the class try to catch up. These kids are bored, and try to fill their time with something more challenging. It's not that ADHD doesn't exist, but most of the kids drugged into submission would actually be fine if they were challenged academically. Instead they're expected to sit quietly for 6 hours a day while never being required to think.
The worst part is when parents try to actually get active in their child's education. Guess what? The teachers always ask for this, but it's never what they want. Try to challenge what is being taught, or even ask questions about the curriculum or teaching methods, and suddenly parents are the enemy. They are "interfering" with the "educators". And of course they know what's best - they are the professionals, right? Parents just aren't "qualified".
While a kid's environment has a lot to do with their capacity to learn, the failure of the public school system has a lot more to do with the environment created by teachers and administrators in the school. The good ones can set up a school in even the worst neighborhood and succeed in education children. Unfortunately, the system is very poor at rewarding that.
What I'd like is a reasoned discussion about what is working and what isn't. I'd argue saying limit the course work to what matters is a pretty complex suggestion. So, what do we see as valid? What is the mission of schools? Who gets to decide?
Well to get to that point, you've got to challenge the current system, where the schools have a monopoly on education for most parents, and the incentives are only to raise perceptions so as to improve lobbying efforts for greater funding. Innovations in this kind of bureaucratic system consists of tiny movements of self-motivated heroes who struggle to make a small difference for a few kids while the system the vast majority to wallow in a system that will cause them more harm than good.
Parents without the means to provide private education for their children will lie to administrators to get their children enrolled in a better school nearby. The over-paid administrators in that district pay "enforcement officers" to check to make sure children in the "better" school really live in the district their parents said they did. If not, they are sent back to the acknowledge failure school where even the meager education they were getting is not available.
Why not let the money follow the child? It would be the parents that decide what's working, and they would decide in a way everyone understands: by sending their children (and education funding) to the school they like. That would pressure every school to do better. That's the system in most of Europe. Children are not required to go to specific schools because they live there - they can go to any school they want, and the student funding follows them.
This is not unfair to certain districts, and some would claim, and it is not unfair to send money to private schools instead of the public system. It's the same money, and it's the kids we want to educate. Should we be more concerned about protecting teachers and school administrators, or is it the education of the children we are worried about?
I use a Logitech VX Nano mouse with my laptop. The precision is exceptional and the wireless range is ridiculously good (it uses 2.4Ghz). Battery life on 2 x AAA is decent also.
I'll second that on the VX Nano. I love mine. The tiny USB connector is a plug-it-in-and-forget-about-it, it's so small. The old large adapters were always getting in the way, in danger of getting bent or broken, etc. I don't use the side-to-side scroller much, but it's very handy when you want it.
As to the Mighty Mouse, I do like it when working with the Mac. The tracking seems perfect to me. It uses more batteries than the Nano, but it's not battery-hungry or anything, the Nano just runs forever. The problem with the Mighty Mouse is that after about a year and a half the little button in the middle quit working both ways (it'll scroll up but not down). I haven't had the Nano that long (have they even been out that long), but my other Logitech mice have never failed.
I dunno who's on third.
So anyone up to a rational non-fear based debate to talk about the true negatives of DNA collection?
How about "The government should fear the people, not the other way around."
Oops - wait - you wanted a non-fear based debate. Um, okay, well nevermind then. I'm sure everything's going to be alright.
What the big stink anyway...the earth has only had ice at its poles for about 30% of its existence. It comes and goes with or without humans and has for millennium. Some are being a tad arrogant to think the human can affect such a chaotic large system.
Why is he modded a troll?
Arrogant human with mod points
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I thought we had already decided slavery and indentured servitude were bad. Have you decided it's a good thing, now?
This is because the people who designed your local busing system are morons.
Yea, government bureaucrats. Unfortunately, those same morons will be in charge of designing this new whiz-bang high-speed rail, too, except with more corrupt politicians and contractors involved.
I predict a massive money pit that will yield a few very expensive and unreliable trains, called "high-speed" because they defined it down to 80 MPH, that nobody rides because they're such a hassle.
The real problem here is that the law is basically an attempt to circumvent the fundamental principals of the Constitution, which was written to limit the powers of the Federal government. The founders didn't trust government, and sought to mitigate the necessary evil of having a government at all by restricting it to some very specific powers.
The 16th amendment gave the Feds all kinds of new power, so that's what they always use to try things like controlling behavior (a power they really shouldn't have). So whenever they pass a law offering a "tax credit", people sit around going "hmmm... how can we get some of that?" And why not? That's what people do. The more of your money goes to taxes, the greater the motivation to limit your liability or to have some benefit from government giveaways.
Same thing with all government handouts. About 40% of the budget of Medicaid and Medicare is spent on fraud. 40%. Because if people can get something for free, they will. Some will find legal ways (like these paper companies), and others don't care whether it's legal or not (like people that commit Medicare and welfare fraud).
So the real problem is $3.8 trillion of government spending. It attracts corruption, fraud, waste, opportunists, and everything else bad that people keep complaining about. And the 535 or so deciding how to spend that money aren't really very interested in being very diligent with it, because it's other people's money - so who cares about a few billion wasted here or there?
Repeal the 16th amendment, institute very strict term limits, hold the Federal government to the Constitution, and these problems would go away.
How do you deal with a debt that's 100% of GDP?
OK, I am in no way pro-Obama (I voted Libertarian). I also think that a 25 trillion debt is horrifyingly insane. Having said that, we'd deal with it as a country the same way my wife and I deal with having a mortgage that's more than we earn in a year.
You are the 2nd person to make this analogy, so let me just point out why it's false.
First, GDP is not federal government income. It's everybody's income. So for now, you not only owe $200,000 on your mortgage, you also owe $70,000 for the national debt. That's for the $11 trillion that is owed right now.
Put another way, the annual service on the debt (the amount of interest paid each year) was $455 billion in 2008, from revenues of about $2.5 trillion. So if the debt doubles, we'll be paying at least a trillion dollars for the interest payments, leaving only about $1.5 trillion for running the government, paying for medicare/medicaid (growing), social security (growing a lot), defense, transportation, everything. Oh - and that new universal healthcare system everybody's screaming for. Of course that assumes that interest rates remain around 1 - 1.5% like they were in 2008 (very unlikely).
So... NOW do you see the problem?
And in case you're thinking that increasing taxes on "the rich" will take care of all that additional revenue that's needed, according to the CBO, in order to raise an additional $1 trillion, you need to raise taxes significantly on everyone making more than $42,000/year. Unfortunately, that won't even cover the current $1.8 trillion deficit.
This country needs healthy dissent to thrive, but the right wing seems to be overflowing with dissent that is downright deranged. Hold Obama's feet to the fire when he fouls up on things like warrantless wiretapping or bank bailouts, stay away from this stupid bullshit.
You mean like this?
Oh... wait.
It's only disappointing to those naive enough to think a big difference would happen overnight. To the small minority of us who understand how politics work, it is business as usual. The reality is that change only works at the speed of bureaucracy.
There seem to always be 2 responses to every criticism of Obama:
Obama even uses them himself. Unfortunately they just don't hold water. If Bush's excessive spending is such a problem, how is spending 3 times as much making an improvement at all? So if Bush left a $700 billion dollar deficit, that makes it okay to expand it to a $1.8 trillion dollar deficit? This just all sounds like childish excuses and finger-pointing to me.
There will be no change. None that will help anyone but the bankers and wallstreet, anyway, while the people of the US are sold down the river.
At the current rate of spending, the US will have a national debt of $23 trillion in 10 years. That's 100% of GDP (assuming there won't be more contraction.
How do you deal with a debt that's 100% of GDP? You can't. Your currency is trash, your economy crashes, and your country is doomed. It may already be too late.
Mod parent up plse. He refers correctly to the type of brainwashing the way the Bush administration has pursuid the last 8 years. Off course there are still a number of elements present that continue this style up to today.
You mean like the Obama elements?