The G20 Meeting in Toronto

I've seen the next picture, they all put their left foot in.

Bah, I hate performance art. That's the worst impression of a McRib I've ever seen.

Hmmm. This video from earlier this evening shows cops charging some singing protesters for...no particular reason that I can see.

Isn't this all like, so 1999?

Heh. Why don't all these angry protesters get a job? Heh.

...in other news, continuing outrage from the Tea Party today over bablargblargmogmog...

Actually, it sounds like this has been pretty mild in comparison to a lot of other G8s and G20s. The media just loves the narrative of RIOTING IN THE STREETS OMG OMG OMG!

They were singing off tune. Bet your ass if Geddy Lee were there nothing like this would have happened.

What's more interesting is how the G20 European countries are decrying deficits and stopping "stimulus" spending at the same time Obama is pushing for more stimulus spending. The disconnect between the European nations and the US is disheartening. Personally, I agree with our European friends here and wish Obama would follow their lead.

What the G20--and the rich, disconnected, fearful, careerist cunts in the US Congress--did was basically guarantee a third depression. After seeing what happened in the 1930S, it's fucking unconscionable to embrace austerity during a market crisis. It's been proven in a real world setting to create an economic depression.

A healthy share of the blame, however, goes to the brilliant minds who thought it wise to blow our fiscal load bailing out the banks and those who created whatever it was that they decided to call the stimulus plan. The problem is that we spent our resources on bailing out those who didn't need it.

If we had spent even a fraction of what we spent on the bailouts on extending unemployment benefits and food stamps (which are, dollar for dollar, the two most efficient ways to aid an economic recovery) instead of what we did then we would probably be in a much better situation right now.

In my opinion, the Republicans arent as evil as many here make them out to be on this issue. The deficits we're running are the definition of unsustainable, and they're right to be concerned. Where they're dead wrong is that they now want the working/middle class to pay for something that the wealthy have already benefited from.

Always love your posts Cuchulain, so even handed and pleasant to read. As for the Depression logic you're spouting:

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/arti...ion_98545.html

Focusing on deficit reduction is stupid and counter-intuitive, but evidently this is a response to the hedge fund vultures who can destroy the economies of sovereign nations for sport and a few extra G5s and islands to land them on. Evidently the idea of actually treating crime as crime and reestablishing laws to the financial sector is out of the question.

That's right-wing revisionism. People with advanced degrees also claim WWII is what ended the depression, which is bullshit. If you look at the actual data and don't go through mental gymnastics to explain it, it's very, very clear that austerity was the main driver of the Depression and hurt recovery during the brief window that FDR caved to the Republicans. Literally, the graph goes straight up through the New Deal and the goes straight down when austerity measures start to kick in.

Ireland has done what the G20 and the US Congress are saying we must do because they bought the dual assumption that the people selling bonds were going to attack and that austerity would somehow appease them like sacrifices to a caricature of the Old Testament God. Let the bonds market people rejoice in your suffering and you will be redeemed. Ireland is in even worse shape. Why? Maybe because actually heeding the lessons of the Depression is a good idea.

Conservative economic ideas have always been horrible. Hell, their policy ideas in general are horrible. They're fantastical morons. However, over the last thirty years, we've let them actually put those ideas into practice. The result that the economy of California and the United States are now almost completely destroyed. What you and other conservatives are telling the general public is that the answer to this problem is to double down on those retarded ideas, which is just fucking madness.

Attempting to simplify California's fiscal woes by blaming conservative economic ideas is a bit of a stretch. And by bit, I mean huge.

Prop 13's legacy is pretty much the main thing that drove California into the gutter and it was a right-wing attack on public services sneaking in under the banner of reforming the draconian property tax scheme of the state in the late 20th century. When you require a supermajority to do anything with the state's funds, have a direct ballot initiative system that allows people to vote in anything they want, and then you have the minority hold a legislative gun to the head of the majority and demand that they slash public services even more in order to fund voter approved initiatives, then, yeah, I think it's fair to say that conservatives in general--and Reagan in particular--fucked California and the country.

And while were talking about things that have been proven in a real world setting, Japan's problems (created by loose lending and a housing bubble burst) weren't exactly solved by bank bailouts, stimulus plans built around infrastructure spending, and running a 10% deficit that turned their debt to GDP ratio to 100%.

In fact, things got worse and stayed that way for a long time.

Fixed that for you.

I'm not going to challenge the extensive damage that Prop 13 has done, but I still think you're going a tad overboard. We may just have to agree to disagree on that one.

The Closer, you don't live in California, do you? Also, I don't think you've looked into this extensively enough to truly understand the disastrous consequences of Prop 13 on California. Cuchulain is entirely right, and it's completely the Reagan-fueled selfishness, greed and short-sightedness of the baby boomer generation that pulled the rug out from under what used to be the best-run state with the #1 education system in the country and free university educations for all California students.

I was born there and lived there for a number of years after college.

I've looked into their problems, and as I mentioned above I'm not discounting the effect that Prop 13 has had.

But you're downplaying it.

Could be. Or you folks could be overplaying it.

Either way it's just another chapter in the eternal struggle between you and I.

LOL, but I live here, and it's actually a serious problem.

In fairness to the guy, he's being kind of reasonable about it. He's not saying he doesn't think it's a problem, he's saying he's unwilling to admit that the political philosophy that drives the movement with which he self-identified is at the heart of it, which is kind of understandable.

To the best of my knowledge, there are at least a few other states that also require a two-thirds majority when it comes to the budget, and I'm sure they're nowhere near the level of California as far as problems are concerned.

We can't forget the fact that there's a literal laundry list of other factors (20% of residents receive economic aid, the fact that such a large portion of tax revenue comes from personal income taxes, primarily on the wealthy, who have either left the state or been hit hard by the real estate bubble burst, etc) that exasperate the fiscal situation.

Like the problems we're dealing with nation wide and around the globe, you'd have to have blinders on to try and pin what were going through now on one single act or economic ideology. It's easier, sure...but it really does us no good when trying to conjure up solutions.

Just my $.02. Whether it's actually worth that much is up for debate.

California does not have an oil extraction royalty, gives big corporations essentially a free ride, and Prop 13 prevents any recalibrating of property tax for corporations, so most of them are paying very little in spite of HUGE drains on public services for these properties. We also have no luxury tax.

We also, along with Florida and Nevada, had one of the most ruthless and debilitating cases of big sprawl builders engaging in essentially fraudulent dealmaking through predatory lenders.

Texas's spending is downright austere compared to ours, yet Texas's deficit is the same as ours, so you can't really pin our problems on spending.

There is ZERO doubt in my mind that Reaganomics are at the core of California's problems. Sure, there are incidents of fraud and waste but it represents a minuscule sliver of the problem. You simply can't run an economy this big without the missing revenue from the big corporations that are sucking up resources and services at our expense.

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local-bea...Look-Good.html


From Dec 2008.

Way to bust out some woefully out-of-date information, Sniake. I live in Texas. The budget is fucked.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...081528528.html

So yeah, we got a similarly massive budget deficit, but that's not all! We rank at the bottom in such irrelevant categories like the number of uninsured children (~25%), life expectancies and health outcomes, educational achievement, etc.

Good job!

Reading, it's required. YT was pointing out that Texas has as large of a deficit as California ... RIGHT NOW (18 billion). I was pointing out that they had a budget surplus as little as 17 months ago while California had a deficit of 16 billion at the same time. Now if you note in the part I quoted, it attributed oil revenue, etc... to the surplus and if you had read YT's post she said California was not getting oil revenue... Now I don't think Texas was getting 27 Billion dollars in oil revenue in 2008 to lead to that surplus, so I would at least attribute some of California's woes to over spending...

I saw on the Food Network show my wife watches that there's a restaurant in San Antonion that makes cinnamon rolls bigger than your head.

Therefore, Texas automatically > California.

Well, Texas has a placed called Texas Land and Cattle Co. which serves the absolute best smoked serloin I have ever tasted...

California has medicinal marijuana shops though...

That's why I picked somewhere in the middle!

ETA, obviously I have an interest in both states and wish for them to sort out their financial problems with the least amount of impact to their local business's

Sure. But you're still wrong. The 2008 budget surplus (last year there was a surplus) actually only amounted to $2 billion (can't count the Rainy Day fund, which is its own thing in Texas and subject to weird constitutional laws and you have to count in the legislature-mandated property tax cuts as well, which amounts to a little more than $8 billion all told). Which isn't hard to do when you are drawing on large oil revenues AND engaged in social spending that ranks, per person, at the bottom of the country.

California's woes are the result of two (very fixable) things: an excess of democracy (voters shouldn't be able to hold referendums that dictate spending and then turn around and vote to limit taxes - who the hell elected the voters, anyway?) and primaries that play to the insane fringes of both parties.

Agree, and it's getting worse. The 30% of the population that actually voted passed an open primaries ballot initiative (definitely NOT voted for by Yours Truly) that will give us Alvin Greene-style election shenanigans. We've also got Queen Meg running for Governor. Please pray for us to whatever entity you think can help.

I sort of hate it when people draw equivalences between the parties. The CDP doesn't really field that many truly progressive candidates in California and the structure of the entire DNC, from local to national, is sort of biased in favor of establishmentarian/center-right Democrats.

The party that courts the insane fringe of its party during primary season is the Republican Party. It's a monolithic, vicious, stupid party filled with herdlike "thinkers" and insufferable people.

Also, the direct initiative system would not fuck us over if we had things like decent campaign finance laws and majority rule in the state legislature. Other states require supermajorities for raising taxes, others require them for passing budgets, still other states have direct initiative systems, and still others allow states to recall their elected officials and conduct open primaries. California is the only state that has all of these things, they have most of these things due to the greed and stupidity of the state and national GOP--which realized that they were never, ever going to be a majority party in the state with the way the demographics were trending--and we have them for the express purpose of allowing the state GOP to hold the majority party hostage.

There is no comparison between the parties. One is afraid to do the right thing, the other actively likes doing the most evil and greedy thing possible.

But seriously. One party is the party of prison guards, the other is the party of the teacher's union. That they both come off looking equally reprehensible is quite the achievement.