Forum Post: How dare they!
Posted 11 years ago on June 6, 2012, 10:44 a.m. EST by JusticeForTrayvon
(34)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
We need to be ever vigilant against balanced budgets NOW!
I can understand someone being against cuts, but you're actually against a balanced budget if it could be done by properly taxing those with the money?
Yeah! America is an evil country, so we need to debase the currency by printing more! Where were you during economics class? Read Rodger Mitchell's blog here, he and Shooz know more about it than I do!
http://rodgermmitchell.wordpress.com/
You're certainly free to believe what you want and advocate for simply printing money. Personally I don't see the resulting economic chaos as solving anything and disagree with your assessment that the nation is evil. There are certainly evil people and some of them reach positions of power, but the basic I believe the tenants of the constitution are not evil.
You don't think the right to bear arms is evil? Tell that to Trayvon! The best quote I've heard on this site was someone saying "We are simply going to demand more and more until the system can't handle it"!
No I don't think the right to bear arms is in and of itself evil. It may be that over time it's lost it's original context. That alone doesn't make the right evil, time and modern interpretation has led to a change.
I don't know all the facts surrounding the Martin case to know if Zimmerman was simply a fool for leaving his vehicle and set off a fatal confrontation, or a racist determined to kill a young man because of his color. Lacking psychic powers, I don't know if he's guilty of involuntary manslaughter or second degree murder.
Do you know who authorizes all the drone strikes? You might be surprised.
I believe the president is very hands on with the drone strikes, all authorization comes from him directly. A little ironic that the man that wanted to treat terrorists as criminals, bring them to trial, ensure all the civil rights given to defendants, is instead simply assassinating them.
What has that got to do with the second amendment being evil or not? It may certainly mean the president has made the choice to do evil, but that doesn't make the constitution evil, in my opinion.
the second amendment is in place so states will have the arms to resist federal rule if necessary
One could argue Iran has a right to nuclear weapons for it's sovereignty by extending the second amendment
Iran has whatever rights it has as a sovereign nation. I see any spread of nuclear weapons as dangerous, but I don't see where one nation with them has the right to restrict another. I don't see the second amendment as applying at all to Iran, or any foreign nation that is not a party to the constitution.
Unfortunately it's been the pattern for most of human history that when nations reach some impasse and diplomatic measures fail, rights are ignored and force is employed. To paraphrase an old saying, might makes your rights.
good point
I don't need psychic powers! I can tell what was in his mind, because of every white person I've met in the world!
I don't have your gift, so I'll have to wait for the facts to come out at trial before I develop a final opinion. I'm certainly in favor of justice, but not for lynching one man because of your experience with others.
it's their money. we're not worthy
That may be so, but it seems a better approach to running deficits forever. Reducing military spending, trimming away duplication, eliminating tax loopholes would seem to be a better approach then borrowing and allowing everything to continue as it is.
For a government that has monopoly control over its currency... there is absolutely no reason to borrow.
I might agree if the money was only used internally, but it is international in it's use. It's necessary for everyone using it to have a certain level of faith in it's value. Printing more would destroy that faith and make the currency worthless. Although that would certainly help eliminate our foreign debt, it's not a solution.
That's only if you believe that money has value and is not just a facilitator of transactions. Money is not wealth. We do not have a commodity backed currency, therefore the concept of money having value is pretty meaningless.
What provides faith in our currency is our aggregate economic power and military power.
Huh? If money doesn't have value, find someone now and give them yours. Of course money faciltates transcactions. It's more efficient than barter, no shit Sherlock. But your pyschobabble about money not having inherent value is ridiculous. It has value as a medium of exchange and therefore it has value. You prove it by not giving yours away.
Before you shoot your mouth off, maybe you should look into the macroeconomics of fiat currency. You are about 40 years behind the current system. Nixon went off the gold standard in '71. Not being commodity based, the rules of currency have changed.
You and others like you are trying to use football rules when the game is now ice hockey. This is what leads to major misunderstandings with monetary policy, making people like you who don't understand dangerous, fucking up the economy with bad decisions. Money is not wealth. The means to produce goods is wealth.
Before you shoot yours off, know how stupid you sound when you say money is worthless, yet wanna for some strange reason hang onto yours.
You do understand the difference between macroeconomics and microeconomics? In that light reread my post, Don't embarrass yourself.
Yeah, I kinda do.
Send me a check or your point is worthless.
Send me a check or your point is worthless.
I guess you really don't.
I sent your mom a check last weekend!
That would be hard to do. She has been deceased for quite some time.
That only means it would be hard to give someone something! Doesn't mean I can't try to send it to them!
sure enough
Families, cities, counties, and state governments need budgets that are balanced....however, the Federal Government does not, nor should not be during times of recession.
Federal funds should have continued to be given to the states for dispersion. As unemployment increased, and property values continued to decrease, a large portion of their tax base changed.
The previous and this administration both chose to give large quantities to the banking industry. There has been very little real dollars spent on job creation.... where the funds are really needed.
Yay for O-bomb-ya! More corporate handouts!
We need to go back to the proper Keynesian policies that got us out of every depression and recession since the 30's. In fact as far as the budget goes, we should be paying back the money the government borrowed in the bad times only during the good times, when there is high growth and employment. That is the part we never really did, and it is why our deficit got so high.
There isn't agreement among economists that a Keynesian approach actually worked for the depression.
There will never be an agreement between economists, the people are going to have to figure this out on their own and vote for representatives that support their views. But I think they all agree we were out of the depression by the end of WW2, and what bigger spending program was that?
Certainly, but there are some that suggest that government action actually lengthened the depression and real recovery came through the growth after the war. Difficult to know what to pressure government to do when no economic theory can be actually proven.
The war was government spending. So I think this proves what economic theory works. Albeit, at a very high cost. I don't recommend this type of government spending in particular.
The growth that came also included top effective tax rates of 60-70% for 30 some odd years to pay down the war debt which was 120% of GDP. Real novel idea, huh? High progressive tax rates to pay for the wars we engage in and other government programs and services.
Why didn't the Iraq war help the economy?
I'm sure it did to some degree. It wasn't WWIII though. Thank goodness.
So, since the economy continued to nosedive through the Bush administration, despite enormous spending on warfare,
The lesson we can learn from this:
If a whole lot of spending is bad for the economy, then doubling it will surely be good for it!
Taxes are a separate issue, but I'd certainly like to see deductions eliminated and everyone paying for what we, as a society, want. Doesn't help me though with my lack of faith in Keynes. There have been many downturns in the economy where you could make a case for government inaction. I simply don't know if more government spending is the answer.
For the past 30 years we've had mostly neo-liberal policies. So I'll have the more classical liberal policies (Adam Smith), a scoop of Keynes on the side and hold the neo-lib.
It's not too hard to make a case for government inaction when we can point to bad policy in hindsight. Like wage and price controls in the 70's. But a chosen bad policy doesn't convince me that government action is necessarily bad. It just says the wrong kind of government action is bad. And government inaction is still an action.
Lots of people were pissing and moaning the other day over the dismal 69,000 jobs creation number. But as far as I can tell this is the result of government inaction. This is what the rightwing neolibs wanted. Government inaction. Let the private sector work it's magic. It's their number. They are the ones that didn't pass the Pres. Jobs Bill last fall, that could have created/saved 1million jobs. Then they have the nerve to piss and moan about a dismal job number. They got what they wanted. No Jobs Bill. No additional government spending for economic stimulus. It's their dismal jobs number. They own it.
Economists have pretty solid information that tells what kinds of stimulus has the best multipliers that will lead to a certain amount of increased government revenues.
I'm not sure why you think taxes are a separate issue. That's part of economic policy.
'what we, as a society, want'. Too late. We already 'decided' what we want. And it is $15T worth of stuff. Mostly the cost of the wars, and the effects of the Bush tax cuts, that did not trickle down leading to increased government revenues. And of course the financial crisis (which neo-lib deregulation contributed to) didn't help.
Yeah! They really let the private sector do its thing, and nothing happened! All 5,000,000 bureacrats stood there observing the private sector very closely, and those sons of guns didn't hardly do a thing!
DIE, FREEDOM, DIE!!!!!!!!!
Exactly. The private sector won't do much when there's lack of demand. A business doesn't hire more people unless there is demand. No matter how many tax cuts you give them. No demand, no job creation.
Right! And, you know how people don't just want things or whatever. They won't buy stuff unless the government makes them! I have no idea how the economy grew at all before the government was there to subsidize it. Magic, I guess.
Was Debbie Wassermann Schultz lying when she said that the Democrats were taking ownership of the economy last June?
http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2011/06/15/democrats-accidentally-ownership-economy/
No, I don't think she was lying. She was talking about the results of Pres. Obama's stimulus package. Which only 3 Congressional Republicans voted for. Thank goodness the Dems had control at that time and were able to get it passed.
http://abcnewsradioonline.com/business-news/on-swing-state-stop-obama-hails-two-years-of-job-gains.html
http://www.barackobama.com/jobsrecord?source=23MonthsOfJobGrowth-01-20120203-hqb
Was Sen. McConnell lying when he said 'The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.' Certainly not. Rightwing neolibs place a higher value on defeating the Pres, obstructing everything the Pres. says and does, obstructing progress and job creation, throwing the nation into turmoil over standard debt ceiling votes, rather than doing what's good for the country. Total batshit crazy. The only thing nearly as important as this is giving tax assistance to millionaires. All that neo-lib 'the wealthy are the job creators' crap. More batshit crazy.
And Rush Limbaugh was lying when he said ''Guess what? Faisal Shahzad is a registered Democrat. I wonder if his SUV had an Obama sticker on it.''
And good thing they passed O-bomb-ya's stimulus bill! Unemployment would probably be almost ten percent if they hadn't! Oh, wait!
If I thought anything that Rush Limbaugh says deserved a nano-second of consideration, I'd commit myself to a mental hospital. Right where anybody that listens to that freaking lunatic belongs.
I like to diversify thought, so I read Leonard Pitts, George Will (occasionally), used to read Molly Ivins and Garrison Keillor, I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and Keith Olbermann.
What label does that allow you to put on me?
'diversity of thought'. 'Thought' refers to mental intellect. Limbaugh is devoid of mental intellect. He's a moronic, racist, misogynistic, doesn't have two brain cells to rub together, blowhard. Hannity's not much better.
But goody for you. If you can stomach that sort of thing.
Of course I can, I'm not easily enraged by people with different points of view. I could listen to anyone I disagree with all day long, only occasionally delighted when I prove their points to be wrong. Open minds do us all good.
Use the power of predetermined conclusions, young lady!
I want it to be true, therefore it doesn't matter if it is or not!
LOL, I think governments use that principal all the time. How's that working out for us?
Let me ask my partisan overlords how it is working out for us! I believe everything they say!
Just to be fair it isn't just governments. Most people seem to act more on personal belief and embellish bits of the truth with their own interpretations of fact. It's what prevents us from making much social progress.
I think the 1937 recession was mostly responsible for lengthening the depression, when we cut back on government spending.
There was some trade bill that also gets some credit for that. My point is that no one is really certain what should be done, we're operating on faith.
It either feels like we're operating on faith or groping around in the darkness
Then you had the economic stimulus of the GI bill that allowed Veterans to pay for schooling and or housing. Boom times.
Not to mention the infrastructure build up in the 50's under Eisenhower (who also said politicians that didn't support the New Deal programs were stupid). What a socialist he was.
Yes that helped fuel our strong economy and ability to ship cross country efficiently for those times. Materials and products and food traveling as it never could before.
The investments made after the great depression got us out of the depression and set us up to be successful of going on a massive national war footing when the rabid nazis came along and needed putting down as well as confronting the Japanese and their go at empire building.
And in making these investments the government also recycled the money back into the economy that would have been simply hoarded by the uber-rich. This gave rise to the middle class.
Unfortunately the war industries gave rise to corporate hunger for government arms money. They could not get over the money they made supplying arms. We made a poor shift back to economic manufacture after WWII. The corporations began to rise and the people began to fall.
hadn't the Nazi been stalled by the time the US joined the war ?
The Japanese had an empire that covered the entire Pacific, far greater than the Nazi's ever held. They also committed atrocities that would have made the SS proud.
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Nope - if we had entered any later than we did we may well have lost.
we couldn't have lost , we are across the pacific
If they had consolidated all of Europe and half of Asia and all of Africa. We would have been facing a very ugly battle to defend our shores.
now now
the US controls the sea and therefor trade
Back in the 40's? We almost lost the whole Pacific on one single day.
I don't recall reading that trade was hampered
probably was
I know sea trade issues were a problem in Europe
U-Boats preyed on shipping. U-Boats and Germain Sub's. The Atlantic was quite a mess.
by the beginning of WW2
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