What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[IrezumiKiss]

Anyone not have Jen's alts on iggy?

NeverEndingMe
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NeverEndingMe
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Where's David_Clunk when you really need him?

 

[NeverEndingMe]

Where's David_Clunk when you really need him?

...awe, did you find a new lover? were you dumped? so sad

go out and spend some of that welfare check

 

[mercury14]

Someone can't take a hint.


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[NeverEndingMe]

get a job dumb ass, stop being a burden on society

Someone can't take a hint.


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[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Yeah, I never, EVER post my own thoughts:

In answer to some of your incredulity, and other less than polite remarks, at my contention that the cost of a progressive tax on the rich gets passed on to those percentiles below them, let us examine the cost of attacking the income wealth of the top percentile (or two) using one million dollars of income and a tax rate of 40%, a fair number, for these hypothetical rich are still earning $600,000 dollars a year and one can easily argue that this amount still provides a moderate and comfortable lifestyle, not much different than one million dollars annually would provide and still feel contented in the honor and nobility of his purpose (especially if one earns $60,000 a year). We can then examine what happens when this is done to the wealthy, and there are going to be more than one type of these wealthy, which demands the examination of these cases somewhat separately. But let us first briefly describe what happens to the $400,000 in taxes in every scenario, for it will be the one constant. That confiscated wealth goes to the central government where an immediate indirect and additional tax of 40% is applied to it for overhead ($160,000, leaving $240,000 for disbursement) which consists of the pay and benefits for bureaucrats, politicians and staff as well as offices and supplies. After that the money is dispersed politically, mainly for the support of voting blocks and, admittedly, some small portion of it will actually go to good works, that is ostensibly why the tax was demanded, although there is a case that can be made for its purpose to merely be assuaging the naked jealousy found in some segments of the citizenry, that is just the chance one takes with government charity.

The wealthy that will obviously be the ones we disdain the most are the idle wealthy, those who did not earn it, those living on a trust and when we hit them with a high tax, we have the one special case where they cannot directly pass on the cost to someone else, but once past the broken window (Bastiat), we see that it is also money that they will now neither be investing wisely or spending wastefully in the bars, restaurants, theaters, and bazaars which means it will not go directly into the hands of barkeeps, waiters, sellers, artists, owners, landlords and banks so we see that, in effect, the hidden cost of taxation has been passed on to the economy by way of lowered receipts to the lower percentiles of wealth.

The wealthy who do nothing but create wealth by investing also greatly earn our misdirected ire but when more wealth is taken from this class, money is confiscated that otherwise would be invested with the knowledge and research to reduce risk and ensure profit, an activity which enriches the average citizen by providing the capital for the manufacture of goods and establishment of services which government cannot do efficiently, for it is hampered by the overwhelming dictate of politics and the need to choose political outcomes beneficial to career and party, investment capital is taken from the economy.

The same goes for the writer of books, an artisan, performer or creator of films except that they also have the option of raising the price of their work, regrettably maybe losing some sales, and robbing some unfortunates of culture, art and entertainment, but still able to make more money and thus taxing the consumers of art and culture for their desired comforts. Another outcome produced from the higher wealth tax would be a reduction of income that might have been invested in the future projects or products of the artist or other such craftsmen and that too becomes an unseen tax economically, for investment capital is what drives the surplus and products that create and meet consumer demand.

The small business person (or the corporation) along with the above options, raising prices and reducing investment in his own venture or those of others, has further the ability to spread the tax by lowering dividend payments to investors and not hiring workers or laying off workers to reduce costs and this, clearly, becomes another of the hidden taxes on the economy.

For the above examples we have also one other option, open to each one, mobility; they can simply desert the economy and contribute nothing to the wealth of the nation or business owners can move significant portions of their operations to nations with easier tax burdens and enrich the economies of those nations as we so often see in the United States as businesses flee from state to state when local taxes work to lose them their competitive advantage.

Now for those few of no great ambition or who have embraced and condoned the looting in the spirit of the ignoble morality adopted by the myopic altruism of the plundering mob who decides to live on the $600,000 and be contented, that is fine, there is nothing purely shameful about sacrificing in the name of doing good and accepting less than one is worth for the sake of appeasing the political class and the beneficiaries of their largess, but they still indirectly spread the invisible tax by not investing, not spending, and not creating more surplus as do the members of the above examples who want more value in their lives.

In this we see clearly that raising taxes on wealth hurts the average citizen by reducing his employment opportunity, reducing his receipts and reducing the capital available to advance himself by the creation of a business, be it goods or services (as well as, I would like to add ancillarily, depriving the wealthy of a greater chance to do good works on their own accord without another tax being applied to the confiscated tax monies by the trappings of the political class before it is used to purchase the voting loyalty of selected constituencies), because he has to absorb the effects of the tax, if not the actual cost of the tax, and many times it is clear that it is both the tax and the unseen consequences of the tax that the general citizenry must bear. A higher income tax on the wealthy is a visible and self-righteous symbol to the envious and covetous wrapped in the false nobility and morality of fairness, but it places an invisible burden upon them in a myriad of ways unseen and misunderstood so that if and when they seek to work themselves into the ranks of the rich, they cannot for they have taxed away their very ability to do so in the sole name of fairness.

Ceterum autem censeo, Socialisem esse delendam!

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Of course when I do, the same crowd starts jumping up and down screaming about facts and links...


... or how they ignore anything that looks like sigline material...

__________________
There is black and white, and if you refuse to believe that, then you will accept grey and let me tell you gray tends to black for when you say ∃ of anything is a good function of government then ∃ is everything ¬∀ and while you may be able to advocate for ∃ you won't be allowed to define it and in this manner its limit will be ∀ for ∑f(∪∃)i [i=from you to the total population] will never tend to ∅ by definition so it is easy to see that it is, indeed, an ∀ or ∅ when it comes to government. (Now, the ∑f(∩∃)i [i=from you to the total population] will tend to ∅ but that is politically unattainable for the obvious reason that the more ∃ is defined, the smaller the ∩∃ becomes.)
A_J, the Stupid

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Meanwhile as this thread approaches its second birthday, all the rw liars that I parrot turned out to be quite correct in their observations and the economic team that gave us this mess did not let the doors hit them on the ass as they fled back to the forgiving climes of academia where they can "explain" to their students where it all went wrong...

It was Ike, it was Nixon, it was Ford, it was Reagan, it was Bush, it was Bush again...

They have all their facts ready to go!



__________________
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.
Victor Davis Hanson

 

[NeverEndingMe]

what we have to remember, is that people like Merc, UD, Sean ARE government workers. they are consumers of Tax Payer money

they don't see any problems with all this entitlement spending.

to them, this is a lack of "taxes"

Meanwhile as this thread approaches its second birthday, all the rw liars that I parrot turned out to be quite correct in their observations and the economic team that gave us this mess did not let the doors hit them on the ass as they fled back to the forgiving climes of academia where they can "explain" to their students where it all went wrong...

It was Ike, it was Nixon, it was Ford, it was Reagan, it was Bush, it was Bush again...

They have all their facts ready to go!



__________________
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.
Victor Davis Hanson

 

[busybody..]

The happiest man in America

is

JIMMY CARTER

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Mitt Romney



By continually forcing the press and America to look at him and admire his greatness, magnanimity, and grandeur, Obama gives Mitt a press pass; that and all the time they have to spend on fact-checking Michelle and Sarah...




Hell, even the FLOTUS is starting to have a hard time of getting any air time!

Is it harvest time yet on the White House lawn?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

More right wing lies and parroting..

Economy

The consumer driven economy is weakening and its ability to drive prosperity is now in serious question. In general, retail sales forecasts are softening and a weak Q4 2011 and Q1 2012 now seems to be a serious possibility. Some forecasters are predicting retail sales to shrink by over 3% for December 2011 and January 2012.
This make sense when early signs of slack demand is reflected in flaccid back to school sales. Many retailers are reporting sales that are flat-lining and are having to take significant mark downs to move already thin inventories. The National Retail Federation states:

As they prepare for their annual back-to-school shopping trip, parents this year will make children scour their closets before agreeing to buy any new jeans, pencils or backpacks. According to NRF's 2011 Back-to-School survey conducted by BIGresearch, families with children in grades K-12 will spend an average of $603.63 on apparel, school supplies and electronics, within a few dollars of last year's $606.40 average. Total spending on grades K-12 is expected to reach $22.8 billion.*
For many retail businesses, flat is the new up, but trying to play up the positive of low growth by sloganeering is really unhelpful. We need actual sustained and real growth, not bumping along the bottom. Add into the mix that a slow down in government spending may create a further downdraft in sales.

Consumer Debt

Yet, more trouble is coming along. A recent report from Bloomberg reports that ever larger numbers of citizens are racking up debt to just keep food on the table and provisions on the shelf. The bottom line is that citizens are turning to their last source of revenue- debt- in order to drive and feed their families. Debt to fund a boat is an act of stupidity. Debt to feed your family is an act of desperation.

Energy Costs

Both West Texas Crude and Brent are climbing back up, and gasoline prices will soon follow. Fuel prices are going to recover from the dip we saw a few weeks ago. While they may not rocket to the prices seen just before the start of the summer, anything near $4.00 a gallon is a hardship and will drain energy from the economy.
After falling to $3.54 a gallon from May's $3.98 peak, prices have unexpectedly surged the past two weeks to a national average of almost $3.70 - a dollar higher than levels a year ago.

How much further they will climb depends upon demand and actions by our administration. Opening up exploration and releasing permits would drive the price of crude down considerably.

Unemployment

Mass layoffs are continuing. Cisco, Borders, Lockheed Martin, Perkins, and many others are undergoing massive restructuring and laying off employees. Now we have NASA releasing thousands of experienced engineers. Many hospitals and health care organizations are furiously cutting staff and consolidating- circling the wagons in anticipation of the ObamaCare debacle that is almost here. Get ready for the health care shortage that is going to hit us, partially due to a reduction in experienced professionals.

Housing

Housing is still not healthy. The Case-Shiller index shows no real improvement. What is worse is the fact that we have deliberately forced the cost of lending downward, making rates artificially low. Yet, these rates will, at some point, rise, and when they do, that's it. Game over. Our current 4.5% 30 year home loans are going to disappear when inflation appears, and when the risk of devalued assets goes up, banks must charge more to cover this erosion in purchasing power of the dollar. Right now a 10 year T Bond is a little under 3%, but it is not hard to imagine a scenario where it raises to 5% . That translates, roughly, into a 7% (or more) 30 year mortgage. Able to afford less house, home prices will drop another 15% or more. To add insult to injury, while housing prices are dropping, closing costs and fees are going up substantially. In other words it will take longer and cost more money to sell your home.

Peak Government

Peak Government. That is what we have been witnesses to, and are now seeing it collapse.

Exhausted financially, addicted to ruinous borrowing, bloated by byzantine bureaucratic control of too many aspects of life, the ocean of borrowed money has dried up, leaving big government stranded ashore like a beached whale in August. Government has simply outstripped the ability of its citizens to pay for the services being provided. The tools it has used in the past are no longer very effective. We got here by having too much debt. The solution is less debt, not more. We are left with very narrow choices. As a clear example of this, our central bank- the Federal Reserve has painted itself into a corner.

As for the Fed, they are "checkmated," Dent says, suggesting the Ben Bernanke & Co. are damned if they do QE3 -- because the bond market will freak out -- and damned if they don't -- because the economy and financial markets are so dependent on easy money.

Hugh de Payns
The American Thinker

Now you may continue countering with your own extra special free-form independent thoughts and your carefully culled facts and pointing out that Bush is to blaim for Obama's failure...
__________________
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.
Victor Davis Hanson

 

[NeverEndingMe]

RIM just let go of another 2,000 people

why do people like RichardDaily, UD, Merc, Sean...and the many others want America to become the next Greece?

what happened to hard working American's? where did they all go?

Hugh de Payns
The American Thinker

Now you may continue countering with your own extra special free-form independent thoughts and your carefully culled facts and pointing out that Bush is to blaim for Obama's failure...
__________________
Obama, you see, is our nemesis. He is a totem, the logical manifestation of a warped media, the reification of some crazy — and arrogant — ideas about redistributive politics, the statist economy, and cultural and social life that permeated American life the last forty years. He is the president with a 1,000 faces that we have all seen at work, on TV, throughout American life, and at some point the odds determined that we had to have a rendezvous with him— perhaps a catharsis to teach us the wages of Keynesian debt, of a social policy contrary to human nature with its equality of result doctrines, of an all-powerful, all-growing unaccountable government, of the now hip ambiguity about past American protocols and history. Obama is the exaggeration of all the dubious ideas that arose since the 1960s — brought to fruition on his watch, delivered by mellifluous cadences by an untouchable persona.

In fact, a Barack Obama was long overdue. Had he not appeared out of nowhere in 2008, we would have surely had to invent him.
Victor Davis Hanson

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Some mindless rw economist... It's sure over my head... merc might be the only one capable of following it since he has already brilliantly proved that government has nto been growing or hiring...

My thesis here is that these seemingly levelheaded realists are the ones who have failed to perceive correctly the ongoing growth of government.[1] A major reason for their failure is their reliance on certain conventional measures of the size and growth of government. Some of these measures have a built-in tendency to exhibit deceleration even when a more compelling representation displays continuing steady growth. Often the conventional measures miss the growth of government because it has been diverted into channels beyond the scope of their measurement.

To some extent, governments have been growing in important but unmeasured or poorly measured ways all along, and they continue to grow in these ways, perhaps more menacingly than ever before. Off-budget spending, for example, is a well-known resort of political scoundrels, but it is only one example among many of how governments employ hard-to-measure means to achieve their usual ends, especially when tax revolts, formal spending limits, or borrowing limitations frustrate their chronic desire to spend at a greater rate.

Government's Share of Gross Domestic Product

The most common measure of the size of government is the amount of government spending relative to gross domestic product (GDP). In a recent monograph on the growth of government, for example, Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht present much of their data in the form of government-spending variables relative to GDP. A major theme of their book is "Government spending [measured in this way] increased most rapidly until about 1980. Since the early 1980s, it has been growing more slowly and in some instances has even declined" (p. 3).

Now, the first thing to notice is that a surefire way to make nearly any economic magnitude appear small is to divide it by GDP, because the latter, which purports to be the total value at market prices of all final goods and services produced within a country in a year, is always an enormous dollar (or euro or peso or other currency unit) amount. Government spending of $2,855,200,000,000, as in the United States in fiscal year 2001, seems to be an astronomical amount, but just divide it by the value of GDP and, voilà, it is a mere 28 percent — surely nothing to be alarmed about, especially in comparison with corresponding figures for many European countries that exceed 50 percent.[2]

The next thing to notice is that because government spending for currently produced final goods and services is itself a component of GDP, the ratio of the former to the latter is immediately compromised. Any addition to such government spending increases the denominator as well as the numerator of the ratio. Suppose that in year one the government spends $100 dollars for currently produced final goods and services, and the GDP in that year is $500. Now suppose that in year two the government spends twice as much — that is, it increases its purchase amount by 100 percent — but nothing else changes. In year two, the government's share of GDP will be 33.33 percent (or $200/$600), as compared to 20 percent in year one. An analyst focusing on the government's spending share concludes, then, that government has grown not by 100 percent, as it plainly has by construction, but only by 66.66 percent (that is, [(33.33/20) − 1] × 100). The greater the government's initial share is, the greater is the bias in moving from its absolute spending to the share concept to measure its growth. If government had begun with spending of $100 out of a GDP of $200, then doubled its purchase amount, other things being unchanged, it would have increased its spending share from 50 percent to 66.66 percent — a mere 33.33 percent growth.

Granted, many economically advanced countries have maintained a fairly steady government "exhaustive" share of GDP during the past couple decades, but this steadiness merely attests that the government's purchases of currently produced final goods and services have grown fully as fast as the sum of nongovernmental purchases of such goods and services during that period of substantial economic expansion, not that the government has become quiescent or stuck in the mud.

...

Of course, the really gigantic increases in government spending have most recently taken the form of transfers (including subsidies), which are not components of GDP and therefore do not give rise to exactly the same numerator-denominator bias that arises when government increases its purchases of currently produced final goods and services ("exhaustive" spending).

Transfer spending also, however, is commonly placed for purposes of analysis in relation to GDP, which then serves as a sort of "normalizer" or standard of comparison, and whenever this ratio is used, some of the same problems identified earlier arise again. Why, one might ask, should government's transfer spending be placed in a ratio to GDP rather than, say, in a ratio to population or some other base? And if the ratio to GDP remains constant, why, one might ask, should such constancy prevail?

That is, why should government's transfer spending increase whenever the economy's output of final goods and services increases? Indeed, such constancy would seem to betoken a kind of relative growth of government in its own right, inasmuch as people in a more productive economy presumably can get by more readily without government assistance; hence, as a rule, the ratio of transfers to GDP might be expected to fall in a growing economy rather than rise or even remain constant.

However this matter might be viewed, in reality the ratio has risen enormously in all the economically advanced countries during the past several decades, and it now stands at more than 20 percent on average for a group of 17 important industrial countries studied by Tanzi and Schuknecht, up from less than 10 percent as recently as 1960 (2000, p. 31).[3]

Increasingly, transfer spending is becoming recognized as the Godzilla that threatens to consume New York, Tokyo, Berlin, and nearly every other city on the planet. A few countries, such as Chile, have taken effective measures to deal with this looming threat to government fiscal viability, but so far most politicians in most countries have kept their heads planted firmly in the sand, ignoring everything beyond the next election, while the government's transfer spending has grown ever more bloated, and the severity of the adjustments that will have to be made — when the day of reckoning can no longer be postponed — has grown ever greater.

Government's Share of Employment

Government employment as a percentage of total employment has often served as an index of the size of government. This measure, too, has a built-in bias toward suggesting that the rate at which government is growing is decelerating over time even when government increases its share of employment by, say, one percentage point every year. Thus, for example, when government's employment share increases from 2 percent to 4 percent, the government grows by 100 percent, but when the share increases from 20 percent to 22 percent, gobbling up the same incremental proportion of total employment, the government grows by just 10 percent.

In the group of 17 advanced countries analyzed recently by Tanzi and Schuknecht, the government's average employment share increased from 5.2 percent in 1937 to 12.3 percent in 1960 to 18.4 percent in 1994 (2000, p. 26). The rate of increase of this ratio has declined during the past two decades in most countries, but one ought not to make too much of that deceleration. In the United States, increases in the amount of "contracting out" of government functions have led to a replacement of formal government employees by a growing "shadow" army of many millions of seemingly private employees — grantees, contractors, and consultants — but the latter are doing what they are doing only because the government arranges and pays for it to be done (Blumenthal 1979; Hanrahan 1983; Light 1999a, 1999b).

According to Paul Light's estimates, the US federal workforce is not the fewer than 2 million persons officially reported (as of 1996), but nearly 17 million persons — "and the count does not even include the full-time equivalent employment of the people who work on a part-time or temporary basis for Uncle Sam — for example, the 884,000 members of the military reserves," although it does include some 4.7 million federally funded workers already counted in the all-governments total as employees of state and local governments (1999a, p. 1).

Moreover, governments increasingly have established regulations that in effect require bona fide private parties to work for the government. Tanzi and Schuknecht themselves take note of such "quasi-fiscal policies," which they describe aptly as regulations that "become alternatives to taxing and spending" (2000, p. 203). In this recognition, they follow in a long line of analysts stretching back at least to Richard A. Posner in his capacity as the author of the 1971 article "Taxation by Regulation."

...

According to a recent summary of US federal regulation by Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.,

The 2001 Federal Register contained 64,431 pages.…
In 2001, 4,132 final rules were issued by agencies.…
Of the 4,509 regulations now in the works, 149 are "economically significant" rules that will have at least $100 million in economic impact. Those rules will impose at least $14.9 billion yearly in future off-budget costs.…
The costs of meeting the demands of off-budget social regulations were as high as $229 billion according to the Office of Management and Budget. A more broadly constructed competing estimate that includes economic regulatory costs and paperwork costs pegs regulatory expenditures at $854 billion in 2001, or 46 percent of all FY01 [fiscal year 2001] outlays. (2002, pp. 1–2)

The foregoing summary, shocking as it is, describes the regulatory burden being imposed at only the federal level of government. The state and local governments, as well as various international bodies, simultaneously continue to pour out endless streams of their own regulations, all of which entail resource costs and sacrifices of citizens' liberties.

Because the public has less awareness of the burdens imposed by these regulations, many of which remain obscure and indirect in their operation and effects, governments encounter even less resistance to their ongoing imposition of regulatory burdens than they encounter in their quest to collect greater revenue from explicit taxes laid on incomes, sales transactions, and property values.

So far, it seems that there is no natural limit to the number of regulations governments can and will impose. Hence, we are fast approaching a condition in which everything that is not forbidden is required, even as Americans, acting for all the world like faux-patriotic zombies, continue to reassure themselves incessantly that "it's a free country."[4]

For present purposes, the point is that people occupied with regulatory compliance are not truly privately employed. Instead, they are in effect stealth government servants, working not for their own ends but doing the bidding of their political masters. In the present Western world, then, nearly everybody is actually a government employee, but rather than getting a government paycheck for our efforts, we are required to pay the government for the privilege of our own serfdom and to bear the risk of prosecution and imprisonment should our unpaid work on the government's behalf prove unsatisfactory to our "employer."

http://mises.org/daily/5485/Contra-Conventional-Measures-of-the-Growth-of-Government

In 2010, we added 4,000+ pages of hidden costs of government to our economy...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

RIM just let go of another 2,000 people

why do people like RichardDaily, UD, Merc, Sean...and the many others want America to become the next Greece?

what happened to hard working American's? where did they all go?

Because they have a generational conceit that assumes they, being more technologically advanced, have evolved as great thinkers and are masters of government and policy and hence this time, it really will work and Capitalism (Life, Liberty and Property) will finally be vanquished and they will deliver us back to Eden.

Greece will only happen if we listen to the Tea Party.
__________________
Why can't Liberals (, Blue Dogs and Republican moderates) stomach the Tea Party?
Because it requires a strong Constitution!
A_J, the Stupid

 

[NeverEndingMe]

what, that Greece will fall? sure it will happen, if they don't get their spending under control. they need to cut entitlements, its just that simple

Because they have a generational conceit that assumes they, being more technologically advanced, have evolved as great thinkers and are masters of government and policy and hence this time, it really will work and Capitalism (Life, Liberty and Property) will finally be vanquished and they will deliver us back to Eden.

Greece will only happen if we listen to the Tea Party.
__________________
Why can't Liberals (, Blue Dogs and Republican moderates) stomach the Tea Party?
Because it requires a strong Constitution!
A_J, the Stupid

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Greece is going to fail.

It might take the Euro with it...

 

[koalabear]

U.S. GDP has increased by 4.26% from 2007 to 2010, according to data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the same period of time, the U.S. national debt has increased by 61.6%, according to the U.S. Treasury. Looking at these numbers, you don't need to be an economist to see that something is very, very wrong.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

He had to spend us out of the Bush recession before it became a depression...





When did you stop listening to NPR and side with the extremists and radicals?



Now our greatest danger is the Republicans won't let him spend more and keep our debt high. Debt does not matter. Everyone has debt. Everyone has car payments and a mortgage. You radicals just don't like the President because he wants to help the poor, the sick, the illegal, the young, the elderly, minorities, women, wild canyon burros, wolves, popcorn caribou, the beaches, the tides...,

 

[NeverEndingMe]

please...if obama was intelligent he would get the economy rolling. he has no clue on what do to. obama has never had a real job. obama has never been in a private sector employer or employee. he's a lost puppy dog

allowing people to live on unemployment for 4 years does nothing

allowing healthy people to live on welfare, only makes people slaves to government


do you support slavery?

He had to spend us out of the Bush recession before it became a depression...





When did you stop listening to NPR and side with the extremists and radicals?



Now our greatest danger is the Republicans won't let him spend more and keep our debt high. Debt does not matter. Everyone has debt. Everyone has car payments and a mortgage. You radicals just don't like the President because he wants to help the poor, the sick, the illegal, the young, the elderly, minorities, women, wild canyon burros, wolves, popcorn caribou, the beaches, the tides...,

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The Autopocalypse

In an effort to bring its global warming initiative back from the dead, the administration has announced that it wants automakers to raise the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, of their fleets from the 34.2 miles per gallon that it mandated in 2009 (which the companies are still scrambling to meet) to 56.2 mpg by 2025. Not a single car—big or small, hybrid or non-hybrid—currently delivers this kind of mileage (with the exception of electrics). But CAFE backers are pooh-poohing industry claims that these standards are unattainable. “Virtually every major improvement in U.S. fuel economy and emissions over the last quarter of a century started as a stringent government standard that automakers ... initially insisted was impossible to meet,” harrumphed a recent Detroit Free Press editorial. “Then the same companies turned their engineers loose and met or exceeded the threshold.”

Did they?

Not really. Rather, they unleashed armies of lobbyists on Washington to poke holes in the CAFE regime. For example, companies that don’t meet CAFE standards face fines. But the fines are so low that many luxury brands prefer to pay up rather than comply. Likewise, companies get CAFE credits, the auto equivalent of indulgences, for flex-fuel vehicles built with gasoline as well as ethanol tanks. Fitting them with both doesn’t add much to manufacturing cost, which is why carmakers happily churn them out even though everyone knows that few drivers ever use ethanol.

But to the extent that carmakers have complied with CAFE, it is less through radical innovation and more by simply slashing vehicle weight. In the 15 years after CAFE standards were first introduced in 1974, vehicle weight diminished by 23 percent. But every 100-pound weight reduction results in a 4.7 to 5.6 percent increase in the fatality rate. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE's downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries.

Even ignoring this loss of life, the era of improving fuel economy by slashing vehicle weight is drawing to a close. Indeed, Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research, notes that it is technologically impossible to squeeze anything beyond 45 mpg in fuel economy from current vehicles. That’s why Europe’s fuel economy has plateaued at that level, despite $8 per gallon gas. The 56-mpg-mandate will require a total, top-to-bottom overhaul of cars. Every part of a vehicle from its transmission to its engine would have to be replaced. “Even a vehicle’s screws and fasteners would have to be secured with epoxy glue,” McAlinden maintains.

Unless automakers once again manage to write massive loopholes into the proposed CAFE regime, the upshot will be similar to the fiasco created by the light bulb mandate that Congress recently tried unsuccessfully to repeal. The mandate required light bulbs to consume 25-30 percent less energy by 2012. But this effectively outlawed cheap incandescent bulbs while artificially boosting more expensive and annoying fluorescents, triggering a consumer revolt.

Likewise, the Obama CAFE standards will drive out pickups and other large vehicles, American automakers’ biggest profit makers, and usher in hybrids—their biggest money losers. That’s because pickups that are CAFE-compliant will be have to be constructed from aluminum or some equally light material, something that will bump their cost upwards of $80,000 per vehicle while rendering them useless for towing.

Meanwhile, even the Environmental Protection Agency admits that the market share made up by hybrids and electric plug-ins will have to touch 49 percent if the industry is to come anywhere near compliance. Given that these vehicles now occupy only 3 percent of the market despite hefty subsidies, it is a foregone conclusion that expanding their presence will mean massively expanding subsidies to them.

Taxpayers are going to be on the hook for more than just hybrids, however. Indeed, average vehicle prices will shoot through the roof, pricing many car buyers out of the market, shrinking the industry and jeopardizing millions of jobs. But if Washington could not resist showering taxpayer dollars on General Motors and Chrysler to prevent job losses now, it is unimaginable that it will sit back when the entire industry confronts a carmageddon. Indeed, the $100 billion that taxpayers have spent on the current bailout will look like chump change compared to what’s to come. This is making even the UAW nervous, causing it to join ranks with automakers to oppose the standards.

http://reason.com/archives/2011/07/26/the-coming-autopocalypse

 

[mercury14]

U.S. GDP has increased by 4.26% from 2007 to 2010, according to data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the same period of time, the U.S. national debt has increased by 61.6%, according to the U.S. Treasury. Looking at these numbers, you don't need to be an economist to see that something is very, very wrong.

Was there a massive recession and stimulus during that time?

 

[busybody..]

Was there a massive recession and stimulus during that time?

Hey PUTZ POON

How come you never answer questions AXED?

 

[busybody..]

Hey YO, PUTZ POON

Since you started a thread and looked like (yet again), a jackass

and

Never went back,

Im gonna shove it up your ass


Terrorism & Security

Libyan rebel chief says Qaddafi could stay after all


British Foreign Secretary William Hague backed up Mustafa Abdul Jalil's comment yesterday that rebels would be willing to sign an agreement allowing Qaddafi to remain in Libya.

Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague, left, listens as France's Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, right, speaks at a press conference in London, Monday, July 25. This is the first time the Foreign Secretary has hosted Juppe, and their discussions focused on Libya, the Middle East, Arab Spring and the UK-France cooperation across bilateral and multilateral issues.

•.British Foreign Secretary William Hague said Monday that Britain would accept an agreement in Libya that allowed Muammar Qaddafi to remain in the country after stepping down from power.

The announcement came after rebel leader Mustapha Abdul Jalil said that Libya's rebels would be willing to sign an agreement that allows Mr. Qaddafi to remain in the country under conditions they set. Mr. Hague's announcement is essentially a signal to the rebels that Britain will accept that outcome if that is what they choose.


"He must never again be able to threaten the lives of Libyan civilians nor to destabilise Libya once he has left power," Hague said, according to the Guardian. "Obviously, leaving Libya itself would be the best way of showing the Libyan people they no longer have to live in fear of Gaddafi. But as I have said all along, this is ultimately a question for Libyans to determine."

Hague also said that Qaddafi may not end up being arraigned in the International Criminal Court, where he faces charges of crimes against humanity.

French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé was with Hague at the time of the announcement. He said Qaddafi should have to stand trial to show that no one is "immune from prosecution," although he reiterated that if the Libyan people allow Qaddafi to remain in the country, then France too will go along with it, the Guardian reports.

Britain may be ambivalent about the ICC trial because if Qaddafi is persuaded to leave the country, it will likely be a country that does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC and therefore will not turn him over.

The Financial Times reports that the British government is under pressure to lay out a clear strategy in Libya, where the conflict is seemingly in a stalemate. Military officials say if operations go on much longer, the military – already stretched thin – will be "severely challenged."

 

[koalabear]

Was there a massive recession and stimulus during that time?

No...

 

[NeverEndingMe]

what we need now, is more spending. spending is the key to America's future.

remember its all about - spend baby spend!

yes we can!

Hey PUTZ POON

How come you never answer questions AXED?