US fiscal cliff deal 'reached'

[Exquisition]

Looks like the free world can all breath easily.

Oh thank you USA. God bless you and all who sail in you. We are all so grateful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20879174

 

[LillyO]

No problem!

No need to thank us again when we start this all over again in a few weeks.

Hopefully we will have come up with a different name, fiscal cliff was getting annoying.

 

[ms_ann_thrope]

The deal is we are changing our name to South Canada.

 

[JackLuis]

They saved the 3% their taxes, now to Gut the Social safety net!

The Kentucky Gerbil will now become intransigent again.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Strictly a short term solution. If the profligate spending continues, the US will still be down the tubes before Obama's four years are up.

 

[unregistered]

 

[John Doe]

Did you bring up this subject just to express how little you care about it? That makes you look like a massive tool.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Was there a vote?

I believe there will be one tomorrow or Wednesday.

 

[fgarvb1]

More like a date to a Gang bang.

Guess who getting fucked.

 

[girlsmiley]

Looks like the free world can all breath easily.

Oh thank you USA. God bless you and all who sail in you. We are all so grateful.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20879174

...

Looks like the free world needs to go back to school and learn the difference between breath and breathe.

 

[KingOrfeo]

More like a date to a Gang bang.

Guess who getting fucked.

Not you. Go back to sleep.

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

Biden, evidently in good spirits after playing a central role in crafting the deal, said little on his way into or out of a roughly one hour and 45 minute meeting behind closed doors with Senate Democrats. "Happy New Year," he said on the way in. Asked on the way out what his chief selling point had been, the vice president reportedly replied: "Me."

Ha. Awesome.

 

[mercury14]

So the bill is tax hikes for the rich (over 400/450) and no cuts? And this is going to pass the house that just rejected tax hikes for those making over $1 million WITH cuts?

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This ship will not, cannot sink!


We have rearranged the deck chairs and the band has struck up a lively tune!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

From Russia, with love:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_socialist_mind_game_a_brief_manual.html

xoxoxoxo

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

This says iit probably better than I have been saying it:

President Obama Will Never Have a Plan
Christopher Chantrill, The American Thinker
January 1, 2013

Now I get it. I get the bone-deep mendacity of President Obama's politics. Here is the money quote from from President Obama's Meet the Press interview on Sunday.

GREGORY: "Would you commit to that first year of your second term getting significant [entitlement] reform done?" ...

OBAMA: "David, I want to be very clear. You are not only going to cut your way to prosperity. One of the fallacies I think that has been promoted is this notion that deficit reduction is only a matter of cutting programs that are really important to seniors, students and so forth. That has to be part of the mix, but what I ran on and what the American people elected me to do was to put forward a balanced approach. To make sure that there's shared sacrifice. ... And it is very difficult for me to say to a senior citizen or a student or a mom with a disabled kid, 'You are going to have to do with less but we're not going to ask millionaires and billionaires to do more.'"

You see what the president is doing here. He is preparing the battlefield for the day, a year from now or a decade from now, when real entitlement cuts cannot be kicked down the road for another day. He wants the rank-and-file Democratic voter to be just as shocked and outraged on that day as the Wisconsin demonstrators of 2011 and the Michigan union demonstrators of 2012.

You don't hear a peep out of the president about the need for a plan to reform entitlements, and you never will. Tweets Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA): "The latest unacceptable Republican offer would mean more pain for the middle class, poor & seniors - and more giveaways to the wealthiest." No context, no attempt to prepare Democratic voters for the future. Just simple class warfare.

The fact is, as the president and Sen. Boxer well know, the long-term prognosis for the federal government's finances is lousy. And the reason is the big entitlement programs. That's why I created usfederalbudget.us, Mr. President. I wanted any American with half a brain to be able to look at today's government spending data and see that, out of the federal government's total $3.8 trillion in spending this year, about $0.9 trillion goes to government pensions and $0.9 trillion to government health care. That's where the money is.

The bottom line for you, Mr. President, ought to be this. When the money runs out Democratic voters will get hurt the most. You'd think that you would want to level with them, since you care about those moms and their disabled kids so much.

I have to admit, Mr. President, that I had an epiphany last week about people like you while I was writing a chapter in my American Manifesto about governments as freebooters and government supporters as freeloaders. I was thinking about the difference between the landed magnates, the ruling class of the feudal era, and the educated class, the ruling class of the welfare-state era. I reckoned that the landed warrior class was a natural ruling class because, whatever their arrogance, their arms might protected the peasants from looting by Vikings and neighboring states. But what makes today's educated class so special?

Then I figured it out. Back in the middle of the 19th century, things were getting better for the poor for the first time ever, what with the textile revolution and the railway revolution and steamships and all. But suppose you were a political activist, thirsting for power and meaning. What's the point of an economy that's delivering real improvement to the working man, raising the poor out of indigence, and making national figures out of textile and railroad barons, if it doesn't mean money, power, and the love of beautiful women for people like you?

That's when Karl Marx had his brilliant idea. Why not divide the masters from the workers, and win votes from the workers by demonizing the masters and plundering their wealth? Why not tell the capitalists "you didn't build that"? Divide and conquer. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong, Mr. President, is Reynolds's Law. "Things that can't go on forever, won't. Debt that can't be repaid, won't be. Promises that can't be kept, won't be." What could go wrong is that the educated ruling class would make a mess of everything it meddled with: health care, pensions, education, housing, green energy, the dollar. For what?

Democratic politicians are never going to come up with an entitlement reform plan and warn their senior voters and their moms with disabled kids. When the Democratic voters are reduced to eating the paint off the walls, they will want to be able to say that the Republicans did it.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

We Are All Patriot Pragmatists Now
Doug Mainwaring, The American Thinker
January 1, 2013

On February 7, 2009, just a few weeks after Barack Obama's inauguration, Newsweek Magazine's cover proclaimed, "We Are All Socialists Now." The headline heralded the new trajectory of the nation, foretelling the passage of massive spending bills, titanic government growth, and most importantly, legislation intended to re-engineer American society.

In the beginning, there was TARP (the type of bipartisan effort that is always wildly acclaimed by the media), enacted in the waning days of the Bush Administration. Then: The stimulus package, Obamacare, auto company bailouts, quantitative easing, cap and trade, card check, Dodd-Frank -- these represent major efforts of the Obama Administration, working in conjunction with the Democrat-dominated 111th Congress. Some became law; others mercifully died before reaching 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

When Tea Party sentiment sent a tidal wave of fiscally conservative legislators to Capitol Hill in 2010, the White House changed its tack, and began its work of reshaping society through executive fiat.

Sweeping transformation -- which had been promised in 2008 amid a profusion of Greek columns and Stars and Stripes, evoking an aura of democracy -- was now being accomplished behind closed doors, circumventing the People's House.

The Executive Branch launched a massive expansion of EPA regulations, condemning reliable American energy sources and jobs while promoting pie in the sky green energy and jobs in their stead. And a year ago, when Health and Human Services announced the contraceptive mandate as part of Obamacare, it was clear to many that this was a shot across the bow at religious liberty, the very bedrock of the American Idea.

This type of raw power exercised by the Executive Branch has felt oddly foreign, if not dictatorial. And now, elected for a second term, the hubris of the President is returning, demonstrated very clearly in his non-negotiations regarding the fiscal cliff.

A sinking feeling has settled in the gut of many Americans:

...

We stand at a crossroads: Either we collectively raise a white flag and passively yield a greater share of our personal, economic and religious liberty to the monstrous Washington Leviathan, or we stand our ground and resist.

It's time to face facts, to roll up our sleeves, to make difficult decisions and choose to sacrifice for the common good of this nation. What else can we do? Will our children and grandchildren forgive us our selfishness in loading them with backbreaking, heartbreaking debt? Can we really justify continuing on as smug, entitled adults, ignoring the disaster our current trajectory guarantees?

Like the greatest generation which preceeded us, and the generations before them which fought world, civil and revolutionary wars to advance and protect the idea of America and the American experience, it is time for our generation to stop taking her for granted and work hard to protect the freedoms and prosperity of our progeny.

From here on through to the foreseeable future, it's Main Street versus Washington's ruling class; It's grassroots and common sense versus the machine of the statists, who, whether Republican or Democrat, share in common their contempt and disregard for those who elected them to power.

We are all Patriot Pragmatists Now. Not by choice, but by absolute necessity.

 

[mercury14]

AJ rings in the new year by spamming other people's thoughts.

"And nothing changes... On New Year's Day"....

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

 

[ChinaBandit]

So the bill is tax hikes for the rich (over 400/450) and no cuts? And this is going to pass the house that just rejected tax hikes for those making over $1 million WITH cuts?

Happy New Year Merc.

May you cross the bridge into the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky and enjoy Newport on the Levy.

However, I don't consider an annual income of US$400K "rich." Sorry.

 

[mercury14]

Happy New Year Merc.

May you cross the bridge into the Great Commonwealth of Kentucky and enjoy Newport on the Levy.

However, I don't consider an annual income of US$400K "rich." Sorry.

I consider it well into upper middle class. My wife and I exceed that if you count our investment income and I don't feel rich. But still, that's the income of more than eight average Americans so the argument could be made that 400k is rich.

 

[butters]

so . . . the richest get to keep their money, the poorest get to keep their benefits (for now), and the money still has to be found someplace so there're gonna be some drastic cuts someplace else?

 

[QueenLevitra]

Foreign aid.

There goes your dole.

 

[ChinaBandit]

Spending cuts are essential.

It's a fallacy to believe that the Obama plan(s) to increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans comes anywhere near resolving the debt issue. I am not suggesting that you believe that but, alas, many Americans do.

Of course, every politician has a unique constituency and the sacred cow that comes with it.

It is a mess to say the least.