Complete 4 part Playlist
So Rupert closes the paper and all are fired and you think this would be the end of it but no,
Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is calling for a U.S. probe of wiretapping allegations against News Corp. and warning the consequences will be severe if the firm is found to have targeted Americans.http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/171157
REPUBLICANS ARE THE PROBLEM
And if you want to group a few Blue Dog Democrats along with them then I couldn't object.
Lately I've come to the realization that the reason the Republicans call Obama a socialist is to try and fool true Liberals into believing Obama has their interests at heart when in fact the opposite is true. The Republicans were unable to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid even when they held the presidency and both houses of congress.
The only way that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid can be destroyed is with a supposedly Democratic President in office. I fully intend to vote for Obama's primary opponent next year and mark my words he will have a primary opponent. The decline in Obamas approval is not because Republicans hate him any more than they used to but because he has betrayed the left.
Do not use Google Products! Some of us are trying to go off skynet (=google), and while anyone can argue they have not DONE anything with their data, the fact they have it makes your privacy at their whim.
Idiots are the problem. With spending increasing 300% in the last 30 years, it is not a revenue problem (which has remained fairly constant at 18% of GDP). So anyone saying it is anything but a spending problem is an idiot.
I agree spending is out-of-control. Drug addicts with credit cards. Both parties.
The spending cuts were NOT cuts, they were minor cuts to increases in spending.
It's more that your vast, indomitable ignorance makes you a communist, and I did. Perhaps if you spent more time learning about how utterly fucked we are as a result of "helping" our fellow citizens, you'd be more interested in helping them off the government tit, instead of helping them stay on it.
Yes, those terrible Republicans, how dare they try to cut the rate at which government expands! We need more of it damnit! Even worse, to actually hold to campaign promises, who do they think they are to do what they were told to by the voters? The gall of them, interfering in the previously unimpeded expansion of government.
Have you ever checked into reality, or is this your permanent residence? If GDP grew by 8% a year, there would be a reason to expand government, across the board, by 8% a year. It doesn't. Eventually, reality will win. Delusions of grandeur will fall away to the hovel that remains. If you check in a wee bit before then, perhaps it wont hurt so much?
GW, if this ain't closet commie, what is. Massively expands the welfare state in a single stroke, goes at cap and trade, card check, and other insane stupid shit like a dog with a bone, and regulates the living shit out of anything and everything he can. He's all but an avowed communist, just look into pappy and read his book if you're lost on this claim, and he bloody well walked the walk these last two years. Still not good enough?
That's some funny shit. I know it was just pocket change these days, but did you really miss the $80 billion bailout for Chrysler and GM?
You make the mistake of confusing corruption with an oligarchy. Your politicians are corrupt, and bailed out their buddies in the banking system because they pay them to do it. Mumbles, who is probably just as nutty as you are with the impending collapse of the socialist safety net, just seems to think they are all Republicans. Reality is much the opposite. Democrats have long been in the pocket of unions(mob included), the financial sector, and large corporations like GE. Both parties are equally in the tank for the agriculture industry, and Republicans tend to be the majority share for defense contract corruption. I'd say Republicans were also in the tank for the oil industry, but it's more that the Democrats are continually trying to screw them for inane reasons, anything resembling untoward favors are few and far between.
Of course, it all depends on who is in power as well. Their respective owners don't bother feeding them much when they're in the minority. Republicans looks crooked as hell for a decade, but they'd have had a hard time getting pissed on the last two election cycles, it all went to Democrats after they won the '06 elections.
GDP, and no, it's not. 10% means even a company like GE is a footnote. It means the other 90% of the production is somewhere other than in corporations, and it would be lower if government would fuck off and stop propping them up while taxing the successful newcomers into stagnation.
Yes, it would have been the only sane thing he said if he'd simply left off the blindingly biased trash talk. GE is practically a wing of the Democratic party, lets shoot all those crooked Republicans for giving it green subsidies!
This convo might be better suited at Inside Job - Banksters and Political GangstersJust a suggestion
OK, I sort of ignored the "closet" part because I left my sexuality closet so long ago I forget where it was and find the trope boring these days. Closets are personal business, and I was simply stating that Mumble, despite his adoption of rhetoric worthy of Rush, is by no means even remotely communist--he's a social democrat, homeless in the US political system like all of his 'fellow travelers.' The point you are willfully refusing to acknowledge is that there is a way to envision and attempt to implement government that is neither populist authoritarianism nor 'evangelical capitalism.'
And since we're throwing around links and attempting to assign macroeconomic responsibility to nebulous organizations, I offer this bit as a possible illustration of how Grandly Fucked Up Shit is by no means the sole province of governments. True, it's an Nth-order of difficulty needle-haystack problem to pin down the boundaries between modern governments and modern financial institutions, but whatever...
@myfist0: Privacy does matter to me, but I'm a technological determinist at heart. Privacy happened because of simple things like hallways and abstract things like search warrants. Ubiquitous cameras and the danged inter-tubes are way ahead of countermeasures like info-age privacy laws and a renaissance of fucking manners.
Mumble is a Democratic Rush Limbaugh actually.
The point is if you want to stop spending then what you need to do is to stop authorizing spending. That's a perfectly reasonable argument to make. What's not reasonable is to decide that you don't want to pay for something you already bought. That's what's happening with the debt ceiling manufactured crisis.
Authorizing a debt ceiling increase does not authorize any new spending, it in fact allows you to pay the debts *already* authorized.
It would be like an individual to decide to cut his budget by deciding to stop making the car payments that he contracted to make when he bought the car.
We already bought the car, failing to raise the debt ceiling is simply deciding to be a deadbeat. If you want to reduce the deficit then stop buying new expensive cars each year but once you've already bought one then you're morally and legally obligated to make the payments.
The bulk of the debt was run up by two unfunded wars (one of which was totally unnecessary and unjustified), an unfunded Medicare prescription plan, the largest tax cut in the history of the US, the TARP and the Stimulus Package.
All of these things except for the Stimulus Package can be laid squarely at the feet of GW Bush and the Republicans. Only one of them, the Stimulus Package, is the responsibility of Obama and the Democrats and excuse me if I agree with the use of proven true keynesian economics to make the attempt at mitigating the worst depression since the great depression that again can be laid squarely at the feet of GW Bush and the Republicans.
Of course the standard response of the right is to use Orwellian logic to prove that up is down, black is white and good is evil and if you're stupid enough to believe that crap then there's really not much hope for you. Trickle down economics and supply side economics have been proven over and over to not correspond to reality and yet at every turn they trot out their dis-proven theories as if they're fact.
So go ahead and keep on voting me tax cuts that I don't need. While I will lament for my fellow former middle class members at least I can join the Koch Brothers laughing all the way to the bank about the stupid peasants that are willing to cut off their own penis just so that the obscenely rich can be that much more obscenely rich.
Idiots.
While I agree with the premise that something other than government can fuck shit up, you link an example of government fucking shit up. Fractional reserve banking, when you can loan out ten times as much as you actually have, it's inevitable that equity outpace reality. The closer to reality, the less volatility there will be. Without fractional reserves, there would be no cascade as they lost money that didn't actually exist to begin with. There would be no major fallout from a billion dollars in stock turning into a hundred million, because there wouldn't be ten billion in lending tied to it. No one would invest so foolishly to begin with, so such massive drops wouldn't happen regardless.
They play with the money supply when things start slowing down, attempting to head off the inevitable that comes from having an artificial equity bubble created by money that wasn't earned. You can multiply till hell freezes over, but it doesn't actually produce anything. No fractional reserve banking, no bubble. High frequency trading might contribute in a minor fashion to the general stupidity of humanity, but for it to be so dangerous, the previous crashes would need to have been minor, as opposed to major. By contrast, the more recent they are, the less severe they've been. Even this last one wasn't a big deal, a six month blip on the radar. Unfortunately for the unemployed, Keynesian economics doesn't actually work. With the additional banking regulations that have effectively frozen credit, we've made a mountain out of a mole hill. Overnight we went from a fluid, credit heavy economy, to one with none. It's the perfect case study for why fractional reserve banking is dangerous, Uncle Sam gave us the perfect counter for their own system.
Social Democrats are just communists that don't like revolution. Getting there through legislation still gets you there.
If people were perfect, that would be true. They aren't, so it isn't. Government is a snowball heading downhill. The more power it collects, the faster it collects more. Our own government is a perfect example of what not to do. Continual expansion, accelerating slowly at first, culminating in an explosion of growth over the last several years.
Humans are a very stupid species, smart enough to circumvent nature, but not smart enough to realize it always wins in the end. Power draws those seeking power, when they're more interested in getting it through government than private enterprise, you've already lost.
A shining example of gross ignorance. First, some minor math details. Tax revenue went up following the tax cut, it's a simple fact, get over it. Obama will greatly surpass Bush in deficit spending with only a single term, without the high levels of wartime spending. Democrats took over the house and Senate in 2006, that would be two years before Bush left office, making TARP their baby, along with all the other preposterously dumb shit they blew money on before he left office. Second, Keynes was just a dumb pervert. When he came up with his theory, it had already been tried, repeatedly. The results had always been, and remain to this day, in direct counter to his ideas. When you increase government spending during a recession, you get a depression. Wilson, Hoover(yes, you ignorant twats, Hoover), and FDR all did it and reaped catastrophic outcomes. Harding cut spending in the depression Wilson created by increasing it, and we got the roaring twenties in six months from a depression that was significantly worse than the Great Depression ever got. Hoover and FDR increased spending and turned a far less severe recession into a decade long depression.
Keynesian economics has held sway for the same reason junk science always become popular in government. When it gives them an excuse to hold more power, they jump at it. Reality dictates that not doing anything is better than doing something, and that the best way to solve one is to give up power by reducing the size and scope of government, an antithetical move for a power hungry politician.
As I said the Orwellian logic of the right, but I forgot about the revisionist history of the right, thanks for reminding me.
"Tax revenue went up following the tax cut, it's a simple fact, get over it." To this I have two words to say, "Bull" and "Shit". A total lie and the most popular right wing talking point. As I said if you believe this crap then there's no hope for you.
Secondly the revisionist history, Hoover and initially FDR both used the conventional wisdom of the time which in fact was to fight recession with austerity and it failed miserably it wasn't until FDR switched over to deficit spending that the tide began to turn and it really wasn't until the most massive deficit spending program in the history of the world including that of today began i.e. World War II, that the country really emerged out of depression.
What we have now is further complicated by the fact that millions upon millions of middle class jobs have been moved to India and China all so that CEO's worth 100's of millions of dollars can earn another 10 million dollar bonus. The result is that we still have cyclic economic behavior however the problem is that the recovery never quite reaches the height of the previous boom cycle and each bust cycle is a little bit lower than the last. Instead of cycles we're on the same downward spiral that you watch every morning as your brown swirlies disappear down the toilet. Kind of fitting since that's how the right views the middle class, as shit to get rid of.
So be the good little corporatist that you are and cut off your penis for the benefit of me and the Koch brothers. Also continue to live paycheck to paycheck so that once you can no longer earn a paycheck and thus are no longer a consumer and therefore no longer a useful part of society please have the good taste to go off and die somewhere and please try to die quietly and discreetly, you wouldn't want to unnecessarily upset the refined sensitivities of the Koch brothers and myself with your destitute demise.
[edit] BTW I learned my keynesian economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from so many professors that had a Noble prize in economics that I forget how many there were. At least 3 if not 4 of them were nobel laureates but then I assume that a Nobel prize is meaningless to you. They give those things out as if they were toilet paper. [/edit]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Revenue_and_Expense_to_GDP_Chart_1993_-_2008.png
As those of us capable of reason can see, revenue went into free fall in 2001, obviously not an immediate and consistent drop in revenue caused by a tax cut. This particular tax cut should never have been passed, but Bush is a fucking moron of a progressive, more in line with you than me, and seemed to think having the bottom 50% not pay income taxes anymore was a good idea. Amazingly enough, despite radically decreasing the base, the revenue curve shows a consistent three year drop, hence no significant effect on revenue.
A second, vastly more intelligent tax cut went through the works in 2003, one that actually did some good instead of just removing another fourth of the population from the tax rolls. The tax cuts in 2003 immediately turned around the recession, halting the free fall in revenue and returning them to the historical norm, 18% of GDP. GDP itself expanded about 40% during the Bush presidency despite his taking office as the tech bubble burst and the dirty accounting practices during the Clinton years came to light, only to end on a sour note with the inevitable collapse of the inflated housing market brought about by well meaning stupidity. Never mind the two major disasters in between.
Have you ever bothered to actually look at the historical tables, or do you get all of your information from lying hacks like Krugman? That he, and other bleeding stupid Keynesians, won a Nobel prize isn't surprising, they're awarded by a bunch of socialists in Sweden.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals
Spend just a little bit of time looking at 1.1 and 1.2 and the absurdity of your claim becomes obvious. There were no austerity measures, the mythical cuts in spending have always been just that, mythical. As GDP fell, Hoover increased spending, both absolutely and as a percentage of GDP. FDR went even one better, more than doubling spending over what had been an all time high in revenue of a mere four billion in 1930, the last in a long run of surpluses. No lost decade followed the crash in 1919 when Harding gutted spending, no secondary crashes followed. It was every bit as severe as the 1929 crash, the difference is obvious.
Hoover, having been in Harding's cabinet, thought him an idiot for not stimulating the economy, and was blind enough to ignore the results and try just that when he faced a nearly identical situation. He was a good little progressive, ignored reality and went with ideology instead of proven results.
One last note on the supposed rise caused by massive spending for WWII. The end of the depression came two years before that. It was a simple result of devastated markets in Europe caused by major infrastructural damage via bombing campaigns and retasked production. It actually was wartime spending, but it wasn't ours.
I wouldn't say it's meaningless. Whenever someone has an award in a politically driven field such as Economics, I simply fact check everything they claim. Krugman, for instance, is why I initially went digging through budget tables. When I caught him lying his ass off, his contradictory claims depending on the party affiliation of the president he was referencing made perfect sense. Republicans that run deficits, like Bush, are EVIL INCARNATE! Democrats that run even larger deficits, like Obama, save the country from never before seen apocalyptic market changes that would, oddly enough, somehow manage to be worse than the actual results they reap. It's as if four major depressions in a century, two of them under the same president, all of them under progressives that expanded government in the face of a recession, were somehow good results...
But hey, who am I to argue with someone that regularly falsifies data?
Not to dig through historical archives and all to garner supporting figures but here's the "simple idiot's" view:
You can't blame a party--they all did it.
You go on from there to:
The consumer is in effect paying their tax increase. Then you counter all this by increasing taxes...at a point where many people are struggling just to maintain what they have.
The simple thing is we may have to raise taxes on some and/or all soon--but that isn't going to solve the problem--it just moves the weight of it onto the people.
One side isn't "all right" and the other side isn't "all wrong" but right now both sides are idiots because they aren't dealing with realities other than political ones.
And the, "I make enough for me so others should be willing to sacrifice" argument is insulting. Come back with that when you have to decide whether to feed the kids or make the car payment--on the car you need to keep the only job you have.
I can hardly be bothered to read your entire wall of text, as if I'm going to go through a list of data to try to prove a point that you have no intent on believing no matter what proof I present.
The only thing I'm going to say is that, as you full well know, "austerity" in those times was not implemented by a reduction in fiscal spending but in a tightening of monetary policy by the Fed which in effect turns out to be pretty much the same thing.
On a similar note not all stimulus is fiscal spending. The easing of monetary policy can accomplish pretty much the same thing at least in the direction in which it pushes the economy. The big difference in fiscal spending versus monetary policy is in the amount of push or drag that it can provide the economy. Once you get close to a zero interbank lending rate, which is where we are at already, then there is no more stimulus available through monetary policy alone.
I've never been a proponent of business taxes because as you point out business taxes are merely a cost of doing business just as are the cost of labor and the cost of raw materials. All of these costs are just that, costs, and as long as a company is able to stay in business they need to make a reasonable profit over and above their costs. Therefore business taxes are never borne by the business itself but by the consumers of the good or service the business produces.
Business taxes are in effect the same as sales taxes and as such are in fact regressive. I've never been a big fan of corporate taxes even though I do blame corporations (and even more so their corporate apologists) for a large amount of the problems in this country today.
However the rich as you call them are an entirely different matter. People often use the term "rich" improperly. Rich is someone with large amounts of money or in other words are the owners of wealth. In point of fact no one has ever suggested that wealth should be taxed. When people speak of taxing the rich what they are actually talking about is taxing the income of "high income earners." While there is certainly some correspondence between high income earners and the rich it's important to make the distinction because not all high income earners are rich (or wealthy) and not all rich people earn high incomes.
The thing is that taxing "high income earners", even if those high income earners happen to own businesses, has nothing to do with business taxes. As I mentioned above, business taxes are a cost of doing business that the business has no choice but to pass along with other costs of doing business onto their customers. Taxes on "high income earners" do no such thing because they do nothing to increase the per unit production costs of the good or service being produced and therefore there is no cost to pass on the the consumer. If the "high income earner" goes out of business or sells his business and assuming he's somehow able to maintain his high income then that does nothing to reduce his taxes. Conversely if the high income earner doubles the output of his business and does not pay himself anymore than he used to then he pays no more tax then he did previously.
The bottom line is that "high income earners" can well afford the extra taxes as I can personally attest to. Last year I earned about $40,000 in interest and an additional $180,000 in salary which makes my gross income about $220,000 per year and by deferring some income as well as using a few critical deductions my AGI (adjusted gross income, which is what you actually pay taxes on) was only $158,000 on which I paid approximately $35,000 in federal income taxes. And in reality I'm very small potatoes indeed but the reality is I can well afford to pay quite a bit more in taxes and therefore the legion of hedge fund managers that make 1,000 times what I do can certainly afford to pay more, particularly when if your occupation is "hedge fund manager" then your top tax rate is 15% (check it out if you don't believe it, one of the many loopholes that should be closed).
The point of this is not to try and impress anyone with how much money I make because in the grand scheme of things I'm as much of a peasant as anyone else, just a slightly better off peasant than most. The point is I, and those like me, can well afford to pay more, have historically had to pay far more and in effect counting payroll taxes and sales taxes along with income taxes pay a far less percentage of our total income in taxes than those earning far less.
That is what is not fair.
And to those that say OK you're free to pay all the extra taxes you want or donate it to charity or whatever but you have no right to ask others to do the same my response is that I could destitute myself and the effect wouldn't even be noticeable but if *all* those that earn what I do or above simply paid our fair share in total percentage of income that a low wage earner does when *all* forms of taxation are included, then we would not even have a deficit.
Here's my view on the "rich" individual.
I was living and going to school in Atlanta, Georgia when President Reagan did his budget cuts that impacted those on permanent assistance and especially those in long term psychiatric care. At the time, I was living in the YMCA on Butler Street as I had arranged to stay at student rates the "Y" before I arrived. When I arrived in Atlanta and tried to check in, I was told that the only student housing at the Y was for Georgia Tech students--which was not the school I was attending.
So they told me to go to the Y down the street. Turns out it was in the projects and was full of drug addicts, drifters and homeless people. I had a tight budget and took a room there in a double--which meant it was half the rent but open at any time to a room mate moving in. With the exception of a Vietnam vet under psychiatric care, I was the only white person there.
The desk clerk was a very nice elderly black man who told me, "You shouldn't stay here and certainly not in a double room--someone will hurt you.". I decided I would (I had no choice really due to my expenses) and ended up getting along with everyone there--even the occasional crazy person who passed through. A few weeks later I snagged a job (this was during the 80's recession) and on my first night walking home from work, three gang members came after me and asked what I thought of Martin Luther King. They were pushing me and stepping on my feet and asking if I was afraid of them while I answered. After I did, they started walking me home every night and telling other gang members to leave me alone and that I as "O.K.". So I had no trouble "on the street" and the front desk clerk steered "certifiable" room mates away from me. One of the homeless guys who had a problem with liquor became a friend of mine (he was twenty years older than me).
One day he told me to go out with him and spend the day so I did. He took me to all the churches and shelters and showed me how he got toothpaste, clothes, deodorant and five meals a day for free. All of it came from privately funded charities and churches. When their budgets ran short it was often, "rich people" who would anonymously write a check to cover the week's difference.
I have a friend now who is a chiropractor and is set for life. He routinely goes to churches and asks about people with no other means to meet an immediate need and writes a check for them to the church--asking not to be identified when doing so.
When you take this money with legislation, the state spends it "for" those people--it robs them of the chance to give it. I admire Bill and Melinda Gates and Richard Branson and those like them--who choose to give something back. I don't think their wealth should be taken from them--I think more incentives should be provided for them to give it. The state would tell Bill Gates what the "best" use of his money is--I think he might want to use it in a different way and be more effective in the process.
In the end, who determines who is "rich"? and who decides how to spend the money they take from them? Some of them are doing a better job than the government...Bill Gates is a good example.
I am somewhat concerned for a culture that wants to take from others out of a sense of entitlement so they can spend it on themselves.
Reform taxes, sure. Increase some on the very wealthy? To a point, sure. But it comes down to us being citizens and neighbors in the same states and country and choosing to help one another.
You earned your money and are entitled to it. I don't covet a cent of it. Blow it or share it--that's between you and your conscience.
You must have missed it, corporations are only about 10% of GDP, hence they do not provide the majority of goods and services, "rich people" do. Which is a bleeding stupid argument, since rich people are managing the corporations too. I wouldn't expect sense from you though.
Once again, you're wrong. Harding and Coolidge were those times, they cut fiscal spending, and returning to an interest rate of 4.5%(it had been there before they upped it to pay for Wilson's deficits) was sufficient for the roaring 20's to begin. With surpluses, there was no need for the Federal Reserve to increase rates, so they remained low.
With the onset of the Great Depression, caused in part by a prime rate hike to 7%, once again rates were reduced, but much, much lower. When FDR(or Fuckwad) took office, nominal interest rates were below 2% and the massive deflation following the collapse of the debt bubble had already been brought down by the not even slightly austere actions taken by the Federal Reserve. So, fiscal spending increased substantially, and monetary policy was the exact opposite of austerity.
Next!
The entitlement problem cuts both ways in any complex economy. The wealth that funds the charity that you are admiring is highly dependent on the overall political economy. The Gates fortune depends on intellectual property systems, which require far more government than something comparatively simple like rights to farm or build on a piece of land. Note the "more" there--property of any type is a social construction; it exists only because collections of people agree on a particular set of rules.
The reason people like Mumblefratz and I are so frustrated with public policy of the last few decades is that the only 'entitlements' that have seen any meaningful cutbacks are safety net programs. (Well, Big Ag did take a wee hit recently.) Programs that facilitate business directly are still thriving by providing a context for private organizations to earn big returns from exploiting public resources like air traffic corridors, interstate highways, and broadcast spectrum.
I'm not as publicly angry as Mumblefratz because I'm a political scientist and I understand that we live in a pluralist democratic republic, at least for a few more years. A healthy democratic system never pleases everyone at once, but it should please most people most of the time, and our Great Experiment looks like it might actually be winding down. Oligarchy's not all that bad if you luck out and most of your oligarchs are more like Gates and Buffet than they are like the Koch brothers.
Yes, because those evil Koch brothers are a bunch of miserly stooges that don't donate hundreds of millions to charity. Oh, wait, they do.
Left wing propaganda. Buffet and Gates are wonderful, really, but as industrialists, with most of their net worth in hard assets, the Koch brothers are highly philanthropic, and highly praised for it despite their low key approach to giving. They are very generous individuals, and they don't seek notoriety for it.
If you want to gut agriculture subsidies, go for it. They should never have existed to begin with, that's always been a far right policy, it was the progressives in the Republican party that put that shit through, not the libertarian wing. It sure as hell wasn't the crazy wing, where I reside.
Most of the business subsidies are nonsense though. When some asshole in congress starts bitching about oil subsidies, they're lying their ass off.
It works like so. You write special tax rules, which cost inordinate amounts of money to comply with and are rewritten regularly so you have to keep spending those inordinate amounts, and these special tax rules create fictitious profits to be taxed. You tell them expenditure A can be deducted as an expense, but expenditure B is an asset, it has to be depreciated. You then give them a depreciation scale that last longer than the lifetime of the asset they've purchased.
This is the case with oil wells, small ones run dry long before the depreciation finishes. As a result, oil companies shut them down, sell them off, and take the capital loss against their capital gains, forgoing the last of the oil for tax purposes. To avoid this economically intelligent behavior created by asinine rules, they made a new rule. Such wells now receive accelerated depreciation to encourage the oil companies not to sell them at a capital loss. They call this a loophole, yet most depreciated assets depreciate in advance of their loss of real value, such as the fences on our property, which if I remember right have a depreciation of 7 years, yet have a life span in excess of a couple decades.
All actual subsidies should go, but what a politician calls a subsidy is often just an insanely written tax code that usually penalizes a specific activity in a counter-productive manner and has had a "loophole" written to fix it. This would be why I decided to support the Fair Tax plan, corporate taxes and income taxes are both stupid ways to raise money, fluctuating massively with the swings in growth, and the politicians have had a field day turning them into a costly disaster that sucks better than a trillion dollars out of the economy just to get them worked out.
Your sarcasm-recognition systems must be offline at the moment. Bill Gates is no hero to me, and the only reason I have a shred of respect for Warren Buffet is that he believes inherited wealth should be modest, not mountainous.
I'm also well aware of the Koch brothers 'philanthropic' activities, which, for me, don't come close to balancing out the damage they've done helping keep Congress on the big-money leash. They've avoided the shame of their father's John Birch Society membership, and at least they're not openly funding the 'family values' crowd of hatemongers, but, yea, best I can tell, they're at least really mean if not outright evil.
Hey Mummbles is back!
My favorite misguided lefty friend
Welcome back!
EDIT:
I just couldn't let this pass.... All this spending was done during Bushies second term, when the DEMOCRATS were in control of the House AND Senate. The president CANNOT author any spending bills, they only come from Congress. Ergo, the Democrats. Whom is to blame?
The First war was justified (Afghanistan) the second was iffy (Iraq) However, the second one has made that nation much more receptive and responsible to the world. And what about this third one that we are "not" in? There wasn't even any authorization from the Congress for that war! Whom is to blame for that?!?
And there is no need for the name calling, Keep it civil people. Dam internets and their rudeness.
In all actuality it was only the 2nd half of Bush's 2nd term or the last 2 years of his 8 year presidency where the Democrats were in control of congress. Also at that time the Democrats did not have veto proof margins. Anything congress authorized that was unacceptable to the White House could easily have been vetoed.
BTW this is a common right wing response whenever some ill is laid at a Republican presidents feet is to claim it's not the presidents fault it's the fault of congress but then they never seem to bring this up when talking about a Democratic president.
But then that's how Republicans act and believe, the rules just don't apply to them.
Speaking of the Koch brothers and rules not applying to Republicans have you heard the latest about one of their astroturf organizations?
It seems Americans for Prosperity (a wholly owned subsidy of Koch Industries, sic) sent out absentee ballots to solidly democratic districts with instructions to return 2 days *after* the election. How cute.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/davidcatanese/0811/AFP_Wisconsin_ballots_have_late_return_date.html
Also in line with voter suppression Scott Walker having already denied college students the vote and already put through a strict voter ID law requiring either a drivers license or state ID only available through the DMV then closed all the DMV's in democratic districts.
http://thepoliticalcarnival.net/2011/07/25/gov-scott-walker-closes-wisconsin-dmv-offices-in-democratic-areas-that-could-provide-voter-i-d/
If you don't recall (pun intended) Scott Walker is the Wisconsin governor that cleared his schedule to talk to a reporter who Walker thought was David Koch.
Here's a recent picture of Scott Walker listening to the Koch Brothers.
I'm not saying that Republicans are not at fault.... I'm just saying the Democrats had their hands in the proverbial cookie jar at the same time.....
And we all know that Bush became a soft spine later in his presidency. Those bills that came to him were so full of earmarks and other fluff, that is how anything got done at that time.
I see the problem with career politicians. The founders sure didn't envision politics to be a way of life.... just simply a duty.... like serving in the armed forces. The system needs a reset.
Nice job broad brushing an entire family there, I guess that makes me a racist, sister porking redneck, as they're only two generations back there in that same age group. The incest hasn't actually been proven, but it's either that or a black man is in the family tree, because grandma refused to ever talk about her family tree.
Neither one of them are even socially conservative, they're both libertarians, preferring that government fuck off and leave everyone alone. I can't find anything that could possibly classify as mean. The overwhelming majority of their campaign contributions go towards libertarians, and their lobbying activities are perfectly reasonable. They're an oil refining company and the EPA is batshit insane environmentalism on steroids with the power to put them out of business pretty much at whim, thanks to the wonderfully fucked up Clean Air Act. Just one rule change and every refinery in the country shuts down because they have to utilize some obscenely expensive technology that can't possibly compete on a global market. If I were them, I'd be spending even more trying to kill the entire program. I could rail on the EPA for pages without running out of shit to complain about, it's another portion of government that costs the economy far more than the tax revenue needed to run it.
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