Re: Sarah Palin's game plan: Make white working class and retirees forget what the real problem is
- From: Neolibertarian <cognac756@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 29 Nov 2010 11:43:11 -0600
In article
<1c531c24-1c86-4b85-b552-fe83850b5071@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Rex B <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Nov 29, 1:52 am, Neolibertarian <cognac...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <r2f6f6lqpattjagjg3ik1o2n1cibmpt...@xxxxxxx>,
ScotchBright <Bustercantre...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:00:15 -0500, Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
<PopUlist...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Here's something to chew on.
From Robert Reich's Blog --
Look, Robert Reich was Labor Secretary for Bill Clinton's administration.
In 2004, he was all over tv telling us that Social Security is sound,
and that the crisis described by the Dubya and other Republicans was all
made up hype.
Let's see, when Bill Clinton left office, the entire national debt,
including bonds purchased by Social Security - were going to be paid
off in full by 2004.
Well, we can't prove a negative. But I hardly think there was even a
wild chance this could have occurred.
For instance, where was the $5.2 trillion supposed to come from to pay
off the debt so quickly?
1998 was the first year since 1969 that the US federal budget had been
balanced. By the time Clinton left office, most of the original
"Contract with America" legislators had also left office through
attrition, DNC targeting and/or scandal. Those that were coming in were
hardly ideologues or fiscal hawks.
Candidates Gore and Bush would have overseen an end to the brief
balanced budget, regardless. There is just too much to be gained from
increasing entitlements, military expansion and general government
spending and largess.
Obviously, it's gonna take a highly ideological majority with a clear
mandate to put a cap on spending. To roll it back, it will take a hero.
History, if it tells us anything, indicates that we get heros, but only
when we need them most.
Then we had the George Bush Tax Loans - he called them tax cuts, but
he didn't do anything to offset the reduction in taxes, such as
reducing the size of the military, reducing entitlements, or cutting
budgets for something like the DEA. So all he was doing was giving
the top 1% of the population tax-free "gifts" which would, in his
plan, be paid off by the rest of the population when the tax "cuts"
expired 10 years later. The result was 3 trillion in deficit.
Over 4 big ones, if I recall correctly.
Btw, I got a nifty little tax cut, too. I'm hardly in the top 1%. Nor
the top 10%.
Think I should thank Uncle for the "gift?"
And the reason the tax cuts will expire is because they were passed in
the omnibus. The Dubya vigorously campaigned to make them permanent
until he left office.
George W Bush gave us the premise that "You know how to spend your
money better than the government can".
That's not from the Dubya, though he may have repeated it. However,
there's no doubt that it's absolutely true.
But this was obviously not the
case. Trillions in pension funds, most of which were over-funded,
were wiped out in the Enron, WorldComm, and AIG investigations - and
many of those who got out, get better prices because brokers were
making buy reccomendations so that Goldman Sachs and Citibank could
pull out. When Martha Stewart went to trial, Merril Lynch had already
had all of the records related to the incident sealed by Elliott
Spitzer in a settlement that made it impossible for Martha Stewart to
even get copies of the broker's books to show exactly when she placed
her order, and to see if there were any patterns of "off the books"
betting against the customer".
We just don't regulate enough, do we?
And when the .com bubble started to peak out, Bush put a pin in it to
make it explode completely.
Please cite your baseless claims.
Nationwide, the average american lost 75%
of their 401k, IRA, and Pension funding, and suddenly over-funded
pensions were unable to meet their current obligations.
These days, they call them 201K's.
Ouch.
There are bureaucrats sensing an opportunity now. They believe that
Americans would be willing to sell them to Uncle for a penny above their
current market value.
Just like Mr. Potter.
Thankfully, all my money is in the Bailey Savings & Loan.
To make matters even worse, George W Bush pushed for the repeal of the
tax on dividends paid to investors - which had the uniintended
consequence of making capital gains far less desirable. Companies
like Microsoft paid Bill Gates $30 billion in tax-free dividends. How
much did Dick Chaney get?
Neither dividends nor corporations nor capital gains should ever be
taxed at the federal level. Except, perhaps, in times of war. And at
that, they need to be extremely temporary.
Income tax of any kind is dangerously self-defeating. But never so much
as when taxing the income of businesses.
When the Mellon tax cuts of the 20's, the Kennedy tax cuts of the 60's,
the Reagan tax cuts of the 80's and the Bush tax cuts of the 0's all
proved to be revenue neutral or slightly revenue enhancing, there really
can be no logical argument to the contrary.
Income taxes are anything but a zero-sum game. The tax code is so
malleable that Congress and the Executive are constantly doing changing
and manipulating it to the point of capriciousness. That ain't no way to
run a railroad, let alone a the federal government overseeing the
world's largest economy.
We the People need to rethink the whole idea. There are many other ways
of taxing and raising revenue that would still give the government a
certain level of flexibility.
It is certain that today the government has far too much flexibility in
taxing, spending and borrowing.
Then we decided that we loud punish Afghanistan for the attack by Bin
Ladin that should have killed less than 600 people
Obviously, the plan was to kill as many as 40,000. For several days
after the attacks, the estimates, based on the number of people known to
be in the buildings at 9:00 am, were on the order of 5,000 to 15,000.
If it hadn't been for the 1993 attack forcing NYCES to revamp and
rethink evacuation and emergency procedures, /and the personal heroism
of the responders/, 15,000 could easily have died.
unfortunately
many of those killed were told to not to evacuate and go back to their
offices, and others were told to go to the roof instead of using one
of the many good stairwells which would have taken them safely to the
street with plenty of time to spare. They couldn't even fly a fireman
and drop him onto the tower to tell them to go downstairs.
There are few options available to firefighters in the world's tallest
buildings.
So to punish Afghanistan for $3 billion in building damage and the
deaths of less than 3000 people, we bombed the country - killing
hundreds of thousands,
Please cite your silly claims.
This is how these numbers get out of control, of course. Pretty soon,
it's millions.
and doing hundreds of billions in damages to
large cities.
There's large cities in Afghanistan?
And what was left was almost stone-age. And the cost
was nearly $3 trillion over the next 10 years.
$1 T, or a little over.
Not insignificant, despite most people becoming desensitized to the "T
word" these days. A million is a thousand thousand. A billion is a
thousand million. And trillion is a thousand billion. Hard to get your
arms around, for sure.
Btw, the US spent twice that much just servicing the federal debt during
the same time period.
This doesn't diminish the huge cost of the GWOT, surely, but it does put
it in perspective.
But that wasn't enough for George W Bush. George decided to invade
Iraq as well, dropping bombs worth $1 billion a day - and an
occupation that would eventually cost another $3-4 trillion.
If you were to address the 9/11 attacks at all, invading Iraq was the
necessary response.
After all, that Saudi millionaire had declared war against the US in
1996 and 1998 because of Iraq.
He wasn't the only one, by far.
And
meanwhile, Iran, the country between Iraq and Afghanistan - got so
nervous about being stuck between to American Occupied countries, that
they felt they were next on the invasion menu - so they bought Nuclear
power plants (since the dark sour crude couldn't be used in power
plants without being refined).
MeK, the Iranian revolutionary organization dedicated to the overthrow
of the Mullahs, gave a press conference in August of 2002. This was the
first public revelation of the secret nuclear enrichment cascades,
already then operating at Natanz under the noses of the IAEA.
This may have been timed for coordination with Operation Iraqi Freedom,
which by some accounts was then targeted to begin in November of 2002.
Undoubtedly, this revelation was intended to keep the Mullahs too busy
negotiating with the IAEA inspectors, and trying to explain away their
own sins to the world, so that their interference in Iraq during the
invasion phase would be minimal.
He has as much credibility as any other political hack, left or right.
By nature, political hacks, political commentators, especially
extremist political pundits, have very little credibility - just by
the nature of their job. Whether it's Bill O'Reilly claiming that
Obama is Muslim or Glen Beck wearing his Nazi Storm-Trooper uniform on
the cover of his book, then telling the Tea Party that Obama is like
Hitler. Or the 5 second snippets of MSNBC on Keith Obermann or Rachel
Maddow making Sharon Engals and Sara Palin and other tea party
candidates look like hood wearing members of the KKK or advocating the
elimination of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Disability -
all by February of 2011.
This is a step up from the days of Walter Cronkite. You see, the
'extremist pundits' (whatever that may mean) now no longer PRETEND to be
unbiased journalists.
I'll take whatever progress I can.
Which is to say, none.
Newt Gingrich and George H. W. Bush were pragmatists, and George H.W.
Bush had the good sense to deliver a clear message that we could wipe
out the entire Iraqi army in just a few days - without actually
creating the political backlash of invading Iraq and trying to set up
a whole new government.
GHW is why we have a Global War on Terror today. His actions aren't the
root cause, of course. But he certainly moved the ball when he possessed
it.
If you don't think that Operation Desert Storm had dire international
backlash and consequences, then...well, I suppose you have lots of
company here in the US.
Whether you ever understand it or not, it's all about the sanctions.
All of it.
Had he managed a second term, perhaps he could have set it right. Had he
been succeeded by someone with a modicum of foreign diplomacy acumen...
But then, "if only" is for children.
Unfortunately, what we have now is a vacuum of power in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and Pakistan,
Excuse me. You seem to be trying to convince us this is some sort of
/new/ development.
Hardly new, my friend. Open a book.
The only different or new element in the equation is that now WE'RE
holding the bag.
Remember, "if only" is for children.
If you find yourself holding the bag, you have three choices: drop it,
keep holding it, or make it yours.
All of which will create horrible consequences.
What will you do?
"My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do
it; you will regret both."
--Soren Kierkegaard
which could easily be filled by people we have
refused to negotiate with - the second we are gone.
Undoubtedly.
Obama ran as a centrist candidate, beating out Hillarynt Clinton who
was swinging to the far left, and John McCain who won the Republican
nomination on the votes of moderates, and then swung to the far right
to get the funding from the big banks and oil companies that backed
George W Bush.
None of this is partly true, even accounting for your gross
oversimplification.
Even more important, McCain had been openly opposed by
the Family Radio Network - especially people like Dr Jim Dobson - and
this threatened to eliminate this channel of "under the radar"
campaign funding - the very kind of funding that McCain had so
protested during both the 2000 and 2008 primaries - until he won the
nomination.
This, on the other paw, is mostly true. Significance remains undefined,
however.
McCain would have been a MUCH better president than Obama,
I don't believe that either candidate had a chance at being a good
president, nor would either have ever survived a second run in 2012. The
financial sector was too weakened for a populist-bureaucrat to have
addressed. And both Obama and McCain are undeniably populist-bureaucrats.
We could believe that McCain would have reacted immediately and
decisively to the sinking of the Cheonan. This might have prevented the
shelling of Yeonpyeong island, and some guessed-at future escalations
that we can now only dread.
Internationally, McCain might not have presented himself as an easily
manipulated mark. Maybe China would have tested him with a less-risky
EP-3E spy plane incident instead of the Choenan. Presumably, McCain
would have passed the test, telling the Chinese to continue to bide
their time. Of course, not only did Obama not react, he seems to have
put a lid on South Korean reaction as well.
A clear green light McCain might not have ever lit.
However, from what we know of him, McCain could hardly have intended to
deal with the economy much differently than Obama. He would have faced a
D Congress, after all. And his populist-bureaucratic proclivities would
have led him on a similar course, sans Health Care.
but nobody
wanted to take the chance that McCain would end up giving Sarah Palin
the same kind of power given to George H.W. Bush during the Reagan
administration, or to Dick Chaney during the George W. Bush
administration.
That's not why he wasn't elected, goofy.
Palin boosted his flagging campaign, and this is clearly reflected in
the polling. This is why there was immediate, vigorous reaction and
damage control from the DNC.
How could this have not been obvious to you?
Palin more or less failed her interview with Couric. However, everyone
in the nation was expecting Couric to create a "gotchya" with Palin,
who'd been a national candidate for only about 4 weeks (at the tail end
of a campaign that had already dragged on longer than any previous
campaign in US history). Albert Einstein would have been seen as
unschooled.
On the other paw, there was the debate hosted by Rick Warren.
Far from gotchya's, everyone in the nation, including Candidate Obama,
knew exactly what Warren was going to ask. That Obama could fumble such
an expected question is almost beyond belief. Well, that is if you
inexplicably believe Barry is somehow competent and schooled.
It's no wonder that almost immediately after McCain announced his
running mate, Presidential nominee Obama began to obviously, painfully
obviously, campaign against the Republican Vice Presidential nominee.
Destroying her credibility might have been an relatively easy task, at
least with certain voting blocks.
However, /maintaining/ Obama's credibility was far more difficult.
They succeeded in both, but it's now more obvious every day they're not
so sure that succeeding was such a good thing for either endeavor.
But there you are then.
Obama even liked a LOT of John McCain's proposals, and proposed them
as part of his own proposals, without making the Republicans bargain
for these concessions - because he didn't want his own party strong-
arming Republicans into passing bad bills to get good ideas included
into things like Health Care, Bank Reform, even TARP.
Obama had never indicated a willingness to bargain with the Republicans,
at all.
This was obvious from when Obama and McCain both flew into town to vote
for TARP. Remember what Barry said when they asked him if he had
negotiated with Republicans for the vote?
The big problem was that Nancy Pelosi and the Far Left misinterpreted
the Democratic win in 2008 as a left-wing mandate - and tried to push
a far-left agenda, often even against the wishes of President Obama.
http://www.elihu.envy.nu/NeoPics/Sounds/rof.WAV
I've often said that George Bush pulled the pin on the hand grenade in
September of 2008 and handed it to Obama, but in reality, is was more
like snowflakes of the first snow on a tree still full of leaves. One
snowflake ways almost nothing, but when all of the snowflakes on all
the leaves add enough weight, the branches begin to break off.
Here's a novel idea: let the markets correct. They're smarter than you,
and even you are smarter than a populist-bureaucrat.
Lots of pain now, then you hit bottom and get on with your life.
Prop up a failing bank, and you get a zombie bank.
They let Terri Schiavo starve to death, didn't they?
George W. Bush made the mistake of adopting a far right-wing agenda
for 8 years
The Dubya was not "far right-wing" by any definition you care to use.
deregulating the banks, eliminating safeguards, and
starving innovative companies of venture capital.
1) Banks are the most regulated enterprises in the United States, bar
none. This was true before the Dubya's administration, it was true
during his administration, and it's still true today.
2) You can't have the safeguards you're imagining here and have a
capitalist economy. You must be allowed to fail, in order for there to
be a possibility for you to succeed.
Sorry, I didn't make up the rules.
3) "Starving companies of venture capital" is completely at odds with
your "far right-wing" characterizations.
He even made it
easier to ship jobs overseas, and didn't push for the emerging markets
to buy more of our products.
Are you aware that export of manufactured goods from the United States
more than doubled between Clinton's first administration and the end of
the Dubya's second?
Look it up.
He did everything the far right wanted,
with relatively few filibusters compared to the last 2 years, getting
most of what he wanted.
Revolutionary income tax reform and social security reform were major
planks in his 2004 campaign. Neither ever really saw the light of day.
2005 saw Harriet Myers and Immigration Reform causing his "right-wing"
supporters to jump ship. He never had them again, and /completely/ lost
them in November of 2006.
Sarah Palin appeals to the racists, neo-nazis, aryan nation, kkk, and
other right wing groups. Her stand for the Tea Party Candidates was
often at rallies where the attendees were wearing the broken cross
(swastika) while carrying pictures of Obama with a Hitler mustache.
http://www.elihu.envy.nu/NeoPics/Sounds/oh_you.wav
Neolibertarian
"[The American People] know that we don't have deficits
because people are taxed too little; we have deficits
because big government spends too much."
---Ronald Reagan
That was very true during Regan's first term. The tax laws were
absurdly complicated, different regulatory agencies like the IRS,
Securities Exchange Commission, and Public Utilties Commission, as
well as state and local regulators - all had different ideas of how
the books should be kept. My dad was an accountant for a public
utility in Colorado - and had to maintain 18 different sets of books -
because each agency had it's own rules, designed to protect their
particular constituency. The expenses were absurd. Eventually, Dad
did help automate the process - and was rewarded with an offer for
early retirement.
When Reagan took office, the highest tax rate was as high as 90% and
even married couples were having bonuses taxed at rates as high as
75%. Reagan's tax simplification did much more than flatten the tax
rate. It also standardize the accounting standards for ALL of the
federal agencies. This way, one set of books could be used for ALL
financial records.
Of course, some of the efforts at deregulation backfired. The savings
and loan system collapsed, because they had been allowed to invest in
commercial property, such as shopping centers - which ended up getting
overbuilt, vacant, and depreciating - with even Senators like John
McCain getting caught up in the mess.
Even when Reagan left office, entitlement programs like AFDC would
punish women for getting work. A woman who took a part-time job at
minimum wage could lose as much as 5 times her in income in benefits
such as WIC, AFDC, Food Stamps, Section 8 housing, and child care.
It wasn't until Bill Clinton that a moderate Clinton and a Republican
Congress led to "back to work" programs. And it was Clinton and the
Republicans who closed "Training Bases" that were no longer practical
- such as Lawry AFB - that didn't even have a working landing strip
for propeller planes anymore. Anyoone at the base had to fly out of
Fort Carson Army base, or be taken to Peterson AFB 75 miles south in
Colorado Springs. Under Clinton and the Republican Congress - many
agencies were closed, and government got MUCH smaller.
Ironically, under the George W. Bush administration - even with a
Republican Congress - government got HUGE - bigger than it has ever
been before. We added the Department of Homeland Security, set up
massive housing compounds and massive mortuaries - under FEMA - in
case Al Queda unleashed a virus similar to the 1918 virus that killed
1/3 of the U.S. population, and quarantine housing for those infected
but not dead. And TSA not only made flying a royal pain, but The
Department of Homeland Security, which includes TSA, also added almost
$1 trillion to the federal budget since it's inception.
So here we are - the government is now $9 trillion in debt,
You need to try harder to keep up.
They can't pass a budget until they raise the debt ceiling to $14 + T.
$14
trillion in mortgages are "at risk" because the home owners are "under
water" - and 10% of the unemployed are about to lose their last source
of income.
In the 1930s, people displaced from their homes pitched tents in
public parks - called "Hoovervilles". Could we see similar tents in
the capital mall - called "Obamaville"?
Well, it's an even bet there won't be an Obama Dam.
You see, unlike Hoover, Obama can't find any "shovel-ready" projects.
--
Neolibertarian
"[The American People] know that we don't have deficits
because people are taxed too little; we have deficits
because big government spends too much."
---Ronald Reagan
.
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