iFi Salamander
I'm a vampire!
This thread makes me wish I cared more about politics...
Knowing what your voting for is all that matters. Politics is just a topic for people to arguable intermittently about.
This thread makes me wish I cared more about politics...
I hope you do understand that it's different for a presidential candidate to want to beat his opponent, very different from being the leader of you party and proposing in 2010 (2 years before the election, when actual work needed to be done) that your number 1 goal is completely say no to everything the president proposed (before having heard any of it) and to alienate members of your party who do try to reach across the aisle. Yeah i'd call that not only un-american, but evil.
Note its from the Washington Post which is conservative,
1.) Democrats are talking about protecting the already existing right to have an abortion.
No legal representation of same-sex couples (including the already existing ones)
Replicating Arizona style immigration laws
which in their own words can't be preformed (even in rape and incest).
Auditing the federal reserve
No woman in combat
No statehood for Washington D.C (really this was setted almost 100 years ago....)
Recovering before Obama took office?
http://money.cnn.com/2009/04/03/news/economy/jobs_march/index.htm
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/10/07/us-usa-economy-jobs-idUSTRE6955IX20101007
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com...011mcn__US_Gross_Domestic_Product_GDP_History (note the dip between 2008 and 2010)
On top of that, if you don't average in 2009 (which as I've stated you shouldn't due to the fact that Obama became president in January and it takes time to pass legislation, and time for that legislation to take effect) Obama created 4.5 million jobs, which already has outstripped Bush. (Note I'm assigning 2008-2009 job losses to Bush)
Well considering the economy under reagan hadn't turned around until a Democratic congressman sponsored a bill that remedied the horrible failure that was ETRA, you can't really blame Obama for having one of the worst congresses in modern history. What's their approval rating again, -97%?
On top of that Obama managed a similar level of GDP growth.
Furthermore, both Obama and Reagan ended their recessions in 2 years. And Reagans unemployment rating after 4 years was only .5% higher than Obama's is today (and remember people continued to look for jobs under Reagan due to his cut to welfare, under Obama most unemployed have already begun to give up.
What's so magical about Reagan? It honestly doesn't make sense to me.
And I'll give you Bush and Clinton. But their recessions were nowhere near the catastrophic levels Obama and Reagan had to deal with.
Yeah long term investments in education aren't going to fix the economy, but his work on reforming federal student aide might do well to prevent another bubble.
I hope you do understand that it's different for a presidential candidate to want to beat his opponent, very different from being the leader of you party and proposing in 2010 (2 years before the election, when actual work needed to be done) that your number 1 goal is completely say no to everything the president proposed (before having heard any of it) and to alienate members of your party who do try to reach across the aisle. Yeah i'd call that not only un-american, but evil.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...hy-looks-like/2012/07/10/gJQAjHR9aW_blog.html
True it wouldn't generate 1 trillion, but 850 billion is pretty close. Note its from the Washington Post which is conservative, and tends to undervalue these numbers I've read other publications that do in fact place the number at 1 trillion. Thats neither here nor there, as this amounts a large increase in revenue.
1.) Democrats are talking about protecting the already existing right to have an abortion.
Replicating Arizona style immigration laws
Mandatory Ultrasound for abortions, which in their own words can't be preformed (even in rape and incest).
Auditing the federal reserve
No statehood for Washington D.C (really this was setted almost 100 years ago....)
I mean its simple demographics, the baby-boomers are ageing, how can we just let them go without Medicare, and Medicaid. As Bill Clinton said, under the republicans there will be NO medicare. At least not as we know it, its infuriating that a party can
1.) Make up a ludicrous fantasy about how Obamacare will result in the forced eunthanization of the elderly.
2.) Proposed nearly eliminating Medicare.
3.) Lie to old people and tell them they're the party that'll save medicare, and that Obama will destroy it.
Furthermore I cannot support a party that first, made it their NUMBER ****ING GODDAMN 1 priority, THE NUMBER ONE PRIORITY, to MAKE SURE WITHOUT A SHADOW OF A ****ING DOUBT THAT BARACK OBAMA BE A 1 TERM PRESIDEMT not JOBS, not THE ECONOMY, not HEALTHCARE, not EVEN THEIR ******** SOCIAL ISSUES but making sure this guy doesn't get his job back. This isn't the tea party fringe group, this isn't Todd Akin. This is Newt Gringrich and Mitch McConnel the freaking intellectual leaders of the republican party.
Ending the Bush tax cuts, I've touched on this before, but this is should be priority number 1, it will generate the revenue needed to pay off the deficit, and hopefully create enough revenue to fix the ailing infrastructure in the Midwest, Eastern Seaboard and New England regions.
Try some math.
http://michaelscomments.wordpress.c...ning-obama-was-handed-an-economy-in-recovery/
The economy was beginning to rebound in late 2008.
Then you also need to take out the job losses from 2000 to 2003 before the Bush Tax Cuts went into effect, as those were not his fault either. Eitherway this time in Bush's career we were pulling down around 300,000 jobs a month, Obama? 90,000
By the way average job creation for 2011, fell below 2010 levels, pointing to a SLOWING ECONOMY under Obama.
And yet Reagan was pulling in higher job creation numbers than Obama...
No, what would be evil is declaring that the Iraq War is lost while Americans are dying on the field of battle still. THAT is evil.
Furthermore even saying that, the Republicans still worked with Obama on a debt deal, one that Obama subsequently destroyed
In previous projections, it said, its “base case scenario” had assumed that Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would expire at the end of 2012, while tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year would be extended. That, it said, would have reduced deficits about $950 billion over ten years.
But the new S&P base case assumes that Congress extends all the Bush tax cuts. “We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act,” S&P said.
That is if all the revenue comes in, ending it for the wealthy just means they will be shifting it toward overseas accounts and tax loop holes. It is ignorant to believe we will see even close to that number.
If we are looking at their party platform they wish to expand that into Late Term Abortions.
And the problem with those would be???
Which is a mere Democratic ploy to get more Senators and Congressmen.
Medicare is already going to end as we know it, it pretty much has a decade or two more left in it, to believe otherwise is purely stupid. Romney and Ryan wish to turn it into more like Medicare Advantage which would prolong it, making it like a already popular program.
Is that why they went out on a limb on the debt deal? Including NEW TAXES on it as Obama asked for? Only to have Obama push for even higher taxes and kill the deal.
Really ending the Bush Tax Cuts? Does that include the ones for the Middle Class and the Poor? As that is the only way you are going to get revenue in, going to those that cannot higher tax attorneys, but since you seem to have such a hard on for raising taxes, and quoting Bill Clinton, lets see what he says about it?
“I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground."
We have the lowest workforce participation for men since pretty much the end of WW2, we cannot afford to start raising taxes.
But lets look at your plan, you wish to
A: End Medicare by stringing it out until it finally goes broke in a few decades.
B: Hike taxes on the Middle and Lower class by ending the Bush Tax Cuts
C: Kill jobs by ending the Bush Tax Cuts.
If this is the Democratic Plan for the economy then we need to kick them out of office ASAP!
That the second derivative of real GDP was prior to Obama's inauguration does not necessarily indicate that the economy was 'beginning to rebound'; it merely indicates that the economic collapse was running out of people to affect, which could indicate a rebound (assuming indicators weren't still negative in the following quarter). In Q1 2009, GDP was still falling, employment was still falling, quite literally every individual and firm was deleveraging or attempting to... every indicator was still decidedly negative (and based on quarterly levels of stimulus spending in 2009, would've remained so for at least Q2 and Q3).
The "Bush tax cuts" went into effect in 2001 and had a near-immediate effect on consumer spending; you are conflating the whole of W's taxation policy with JGTRRA. Further, please remind this thread what industries that 2003 job growth was primarily focused in (and then tell me what started happening to those industries 4 years later).
Average job creation for 2011 fell below 2010 levels because a little thing called the US Census wasn't taking place that year. I know you like misrepresenting data and quotes and God knows what else to fit your own ends, but this is a bit much even for you.
No, what would be evil is starting that war in the first place on false pretenses, conducting character assassination on any prominent public figure who dared to oppose it, and only beginning to change course after your political party was shellacked at the polls for it. (But then I suppose you would have had a hate-boner for Mike Mansfield if you were posting on a hypothetical proto-SPPF in the Sixties, so the fact that you're still attacking boring-*** Harry Reid for an out-of-context quote - made while the war was definitely militarily unwinnable to anyone with even a basic strategic acumen - really shouldn't surprise anyone.)
Oh right, those 'negotiations' where absolutely 100% of the deal had to come from spending increases, and that downgrade (from one credit rating agency) that was explicitly stated to be the fault of the congressional GOP.
They've already 'shifted it toward overseas accounts and tax loopholes' even with historically low effective tax rates; it is farcical to claim on this basis that the current administration shouldn't even try to return taxation to OBRA-93 levels, as any revenue collection above current levels would go far toward closing the deficit.
Tell me more about how any of this refers to late-term abortions.
Well, at least in the case of mandatory ultrasound laws, they're 1) a gratuitous waste of money given that they are extremely likely to be found unconstitutional, and 2) an even more gratuitous example of government overreach than any single thing you'll be able to cite as the fault of Democrats.
Ah yes, I forgot 'taxation without representation' only applied to people I agreed with politically.
Oh, so they wish to turn it into one of the more wasteful programs the government has enacted since 1990?
Once again, you solely blame Obama for something that was the fault of both sides' inability to actually compromise, including the ill-timed "Gang of Six" memo that prompted the counteroffer that nearly sent us past August 2 with no deal in the first place.
And once again, you conflate "new taxes" with what Boehner proposed: the only hard number for revenues in his offer, "$800 billion", functioned solely as a maximum - implying that Congress could raise that much revenue solely through closing loopholes. Those are "new taxes" in the same sense that the DoD trigger in the Budget Control Act cuts defense spending outright rather than slowing its increase, which is to say "not really".
You do realize, in this same quote, that Clinton says we shouldn't cut spending?
A: You've already indicated you don't actually understand what you're talking about, given that you're supporting presidential candidates who intend to turn it into a larger version of the wasteful Medicare Part C.
B: You seem to be completely discounting the idea that the 'upper class' will actually pay higher taxes on aggregate if EGTRRA and JGTRRA are allowed to expire, with absolutely no empirical basis behind this assertion.
C: Most job creation is done by startups and large existing businesses, neither of which would be significantly marginally affected by raising just the top two brackets to 1993 levels, let alone raising all of them.
And yet we were already beginning to bottom out by Q4 2008, or did you fail to read that?
You forget to note that there was a second round of Bush tax cuts in 2003 that has a immediate effect in turning the economy around.
You would think with a growing economy we would be able to make up such losses... guess Obama's economy isn't growing that well.
Out of quote context, lets see what he said shall we?
"I believe myself that the secretary of state, secretary of defense and - you have to make your own decisions as to what the president knows - (know) this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday,"
In the end the surge did accomplish something and the war was won.
"Madam President, the White House has been telling America that Democrats are doing the wrong thing by calling for a change of course in Iraq. They say holding the Iraqi Government accountable is wrong. They say finding a political solution for Iraq is wrong. They say redeploying troops out of a civil war is wrong. They have said even debating a strategy for changing course is dangerous, and many Senate Republicans have backed that up by blocking several of our attempts to debate this issue here on the Senate Floor.
Conditions in Iraq get worse by the day. Now we find ourselves policing another nation's civil war. We are less secure from the many threats to our national security than we were when the war began. As long as we follow the President's path in Iraq, the war is lost. But there is still a chance to change course and we must change course. No one wants us to succeed in the Middle East more than I do. But there must be a change of course. Our brave men and women overseas have passed every test with flying colors. They have earned our pride and our praise. More important, they deserve a strategy worthy of their sacrifice."
100% of the deal had to come from spending increases? That would be a shock to the actual negotiators
I never said they would not get some of it back, but it is purely idiotic to believe they would get anywhere close to the projected revenue back
I believe the quote is "there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.”
And yet they might very well cause the woman to decide not to have a abortion as it drives home the fact there is a real life inside of her.
Ironic seeing how the Constitution itself spells out that the area is not supposed to have voting rights.
To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;
As opposed to having it completely destroyed? Yes.
The Gang of Six memo was not something to take serious
Seeing how closing loopholes would be raising the taxes on those that use those loopholes, congrats you have new taxes!
And?
Considering the waste and fraud that we deal with Medicare already, Medicare Part C would be a godsend.
No I agree they will, but so will the middle and lower classes.
You fail to note many start ups and small businesses make over $250,000 before they begin to give out business costs, thus they would be affected by it.
You are talking past me. Bottoming out != beginning to recover, especially when that bottoming out is still followed by negative growth.
...I explicitly referenced JGTRRA in that post. The most explicitly stimulative part of EGTRRA (round one), the tax rebates, came into effect for every 2000 taxpayer by the end of 2001.
The "losses" you speak of were a temporary illusion brought upon by a decennial process. Jesus, did I not just post this?
Bear in mind (if that's even possible) that this quote was said after the Democratic caucus gained majorities in both chambers of Congress specifically on the basis of calling for a change of course in Iraq (in addition to dissatisfaction over handling of Katrina). Also try to bear in mind that the surge was on record on having resulted in a net zero change in death rates at the time Reid made those comments.
Actual negotiators like Eric Cantor, the second most powerful man in the House of Representatives, who was on record midway through negotiations as saying the GOP would not agree to any deal that raised a non-net zero amount of tax revenue (and that his party, by and large, backed this decision).
On what empirical basis?
So saying they don't want government to "get in the way" means they want to go against Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, Gonzales v. Carhart, and countless other SCOTUS precedent, not to mention the Democratic members of the Energy and Commerce committee who referred solely to "legal abortion" in a report released this past Thursday (during that same convention)? I don't buy it.
So you're okay with gratuitous wastes of money if they achieve an end you're okay with. Once again, not surprised.
So instead of having a scant amount of waste and still allegedly being doomed, you want to replace it with a program that has a substantial amount of waste... and which is still doomed.
Neat, so Obama was supposed to completely ignore a bipartisan group of negotiators' recommendations which undercut his own revenue argument. No, you don't get to arbitrarily decide what was or was not to be "taken seriously" during the debt ceiling fiasco any more than you have already - you don't seem to be looking at House Majority Leader Cantor, Senate Minority Leader McConnell and the Tea Party explicitly and publicly stating they'd try to play chicken with default over the protests of just about every economist and sovereign government.
Except they aren't "new", an interpretation the Boehner camp seemed to agree with prior to taking its ball and going home.
So you concede the point that immediate and deep spending cuts were and are a bad idea for an economy still in recovery? I don't think you know what contortions you're wrapping yourself into.
Interesting that you take this position given that a substantial portion of the 'waste and fraud' in Medicare COMES FROM Part C.
It doesn't matter if they make ≥$250,000 "before they begin to give out business costs", because that's not how taxation on businesses works. What they report after business costs, depreciation/amortization and interest (the EBT) is what's relevant to their 1040 forms, and scarcely 3% of all taxpayers with business income make that much or more.
It is when it shows the ending of the decline, as this one clearly showed.
Yes and would have helped our economy if we did not have that little terror attack at the end of 2001.
Again as I said, you would think a growing economy, especially one making "4.5 Million" jobs under Obama could absorb those losses with out regressing.
The surge was barely able to start by the time that Reid made the assinine statements, but he was already willing to wave the white flag and demoralize our troops by calling it a loss.
Which is great except Bohener was in charge of the negotiations, Cantor wasn't.
The basis that those with the money would immediately seek tax shelters to save themselves from atleast some of the tax increases.
I believe all of those would be the Government getting in the way would it not?
Yes because a ten minute ultrasound is such a massive waste of money...
Scant amount of waste? Are you kidding me?
The total number of fraud and waste is between 50 billion and 100 billion a year.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Artic...es-[B]Almost-50-Billion[/B]-a-Year.aspx#page1
[...] improper payments in Medicare came to $47.9 billion ($34.3 billion in Medicare fee-for-service and $13.6 billion in Medicare Advantage).
[...]
But in addition, Issa wrongly suggests that all of the money from "improper payments" can be "saved" by simply not making those payments. In fact, a good portion of that money lacked proper documentation, but upon further investigation, may very well be verified as proper. In other words, even the $47.9 billion in improper payments in Medicare could not be fully recaptured for taxpayers.
But is the senator right? It depends on whether you trust NHCAA or Sparrow.
Total Medicare outlays were $431 billion in 2007, or 19 percent of total national health care expenditures. If one assumes that fraud is equally prevalent in Medicare and other types of health care, that would make the Medicare share of the NHCAA's $68 billion fraud estimate $13 billion. And $13 billion in fraud divided by $431 billion in total Medicare outlays would be 3 percent of total Medicare expenditures — a far cry from Coburn's 20 percent. (A rate of 20 percent is "possible, but I don't think it's very plausible," Saccoccio said.)
Skeptical that Medicare is only being defrauded at rates equal to the private sector? Let's triple that number to $39 billion in fraud. If you do that, it still comes out to 9 percent — less than half of what Coburn asserted it was.
In the meantime, Coburn's dollar figure — $80 billion in fraud — would be no more accurate if the NHCAA is right. The group says there's $68 billion in fraud in all health care expenditures — but Coburn's figure for Medicare alone is bigger than that.
However, by Sparrow's analysis, Coburn could indeed be in the ballpark. In an interview, Sparrow himself said the Coburn estimate is "perfectly plausible." He added that Coburn "doesn't know any more than you or I do."
Because of the uncertainty about how much Medicare fraud actually exists, we think Coburn oversteps when he states definitively that "Medicare has at least $80 billion worth of fraud a year." Not only is there a statistical disagreement over how big the problem currently is, but all the key players also agree that there are simply no good data to rely on. Still, because Coburn's estimate is considered plausible by a leading academic in the field, we can't dismiss it as undeniably false. We rate Coburn's statement Half True.
By the way, Medicare is expected to go Bankrupt by 2026, and is a massive driver of our long term debt.
Obama was also expressly cut out of the negotiations due to his inability to negotiate and his stupidity in wanting to raise more and more taxes.
Did some of them "Play Chicken" with default? Yes,
They are new in that Obama was adding to the number already agreed upon.
Never said they were, I was posting Bill Clinton's words showing that even Democrats believe that raising taxes in a down economy was a bad idea, I never said I agreed to everything he said.
And yet Ryan's program would lower the cost of Medicare on the Government and prolong it.
"Small business owners are often unfairly grouped with the extremely affluent because of the way they file their taxes. Due to their size, most small businesses file as sole proprietors or partnerships—in fact, approximately 85 percent of small businesses file income taxes as individuals. This means that, while a small business owner's personal income may seem large, the majority of the money is actually funneled directly back into the business."
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs...bamas-tax-hike-plan-punishes-small-businesses
You were saying?
2) If I were ever to bother voting, I would vote on an individual basis rather than along party lines.
...The "end of a decline" is characterized by net growth being above zero, not by the derivative of that growth being positive. Output still declines if it's declining by a lower rate.
Acknowledging the existence of mitigating factors in one case, claiming it was clear that JGTRRA alone was driving Bush-era growth in the next.
You would think you wouldn't conflate the "4.5 million private sector jobs created" claim with overall job growth, which includes the public sector's hemorrhaging (and the temporary Census hiring itself) over the last 4 years. As usual, you're attacking the president because of an illusion.
The troops already wanted to get the hell out.
Which is a great deflection from the fact that the negotiations stalled only when Cantor started wielding his Congressional influence.
I said empirical basis, not "**** BigLutz made up on the fly that sounds like an empirical basis". Give me academic papers, surveys of people who'd be affected by tax increases, anything other than the words of blog posters.
I'm fairly sure "government getting in the way" would be something like H.R. 3, given that there hasn't been a serious attempt by Democrats to overturn 'partial-birth' abortion bans since the later of those SCOTUS rulings.
Do you have any idea how much money a single ultrasound costs? Would you like to extrapolate this cost over the hundreds of thousands of abortions performed every year?
So which is it? Is it 30% or not?* 30% of all reported Medicare fraud in 2010 was attributable to Part C.
* An unspecified amount of Medicare fraud claims turn out to be unsubstantiated (i.e., finding that no fraud actually occurred).
* There actually isn't any way to measure Medicare/Medicaid fraud with any level of precision.
* Fraud is a major problem, yes; it's also being explicitly combated by this administration. The scale of fraud, and of waste, is the point of contention here - and if the NHCAA's estimates taken with OMB figures are anywhere near the case, it's less of a problem in fee-for-service Medicare than in private insurance (and, being a handout to private insurers, Part C)
You neglect to mention that the only reason Medicare Part A is expected to be depleted that year is because the PPACA extended its solvency by nine years.
You BigLutz (or is it Richard Mourdock?) logic: trying to achieve more favourable terms is bad negotiation; compromise entails one side completely accepting the other's terms without offering their own.
You Did the S&P not base a large part of their credit downgrade on this fact? Did they not continuously critique the GOP for decisions made between March and August, including the aforementioned 'playing chicken'?
You So first the tax reforms in Boehner's proposal were "new taxes", because they raise effective tax rates (except Boehner's camp didn't agree with that interpretation), and now they're new because of... completely different taxes.
You When you're quoting someone on economic effects (within an argument including the national debt), it kind of helps if that quote doesn't simultaneously undermine your debt argument (not to mention that Clinton is on record as supporting the tax increase on the highest bracket).
You Taking this at face value since you don't seem to be able to provide a citation that isn't a blog... it would also comically raise the cost of Medicare on everyone else, which you appear to not give a damn about.
Citing a blog post that dodges the actual point, instead of an analysis of the relevant forms for the tax code itself? Another BigLutz shocker.
Problem is that not everyone follows that, and thus end up paying the higher taxes.Citing Intuit points out that 'net profit' (i.e., EBT) is what's actually taxed from the 1040 or 1120 forms. Actually reading the 1120 and 1040C forms bears this out. When tax statistics say 3% of business taxpayers report being in the ≥$250,000 bracket, they are respectively referring to lines 30 and 31 in each form.
Third, any president is going to have a breaking in period, and that period is probably about 2 years. In that time, a new president learns a few things, like that the platform he ran on is actually terribly unrealistic, even if it was all great ideas and everyone went wild about them. A candidate is an idealist. A president must learn to be a realist. This was a big issue with this president, because from the time he got in, the right made it their entire goal to get him out of office, instead of trying to work with him or do their actual jobs. Romney will have a very similar battle, if not worse, if he is elected. Not only will he have the left to deal with, but they will also have the right when they find out that Romney was just pandering to them to get elected, and he turns out far more centrist than the Tea Party hoped for.
So for a first term, I never really consider the first 2 years.
It will take the remaining 6 years for any president to get any real progress made on anything. A second term won't have quite so much bickering I think, because the republicans aren't going to have to be worrying so much about getting him out of office, unless they go on a big campaign for impeachment, even when there's no currently impeachable offenses to speak of.
Electing a new president would reset the progress we've made so far. We would slide back, which we cannot afford right now.
Plus, Obama has made some progress in getting us out of wars. I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Romney will throw us right back into another war within his first year.
TBH I won't bother arguing with you b/c from what I've seen, you're incredibly closed minded and will not take anyone else's opinion but your own. (People like you are what ruin the debate forum)
I'll Leave with this, if you're going to prove to someone their choice is wrong, you might want to go with a different argument other than "obama sucks" which is the mentality that last response was engrossed in.
You might also want to prove how electing Romney is beneficial to the economy and the minorities.
Romney also assaulted a gay student once. I know that I shouldn't resort to personal attacks for presidency but there's a point where I have to side eye someone.