contractors that are probably charging $300 an hour too.
Contractors are hired to save money for the US government. No healthcare. No benefits. The contractor has to buy these themselves.
There are pro's and con's to being a contractor and the lack of benefits is one of the cons. The pro is you wont have to answer to a boss and you wont be micromanaged.
I guess you are missing the point of what I was saying.
It's the timing. Do part of it now, then raise taxes once the economy recovers. IT doesn't need to happen right this second. It's obvious that both needs to happen eventually, and it's obvious that cuts alone will not fix the problem. It's also obvious that raising taxes right now is irresponsible and recklessly endangering the economy.
So the solution, cut some government now, cap some spending now, wait until the economy recovers, cut some more spending (hopefully the war funding will be gone), cut some more government, revisits changing the taxes, and if the economy is robust enough to handle it, raise taxes.
You are one of the naive optimists who think the jobs are coming back? The economy is never going to recover. Deal with it and raise taxes now.
the problem with raising taxes is that it creates dead costs for an already struggling economy. If the economy was sound, raising taxes would be a god idea, but right now, and in the foreseeable future, it is a very bad idea that could further damage the economy or destroy it altogether.
Now before anyone chimes in with Clinton raised taxes, look at the details, he had a fairly robust economy and it could stand the dead costs.
Also, note that by dead costs, I means costs that add absolutely no value to the economy and the participants within. It would only cover existing obligations while draining investments from it.
Ah so to fix the deficit could kill the economy. Tell me something I don't already know.
If we want to fix the deficit we have to raise taxes. Anything else is kicking the can down the road.
You think that's bad? You can do something. It's worse watching from the sidelines. I'm in another country and can't do squat about the craziness you guys are starting by debating whether or not to continue paying your credit card bill's minimum payment. It's ultimately your business, of course, and you can tell the rest of the world to PFO (damn nosy neighbors meddling in USA internal affairs), but when the financial health of the USA is so intertwined with the rest of the world, it does become cause for legitimate global concern. The rest of the world cares about the decisions you guys are making, and the people in the USA should worry about this fact greatly. Because the obvious interpretation whether you do manage sort things out reasonably in the next little while or not will be: "Divest in the USA, because they can't keep their financial house in order anymore." As Obama has suggested, kicking the can down the road for 6 months and then going through this all over again, and again after that, does not bode well for future investment in the country.
I'm sympathetic and hope you guys sort things out, but, sheesh, get your act together. The numbers don't lie. You have to do something. Get on with it. This is going to affect a large part of the world because the rest of us have banked on the until-now-unquestioned idea that the USA is a reliable country when it comes to paying off its financial debts. Change that impression and people will invest elsewhere instead. It will be disruptive in the short term, but it will eventually be sorted out, with the exception that the USA will lose the special status in the financial realm that it has had for roughly the last century.
Let me put it another way. The rest of the world doesn't particularly care what the underlying political causes of this impasse are. That's your business. What we care about is that usually the USA has been able to put aside the worst kind of politics and do the right thing when necessary. You are a practical if fractious bunch, and that's why you are such a vibrant and successful democracy. If that willingness to put aside political differences for the sake of practicality has changed, well, a lot of things are going to be reassessed -- probably not in your favor. And that would be sad. Kind of like seeing your favorite uncle Sam succumb to dementia as they get older.
If you haven't noticed, the US congress has already been hijacked by crazies.
I would hope these crazies aren't so crazy that they force foreigners such as yourself to "do something", because I don't want the chaos that would result. I'm not in control, I'm a peasant, a peon, and unfortunately neither are the congressmen, as they are all puppets being blackmailed and commanded on what to say and how to vote by corporations.
The very point of this whole matter is that at the moment the United States do not have enough income to pay all their obligations (to their own people and the creditors), so they need to either increase their debt or fail to meet all their current obligations in some way. The Republicans want to cut the obligations (which is like saying "you're not going to get this anyway, so we might as well not promise that you get it"), the Democrats want to take on more debt. If neither happens, the total obligations exceed the income. Then it is only a matter of choosing which obligations to default on.
The gang of six and the Democrats basically agreed to cut spending and raise taxes. Republicans rejected that idea because they want to cut spending but not even attempt to pay off the debt. They just want to use this to keep Obama hostage and not actually solve the deficit.
That is your political slanted view of the issue. Others views are different, you need to stop reacting and learn to listen carefully to both sides... Those Tea Party (while may have rooted and contain ultra conservative members) are not trying to threaten the lives of those people but see it as more a "Tough Love" aspect to many of these groups. They feel that a lot of these people especially the poor, are on welfare and not working because welfare makes it too easy for them not to work, and by getting rid of it, it will force them to go out and work to survive. Not as much punishing the poor but making incentives to get off their butt and do something. Now I don't particularly follow that view but I do understand it. Also I find that the Liberal Parties are often the first to point out that any sort of cuts will effect social services that government provides as to rally the people against those EVIL republicans while for most of them they want a cut in government spending and not necessarily in direct social services, it is the liberal party who decides that is where the cuts should be. Look at say your local government when they propose to keep school takes the same while costs rise. The Liberal parties will state how many teacher will be laid off, vs. Keeping the School Bus that has some rust on it for an other year, or cutting the Vice Principals Secretaries Assistants. Both parties are evil. Why do we elect people if all they do is just follow the party line? If that is all they do they are useless we should just vote for a Party Line, hire 2 lawyers to interpret those party lines. And when an Issue comes up, based on the percentage of votes you can determine if it will pass or not. If it is in direct conflict of a party line 2/3 of the opposing party line will be needed to pass. If it is in the gray zone the majority party line will win, If the problem doesn't fit into either party line, it gets passed easily. We need to elect people who do not follow the party line as a rule, we need people who can lead and see if their party line view may not work in the case and make their vote... And their party shouldn't punish people who had made such a decision..
When you are talking about costing people their jobs and cutting their monthly checks yes that is threatening their lives.
You can't really get much more direct than this. How would you feel if Obama's Admin personally threatened your job because of politics? And that is not the only way the Tea Party is threatening lives. They also support the prison industrial complex. Read their plans: http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Guns,_Prisons,_Crime,_and_Immigration
I appreciate your research and you are undoubtedly on to something.
But do you not think that there should be a public outcry of some sort, either under the flag of "Tea Party" or just concerned citizens banding together with no particular group name?
After this administration took office and had the same initial after their names as that of the majority of the congress, to me it seemed as if it was a group of children waking up on Christmas morning finding themselves magically transported into a locked candy store. They were rushing about gleefully diving into an endless bounty of taxpayer money with no pesky adult supervision nor restraint, free to indulge in what had before only been long-distant dreams.
The deficit is the result of the Bush tax cuts. I knew when Bush started the two wars and didn't raise taxes to pay for it that it would eventually cause a crisis. This is the crisis.
The solution is to raise taxes and then use that to pay for infrastructure and pay down the debt.
I mean, it's kind of like your wife saying I'm not giving you any extra money to pay the bills until you hand over the credit cards and let me cut them up.
You explain "We can make the minimum payment"
And your wife says, yes, for now...but you just added another $2,000 grand to our credit debt. And your response is "But if we don't pay the minimum balance this month, we'll get hit with a late fee. Our rates my go up. And our credit rating will go down.
Your wife replies I know. But what does that matter if you're going to add a thousand dollars of debt every month. We're going to go bankrupt anyways and it will be a lot worse than a late payment. So let's cut the credit cards and start paying down our debts.
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Hmm.....doesn't sound so stupid anymore does. Who's the fool? Uh, yeah...those who want to raise the debt ceiling. Mind you, they're not saying they won't raise it. They just want to start cutting the credit cards first. Is that too much to ask?
We've already spent ALL the money my generation will ever earn. We're now into our children's and grand childrens lives. That's called thievery, greed, and stupidity. Extortion is threatening the livelihood of seniors, soldiers, etc if we don't let you spend our grandchildren's money. Rather that cutting the waste of government.
If you can't raise taxes how are you supposed to pay down the debt?
It could be that They modded your post down. Or it could have been modde down because you cherry picked a handful of unrelated actions (fringe groups are everywhere), glued it all together with some unsubstantiated opinion, then presented it as fact. Moreover you do it in an arrogant "I am right and everyone who disagrees with me is part of the conspiracy" manner.
You could have picked any two of those and gotten away with it, but combining all three just trips the bullshit meter. Try rewording your posts, you might be surprised at the difference it makes.
The Tea Party is not a fringe group anymore. They control the house.
There is more than enough income to the federal government to pay all of social security and medicare (They have their own dedicated tax of your 7% contribution plus your employers 7% contribution). Everyones SS and Medicare will get paid, unless Obama specifically decides not to pay them, to prove his OWN point.
Debts will get paid, the US will and cannot default because there is more than enough income to pay for our interest to our creditors.
It is how it works, this is how legislation gets passed.
Okay. Precisely how much revenue was generated by taxes? I want an exact number. Then I want the exact number of money the government has to pay out. Get the numbers and then you can make a case, without the numbers you just speculate.
So it's okay for that scumbag to threaten the lives of seniors, of poor people, of veterans, of anyone by threatening to let the nation default which means the checks wont be sent out to them? What about troops serving right now who are risking their lives so that ignorant congressman can safely speak like that? What about law enforcement who protects scumbags like him from being robbed and preyed upon?
Defaulting on the federal debt will simply mean the federal government is limited to its revenues and whatever it can print (and that will totally screw over the poor and vulnerable). We have over $2T in revenues. All that means is that the federal government will have to prioritize.
How about we start means-testing Social Security and Medicare. If Grandma has a pension, fat 401k or private assets she gets no Social Security.
So what if she "paid into the system her whole life." I have no kids and pay thousands of dollars in property taxes, mainly to support local schools. Do you see me whining, bitching and moaning about the injustice of paying for something from which I derive no personal benefit? No. It's called civic responsibility. Part of your duty as a citizen is to put the common good before yours and frankly, I'm sick of ordinary Americans adopting the same "fuck you, I'll get mine" attitude they accuse the rich of having and then acting holier than thou toward them.
Say they decide to pay the troops, what about the contractors who were promised money who are risking their lives as well? You think the mercenaries are going to be happy when they find out they might not be paid and that their contract may even be canceled? So how are they going to get their money?
Also how will the troops be paid? That isn't even a guarantee. The foreigners who own the nations debt have to be paid before anyone else and that includes the troops. After the foreign debt holders are paid then the President can think to give priority to the troops, or to contractors, or to social security. And at some point, somewhere, some people aren't going to be paid. Which people can afford not to get paid for a month?
And when a budget is finally passed, will that lost month's pay be included in the budget? The point is that this will fuck the system up internally, as well as fuck up the entire economy.
The Business Plot was the attempt to overthrow the US government and in specific overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictatorship I forgot which US president gathered up US citizens and placed them in camps? Which president summarily executed American citizens without benefit of trial? Oh that's right it was FDR, sounds like we already had a dictatorship. As for worrying about FBI investigations, given how well the Justice Dept is handling Operation Gunrunner no one should worry about investigations for a while.
We won World War 2 because of some of the actions of FDR. And if the business plot coup were not thwarted then the USA would have been run by a fascist establishment and Hitler would have won World War 2.
Do you not realize what was at stake? As far as the FBI Counter Intelligence operations go, even the President would not have knowledge of what is going on. That shit would be beyond top secret. For all we know the FBI could already have the Tea Party and the Koch Bro's under surveillance.
This is how democracy works, FYI. It isn't extortion, it is how that pesky legislative process works. Troubling, I know.
So it's okay for that scumbag to threaten the lives of seniors, of poor people, of veterans, of anyone by threatening to let the nation default which means the checks wont be sent out to them? What about troops serving right now who are risking their lives so that ignorant congressman can safely speak like that? What about law enforcement who protects scumbags like him from being robbed and preyed upon?
Do you realize he's not only threatening all their jobs, but he's threatening to withhold their pay that they earned fair and square. He is doing this so that he can score political points and try to pass a Constitutional amendment which has no hope in hell of passing. So what he is doing is attempting to extort the entire nation.
If you think that is how democracy works, maybe when people like him call the police the police should decide "you know, we aren't going to keep you safe anymore unless you agree to write this bill for us.", in fact maybe the whole government could do the same thing to these congressmen. Then it would be called blackmail and extortion right? I guess it's not extortion if a Republican congressman does it?
It seems like the more extreme Republicans that are running things in the House don't have a political philosophy so much as they have a religion. It's hard to convince a zealot of anything.
Pay attention, kids: we're experiencing history! This is another stage in the long decline of the United States.
They don't have a religion either. They have a plan to overthrow the US government and Obama. They don't even recognize Obama as a US citizen. They listen to Alex Jones and think the UN is run by the jewish mafia elite. They also are the ones who hate multi-culturalism in Europe.
They don't want to pay taxes because they know the government are the ones who will be arresting them for their corruption and that if they stop paying taxes the government will shrink and become ineffective. Is it a surprise that Murdoch or someone like that would want lower taxes?
In specific Tea Party Republicans are threatening to put the nation into default, holding the entire US economy and millions of lives hostage to pass their amendment to the Constitution. They want the nation to default because it will boost recruitment into their militias. They want a civil war and are apparently beyond compromise. They cannot be reasoned with apparently.
Who are these people? Before they called themselves the Tea Party they called themselves the John Birch Society. and before they were called the John Birch society they called themselves the American Liberty League.
This is the same American Liberty League that was behind the Business Plot.
The Business Plot was the attempt to overthrow the US government and in specific overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictatorship. The history of that can be seen by watching this video.
Read about Smedley Darlington Butler and how he single handedly saved the nation from a coup. Now that we have a black President the forces looking to have a coup have grown stronger than ever. And these groups hate the feds and the government because these are the ones investigating them. The solution? Tax cuts, smaller government, which means less FBI investigations into them.
And btw I expect "them" to rate my post down into oblivion. Expect to see it rated as flamebait, overrated or something else.
Or arm up and start a revolution. Egypt has won democracy this way.
Anarchy IS democracy and the preferred political system for lulzsec, anonymous, Kevin Mitnick and alike. Death to the Jew World Order masqueraded as law and order.
LMAO. Revolution? I think you mean a civil war. The USA isn't Egypt. There isn't/aren't a CIA or other NATO or other intelligence agencies waiting to arm the so called cyber revolutionaries, and you'll have no country to flee to if you start losing.
I mean why not just call it the "anti police" movement, or the "anti government" movement.
Who exactly benefits from an anti-sec movement? Hackers don't generally benefit from it. Users don't generally benefit from it. Who benefits from it?
If you are a hacker and a teenager, someday you'll be working in the security industry. So basically you'll be killing your job prospects if you support such a movement and you'll be making it impossible for hackers in the future to ever go legit. This is like drug dealers creating a movement to keep drugs illegal, so that their drug deals can never be regulated. It seems to not make any sense at all from the perspective of the hacker.
It makes no sense for a user to ever support this movement because what does the user gain by having their passwords cracked and shared on some russian forum? This is no better for users than Facebook sharing their private information with other corporations.
The only group that can benefit from the anti-sec movement are the high up government overlords who will decide that since there is a deliberate anti-sec movement, they must in return start a pro-sec movement. It creates an even sharper divide in the hacker community which empowers the elite government types who don't know a damn thing about computers. It's divide and rule all over again, by dividing the hacker community into black and white, and then dividing the blackhats in Anonymous into various movements some which seem to make no sense, it only creates a sort of boogyman which lawmakers can capitalize on with...
"See? We need to do something about these cyber terrorists. They are terrorists, they have a political movement now."
So now cyber crime is turned into cyber terrorism and more resources are poured into surveillance. So what is the first big move they have done to catch these anti sec types? Trojan software on every PC. FBI malware to monitor every computer for illegal activity. And how long before they use this sort of monitoring to go after copyright infringers and other low hanging fruit?
Slashdot Mirror
And if people aren't elite enough to say what they want, then they risk being blacklisted.
Sigh. Another teabagger. DC is a majority African-American area, putting a waste dump there would be racist. Why am I not surprised here?
That hasn't stopped them before has it? "But it might be racist!"
Look at the country, and tell me when anything healthy is ever dumped in the ghetto.
As that is the typical pattern when the decision is made where to dump the waste. Whether it be liquor stores, guns, or crack.
It's only a matter of time. If you live in the ghetto it's time to move.
That is where the nuclear waste will surely be dumped. Bet on that.
It's only a matter of time before the technology is ready.
contractors that are probably charging $300 an hour too.
Contractors are hired to save money for the US government. No healthcare. No benefits. The contractor has to buy these themselves.
There are pro's and con's to being a contractor and the lack of benefits is one of the cons. The pro is you wont have to answer to a boss and you wont be micromanaged.
I guess you are missing the point of what I was saying.
It's the timing. Do part of it now, then raise taxes once the economy recovers. IT doesn't need to happen right this second. It's obvious that both needs to happen eventually, and it's obvious that cuts alone will not fix the problem. It's also obvious that raising taxes right now is irresponsible and recklessly endangering the economy.
So the solution, cut some government now, cap some spending now, wait until the economy recovers, cut some more spending (hopefully the war funding will be gone), cut some more government, revisits changing the taxes, and if the economy is robust enough to handle it, raise taxes.
You are one of the naive optimists who think the jobs are coming back? The economy is never going to recover. Deal with it and raise taxes now.
the problem with raising taxes is that it creates dead costs for an already struggling economy. If the economy was sound, raising taxes would be a god idea, but right now, and in the foreseeable future, it is a very bad idea that could further damage the economy or destroy it altogether.
Now before anyone chimes in with Clinton raised taxes, look at the details, he had a fairly robust economy and it could stand the dead costs.
Also, note that by dead costs, I means costs that add absolutely no value to the economy and the participants within. It would only cover existing obligations while draining investments from it.
Ah so to fix the deficit could kill the economy. Tell me something I don't already know.
If we want to fix the deficit we have to raise taxes. Anything else is kicking the can down the road.
You think that's bad? You can do something. It's worse watching from the sidelines. I'm in another country and can't do squat about the craziness you guys are starting by debating whether or not to continue paying your credit card bill's minimum payment. It's ultimately your business, of course, and you can tell the rest of the world to PFO (damn nosy neighbors meddling in USA internal affairs), but when the financial health of the USA is so intertwined with the rest of the world, it does become cause for legitimate global concern. The rest of the world cares about the decisions you guys are making, and the people in the USA should worry about this fact greatly. Because the obvious interpretation whether you do manage sort things out reasonably in the next little while or not will be: "Divest in the USA, because they can't keep their financial house in order anymore." As Obama has suggested, kicking the can down the road for 6 months and then going through this all over again, and again after that, does not bode well for future investment in the country.
I'm sympathetic and hope you guys sort things out, but, sheesh, get your act together. The numbers don't lie. You have to do something. Get on with it. This is going to affect a large part of the world because the rest of us have banked on the until-now-unquestioned idea that the USA is a reliable country when it comes to paying off its financial debts. Change that impression and people will invest elsewhere instead. It will be disruptive in the short term, but it will eventually be sorted out, with the exception that the USA will lose the special status in the financial realm that it has had for roughly the last century.
Let me put it another way. The rest of the world doesn't particularly care what the underlying political causes of this impasse are. That's your business. What we care about is that usually the USA has been able to put aside the worst kind of politics and do the right thing when necessary. You are a practical if fractious bunch, and that's why you are such a vibrant and successful democracy. If that willingness to put aside political differences for the sake of practicality has changed, well, a lot of things are going to be reassessed -- probably not in your favor. And that would be sad. Kind of like seeing your favorite uncle Sam succumb to dementia as they get older.
If you haven't noticed, the US congress has already been hijacked by crazies.
I would hope these crazies aren't so crazy that they force foreigners such as yourself to "do something", because I don't want the chaos that would result. I'm not in control, I'm a peasant, a peon, and unfortunately neither are the congressmen, as they are all puppets being blackmailed and commanded on what to say and how to vote by corporations.
The very point of this whole matter is that at the moment the United States do not have enough income to pay all their obligations (to their own people and the creditors), so they need to either increase their debt or fail to meet all their current obligations in some way. The Republicans want to cut the obligations (which is like saying "you're not going to get this anyway, so we might as well not promise that you get it"), the Democrats want to take on more debt. If neither happens, the total obligations exceed the income. Then it is only a matter of choosing which obligations to default on.
The gang of six and the Democrats basically agreed to cut spending and raise taxes. Republicans rejected that idea because they want to cut spending but not even attempt to pay off the debt. They just want to use this to keep Obama hostage and not actually solve the deficit.
That is your political slanted view of the issue. .
Others views are different, you need to stop reacting and learn to listen carefully to both sides...
Those Tea Party (while may have rooted and contain ultra conservative members) are not trying to threaten the lives of those people but see it as more a "Tough Love" aspect to many of these groups. They feel that a lot of these people especially the poor, are on welfare and not working because welfare makes it too easy for them not to work, and by getting rid of it, it will force them to go out and work to survive. Not as much punishing the poor but making incentives to get off their butt and do something. Now I don't particularly follow that view but I do understand it.
Also I find that the Liberal Parties are often the first to point out that any sort of cuts will effect social services that government provides as to rally the people against those EVIL republicans while for most of them they want a cut in government spending and not necessarily in direct social services, it is the liberal party who decides that is where the cuts should be.
Look at say your local government when they propose to keep school takes the same while costs rise. The Liberal parties will state how many teacher will be laid off, vs. Keeping the School Bus that has some rust on it for an other year, or cutting the Vice Principals Secretaries Assistants.
Both parties are evil. Why do we elect people if all they do is just follow the party line? If that is all they do they are useless we should just vote for a Party Line, hire 2 lawyers to interpret those party lines. And when an Issue comes up, based on the percentage of votes you can determine if it will pass or not. If it is in direct conflict of a party line 2/3 of the opposing party line will be needed to pass. If it is in the gray zone the majority party line will win, If the problem doesn't fit into either party line, it gets passed easily.
We need to elect people who do not follow the party line as a rule, we need people who can lead and see if their party line view may not work in the case and make their vote... And their party shouldn't punish people who had made such a decision.
When you are talking about costing people their jobs and cutting their monthly checks yes that is threatening their lives.
You can't really get much more direct than this. How would you feel if Obama's Admin personally threatened your job because of politics? And that is not the only way the Tea Party is threatening lives. They also support the prison industrial complex. Read their plans: http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Guns,_Prisons,_Crime,_and_Immigration
I appreciate your research and you are undoubtedly on to something.
But do you not think that there should be a public outcry of some sort, either under the flag of "Tea Party" or just concerned citizens banding together with no particular group name?
After this administration took office and had the same initial after their names as that of the majority of the congress, to me it seemed as if it was a group of children waking up on Christmas morning finding themselves magically transported into a locked candy store. They were rushing about gleefully diving into an endless bounty of taxpayer money with no pesky adult supervision nor restraint, free to indulge in what had before only been long-distant dreams.
The deficit is the result of the Bush tax cuts. I knew when Bush started the two wars and didn't raise taxes to pay for it that it would eventually cause a crisis. This is the crisis.
The solution is to raise taxes and then use that to pay for infrastructure and pay down the debt.
Yeah...ridiculous...
I mean, it's kind of like your wife saying I'm not giving you any extra money to pay the bills until you hand over the credit cards and let me cut them up.
You explain "We can make the minimum payment"
And your wife says, yes, for now...but you just added another $2,000 grand to our credit debt. And your response is "But if we don't pay the minimum balance this month, we'll get hit with a late fee. Our rates my go up. And our credit rating will go down.
Your wife replies I know. But what does that matter if you're going to add a thousand dollars of debt every month. We're going to go bankrupt anyways and it will be a lot worse than a late payment. So let's cut the credit cards and start paying down our debts.
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Hmm.....doesn't sound so stupid anymore does. Who's the fool? Uh, yeah...those who want to raise the debt ceiling. Mind you, they're not saying they won't raise it. They just want to start cutting the credit cards first. Is that too much to ask?
We've already spent ALL the money my generation will ever earn. We're now into our children's and grand childrens lives. That's called thievery, greed, and stupidity. Extortion is threatening the livelihood of seniors, soldiers, etc if we don't let you spend our grandchildren's money. Rather that cutting the waste of government.
If you can't raise taxes how are you supposed to pay down the debt?
It could be that They modded your post down. Or it could have been modde down because you cherry picked a handful of unrelated actions (fringe groups are everywhere), glued it all together with some unsubstantiated opinion, then presented it as fact. Moreover you do it in an arrogant "I am right and everyone who disagrees with me is part of the conspiracy" manner.
You could have picked any two of those and gotten away with it, but combining all three just trips the bullshit meter. Try rewording your posts, you might be surprised at the difference it makes.
The Tea Party is not a fringe group anymore. They control the house.
I didn't vote for him. But he has the power to influence elections regardless of who the people voted for.
There is more than enough income to the federal government to pay all of social security and medicare (They have their own dedicated tax of your 7% contribution plus your employers 7% contribution). Everyones SS and Medicare will get paid, unless Obama specifically decides not to pay them, to prove his OWN point.
Debts will get paid, the US will and cannot default because there is more than enough income to pay for our interest to our creditors.
It is how it works, this is how legislation gets passed.
Okay. Precisely how much revenue was generated by taxes? I want an exact number. Then I want the exact number of money the government has to pay out. Get the numbers and then you can make a case, without the numbers you just speculate.
Defaulting on the federal debt will simply mean the federal government is limited to its revenues and whatever it can print (and that will totally screw over the poor and vulnerable). We have over $2T in revenues. All that means is that the federal government will have to prioritize.
How about we start means-testing Social Security and Medicare. If Grandma has a pension, fat 401k or private assets she gets no Social Security.
So what if she "paid into the system her whole life." I have no kids and pay thousands of dollars in property taxes, mainly to support local schools. Do you see me whining, bitching and moaning about the injustice of paying for something from which I derive no personal benefit? No. It's called civic responsibility. Part of your duty as a citizen is to put the common good before yours and frankly, I'm sick of ordinary Americans adopting the same "fuck you, I'll get mine" attitude they accuse the rich of having and then acting holier than thou toward them.
Say they decide to pay the troops, what about the contractors who were promised money who are risking their lives as well? You think the mercenaries are going to be happy when they find out they might not be paid and that their contract may even be canceled? So how are they going to get their money?
Also how will the troops be paid? That isn't even a guarantee. The foreigners who own the nations debt have to be paid before anyone else and that includes the troops. After the foreign debt holders are paid then the President can think to give priority to the troops, or to contractors, or to social security. And at some point, somewhere, some people aren't going to be paid. Which people can afford not to get paid for a month?
And when a budget is finally passed, will that lost month's pay be included in the budget? The point is that this will fuck the system up internally, as well as fuck up the entire economy.
The Business Plot was the attempt to overthrow the US government and in specific overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictatorship
I forgot which US president gathered up US citizens and placed them in camps? Which president summarily executed American citizens without benefit of trial? Oh that's right it was FDR, sounds like we already had a dictatorship. As for worrying about FBI investigations, given how well the Justice Dept is handling Operation Gunrunner no one should worry about investigations for a while.
We won World War 2 because of some of the actions of FDR. And if the business plot coup were not thwarted then the USA would have been run by a fascist establishment and Hitler would have won World War 2.
Do you not realize what was at stake? As far as the FBI Counter Intelligence operations go, even the President would not have knowledge of what is going on. That shit would be beyond top secret. For all we know the FBI could already have the Tea Party and the Koch Bro's under surveillance.
This is how democracy works, FYI. It isn't extortion, it is how that pesky legislative process works. Troubling, I know.
So it's okay for that scumbag to threaten the lives of seniors, of poor people, of veterans, of anyone by threatening to let the nation default which means the checks wont be sent out to them? What about troops serving right now who are risking their lives so that ignorant congressman can safely speak like that? What about law enforcement who protects scumbags like him from being robbed and preyed upon?
Do you realize he's not only threatening all their jobs, but he's threatening to withhold their pay that they earned fair and square. He is doing this so that he can score political points and try to pass a Constitutional amendment which has no hope in hell of passing. So what he is doing is attempting to extort the entire nation.
If you think that is how democracy works, maybe when people like him call the police the police should decide "you know, we aren't going to keep you safe anymore unless you agree to write this bill for us.", in fact maybe the whole government could do the same thing to these congressmen. Then it would be called blackmail and extortion right? I guess it's not extortion if a Republican congressman does it?
It seems like the more extreme Republicans that are running things in the House don't have a political philosophy so much as they have a religion. It's hard to convince a zealot of anything.
Pay attention, kids: we're experiencing history! This is another stage in the long decline of the United States.
They don't have a religion either. They have a plan to overthrow the US government and Obama. They don't even recognize Obama as a US citizen. They listen to Alex Jones and think the UN is run by the jewish mafia elite. They also are the ones who hate multi-culturalism in Europe.
They don't want to pay taxes because they know the government are the ones who will be arresting them for their corruption and that if they stop paying taxes the government will shrink and become ineffective. Is it a surprise that Murdoch or someone like that would want lower taxes?
This is extortion. This is anti-American. Rep Mike Lee Admits Extortion.
In specific Tea Party Republicans are threatening to put the nation into default, holding the entire US economy and millions of lives hostage to pass their amendment to the Constitution. They want the nation to default because it will boost recruitment into their militias. They want a civil war and are apparently beyond compromise. They cannot be reasoned with apparently.
Who are these people? Before they called themselves the Tea Party they called themselves the John Birch Society. and before they were called the John Birch society they called themselves the American Liberty League.
This is the same American Liberty League that was behind the Business Plot.
The Business Plot was the attempt to overthrow the US government and in specific overthrow FDR and install a fascist dictatorship. The history of that can be seen by watching this video.
Read about Smedley Darlington Butler and how he single handedly saved the nation from a coup. Now that we have a black President the forces looking to have a coup have grown stronger than ever. And these groups hate the feds and the government because these are the ones investigating them. The solution? Tax cuts, smaller government, which means less FBI investigations into them.
And btw I expect "them" to rate my post down into oblivion. Expect to see it rated as flamebait, overrated or something else.
Or arm up and start a revolution. Egypt has won democracy this way.
Anarchy IS democracy and the preferred political system for lulzsec, anonymous, Kevin Mitnick and alike. Death to the Jew World Order masqueraded as law and order.
LMAO. Revolution? I think you mean a civil war. The USA isn't Egypt. There isn't/aren't a CIA or other NATO or other intelligence agencies waiting to arm the so called cyber revolutionaries, and you'll have no country to flee to if you start losing.
You're right, my mistake.
But this is still a move I expect the FBI to make if they haven't already.
I mean why not just call it the "anti police" movement, or the "anti government" movement.
Who exactly benefits from an anti-sec movement? Hackers don't generally benefit from it. Users don't generally benefit from it. Who benefits from it?
If you are a hacker and a teenager, someday you'll be working in the security industry. So basically you'll be killing your job prospects if you support such a movement and you'll be making it impossible for hackers in the future to ever go legit. This is like drug dealers creating a movement to keep drugs illegal, so that their drug deals can never be regulated. It seems to not make any sense at all from the perspective of the hacker.
It makes no sense for a user to ever support this movement because what does the user gain by having their passwords cracked and shared on some russian forum? This is no better for users than Facebook sharing their private information with other corporations.
The only group that can benefit from the anti-sec movement are the high up government overlords who will decide that since there is a deliberate anti-sec movement, they must in return start a pro-sec movement. It creates an even sharper divide in the hacker community which empowers the elite government types who don't know a damn thing about computers. It's divide and rule all over again, by dividing the hacker community into black and white, and then dividing the blackhats in Anonymous into various movements some which seem to make no sense, it only creates a sort of boogyman which lawmakers can capitalize on with...
"See? We need to do something about these cyber terrorists. They are terrorists, they have a political movement now."
So now cyber crime is turned into cyber terrorism and more resources are poured into surveillance. So what is the first big move they have done to catch these anti sec types? Trojan software on every PC. FBI malware to monitor every computer for illegal activity. And how long before they use this sort of monitoring to go after copyright infringers and other low hanging fruit?
Who cares about governments? Corporations write the fkn laws.