You are redefining the word debt, I think. The government does not owe money to employees for services not yet rendered, and can legitimately choose to forgo those services in order to not have to pay for them. If the government lays off, say, 10% of federal employees in some agencies, it is not failing to meet an obligation to pay those people, it's eliminating the obligation.
It does have to follow any contracts signed, which may have been signed because that budget was passed and various government employees thought they had the funds. In that case the contract may have incurred a debt depending on the wording of the contract, but it may not be if the government can cancel the contract at will. That debt was not incurred by the budget but by the decision to sign the contract. Authorization to sign a contract is not the same as actually signing it. I might authorize my lawyer to sign a plea bargain if he thinks it's a good deal, but he might well opt not to do so. Government agents are quite free to spend less than budget allocated, although in practice they rarely do. They are not required to spend as much as they are told they can. The budget bill authorized spending up to point X, but did NOT guarantee that actual funds existed to back up all that spending. It's good practice to keep budgets less than expected revenue plus expected borrowing, but there is no existential requirement that anyone does so. .
I was in fact talking about debt. Issuance of bonds is creation of debt. Contracts may also be creation of debt. Bonds are not re-financing of debt, they are the initial creation of debt, as an agreement to pay out certain funds in the future.
The above needs editing I think, but my basic issue is that you appear to be conflating parts of a multi-part process with the process as a whole.
In at least one case, the only reason given not to sign was that it didn't extend the debt limit enough to cover past the next election. You don't like that link, how about this one. Obama bears full responsibility for his demand that the debt limit increase be large enough to last until 2013.
But how does the president decide which law of congress to break? Breaking the debt ceiling explicitly takes on powers reserved for congress. Spending less than authorized is probably within executive authority, since authorization to spend is not a requirement to spend. The budget did not sign debt into law. The debt limit law allows the fed to issue bonds up to that limit as needed to meed spending requirements, and not a penny more. They are not circumventing the law by needing a new law to allow more bonds, they are following it.
To reiterate: nothing whatsoever in the budget bill authorized debt. It only authorized spending. They are not the same.
Yeah, I've often thought we were best off with a Democrat president and republican congress. Of course, the only times that happened in the previous 60 years has been Clinton and Obama, so it's a little thin as statistical meaning. Overall, plotting deficits by party is tricky, especially when you try to account for election years and items outside the normal budget. The 2009 stimulus was done by obama, most of the budget that year wasn't...
My understanding was that the deficit hawk democrats were a small minority of democrat congressman if theyexistat all.
Lawrence tribe is a fairly well recognized legal scholar. Not sure what the inverse of appeal to authority is, but it fails in this case.
The biggest issue is that the debt ceiling doesn't affect the paying of debts, it limits the increase of new debt, which is not actually the same thing. It's quite reasonable to say that Obama is required to cut spending in other areas in order to pay off existing debt, maybe by furlough or layoffs of the federal workforce. Since the power to borrow money is invested in the legislature as per Article 1 section 8, that is arguably the only option he can constitutionally take. The president can legitimately choose not to do something if doing so would violate the constitution. Authorizing payment for something by law in the future is not actually the same thing as authorizing debt.
True, but that still puts republican congressman ahead of democrat congressman, who are never deficit hawks as a caucus (individual members someimes are).
I'd agree, as long as all of the bush tax cuts are on the table. By far the most expensive component was tax cuts for the middle class, which Democrats didn't want to touch. The cost per person was a lot smaller for the middle class, but there are so many more of them.
Reduce spending on various programs and take the existing income that was going to those things and put them towards debt instead. It's not actually fair that obama gets blamed for the tripling of the deficit in 2009, but TARP 2 and the stimulus were contributing factors and that vast increase in deficit is what triggered the tea party movement's formation.
The 14th amendment may not mean what you think it means. The reason to hang some of the current issue on the President is that he has publicly said he would not sign any of the proposals currently before the house. He put in an ultimatum that the debt ceiling had to be raised enough to push the issue past the next national election. Budgets have to initiate in the house, but the senate and president have to agree for them to pass. That does mean congress has more responsibility to produce something than the president, but they did manage to get something that house democrats would agree to, but that Obama would not.
I hate to tell you, but the birthers are not representative of the tea party. Of course they aren't really the Birchers eather. Some people who belong to either group are involved with tea party activities as birthers, but since it's not really an organzied party they don't actually keep people out. Some of the worst get shunned at actual events though.
I didn't say otherwise. It's just harder to edit large number of ballots, or "find" boxes of missed ballots, than to use an append query to add a number of false ballots.
The stimulus was off budget, although the cost in that year was only about 100B or so (i can't find a fixed value for this). GM repaid it's loans under one program with loans under a different program, which made me deeply suspicious of any claim of repaid funds, and as far as I can tell about 2/3 of it have been paid back.
Obama can't completely abandon responsibility for the 2009 budget, since he was a senator that year and voted for it as well. I really don't think presidents should get much credit OR blame for budgets, since they have very little control over them.
The problem with blaming any one program is that anyone can take some budget item they don't like, put it on the top of the pile, and claim that it and it alone are responsible for our shortfalls.
Why do you think it's possible to keep human nature from following us into space? For that matter, do you think it's desirable to eliminate the desire of human individuals to improve their own lot? It's a great motivator.
To be fair, at least one notable Republican, Newt Gingrich, appears to support Obama's space policy. There is a lot of evidence that NASA was mostly a method of channeling funds to constituencies rather than a means of getting people into space.
I agree. The purpose of my previous post was to take issue with "the Republicans clearly proved that they were in this to win the presidency, not win an election." which seemed to conflate the popular vote with the election.
Well, they copied the headline verbatim from a known partisan website. It's worth noting that truthout.org made a stronger claim than the actual legal filing did, as far as I can tell. Blame chimpo13, not slashdot.
Winning an election by the rules is not the same as winning the popular vote. The republicans proved that they were interested in winning an election, and they surely would have liked to win the popular vote too, but that wasn't as important.
No, they weren't. The projected unemployment rate was 8.8% without stimulus and just under 8% with stimulus, with a footnote that some private forecasters said it would get as high as 11%. There are numerous other sources for that report, that was the administrations take on it, and their model was clearly crap one way or another since the actual unemployement rate with stimulus was higher than their models allowed for without it. There is no actual evidence that the stimulus decreased unemployement (it may have provably saved a few specific jobs, but those could have come at the expense of others). Politifact continues to use numbers from the CBO, which are useless for actually proving that jobs are saved, if for no other reason than they use the same model that was proven wrong by reality already.
The right not to be killed is a negative right. The right to live is a positive one, and self negating at that. There is a clear distinction between the 2 even if the full extent of a right to live is nebulus. My entire point was that every positive right requires force, and the negative ones don't. Does that clarify things for you? I don't know how else I can make it clear.
The right not to be killed does not require the action of anyone else. It does allow action by other people to defend or avenge you (by attempting to kill you, the attacker forfeits their own right to live if rights are equal), if they choose, but all it requires is that no one kill you. Allowing you to starve, for instance, is not killing you. It's failing to intervene on your behalf.
An awful lot of positive rights supporters tend to confuse "causing harm" with "failure to assist", and/or to confuse action with inaction. I am responsible for any actions I take, and the consequences thereof. I am not, in any way shape or form, responsible for any events which I did not cause even if I could have acted to avert those events and chose not to do so. Inaction, by any reasonable definition of cause and effect, can't cause anything.
I think you are correct in the narrow case that republicans are more dangerous to your personal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than democrats. I don't think it they are worse when it comes to the public as a whole, which contains many individuals (small business men for instance) who are in more danger from democrat party policies. You didn't, upon careful rereading, assert anything beyond your personal case however.
I did assume that you were ascribing all instances of police abuse to republicans, which is inaccurate. I think it quite likely that many cops are part of the social conservative wing of the republican party, and I noted CPS as a bastion of Left wing individuals (judging on my personal interaction with them, which is limited) as an example of where the interference in peoples lives could potentially be ascribed to the other party.
Negative rights are compatible with equal rights, as they never come into conflict. Positive rights (or entitlements, or whatever you want to call them) require the involuntary service of someone, which requires force for backing, which is incompatible with the right not to be killed, and with the whole concept of equal rights. If you don't have the right not to be killed, all other rights are meaningless. The use of involuntary labor of others is a basic distinction to the two, and is an fundamental difference, not just semantics.
Consider two individuals trapped in such a way that there is enough food or water for one of them, but not both, to live until they can be rescued. The right not to be killed of one doesn't conflict with the right of the other to not be killed. But if you assume a positive right to live, then only one but not both can exercise it and only by denying that same right in their counterpart. The positive right to live thus is self negating in at least some circumstances. Conversely, the right to not be killed can coexist in every case, although it might lead to both parties dying unless one of them voluntarily self sacrifices for the other. Anything called a right which can't be universally applied should not be called a right.
Slashdot Mirror
You are redefining the word debt, I think. The government does not owe money to employees for services not yet rendered, and can legitimately choose to forgo those services in order to not have to pay for them. If the government lays off, say, 10% of federal employees in some agencies, it is not failing to meet an obligation to pay those people, it's eliminating the obligation.
It does have to follow any contracts signed, which may have been signed because that budget was passed and various government employees thought they had the funds. In that case the contract may have incurred a debt depending on the wording of the contract, but it may not be if the government can cancel the contract at will. That debt was not incurred by the budget but by the decision to sign the contract. Authorization to sign a contract is not the same as actually signing it. I might authorize my lawyer to sign a plea bargain if he thinks it's a good deal, but he might well opt not to do so. Government agents are quite free to spend less than budget allocated, although in practice they rarely do. They are not required to spend as much as they are told they can. The budget bill authorized spending up to point X, but did NOT guarantee that actual funds existed to back up all that spending. It's good practice to keep budgets less than expected revenue plus expected borrowing, but there is no existential requirement that anyone does so. .
I was in fact talking about debt. Issuance of bonds is creation of debt. Contracts may also be creation of debt. Bonds are not re-financing of debt, they are the initial creation of debt, as an agreement to pay out certain funds in the future.
The above needs editing I think, but my basic issue is that you appear to be conflating parts of a multi-part process with the process as a whole.
In at least one case, the only reason given not to sign was that it didn't extend the debt limit enough to cover past the next election. You don't like that link, how about this one. Obama bears full responsibility for his demand that the debt limit increase be large enough to last until 2013.
But how does the president decide which law of congress to break? Breaking the debt ceiling explicitly takes on powers reserved for congress. Spending less than authorized is probably within executive authority, since authorization to spend is not a requirement to spend. The budget did not sign debt into law. The debt limit law allows the fed to issue bonds up to that limit as needed to meed spending requirements, and not a penny more. They are not circumventing the law by needing a new law to allow more bonds, they are following it.
To reiterate: nothing whatsoever in the budget bill authorized debt. It only authorized spending. They are not the same.
Yeah, I've often thought we were best off with a Democrat president and republican congress. Of course, the only times that happened in the previous 60 years has been Clinton and Obama, so it's a little thin as statistical meaning. Overall, plotting deficits by party is tricky, especially when you try to account for election years and items outside the normal budget. The 2009 stimulus was done by obama, most of the budget that year wasn't...
My understanding was that the deficit hawk democrats were a small minority of democrat congressman if they exist at all.
Lawrence tribe is a fairly well recognized legal scholar. Not sure what the inverse of appeal to authority is, but it fails in this case.
The biggest issue is that the debt ceiling doesn't affect the paying of debts, it limits the increase of new debt, which is not actually the same thing. It's quite reasonable to say that Obama is required to cut spending in other areas in order to pay off existing debt, maybe by furlough or layoffs of the federal workforce. Since the power to borrow money is invested in the legislature as per Article 1 section 8, that is arguably the only option he can constitutionally take. The president can legitimately choose not to do something if doing so would violate the constitution. Authorizing payment for something by law in the future is not actually the same thing as authorizing debt.
True, but that still puts republican congressman ahead of democrat congressman, who are never deficit hawks as a caucus (individual members someimes are).
I'd agree, as long as all of the bush tax cuts are on the table. By far the most expensive component was tax cuts for the middle class, which Democrats didn't want to touch. The cost per person was a lot smaller for the middle class, but there are so many more of them.
Reduce spending on various programs and take the existing income that was going to those things and put them towards debt instead. It's not actually fair that obama gets blamed for the tripling of the deficit in 2009, but TARP 2 and the stimulus were contributing factors and that vast increase in deficit is what triggered the tea party movement's formation.
But the birchers always were a fringe group, and do not have control of the tea party movement.
The 14th amendment may not mean what you think it means. The reason to hang some of the current issue on the President is that he has publicly said he would not sign any of the proposals currently before the house. He put in an ultimatum that the debt ceiling had to be raised enough to push the issue past the next national election. Budgets have to initiate in the house, but the senate and president have to agree for them to pass. That does mean congress has more responsibility to produce something than the president, but they did manage to get something that house democrats would agree to, but that Obama would not.
I hate to tell you, but the birthers are not representative of the tea party. Of course they aren't really the Birchers eather. Some people who belong to either group are involved with tea party activities as birthers, but since it's not really an organzied party they don't actually keep people out. Some of the worst get shunned at actual events though.
I didn't say otherwise. It's just harder to edit large number of ballots, or "find" boxes of missed ballots, than to use an append query to add a number of false ballots.
The stimulus was off budget, although the cost in that year was only about 100B or so (i can't find a fixed value for this). GM repaid it's loans under one program with loans under a different program, which made me deeply suspicious of any claim of repaid funds, and as far as I can tell about 2/3 of it have been paid back. Obama can't completely abandon responsibility for the 2009 budget, since he was a senator that year and voted for it as well. I really don't think presidents should get much credit OR blame for budgets, since they have very little control over them.
The problem with blaming any one program is that anyone can take some budget item they don't like, put it on the top of the pile, and claim that it and it alone are responsible for our shortfalls.
Why do you think it's possible to keep human nature from following us into space? For that matter, do you think it's desirable to eliminate the desire of human individuals to improve their own lot? It's a great motivator.
To be fair, at least one notable Republican, Newt Gingrich, appears to support Obama's space policy. There is a lot of evidence that NASA was mostly a method of channeling funds to constituencies rather than a means of getting people into space.
I agree. The purpose of my previous post was to take issue with "the Republicans clearly proved that they were in this to win the presidency, not win an election." which seemed to conflate the popular vote with the election.
Well, they copied the headline verbatim from a known partisan website. It's worth noting that truthout.org made a stronger claim than the actual legal filing did, as far as I can tell. Blame chimpo13, not slashdot.
Winning an election by the rules is not the same as winning the popular vote. The republicans proved that they were interested in winning an election, and they surely would have liked to win the popular vote too, but that wasn't as important.
Hey, but the ham sandwich didn't serve in Vietnam!
Personally, I prefer human readable paper ballots. It's simply not as easy to fudge physical ballots as elecrontic ones.
No, they weren't. The projected unemployment rate was 8.8% without stimulus and just under 8% with stimulus, with a footnote that some private forecasters said it would get as high as 11%. There are numerous other sources for that report, that was the administrations take on it, and their model was clearly crap one way or another since the actual unemployement rate with stimulus was higher than their models allowed for without it. There is no actual evidence that the stimulus decreased unemployement (it may have provably saved a few specific jobs, but those could have come at the expense of others). Politifact continues to use numbers from the CBO, which are useless for actually proving that jobs are saved, if for no other reason than they use the same model that was proven wrong by reality already.
The right not to be killed is a negative right. The right to live is a positive one, and self negating at that. There is a clear distinction between the 2 even if the full extent of a right to live is nebulus. My entire point was that every positive right requires force, and the negative ones don't. Does that clarify things for you? I don't know how else I can make it clear.
The right not to be killed does not require the action of anyone else. It does allow action by other people to defend or avenge you (by attempting to kill you, the attacker forfeits their own right to live if rights are equal), if they choose, but all it requires is that no one kill you. Allowing you to starve, for instance, is not killing you. It's failing to intervene on your behalf.
An awful lot of positive rights supporters tend to confuse "causing harm" with "failure to assist", and/or to confuse action with inaction. I am responsible for any actions I take, and the consequences thereof. I am not, in any way shape or form, responsible for any events which I did not cause even if I could have acted to avert those events and chose not to do so. Inaction, by any reasonable definition of cause and effect, can't cause anything.
I think you are correct in the narrow case that republicans are more dangerous to your personal life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness than democrats. I don't think it they are worse when it comes to the public as a whole, which contains many individuals (small business men for instance) who are in more danger from democrat party policies. You didn't, upon careful rereading, assert anything beyond your personal case however.
I did assume that you were ascribing all instances of police abuse to republicans, which is inaccurate. I think it quite likely that many cops are part of the social conservative wing of the republican party, and I noted CPS as a bastion of Left wing individuals (judging on my personal interaction with them, which is limited) as an example of where the interference in peoples lives could potentially be ascribed to the other party.
Negative rights are compatible with equal rights, as they never come into conflict. Positive rights (or entitlements, or whatever you want to call them) require the involuntary service of someone, which requires force for backing, which is incompatible with the right not to be killed, and with the whole concept of equal rights. If you don't have the right not to be killed, all other rights are meaningless. The use of involuntary labor of others is a basic distinction to the two, and is an fundamental difference, not just semantics.
Consider two individuals trapped in such a way that there is enough food or water for one of them, but not both, to live until they can be rescued. The right not to be killed of one doesn't conflict with the right of the other to not be killed. But if you assume a positive right to live, then only one but not both can exercise it and only by denying that same right in their counterpart. The positive right to live thus is self negating in at least some circumstances. Conversely, the right to not be killed can coexist in every case, although it might lead to both parties dying unless one of them voluntarily self sacrifices for the other. Anything called a right which can't be universally applied should not be called a right.
Damn it, I reloaded the page and didn't see my previous comment before I posted this one as a replacement. Sorry for the double post.