It would be pretty presumptuous of him to include his as-yet-unpassed health reform bill in this year's budget, wouldn't it? He said this before the joint session of Congress:
Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem.
And it's true.
His budget decreases the deficit by 60+% over 3 years. It will stabilize at about 60% of GDP which is not bad by historical standards. From there, you're right, we'll have to tackle the long-term picture including social security, etc. But his budget is, in fact, a step in the right direction.
And there will be population growth, so that there will be more homes, which makes it less per home, and people will make more/GDP will be higher, which makes it (in terms of real value) less per home, and both of the above will mean there will be more tax receipts with which to pay it off faster.
Look at all of the massive budget cuts they had to do in the postwar period, especially in Europe. Except that in reality, that didn't happen: they all instituted massive social safety nets, and the growth of the middle class (ours is shrinking, but hopefully Obama's tax policies will fix that) and the corresponding tax receipts and GDP growth reduced the real value of the debt to manageable terms as a percentage of GDP.
And they thrived on that model--look at the growth rates between 1950 and 1970.
I would say that my evaluation of the buffer to apply between Presidents is dependent upon the kind of policy in question: foreign policy can be changed at the drop of a hat, since it falls solely to the executive to determine. I would not, however, blame Clinton for 9/11--nor, on the other hand, would I blame Bush. I'd blame a whole half-century of US middle-eastern foreign policy.
But when you're talking about existing foreign engagements, the lag will have to increase for logistical reasons. Pulling out of wars is tricky.
I attribute our engagement in Iraq solely to Bush (since Obama did all in his power to draw down troop levels as soon as he assumed office). Obama will have to take some blame for Afghanistan costs, and in particular the cost of the troop escalations he proposed. However, we still may not have been in that situation if not for Bush.
However, economic issues require more lag, but that lag will be variable depending on the budgetary impact and timing of the policies put into place. On top of that, one has to factor in congressional control, since the President can't pass laws.
As an example of budgetary lag, Obama's healthcare plan, should it pass, won't take effect until 2014. (Tangentially, at that point, when projecting Obama's budget I would, personally, start to include its deficit reductions in my calculations, simply based upon the President's attempted agenda. If it turns out that it fails, well, I'd assume next year's budget will account for that.)
In any case, if Obama loses in 2012, his healthcare policies will impact his successor's budget. By the same token, the estate tax holiday is this year. This will have much more of an impact on Obama's budget than it did on Bush's, even though Bush proposed it.
Fairness is in order; in general, I'd give probably a year or two worth of buffer between presidencies as far as economics are concerned. We started on the downward trajectory under the latter part of Bush's term, and Obama largely stopped the downturn while not doing enough to turn it back *up* again. I blame him for not putting forward enough stimulus to close the output gap.
For the most part, I blame our economic woes on Reagan, for instilling in an entire generation the idea that government can never provide solutions to a problem and "unions are bad". Those sentiments led, respectively, to bank deregulation (responsible for the current crisis) and the absorption of the GDP gains of the past 30 years by the top 0.1% of the population while the real inflation-adjusted wages of the lower 20% and middle 60% have remained stagnant.
I've tried both ways. Oddly, it turns out that adding some variety thereof gets you modded ++.
Really, it boils down to this: after you repeat yourself so many times and nobody seems to hear, it just becomes exhausting. Doesn't mean it doesn't need to be said, but when Google can debunk these arguments in thirty seconds, I often wonder why I bother.
The economy has a certain potential output at any given time, in the case that it's at full employment and fully utilizing all available resources. But when the economy isn't operating at 100% utilization, the gap between the real output and the maximum potential output (called the "output gap") grows.
To throw in a computer analogy, this is sort of like the gap between your internet connection's theoretical maximum throughput and what you're utilizing at an instant in time, in the sense that once that instant has passed, you can't go back and reclaim that bit of bandwidth that you paid for but didn't use. Hence the aggregate GDP is not as high as it could have been had there been full utilization.
Right now our economy has an output gap of about $1 trillion (per the plot here). The integral over the time period between when the two lines on the plot diverged and today represents lost productivity.
Since right now private demand isn't adequate to utilize the resources available at 100%, the government should be pushing money into the economy to employ these resources and close the output gap until private demand picks up.
As far as the debt is concerned, as a percentage of GDP it will shrink as the GDP grows, hence its real cost will be less than the initial outlay--in essence, we get an increase in productivity and GDP for cents on the dollar. This costs us *less* in real terms than it would cost us to continue to let the output gap grow.
I agree that cutting taxes on the rich didn't help, but the only REAL solution is to raise taxes on the people who currently aren't paying any, cut spending (entitlements), and stop the pork barrel spending.
Because the lowest 20% have *so* much leftover income to contribute to taxes. And "pork barrel spending" comprises less than 1% of the Federal budget. Most goes to entitlements and defense--and entitlement spending, namely Medicare, is growing because our health costs are twice as much per-capita as nations with universal healthcare.
Of course Obama's Health Care reform isn't really about Health Care, it is about creating another bankrupt entitlement, and passing the debt off to our children.
Except for the part where it reduces the deficit in the next decade per the CBO, and reduces the deficit still *more* for the decade after. And so on.
PEOPLE do you not realize that you're selling your children into slavery? And it isn't just the USA that is facing this problem, it is happening all across the world.
Think about this for a second: if everyone, across the world, was selling their children into slavery, then who, exactly, would be buying them? By its very nature, a debt must be owed to a person or collection of people (either directly or by proxy). The nature of a debt is such that it belongs to a debtor and is owed to a creditor. Who, exactly, in this world you've dreamed up, is left to lend?
And yes, I was against the bailouts. GM should have failed, same with AIG and Goldman-Sachs. Nothing is "too big to fail", and failure is like a forest fire, it cleans out the dead underbrush.
You left out the part where their failure takes down our entire banking system and leaves a liquidity vacuum even bigger than the one we currently have, thereby cutting off the supply of money to anyone who might need to borrow it and slowing our economy to a complete and utter halt. But that's okay, the market will correct itself, right?
Oh, shit! I forgot. The market is what got us here in the first place. My bad.
No, but economic growth as measured by GDP nets higher tax receipts. The point is that for any given deficit, the faster GDP grows, the smaller it becomes in real terms.
Under Obama's existing and projected budget, the debt increased by about $25 trillion during 2009, $15 trillion in 2010, and $10 trillion for the years 2011, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Look up Obama's budget - it's there in plain balck and white.
Yes--due largely to the unfunded liabilities that the Bush administration incurred before Obama even took office. See also: Medicare part D, estate tax repeal, Bush's tax cuts for the top 1%. Their full cost is playing out *now*.
And you're assigning a numerical value per household, which is at best tangential to the issue of the debt/GDP ratio. See here and the plots here.
Might be handy to look up national debt as a percentage of GDP. From historical experience, where we are now is far from untenable--and Bush's tax cuts cost us a great deal more, in terms of the deficit, than Obama's budget.
Relax the "zomg deficit spending is teh baaaad" meme until we're out of the recession/under 10% unemployment, mkay?
I paid a hell of a lot of money to go to a college where the professors are, first and foremost, teachers. Small class sizes (30ish at the most), professors who know what they're talking about and whose success doesn't depend on research as much as it does on student evaluations of their classes and their teaching (as framed by the students' evaluation of their own learning).
I wouldn't want to sit in a 100-person-plus lecture hall again after experiencing that. I really can't think of a way to overstate how much of a difference it makes.
oh and not forgetting the stunted ideologue who will sing the praises of html5, knowing full well it won't amount to squat. who could forget them around here!
This is not so much about singing the praises of Apple or HTML5 as it is about how few people I hear singing the praises of Flash.
Steinman, I know Medical Pavilion is your manor, but you might want to cogitate on this: ocean water is colder than a witch's tit. You don't heat the pipes, the pipes freeze; pipes freeze, pipes burst. Then Rapture leaks. Now, I realize you're a posh sort of geezer and, frankly, I don't give a toss if you piss or go fishing. But once Rapture starts leaking, the old girl's never gonna stop, and then I'll be sure to tell Ryan he's got you to thank.
It seems like you could make the case for version control as well, especially since he's loading/saving over the network where the connection could be flakey. How about an SVN server? Are there plugins for whatever tool you're using to have it interface automatically?
If you can make it check in a new version every time it's saved, you get version control, user-stupidity backups, centralization for file storage/redundancy/system backups, and it's transparent to the person who's the source of the problem--all while saving the designer's computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh... what exactly are you having problems with? It worked for me just now. Direct link to the executable.
This is what Iron is for.
Amateur. Everyone knows to wait for Virtual Ark 1.0 SP1.
Put simply, our health care problem is our deficit problem.
And it's true.
His budget decreases the deficit by 60+% over 3 years. It will stabilize at about 60% of GDP which is not bad by historical standards. From there, you're right, we'll have to tackle the long-term picture including social security, etc. But his budget is, in fact, a step in the right direction.
And there will be population growth, so that there will be more homes, which makes it less per home, and people will make more/GDP will be higher, which makes it (in terms of real value) less per home, and both of the above will mean there will be more tax receipts with which to pay it off faster.
Look at all of the massive budget cuts they had to do in the postwar period, especially in Europe. Except that in reality, that didn't happen: they all instituted massive social safety nets, and the growth of the middle class (ours is shrinking, but hopefully Obama's tax policies will fix that) and the corresponding tax receipts and GDP growth reduced the real value of the debt to manageable terms as a percentage of GDP.
And they thrived on that model--look at the growth rates between 1950 and 1970.
Let's not forget that they both use child labor in China.
I would say that my evaluation of the buffer to apply between Presidents is dependent upon the kind of policy in question: foreign policy can be changed at the drop of a hat, since it falls solely to the executive to determine. I would not, however, blame Clinton for 9/11--nor, on the other hand, would I blame Bush. I'd blame a whole half-century of US middle-eastern foreign policy.
But when you're talking about existing foreign engagements, the lag will have to increase for logistical reasons. Pulling out of wars is tricky.
I attribute our engagement in Iraq solely to Bush (since Obama did all in his power to draw down troop levels as soon as he assumed office). Obama will have to take some blame for Afghanistan costs, and in particular the cost of the troop escalations he proposed. However, we still may not have been in that situation if not for Bush.
However, economic issues require more lag, but that lag will be variable depending on the budgetary impact and timing of the policies put into place. On top of that, one has to factor in congressional control, since the President can't pass laws.
As an example of budgetary lag, Obama's healthcare plan, should it pass, won't take effect until 2014. (Tangentially, at that point, when projecting Obama's budget I would, personally, start to include its deficit reductions in my calculations, simply based upon the President's attempted agenda. If it turns out that it fails, well, I'd assume next year's budget will account for that.)
In any case, if Obama loses in 2012, his healthcare policies will impact his successor's budget. By the same token, the estate tax holiday is this year. This will have much more of an impact on Obama's budget than it did on Bush's, even though Bush proposed it.
Fairness is in order; in general, I'd give probably a year or two worth of buffer between presidencies as far as economics are concerned. We started on the downward trajectory under the latter part of Bush's term, and Obama largely stopped the downturn while not doing enough to turn it back *up* again. I blame him for not putting forward enough stimulus to close the output gap.
For the most part, I blame our economic woes on Reagan, for instilling in an entire generation the idea that government can never provide solutions to a problem and "unions are bad". Those sentiments led, respectively, to bank deregulation (responsible for the current crisis) and the absorption of the GDP gains of the past 30 years by the top 0.1% of the population while the real inflation-adjusted wages of the lower 20% and middle 60% have remained stagnant.
I've tried both ways. Oddly, it turns out that adding some variety thereof gets you modded ++.
Really, it boils down to this: after you repeat yourself so many times and nobody seems to hear, it just becomes exhausting. Doesn't mean it doesn't need to be said, but when Google can debunk these arguments in thirty seconds, I often wonder why I bother.
The basic premise is this:
The economy has a certain potential output at any given time, in the case that it's at full employment and fully utilizing all available resources. But when the economy isn't operating at 100% utilization, the gap between the real output and the maximum potential output (called the "output gap") grows.
To throw in a computer analogy, this is sort of like the gap between your internet connection's theoretical maximum throughput and what you're utilizing at an instant in time, in the sense that once that instant has passed, you can't go back and reclaim that bit of bandwidth that you paid for but didn't use. Hence the aggregate GDP is not as high as it could have been had there been full utilization.
Right now our economy has an output gap of about $1 trillion (per the plot here). The integral over the time period between when the two lines on the plot diverged and today represents lost productivity.
Since right now private demand isn't adequate to utilize the resources available at 100%, the government should be pushing money into the economy to employ these resources and close the output gap until private demand picks up.
As far as the debt is concerned, as a percentage of GDP it will shrink as the GDP grows, hence its real cost will be less than the initial outlay--in essence, we get an increase in productivity and GDP for cents on the dollar. This costs us *less* in real terms than it would cost us to continue to let the output gap grow.
Make sense now?
I agree that cutting taxes on the rich didn't help, but the only REAL solution is to raise taxes on the people who currently aren't paying any, cut spending (entitlements), and stop the pork barrel spending.
Because the lowest 20% have *so* much leftover income to contribute to taxes. And "pork barrel spending" comprises less than 1% of the Federal budget. Most goes to entitlements and defense--and entitlement spending, namely Medicare, is growing because our health costs are twice as much per-capita as nations with universal healthcare.
Of course Obama's Health Care reform isn't really about Health Care, it is about creating another bankrupt entitlement, and passing the debt off to our children.
Except for the part where it reduces the deficit in the next decade per the CBO, and reduces the deficit still *more* for the decade after. And so on.
PEOPLE do you not realize that you're selling your children into slavery? And it isn't just the USA that is facing this problem, it is happening all across the world.
Think about this for a second: if everyone, across the world, was selling their children into slavery, then who, exactly, would be buying them? By its very nature, a debt must be owed to a person or collection of people (either directly or by proxy). The nature of a debt is such that it belongs to a debtor and is owed to a creditor. Who, exactly, in this world you've dreamed up, is left to lend?
And yes, I was against the bailouts. GM should have failed, same with AIG and Goldman-Sachs. Nothing is "too big to fail", and failure is like a forest fire, it cleans out the dead underbrush.
You left out the part where their failure takes down our entire banking system and leaves a liquidity vacuum even bigger than the one we currently have, thereby cutting off the supply of money to anyone who might need to borrow it and slowing our economy to a complete and utter halt. But that's okay, the market will correct itself, right?
Oh, shit! I forgot. The market is what got us here in the first place. My bad.
No, but economic growth as measured by GDP nets higher tax receipts. The point is that for any given deficit, the faster GDP grows, the smaller it becomes in real terms.
Under Obama's existing and projected budget, the debt increased by about $25 trillion during 2009, $15 trillion in 2010, and $10 trillion for the years 2011, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16. Look up Obama's budget - it's there in plain balck and white.
Yes--due largely to the unfunded liabilities that the Bush administration incurred before Obama even took office. See also: Medicare part D, estate tax repeal, Bush's tax cuts for the top 1%. Their full cost is playing out *now*.
And you're assigning a numerical value per household, which is at best tangential to the issue of the debt/GDP ratio. See here and the plots here.
Might be handy to look up national debt as a percentage of GDP. From historical experience, where we are now is far from untenable--and Bush's tax cuts cost us a great deal more, in terms of the deficit, than Obama's budget.
Relax the "zomg deficit spending is teh baaaad" meme until we're out of the recession/under 10% unemployment, mkay?
I paid a hell of a lot of money to go to a college where the professors are, first and foremost, teachers. Small class sizes (30ish at the most), professors who know what they're talking about and whose success doesn't depend on research as much as it does on student evaluations of their classes and their teaching (as framed by the students' evaluation of their own learning).
I wouldn't want to sit in a 100-person-plus lecture hall again after experiencing that. I really can't think of a way to overstate how much of a difference it makes.
At least as far as CPUs go, there was an article on /. a week or two ago that compared pretty much every CPU from now back to the P4.
Arrr. If yer captain be salty enough, ye don't need desalination slurry ta' repel things.
Yeah, but "Gor-ky" just didn't have the same ring to it.
oh and not forgetting the stunted ideologue who will sing the praises of html5, knowing full well it won't amount to squat. who could forget them around here!
This is not so much about singing the praises of Apple or HTML5 as it is about how few people I hear singing the praises of Flash.
You're just figuring this out now?
These are the same people who measure area in barns, sheds, and outhouses. 1 square foot = 9.290304 × 10^26 barns. Or 9.290304 × 10^32 outhouses.
Steinman, I know Medical Pavilion is your manor, but you might want to cogitate on this: ocean water is colder than a witch's tit. You don't heat the pipes, the pipes freeze; pipes freeze, pipes burst. Then Rapture leaks. Now, I realize you're a posh sort of geezer and, frankly, I don't give a toss if you piss or go fishing. But once Rapture starts leaking, the old girl's never gonna stop, and then I'll be sure to tell Ryan he's got you to thank.
-Bill McDonagh
/oblig
Seriously? You're telling him what to google?
This is slashdot. Where's the snark? The cynicism? The lmgtfy link?
You must be new here.
It seems like you could make the case for version control as well, especially since he's loading/saving over the network where the connection could be flakey. How about an SVN server? Are there plugins for whatever tool you're using to have it interface automatically?
If you can make it check in a new version every time it's saved, you get version control, user-stupidity backups, centralization for file storage/redundancy/system backups, and it's transparent to the person who's the source of the problem--all while saving the designer's computer.
I think they probably ought to exclude the "fap" acoustic signal. Otherwise it might spawn too many child processes.
You can always interface with her primary or secondary ports directly. They're great I/O/I/O/I/O/I/O mechanisms.
To that point: I think Ubuntu Studio got it right a long time ago.