Romney on 47% comments: I was 'completely wrong'[views:14991][posts:81]________________________________ [Oct 8,2012 12:03pm - Burnsy ""] Oh look. I can find charts too. [img] [img] Are these charts accurate? Maybe. I look at any chart with extreme scrutiny. Who performed the calculations? I'm sure you well know that statistics are easy to manipulate. Here's an article from the Washington Post fact checking Rex Nutting's analysis which resulted in the chart you posted. Washington Post Fact Checker |
| ________________________________ [Oct 8,2012 12:05pm - Burnsy ""] And Bill Clinton? Fuck that guy. He lied under OATH (awesome band btw, definitely check them out) as the chief law enforcement officer of the land. That's all I need to know about that prick. He can go suck a shitdick. |
| ____________________________________ [Oct 8,2012 12:29pm - Alx_Casket ""] Blowies =/= sex. Problem? |
| _____________________________________ [Oct 8,2012 12:32pm - Randy_Marsh ""] Burnsy said:And Bill Clinton? Fuck that guy. He lied under OATH (awesome band btw, definitely check them out) as the chief law enforcement officer of the land. That's all I need to know about that prick. He can go suck a shitdick. Bill was a pretty good president aside from him lying about that. |
| ________________________________ [Oct 8,2012 12:57pm - Burnsy ""] Ok. |
| ________________________________________ [Oct 8,2012 8:05pm - Headbanging_Man ""] ShadowSD said:My point is that I can accept the argument of Obama should have done a and not b. But when there's never a plausible a suggested, that's where I don't understand the logic. Cheers. Obama should have done: a) Prosecuted Bush administration, CIA and Pentagon officials for torture not b) Thrown out some bullshit about "Let's move forward" while normalizing heinous and inhumane interrogation and incarceration tactics. a) Brought all troops out of Iraq not b) Left over 50,000 behind and pretended to have removed us from the conflict. a) Considered a single-payer health insurance system or at least allowed advocates of single-payer into the discussion and supported a public health insurance option not b) Let health insurance companies write the legislation to force the public into their for-profit industry, essentially giving them a permanent bailout. a) Prosecuted Wall St. fraudsters not b) NOT prosecuted Wall St. fraudsters. a) Used the EPA's powers to bring an end to fracking and mountain top coal removal not b) Rolled over for the energy conglomerates. a) Refrained from ordering assassinations of U.S. citizens and other "terror" suspects abroad not b) Ordered assassinations of U.S. citizens and other "terror" suspects abroad. a) Used the bully pulpit to denounce SOPA strongly and illustrate the dangers of federal control of the internet not b) Only addressed this threat through spokespeople and avoided a strong public stance on the bill. a) Vetoed the NDAA not b) Signed the NDAA. These are 8 examples of specific acts that Obama could have taken on his own initiative with virtually no input from Congress. The Democrats LOVE to blame the GOP when their alleged progressive ideals don't seem to be borne out by their actions, but the fact is, the Democrats (with a few exceptions like Elizabeth Warren and Dennis Kucinich) are NOT at all progressive and only brand themselves as such for votes. Blame the GOP controlled Congress as much as it deserves, as I certainly do, but you cannot blame them for distinctly harmful, anti-progressive, illiberal actions taken within the Obama executive branch itself. |
| _____________________________________ [Oct 9,2012 8:30pm - ShadowSDNLI ""] Burnsy, agreed Clinton is a liar, I always felt that way, I remember being twelve when he ran the first time and thinking what a liar this guy is. I never found him at all inspiring in that campaign like a lot of people did. On the charts, even if the ones we have on Presidents relative to each other cancel each other out because of different metrics - there's still no set of charts that differs on the fact that most Obama spending (whatever the total figure) came from three Bush policies: Med D, 2 Wars, '02 Tax Cuts, not the policies that Obama initiated. That's one set of numbers that can't be spun, and if you can find a chart that can flip that on its head then that'll be something - but I don't see how that's even possible. |
| __________________________________________________________ [Oct 9,2012 9:48pm - Big bag of assorted nigger parts ""] TRILLIONS of dollars in "stimulus" between two rounds of quantitative easing (with a third one planned, not added in yet!), big bank bailouts, and possibly worst of all (?) the billions upon billions given to other countries, including countries that would be very happy to see Americans die and have said so (Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, every other gasolineistan). Where'd trillions of dollars go? Besides many billions to his friends, you know, the same way they're accusing R-money of wanting tax breaks for his friends (which is probably correct, but is more than a double-standard, as Yobama gave not only breaks but cold hard cash). Bad music, hard facts: http://youtu.be/Tym9AhMNcP0 OBlackguy added more to the US defecit in 3 years than warmongering Bush did in 8 years. |
| ____________________________________________________________ [Oct 10,2012 12:20am - Big bag of assorted nigger parts ""] While I stand by the above statements, I do have to apologize for getting sucked into the discussion with the faulty premise that there's really any fucking difference at all between Ds and Rs. They're all jewbags. Bottom line is, best reason to vote Romney is, he's not Obama. That way, I don't have to look at that steak-face nigger for another 4 years. |
| __________________________________ [Oct 10,2012 8:11pm - ShadowSD ""] Headbanging_Man said:Obama should have done: I agree strongly with you on some things, disagree on others. On Iraq, you’re incorrect, Obama finished withdrawing the 50,000 residual troops out at the end of 2011. They're not in Iraq anymore and haven't been for a while. This is also another generally unnoticed example of where Obama has been even more anti-war than the details of his campaign promises; while Obama never set an end withdrawal date for those residual non-combat troops during the 2008 campaign, he did so immediately when he got into office and followed through on that timeline exactly. What really gets me even worse is that if someone aside from Obama had become President in 2008, even if they were another leading Democrat (HRC or Edwards) who withdrew all the combat troops out of Iraq, we'd still have those 50K residual "non-combat" troops in Iraq to this day, and still holding the permanent bases that we've since handed off to the Iraqi military on top of it. No one registers how abruptly Obama broke from bad historical US policy embraced by both parties in recent years by doing these things. In fact, based on what you said, it seems a lot of people still think we have 50K troops in Iraq STILL, when we haven't had those soldiers there for ten months. How can we determine what the most progressive anti-war options are if we don't even have the right facts? Yes, the public option should have happened and single payer would have been great, but single payer certainly wasn't going to pass if even the public option couldn't get sixty votes in the Senate (thanks to Joe Lieberman's ties to the health insurance industry). The idea that Obama pushing more forcefully on the public option than he did by waiting even more than a year for it to pass or twisting more arms on it would have somehow changed ex-Democrat Lieberman's mind makes no sense, and the idea that the Obama law was preferable to the insurance industry over the previous system is equally absurd considering the money that industry has invested in repealing the law; sure they would have hated a public option even more than the law that passed, but they clearly loved the old system the most since they're spending every lobbying dollar they have to go back to that, and to get rid of the Obama law. Why are they spending so much money to get rid of a law if they prefer it? I agree there should have been more Wall Street prosecutions for the mortgage swap fiasco, but Obama's record on standing up to Wall Street can't be ignored: he forced the execs of Wall Street companies like AIG who owe taxpayer money to take pay cuts, he forced execs of failed banks across the country to pay for the financial losses they caused, his administration implemented the biggest mortgage fraud crackdown in history, he signed into law financial regulation that cuts Wall Street financial sector profits by as much as 20%, and his probes of Goldman Sachs and AIG resulted this past April in Goldman paying a restitution settlement totaling tens of millions of dollars. I'd love to see more, but comparatively, that's objectively the biggest crackdown on Wall Street since FDR - by far. Ignoring it hardly makes the needed case for the additional cracking down that is necessary. Obama's EPA has also more teeth than any in history, and while you are absolutely right that fracking and mountaintop removal should not be allowed, contrary to what you said HAS denied permits for mountaintop removal, and two months into the Obama administration actually halted all of them. On the biggest issue where environmental activism has made a stand in this administration, the Keystone Pipeline extension, Obama came down on the correct side against it when all the chips were down. Obama is also responsible for progressive environmental cabinet appointments, the Wilderness Lands Law, the China Climate Deal, the Copenhagen agreement, Cash For Caulkers, $2.3B on green energy, EPA regulation of coal ash, EPA enforcement of the Clean Air Act, preventing Arctic Drilling, adding deepwater drilling regulations and a mortatorium, appealing in court to keep that moratorium in place, EPA shutdowns of coal plants, cutting fed govt greenhouse emissions, veto threats to stop legislation weakening the EPA, protecting whales, an additional $2B in solar power, the new law to reduce formaldehyde emissions, the offshore drilling ban, solar panels for the Defense Department, pushing to end oil subsidies repeatedly despite uniform opposition, the EPA limiting greenhouse gases from new power plants, and perhaps most important of all the EPA's higher fuel efficiency standards. That's an outstanding environmental record, and the most pro-active President and EPA on the environment ever. I personally think Obama did have the right to assassinate Bin Laden and that cleric in Yemen, even though the latter was a dual citizen, and I say that as a dual citizen myself; I don't think I have the right to go to Iran where I also have citizenship through my bloodline, independently plot attacks against the US that are successful in killing innocent people, and then say that since there is no extradition treaty so my American citizenship prevents me from retaliation - that's just nuts. Now of course, there is absolutely a valid point that such a power not clearly restricted could some day create precedent for terrible shit to happen, but the idea that citizenship creates an impenetrable shield for a foreign terrorist who has denounced and waged war on the US is equally ridiculous. I agree prosecuting torture is a must. If Obama leaves office without doing it, it will always be a shortcoming of his Presidency, likely the biggest. I also understand why he hasn't in his first term, because third-world democracies are rife with parties prosecuting each other once in power, and the argument is that combination of the Clinton impeachment and Bush being tossed in jail within a ten or twelve years might have set in place a doomed pattern in this country we might not be able to break out of, and a downward spiral of retribution that America has always steered clear of no matter how bitter politics ever got between the two parties. That's actually not an unreasonable argument to at least consider when someone has made a core campaign promise to try and bring different sides together - but on the other hand, I think if at the end of the day that level of systematic and widespread torture is never prosecuted, we're actually WAY worse off. So I'm with you that prosecutions are absolutely necessary - it's just a more fucked choice either way than I think you lay out when it comes to doing it, particularly in a first term. Obama must however pursue prosecutions in a second term, and it needs to get done. After all, it’s one thing to say it was something that could have backfired in his first term for the torture issue itself (Obama prosecutes, doesn’t get re-elected because he is cast as a partisan on that specific issue, other party gets elected and actually takes it as a popular mandate to torture, expanding the Bush torture policies instead of only reinstating them as Romney would currently do), but in a second Obama term there would be zero excuse for not prosecuting Bush/Cheney/Yoo/Gonzalez/etc. Zero. Obama ending torture and his DOJ launching investigations of it were great, but it just isn’t enough. I agree with you that Obama should have followed through with his initial threats to veto the NDAA, although it's also fair to point out that there were enough R and D votes to override his veto. |
| ____________________________________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 12:04am - Big bag of assorted nigger parts ""] ShadowSD said: I say that as a dual citizen myself; I don't think I have the right to go to Iran where I also have citizenship through my bloodline, etc etc Do you eat bacon / ham / etc? |
| __________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 8:27am - ShadowSD ""] Yup, bacon, pork chops, not ham so much but pig roasts kick ass. Mmmm... pork fat. As you can tell, I'm not Muslim, I'm a non-believer. My parents always have been as well. It takes going up a couple generations in our family to find anyone at all religious, like my mom's mom. Even though my grandma is Muslim, though, I'd still like Mitt Romney not to bomb her. Funny how that works. |
| ______________________________ [Oct 11,2012 8:47am - ark ""] Big%20bag%20of%20assorted%20nigger%20parts said: OBlackguy added more to the US defecit in 3 years than warmongering Bush did in 8 years. that's false: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/st...s-barack-obama-has-doubled-deficit/ http://factcheck.org/2012/09/obamas-deficit-dodge/ |
| _____________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 10:14am - eyeroller ""] ^ That second link supports the claim. Bush added 4.7 in 8 years. Obama added 5.2 as of September 30th. |
| ___________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 11:06am - ShadowSD ""] Whichever version of the figures someone accepts on the relative amounts, one thing no one can dispute is that the Obama amount came mostly from Bush policies. The policies passed in the five years when Bush and Republicans controlled Congress (wars, defense hikes, Medicare D, and tax cuts) cost more than any government policies from any other five year period in world history - several trillion dollars and counting in the last ten years - costing several times more than all the programs Obama has proposed and then enacted combined (which AT BEST amount to no more than a trillion or two over the next ten years, if even that). There's also the fact that deficit reduction attempts by last two Presidents in the last decade amount to... Bush admin: "Deficits don't matter" Obama admin: $124B deficit cuts from the health care law, $126B Pentagon deficit cuts, $1.2T sequestration deficit cuts, $4T deficit cut deal nearly reached but R House Speaker bails Looking at that comparison, who is clearly making an effort on the deficit and who isn't? Does anyone remember deficit reduction efforts by the last administration? Ever? Google 'Bush "deficit cuts"' and see for yourself; be prepared to read one article about his father, and another where the article describes the deficit cuts being proposed as not credible. If only Republicans would dump the supply side crack smoking and go back to a Ron Paul or even Bob Dole traditional Republican budget instinct of caring about numbers instead of just denying them. What we all have to remember in this election was that there was another Presidential candidate, aside from Mitt Romney in last week's debate, who swore up and down in the Presidential debates that he wasn't going to cut taxes for the rich really and he wouldn't add to the deficit at all really, despite the plan he had always been pushing. It was Bush in 2000. What was that old saying he later butchered about not being fooled twice? |
| ___________________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 11:17am - largefreakatzero ""] Fuck both of these clowns. http://www.lp.org/ |
| _______________________________ [Oct 11,2012 11:41am - ark ""] largefreakatzero said:Fuck both of these clowns. http://praxeology.net/all-left.htm |
| _______________________________ [Oct 11,2012 11:43am - ark ""] fully support voting for Gary Johnson. |
| _______________________________ [Oct 11,2012 11:44am - ark ""] shadows posts have real substance here, well done |
| __________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 7:39pm - ShadowSD ""] Thanks. One other thing to back up my point that most Obama spending comes from Bush policies, here are the hard numbers (in a clear straightforward way without relying on any charts that can be spun): Big%20bag%20of%20assorted%20nigger%20parts said:TRILLIONS of dollars in "stimulus" between two rounds of quantitative easing (with a third one planned, not added in yet!), big bank bailouts, and possibly worst of all (?) the billions upon billions given to other countries, including countries that would be very happy to see Americans die and have said so (Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, every other gasolineistan). Where'd trillions of dollars go? Besides many billions to his friends, you know OK, let's go exactly by the policies you just listed, using only raw numbers. Stimulus cost $833B. Quantitative easing cost $0 since the Fed creates new money (bad for inflation as Ron Paul has pointed out, but taking no money from the treasury: "the central bank does not use taxpayer money to buy bonds.") The bank bailouts cost $42B after all the banks have paid back. The auto bailouts cost $25B after all the auto companies have paid back. Foreign aid (having gone up from about $13B a year under Bush on average to $20B under Obama last year) adds up to an Obama increase of $70B over comparable ten year periods. Solyndra was given considerably less than $1B in government money ($535M to be exact) but for the sake of easy math let's say $1B. $833B + $42B + $25B + $70B + $1B= $971B $4T (Cost Of Bush Wars Over Ten Years) + $2.9T (Cost of Bush Tax Cuts Over Ten Years) + $1.25T (Cost of Bush's Medicare D over ten years) = $8.15T How is there any comparison? How can a Republican who doesn't denounce the Bush fiscal policies as a failure and credibly plan to do things differently on spending even be considered seriously as a candidate? |
| ___________________________________________________________ [Oct 11,2012 8:03pm - Big bag of assorted nigger parts ""] ShadowSD said: Big%20bag%20of%20assorted%20nigger%20parts said:TRILLIONS of dollars in "stimulus" between two rounds of quantitative easing (with a third one planned, not added in yet!), big bank bailouts, and possibly worst of all (?) the billions upon billions given to other countries, including countries that would be very happy to see Americans die and have said so (Egypt, Libya, Pakistan, every other gasolineistan). Where'd trillions of dollars go? Besides many billions to his friends, you know Quantitative easing cost $0 since the Fed creates new money (bad for inflation as Ron Paul has pointed out, but taking no money from the treasury: "the central bank does not use taxpayer money to buy bonds.") Quantitative easing means the Fed manufactured trillions of dollars. Not billions, trillions. 1) That's not free. 2) The radical devaluation of the dollar is rampant. Let's say you have a copy of whatever gay record is "rare" this week, it happens to be worth a certain amount of money. Now let's have the label manufacture a few trillion identical copies. How much is your record worth now? Here is a cuddly sarcastic cartoon to say some things relevant to the topic that you're going to disagree with (I'm too stupid to embed vids, sorry - Tips welcomed): http://youtu.be/PTUY16CkS-k For that matter, the Fed's printing of money is a long-standing nightmare. Here's a source you're going to disagree with, but should be read anyway, if only just to know it's out there: http://theintelhub.com/2012/09/02/audit-of...als-16-trillion-in-secret-bailouts/ And while we're at it, 9/11 will forever outshadow 9/10. Yup, it was one fucking day prior that Donald Rumsfeld announced that $2.6 trillion was missing from the Pentagon. Luckily, a fucking airplane hit the business office of the Pentagon the next day, oopsiedaisy. S'ok, the Fed will print more, right? Bacon is awesome, I'm glad to hear you enjoy it. I hope I didn't fuck up the quotes, apologies if so. |
| _______________________________ [Oct 12,2012 10:15am - ark ""] the fed is an abomination, 9/11 was an inside job, and bernie sanders for president. |
| _____________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 10:17am - arilliusbm ""] ANYONE THAT BUYS THE OFFICIAL STORY OF 9/11 IS NO FRIEND OF MINE |
| ___________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 10:32am - ShadowSD ""] The whole argument against printing more money is that it's too tempting because while it takes no previously existing funds out of the Treasury and SEEMS free and easy, it causes inflation and economic downturns in the long run, downturns and job losses which then reduce taxpayer revenue to the government. That's a great reason to look at "economic downturns" on the deficit chart above and blame the Fed for those losses if you believe that argument, absolutely; it's not a reason to count those losses twice by counting the printed money as coming out of previously existing Treasury bills when it didn't. The only material cost of printing money aside from future inflation/downturns - a serious concern that you make a good point about - is a few bucks of ink and paper already in the budget every year for the Treasury Department. I'll put it more simply: in your example with the record, you're right except one thing, the analogy to creating new money only works if the person created the record (instead of buying it) and expected it to have a certain value being the only copy in existence; the devalued record after over-mass-production {I guess by some third party who somehow manages to copyright all but the original copy, work with me here} would mean the asset (the original copy of the record) was worth that much less, but it wouldn't mean the person should think about their bank balance and deduct what they initially thought selling their copy of the record had been worth, does it? How would that make sense? The only cost in their budget math was the already factored in cost of making the record in the first place (the ink and paper for the printed money in the analogy). While the excessive mass production was clearly bad for the person in the long term as it cost them something in loss of asset value, it still doesn't make sense to deduct the prospective value of an asset from your budget math going forwards, because that's too speculative to even function (since markets in real time will also affect the value of assets/currency at any given moment). Your case is one you can only even begin to make comparing time periods (and subsequent inflation rates) retroactively and from a considerable distance; deducting newly printed currency as hard numbers in a prospective budget analysis is impossible out of the gate. But, hey let's say for the sake of argument we do it your way anyway and add quantitative easing to the easy budget arithmetic I posted above despite all of that: The Federal Reserve under Bush spent $800B on QE1. The Federal Reserve under Obama spent $600B on QE1 and $600B on QE2, let's speculate QE3 is the same. Updated spending totals: $833B + $42B + $25B + $70B + $1B + $1.8T= $2.77T Obama policies $4T + $2.9T + $1.25T + $800B = $8.95T Bush policies Of course, that's not including one other multitrillion Bush item: defense spending hikes other than the wars, which consists of items like the missing $2.6T from the Pentagon you correctly pointed out - to which there is no comparable large Obama figure missing from the equation; the health care law cost of $1.7B barely changes the overall totals to Obama policies $2.79T, Bush policies $8.95T. (That's giving no credit - zero - in those figures for any of the Obama deficit reduction policies - health care/defense/sequester - which had they been included cut the cost of his policies $1.5T to $1.29T) Am I leaving anything out? I want to be absolutely fair here. If there's a giant Obama policy spending item or Bush deficit reduction success we're somehow overlooking, let's add it in. So far, counting quantitative easing and if we ignore Obama deficit reduction as well as the trillions you mentioned Rumsfeld lost at the Pentagon, we're still at $2.79T Obama policies v. $8.95T Bush policies. |
| _____________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 11:42am - eyeroller ""] ShadowSD said: deducting newly printed currency as hard numbers in a prospective budget analysis is impossible out of the gate. But isn't that the point? They're creating fiat money - Just printing it, with the expectation that it's all "worth" the same. |
| _______________________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 12:44pm - BobNOMAAMRooney nli ""] ITT: Serious economic discussions from people who spend their food budget on NWN reissues of albums they already own. |
| ____________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 1:35pm - eyeroller ""] GBK > Obama |
| ______________________________ [Oct 12,2012 1:37pm - ark ""] anything > discussing politics with regular random assholes (love you guys) |
| ______________________________ [Oct 12,2012 1:38pm - ark ""] ark said:but high income people still pay a higher tax rate, which is out of balance with what the federal government wants to spend money on. oops, i meant higher incomes pay a lower tax rate, across the board. |
| _________________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 3:02pm - GET_ON_WITH_IT ""] [img] |
| __________________________________ [Oct 12,2012 3:07pm - ShadowSD ""] eyeroller said:But isn't that the point? They're creating fiat money - Just printing it, with the expectation that it's all "worth" the same. Not the expectation that it's all worth the same (that would require an inflation rate of precisely 0% over years which is impossible since it's never exactly zero), but they do it with the expectation that any economic upturns created by the spending outweighs any downturns caused by the eventual inflation. Whether they're right or wrong on that is a really important debate, and not exactly a simple thing to prove or disprove even in hindsight; in addition, say a person thinks its the right approach to some degree, then at what point are there diminishing returns on such an approach? Where's the line? Has the Fed crossed that line by printing TOO much? On the other side, does risking any inflation at all always mean a worse fate than any federal reserve stimulation no matter how bad the economy is? If not, then where's the line there? Tricky stuff, and I don't claim to have all the answers on that rubix cube. The 2008 economic crash isn't far enough in the rear view mirror to judge the long-term consequences of how the Fed has reacted with full certainty, since we can't see what inflation will be in five or ten years to know whether doubling the Dow and turning job losses into gains within a year or so after the first QE and the stimulus was worth the price. The results of how we got out of the Great Depression do make a more complete and convincing case for Keynesian economics in responding to a downturn, but of course not everyone agrees with even that, and even if one does, then - like I said- where's the line? And how do you EVER prove or disprove exactly where that line even is? Fuck. All I'm saying for certain is that abstract prospective speculation can't be part of a budget projection that uses only hard numbers (for the same reason I can't play x notes on my guitar for you unless I know for certain what number that x represents). We know this especially well since failing to understand that was the same reason for the bank mortgage swap mess which crashed the economy: credit default swaps inserted abstract prospective speculation into projections that were supposed to be based on hard numbers. That's why including the costs and effects of QE prospectively as part of a ten year comparison of policy effects initiated by different Presidents is a pretty haphazard proposition. Nonetheless, even when I played devil's advocate and included the implausibly worst case scenario into the arithmetic anyway - that the cost of all QE would be as much to the economy through inflation in the long term as the trillions of new money that were created, and assuming zero dollars economic benefit from the spending to counterbalance that - it still barely makes a dent in the ratio between how much each admin's policies cost v. the other. |
| __________________________________ [Oct 13,2012 7:40am - ShadowSD ""] This monetary policy stuff is important and all, but it does get pretty fucking dry doesn't it... Get on with it indeed: bennyhillifier |