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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

techno900 wrote:
I think we are stuck until the tea party sees that there is a real effort to address the deficit, or at least seriously try to slow it down.

And we seen zero evidence of that -- and virtually nothing BUT evidence to the contrary -- from this administration. It actually believes in Keynesian economics: "The hell with growing the economy; take money out of the economy, skim off ~25% for big government, and put the change back into the economy." Then this administration, like Bush before it but at a stunningly faster pace, spends more than it takes in and borrows to pay the difference. Worse yet, the loans the government takes out are just like ARMs ... they're short term obligations which must be refinanced at higher rates every few months.

How many of you are stupid enough to keep refinancing your mortgages every time the interest rate goes UP?
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pointster



Joined: 22 Jul 2010
Posts: 376

PostPosted: Fri Dec 21, 2012 8:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Interesting that Bruce Bartlett, a supply-sider from the Regan era, has of late decided that Keynes was right. How did that happen? He looked at the results of the current mess, and, in the process of figuring out what went wrong, actually bothered to read Keynes.

He even took back what he said about Paul Krugman.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 4:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

While clicking away trying to figure out what percentage of my savings to put into precious metals, I ran across this. Sure, he's a right winger, but at least he backs up his rhetoric with details based on the government's own figures.
It's at
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/07/the_worst_steward_of_the_economy_in_american_history.html .

July 22, 2011
The Worst Steward of the Economy in American History
By Steve McCann

The Obama sycophants often resort to the White House pre-packaged line that Obama inherited the worst economy since the Great Depression, as a means of deflecting responsibility onto George Bush. Like so many of the emanations from this administration that too is a fabrication. As side-by-side comparison of circumstances inherited by Reagan and Obama is as follows:

<SNIP>

The job facing Reagan was the most daunting since the Great Depression -- and far worse than what Barack Obama inherited in 2009 -- as the combination of extreme inflation (the highest annual rate in the nation's modern history), unemployment (which peaked at 10.8% in 1982) ...

<SNIP>

It has been debated whether Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama is the epitome of incompetence in modern U.S. history. While Carter made myriad mistakes and was in over his head, he did not put the country in an untenable position regarding its future. Obama has.... there is a very real possibility that the dollar will no longer be the world reserve currency -- a disaster for the American consumer.

Carter's maximum Gross Federal Debt as a percent of GDP was 33%.... Bush left office at 69% ... Obama's has topped 100% [and we refinance it every few months at ever higher interest rates ... like an ARM].

The United States as a nation is 222 years old, yet over one-third of the nation's debt will have been accumulated by Barack Obama in just [his first] four years.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Mon Dec 24, 2012 7:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Why does Steve McCann conveniently overlook the root of the inflationary spiral had it's beginnings during a Republican administration, that of President Nixon. While I'm not trying to crucify Nixon here, stuff just doesn't happen overnight. Also, one just needs to take a economic and financial tour of the Reagan Administration, and see how it resulted in ever growing irresponsibility and debt. No need to mention President G. W Bush and his sidekick VP Cheney too much, as most thoughtful folks readily know what happened under their leadership.

How convenient to cherry pick facts for specious reasons. Just leave it to the right wingers.
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pueno



Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Posts: 2807

PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:08 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

swchandler wrote:
...stuff just doesn't happen overnight....

Including economic recovery from a financial disaster that was years in the making.



Mikey wrote:
...yet over one-third of the nation's debt will have been accumulated by Barack Obama in just [his first] four years.

...caused by the horrendous momentum and impact of the financial train wreck known as Bush/Cheney and their unfunded, illegal wars, among other things.
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 1:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

pointster wrote:
Interesting that Bruce Bartlett, a supply-sider from the Regan era, has of late decided that Keynes was right. How did that happen? He looked at the results of the current mess, and, in the process of figuring out what went wrong, actually bothered to read Keynes.

He even took back what he said about Paul Krugman.

I'm reading Bartlett's story as I type this. Few surprises so far ... He's pisssed that the Bush administration didn't fawn on his gospel ... that Bush spent money he didn't have like the proverbial drunken sailor ...

But now I'm at the part where Bartlett claims to be banned from Fox News ... the network on which Bill O'Rielly conducts MANY respectful interviews with Michael Moore, Whoopi, Kucinich, Alex Baldwin, Lamont Hill, Babawawa, and countless other far lefties both because and as long as they answer his questions directly and succinctly (I admire Kucinich ... and Ron Paul ... expressly for that, if little else). If Bartlett has been banned, it is because he dodged questions or tried to filibuster, not because of his politics. After all, O'Reilly endlessly ripped Bush, Rumsfeld, et.al new ones for years over their policies and actions.

"anti-immigrant attitude among the Republican base"? BS. The base is anti illegal line-breaker, anti unearned entitlement-sucking, anti gang element, etc., not "anti-immigrant". Just as we are fine with sane Muslims, we're fine with legal and sane immigrants from any other cultures or nations. Barlett's demonizing.

"My publisher published my book before I was ready, so it sold poorly." Yeah, right.

"Obama is not a leftist. In fact, he’s barely a liberal ... I see Obama as actually being on the center-right."
That does it. Obama's documented senatorial voting record is THE farthest left of any and every other senator. There's no point in reading any further; this is just getting stupid.

But I'm curious now to see how far this guy will go.

"Tellingly, a key reason for Obama’s victory, according to exit polls, is none other than George W. Bush, whom 60 percent of voters primarily blame for the nation’s economic woes—an extraordinary fact when he has been out of office for four years."
"Telling", for damned sure. It tells us that Obama's and the media's four years of blaming Bush virtually every single day for every last negative event or trend has thrown sanity and facts out the window. See my last post, for example.

The ONLY evidence he offers to support his statement that "no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman" is his statement that "no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman". The other side offers hundreds of thousands of detailed pages of data and logic to the contrary.

I've read enough about Bartlett.
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windoggi



Joined: 22 Feb 2002
Posts: 2743

PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 3:23 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

pointster wrote:

He even took back what he said about Paul Krugman.
I heard he even admitted that BFF is a joke.
_________________
/w\
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isobars



Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935

PostPosted: Tue Dec 25, 2012 7:31 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Google Krugman 91% tax rate.
Q.E.D.
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nw30



Joined: 21 Dec 2008
Posts: 6485
Location: The eye of the universe, Cen. Cal. coast

PostPosted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 12:27 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

BINGO! This guy gets it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 27, 2012, 6:22 p.m. ET.
Dear Mr. President, Zero-Sum Doesn't Add Up
Is life like a pizza, where if some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box?.
By P.J. O'ROURKE

Given that hypocrisy is an important part of diplomacy, and diplomacy is necessary to foreign policy, allow me to congratulate you on winning a second term.

I wish I could also congratulate you on your conduct of international affairs. I do thank you for killing Osama bin Laden. It was a creditable action for which you deserve some of the credit you've been given. Of course the intelligence was gathered, and the mission was undertaken, by men and women who, although they answer to your command, answer to duty first. And it is difficult to imagine any president of the United States who, under the circumstances, wouldn't have ordered the strike against bin Laden. Although there is Jimmy Carter. Thank you for not being Jimmy Carter.

But even though it violates the insincere amity that creates a period of calm following national elections, no thank you for the following, and it is only a partial list:

• Telling the Taliban to play by the rules or you'll take your ball and go home;

• Leaving Iraq in a lurch (and in a hurry);

• Watching the EU go down the sink drain and into the Greece trap and wanting to take America along on the trip;

• Miscalculating human rights and strategic engagement in the Chinese arithmetic of your China policy;

• Being the personification of bad weather during the Arab Spring with your chilly response when you encountered its best aspects and your frozen inaction when you encountered its worst;

• Playing with Russian nesting dolls, opening hollow figurine after hollow figurine hoping to find one that doesn't look like Vladimir Putin;

• Sitting and doing nothing like a couch potato watching a made-for-TV movie as the Castro and Chávez zombies continue their rampage;

• Hugging the door on your date with Israel;

• Putting the raw meat of incentives in your pants pocket when you go to scold the pit bulls of Iran and North Korea;

But the worst thing that you've done internationally is what you've done domestically. You sent a message to America in your re-election campaign. Therefore you sent a message to the world. The message is that we live in a zero-sum universe.

There is a fixed amount of good things. Life is a pizza. If some people have too many slices, other people have to eat the pizza box. You had no answer to Mitt Romney's argument for more pizza parlors baking more pizzas. The solution to our problems, you said, is redistribution of the pizzas we've got—with low-cost, government-subsidized pepperoni somehow materializing as the result of higher taxes on pizza-parlor owners.

In this zero-sum universe there is only so much happiness. The idea is that if we wipe the smile off the faces of people with prosperous businesses and successful careers, that will make the rest of us grin.

There is only so much money. The people who have money are hogging it. The way for the rest of us to get money is to turn the hogs into bacon.

Mr. President, your entire campaign platform was redistribution. Take from the rich and give to the . . . Well, actually, you didn't mention the poor. What you talked and talked about was the middle class, something most well-off Americans consider themselves to be members of. So your plan is to take from the more rich and the more or less rich and give to the less rich, more or less. It is as if Robin Hood stole treasure from the Sheriff of Nottingham and bestowed it on the Deputy Sheriff.

But never mind. The evil of zero-sum thinking and redistributive politics has nothing to do with which things are taken or to whom those things are given or what the sum of zero things is supposed to be. The evil lies in denying people the right, the means, and, indeed, the duty to make more things.

Or maybe you just find it easier to pursue a political policy of sneaking in America's back door, swiping a laptop, going around to the front door, ringing the bell, and announcing, "Free computer equipment for all school children!"

However, domestic politics aren't my first concern here. The question is whether you want to convince the international community that zero-sum is the American premise and redistribution is the logical conclusion.

I would argue that the world doesn't need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.

Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos.

Redistributionist political ideologies, in decline since the fall of the Soviet bloc, are on the rise again. Will you help the neo-Marxists of Latin America redistribute stupidity to their continent?

The Janjaweed are trying to redistribute themselves in Darfur. The Serbs would like to do the same in Kosovo. The Chinese have already done it in Tibet. Al Qaeda offshoots are doing their best to redistribute violence to places that didn't have enough.

And Russia and China would like the global balance of power to be redistributed. Since China has plenty of money to lend and Russia has plenty of oil to sell, your debt and energy policies should go a long way toward making the balance of power fairer for the Russians and Chinese.

While redistribution—or "plagiarism," as we writers call it—is a bad idea, zero-sum is even worse. Zero-sum assumptions mean that a country that doesn't pursue a policy of taking things from other countries is letting its citizens down. That's pretty much the story of all recorded history, none of which needs to be repeated. It has taken mankind millennia to learn that trade is more profitable than pillage. And we don't have to carry our plunder home in sacks and saddlebags when we're willing to accept a certified check.

The Chinese don't seem to understand this yet. They think trade is a one-way enterprise, the object of which is for China to have all the world's money. They've got most of ours already. Mr. President, validating China's economic notions isn't a good thing.

A zero-sum faith in getting what's wanted by taking it can extend to faith itself. In some places there is only one religion. If other people have a religion of their own they must be taking away from my religion. Give up that faith, infidels.

Speaking of infidel faiths, Mr. President, please consider the message of this Christmas week—a message of giving, not taking. And consider your prominent position as a messenger of peace on earth and goodwill toward men. When you embrace a belief in the zero-sum nature of what's under the Christmas tree and propose to redistribute everything that's in our Christmas stockings, you're asking the world to go sit on the Grinch's lap instead of Santa's.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324660404578199363527441002.html?mod=hp_opinion
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17736
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Dec 28, 2012 1:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

O'Rourke is intentionally a comedian. With NW it appears to be an accident.
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