2011 Federal Budget - Page 2

I was referring to this- "No, but sane people aren't chanting "Marxist!" either." I think he pretty much had you dead to rights. You were defending the crazed tea baggers, and he makes a valid point to which you didn't say anything, because he was right.

However, I will say that you seem like a perfectly nice/sane guy when you're not discussing politics.

Firstly, I was unaware it was to me and secondly that's hardly a "gotcha" since there is about 8 years of similar slurs against Bush made from liberals. Does that clump liberals in the same boat as Tea Partiers? Did you ever call Bush a slur and if so, does that make you a member of the Tea Party? judging from the fact you refer to them as "tea baggers" I'd say no.. but it makes you as culpable applying Richard Dicksons 'gotcha' moment.

That doesn't disprove my point that anyone who is against Obama for fiscal reasons (a valid reason) is now labeled a crazy tea party member as a way to dismiss their valid critisim. Obama is a fiscally reckless President and has locked up our federal budget for the next 10 years giving little to no room for correcting the error.

See, this just screams: "I am willfully ignorant of the fact that deficit fearmongering is the new thing my political party is rolling out to scare people regardless of whether or not those fears have a factual basis." Also, you're misusing the word "valid."

I called them Tea Baggers becuase that's what they called themselves until they figured out it carried a sexual connotation. I'm not going to fucking type out "Tea Party Activist". And no, I'm not a Tea Bagger cause I never fucking questioned W's citizenship, or compare him to Hitler or Mao.

Also, in honor of your pal Sarah's TEA PARTY ACTIVIST speech, I must remind you that you're a retard.

FlashBack! Clintononics 101

This article was published in 1992 yet is just as relevant today. Sadly it still seems to be a minority point of view among both public and elected officials.

... rich Americans -- once relieved of some of their tax burden -- do not necessarily invest their extra wealth in factories, machinery, and equipment. They tend to consume and speculate. But not even the portion of their windfall that they do invest is likely to have much of an impact on American productivity, since it is concentrated on capital assets rather than people. And here is where the contrast with Clinton's approach becomes especially clear. In the emerging global economy, national productivity is uniquely related to the accumulation of human capital. High-tech factories and equipment are worthless without skilled workers. For fifteen years American firms have loaded on computers, for example, but haven't reaped the benefits because employees don't know how to use them to improve output and quality.

The rates of return on investments in people -- in their education and training -- are thus high, and appear to be accelerating. One piece of evidence is the growing wage gap between workers who have college degrees and those who don't. In 1980 graduates earned about 50 percent more than non-grads; ten years later they were pulling in twice the non-grad wage. New evidence suggests that every additional year of schooling increases future wages by 15 percent. Compounded over a working lifetime, we're talking big money.

The rest is HERE

I also like the Snaeke like comment at the bottom that completely misses the point

Do they, in your opinion?

No. First--even if the long-term fears of the "deficit emergency" were based in reality--we're in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression, which makes worrying about spending sheer fucking madness. We've tried cutting spending in a recession before, it was proven to have a horribly regressive effect on recovery. This is why Republicans like to peddle the lie that the military-industrial-complex, not the New Deal, ended the Depression, they don't like owning up to the fact that most of their ideas are horrible and fail miserably in the real world.

Furthermore, the best way to cut down the deficit is to stimulate actual growth in the economy and reform the healthcare system. Both would actually reduce the deficit, reduce the amount of GDP we spend on government, and increase revenue. Oddly, these are the two things the GOP is diametrically opposed to doing.

Lastly, we're currently not set to spend more on the interest of our debts than countries in similar situations in recent history. That is, unless we fail to pass health care reform, then the deficit will actually screw us.

Also, the foreign powers that hold the debt that scares the easily scared rank-and-file of the conservative movement are very much dependent on that debt economically, which actually gives us leverage with them until they restructure their economies. True, some, like China, are in the process of doing this, but it will take them years, if not decades, to do that. Again, we aren't screwed unless we do what the "deficit hawks" want.

The deficit emergency is just the latest shiny object the GOP and Conservadems are holding up in an election year to distract people from the fact that they are, to the last man, bought and paid for by the interests who are seeking to destroy the financial and health insurance reforms that are important for the survival of the middle class but bad for corporate America's bottom line.

^OK, I think that's a bit much. Now you're demonizing people who don't agree with your point of view.

Could it be possible that events in the Depression were sufficiently complex that one could reasonably argue that either the New Deal policies or WW II (or both, which is my opinion)?

You really do yourself a dis-service when you start portraying Free Market proponents as eeeeevil Illuminati who don't actually believe in what they say but are plotting World Domination

To vastly oversimplify, I'd actually say that WWII played a major role in ending the Depression, but the New Deal is responsible for the two decades of prosperity that followed.

It's also worth noting that in WWII, the whole country was "pitching in" to the war effort. It was a wholehearted national endeavour that affected almost everyone, from industry to the common person. You can't compare it to the current conflicts (which seems to be the point of this argument) wherein the war effort is separated from our daily lives, and the profit largely goes to huge corporations that have made it a point to reduce trickle-down.

Which were based on things that Bush, you know, actually did.

Yes, but what was WWII if not a giant public works project?

Anyway, I found an interesting site today discussing Obama's budget. It's done up all special and flashy. You can even toggle between mandatory and discretionary spending. And if do, you'll see that the Medicare and Social Security are mandatory, you-can't-change-this-without-changing-the-law kind of spending. You know what the biggest piece of discretionary spending is? The Department of Education.

I'm kidding of course. It's defense.

Anyway, keep this site in mind the next time you hear someone demagoguing the budget deficits. Give them the link and patiently explain that 1) SS, Defense and Medicare are the three largest expenditures in the Federal Budget, 2) without Congressional action, medicare spending and SS go up every year, 3) SS is fine for at least the next three decades, 4) the GOP threw hissyfits when the Dems tried to get medicare under control with health reform. Then you can ask them how much they want to cut defense spending. I'm sure you'll get a valid, rational response.

Check it out...

That's more or less what I was trying to say. Uh, unless you were joking. But it's clearly something that stimulated the domestic economy far more than conflilcts since.

You don't have to be a conspiracy nut to think the Republican Party--and the conservative elected officials on the other side of the aisle--is both disingenuous in the way it is engaging policy debate these days and cynically exploiting the ease with which the American public is manipulated by political sophistry. You just have to be paying attention to current evetns and have a basic understanding of public policy.

Everything the conservatives are doing right now has no objective other than to destroy reform. They don't have concrete policy proposals of their own. They just print out bullshit lists of values that just happen to be in direct conflict with whatever the opposition party's views are, even if they're views that Republicans and conservatives have supported as recently as last year.

The conservatives dance to the tune that Wall Street calls. The party itself has no inflexible ideology outside of what is in the interest of the top 5% of earners in this country. You pretty much have to take the most charitable view of their intentions--which, I think, is that they are still plodding along with the naive optimism that Reagan peddled cynically throughout his political career--and ignore current events, what a reasonable grasp of the policy issues at play happens to be, and the entire course of political event of the last decade to not see that.

When it comes to WWII, the reasonable argument--that has been presented before in this thread--is that, yes, the war machine accelerated recovery but was not the cause of the recovery. Republicans like to argue that the war machine was the cause of the recovery, which is just in direct conflict with the reality that the data represents. Literally, if you chart the progress of post-Depression recovery, the graph goes straight up when the New Deal goes into effect, immediately snags down when FDR gives in to the Republicans and pulls back spending, and then goes back up when federal spending increases again. The New Deal, not the war, is the thing to give credit for the recovery and the post-war economic boom and creation of a thriving middle class.

Also, Republicans like to ignore that the war machine itself was also a Keynesian project, i.e. it was funded on the back of deficit spending. When you claim that the federal government has never created a job, you're sort of willfully ignoring that fact and the fact that the government pays our soldiers, park rangers, mailmen, bureaucrats, and lawmakers.

See, I think that the GOP IS ingenuous in their tactics, but that they really believe that whatever the failings of Business, they pale in comparison with Big Government. They believe that Government bureaucrats want to control everyone's lives if not their souls.

This is not new" Albert Jay Nock wrote about how people who are attracted the government positions are weak power mad control freaks back in the early 1900's

The point being that the current Conservative movement, in and out of the GOP apparatus, is working from a long tradition, both intellectual and anti-intellectual.

As for the WWII thing, about a year ago I read an editorial in New Republic that argued that if WWII had not happened, but if we still built all those tanks, planes etc and then sunk them all in the Atlantic, it would have made exactly the same effect in terms of the economy.

And thus I restate my plea: MARS OR BUST!

Sorry. It's a knee-jerk response. You'd be surprised how many people online would say "Uh, government spending didn't get us out of the depression...WWII did!" In hindsight you weren't saying that so I hope this clears up any misunderstandings.

Go back to the 1994 GOP playbook on Hillarycare, which is now public record, and compare it to what is going on today. It's the exact same people behind the scenes with the exact same tactics. Kristol's memos make it abundantly clear they were--and are--opposing health care reform on a purely political basis, not a policy basis. Why would they do that?

The last time Democratic health care reform went through Congress--Medicare and Medicaid--Republicans lost control of both houses for four decades. Republicans lack many intellectual gifts, but a long memory is not one of them. They know how this narrative plays out if reform goes through and works. They are fearful of it working, not failing.

It's a bit funny how people have fallen for rhetoric. You still believe that your 'children' are going to pay for these deficits and that the money we're spending now will pave the way for our future prosperity.. when in fact we're going to be paying the price for that in as little as 8-10 short years. So, how old are you going to be in 10 years? I bet you're going to be in your 30's and still working and probably bitter about the reckless spending of the Obama administration. Food for thought.

By the way, you may be forgiving to the Obama administrations "spending their way out of a recession!" plan but I doubt the bond markets will be and when that collapses (inevitable) what will be the plan then? deficits greater then 3% of GDP is unsustainable and that's all the White House is projecting even with modest (read: unlikely) GDP growth. What happens when they have to spend more?

Me, I'm OK with raising taxes. I'm OK with cutting spending on the military and I'm OK with altering the medicare \ ss struture but then again I don't think anyone in Congress or the White House are anywhere near that level of acceptance and that goes for Democrats or Republicans. I'd even bet that if they did some how muster a way to pass it, they'd spend any revenue generated \ saved.

"Hey look, now we can pass health care!" (Democrats)
or
"Hey look, now we can cut OTHER taxes!" (Republicans)

SS is going to take in more than it sends our for at least another 30 years, so I doubt you'll see much attention paid to it until around then.

Also, what do you mean by "collapse" when referring to the bond market?