Austerity

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QFT.

 


You should stop believing to know what other government have to do.

Talking about parasitism is so... i want to be polite, i won't finish this message.
 


Totally agree. Although we probably don't agree on who earn (imo not necessarily the same people who have/make) money and who are the [strike]Wall Street scum gambling other people's money away[/strike] parasites.


And no, not every government should implement austerity: many countries don't have a huge deficit and some of the ones that do have more of a revenue problem than a spending problem. The ones that should really implement austerity don't have to listen to America telling them to do so, because America never listened when foreigners were warning it about its growing debt, credit card society, pointless, costly wars, wasteful/cruel healthcare "system" and deregulation of the banks/Wall Street.
 
All Government needs to do is count money coming in, pay the military payroll and keep the Nation running with a fiscal budget on time each year every time.

We have been running on imaginary binary money for way too long. Sort of like using a ledger pad to keep the Monopoly Bank solvent until the cash is transferred back by the losing players.

Living frugal has already been forced onto millions of angry people who are getting angrier by the month. Our soup has been simmering for decades as Jobs went over seas and employers extracted themselves from Unions, Pensions, Liabilitiy and Benefits.

Temp workers not included. These are the lucky ones who can still make a living working when they feel like it and clocking out any time the job is completed instead of riding the clock.
 
The Wall Street gamblers and banksters are indeed parasites, who just move massive amounts of OPM around, skimming the flow. Their mode of parasitism is one of the most pernicious, because to many people it is not anywhere near as obvious as welfare crack whores with their hands out. I'd happily see them stripped to penury, because tricking people out of their money is not at all the same thing as earning it. The government needs to keep its grubby paws out of the Producers' pockets, but snatch up all that unearned wealth. Problem is, too much of it ends up in campaign coffers for me to have much hope things will improve until they've gotten a lot worse.

 


Sounds reasonable, but here's the $1 million question: are "the producers" the employees, the executives, the shareholders/investors, the government who build and maintain legal security and infrastructure or a combination of these? If you accept that the employees and government are also producers than "taxing the rich" and "wealth distribution" (towards the working class) suddenly don't sound so unfair anymore... If you see the executives and shareholders/investors as producers you'll come out at the opposite end. So yeah, this is why you can't just get by shouting the obvious in such a way everyone will agree, meaning without strictly defining what you mean by your words and actually describing your ideas in great detail.
 
Your system of government election for officials is so screwed up you will never get the kind of people into ffice that you need.

Your government won't push austerity ... it is political suicide ... therefore the US govt will continue running a deficit until it is bankrupted ... no politician takes a view longer than their own term of office ...

You need millions to fund a campaign for office ... so only the rich get in ... or those "bought" buy the rich ... and therefore tainted in the process.
Click to expand...

So true. Election cycles start 18 months before the actual election and since representatives are chosen every two years (with only two year terms) it's pretty much constantly "election season". No democracy can function like that because election season means making sky high promises you can't keep instead of actual governing. Then there's the campaign donations (now even from corporations)...

In my country only a minority of politicians come from rich families and only a handful went to elitist, exclusive universities (abroad, because we don't have them and strangely we have a lot less anti-science types despite this), in America it's the majority of politicians, we also only have national elections every 4 years. Since I can easily point to 100 things that are bad about our politicians and government I can only imagine how bad it must be in America...
 


All I've seen in American media since late 2007 is elections this and primaries that. The 2010 congressional elections were preceded by months of campaigning for example, there were primaries 6 months (a quarter of a term!) before the elections.
 


Sure, but there have been 2149 republican Presidential "debates" already, one of which was apparently so important the president had to reschedule an important speech for it. Election season has already begun, at least for the republicans, so that means a bunch of governors, representatives and senators being more busy making promises they can't keep and appealing to all kinds of fringe ideas (they don't flip flop, they are just telling the bloodthirsty crowds what they want to hear in order to get elected) than they are with governing. Any one of them compromising with the administratio has now become even more implausible and will remain so until at least november 2012. There you have it, at least 14 months wasted.
 
Actually President Obama didn't need to reschedule his campaign speech. But between the Republican debates and the NFL pregame show, he wouldn't have had much of an audience.

Probably the only thing that would have guaranteed him a smaller audience would be a NASCAR race in the same time slot.

Besides, "The 10 O'clock News" (depending on your time zone) would have covered it.

I pretty much do not listen to political speeches. I read transcripts.
 


It wasn't "his" campaign speech, it was a speech to outline a new, major program worth hundreds of billions of $. The republican "debate" (which was about presidential candidates) taking up so much viewers just underscores my point that election season has already begun (or is still going, I really can't tell the difference anymore).
 
Individual rights are not uniquely American; they are Human. The Human survival mechanism is not claw and fang, not emotion, and not faith; it is Reason. In the USA, people are no longer held accountable for their errors or their wrongdoing, but are compelled by force to accept the responsibility for everyone else's errors and wrongdoing. That is not at all consistent with Reason.
The damn shame is, I really don't know a better place to be, although I'm worried that could change.
Who knows, maybe in a few years (before such travel becomes impossible), I may end up emigrating to AUS.
 




It was a campaign speech, he wanted to appear to be trying and make the republicans look like obstructionists. It was all about setting up campaign talking points. He keeps saying "Pass this bill" but no Democrat has presented it to the Congress for a vote. Why is that? Its stragety, they might present it next year after the republican primaries and try to use it as a way to say the republicans don't care. Obama says to pass it, but it wasn't ever really meant to be passed, just a talking point.

But you are right, the election season has started. Which I think is both good and bad. Good beacuse we get more time to vet the candidate and bad because of all the money wasted. Don't you wish the media had vetted Obama the same way they do repubs?

Both sides lie and exaggerate, its up to the people to figure out which is the lesser of the evils or at least who will do the least amount of damage.
 
1) 'rethugs' ..Really ? it always amazes how the leftists call for 'civility'
2) you dont have to be rich to get elected ..(though it does not hurt) ..the recent FL senate Election of Marco Rubio is a prime example of that; The incumbant Governer Crist was a 'shoe in' , known name, more money, support of the press etc etc, NO one thought Rubio had a snowballs chance in hell (except the people of FL) ..and geuss what ex-Governer Crist is doing now ? oh he works for Morgan&Morgan (a personal injury trial lawyer firm, ie 'Ambulance Chasers') and is NOT a Senator, ..
you could also go back to Jimmy Carter or Harry Truman (who did Not come from money, and the media back then was as full of crap as they are today (anyone remember that famous pic of Truman holding the Newspaper with the Headline "Dewey defeats Truman" ??)
I just watched a Doc about the Representative who ran SOLELY on the platform of repealing the "Dont Ask; Dont Tell" Gays in the Military policy..and guess what it has been repealed, and he lost his re-election, but he was ok with that , re-election was not his goal.
3) not EVERY Gov't needs Austerity ..though the US certainly does ..and while the pundits will say it is political suicide for the politician, they are wrong, the American People have wanted a "Balanced Budget Amendment" for quite some time, I would be willing to bet that they would vote for the guy or gal, who brings that up and RE-elect them.
4) Yes Big O's speech was a re-election speech , it was a setup , to try and label the republicans as 'obstructionist' and make it look like he is trying to 'get things done' and make it look like he is trying to create jobs' ..it was a rehash of the epic fail Stimulus of the past , I got my 'Shovel ready' ..everyone else got their shovel? you're gonna need it for the upcoming 'silly season' as you are about to witness some of the most epically huge loads of BS you have ever seen in your life.
but even still I will give Big O a chance ..soo lemme see if I got this straight, we are in epic debt, you just had spent a record amount of money that we dont have, it failed to create jobs, soo your solution is to (after losing your good credit score; after visiting the Queen of England and bringing a larger Entourage than even the Queen herself has, including your own personal chef (what the Queens Food aint good enough for ya? after telling Americans to 'eat their peas' ? after vacationing in your $50,000 a WEEK Martha's Vinyard retreat) your solution is to spend more money that we dont have ? ...hmm sounds like more epic fail to me...
 


Yeah, cause he's so much worse than Nixon, Reagan and Bush Jr...

All this "Obama is the second Hitler/Stalin/antichrist, etc..." crap is unfounded BS. It goes from the NRA saying he'll make all guns illegal (the only law he has signed on the subject actually made it legal to carry guns in national parks), O'Reilly saying his taxes will be raised to 50% (Obama only wants them to get back to the rates of the Clinton era, meaning 35% --> 39,6% for the top rate) to Glenn Beck saying ACORN stole the election for Obama (not one single republican senator, representative or governor reported voting irregularities in their state and not one has publicly supported Glenn Beck's theory), to various pundits saying he wants to nationalize healthcare (he never proposed anything of the sort, ever), hell, there's even a thread about Obama wanting to chip everyone, right here on Toms. It's all a load of crap, but hey, facts don't matter anymore. Obama is more centrist/slightly to the right than Clinton, FDR or Johnson and they didn't cause the world to come to an end, now did they?

How about the politicians and pundits calling him the worst thing in the universe first get rid of the religious/anti-science nutjobs and corporate whores among their own first (there'd be none left if they did that, so this is a rhetorical question)?

These days, there is just so much hatred, propaganda and ignorance in politics... The hatred is just so much stronger than when Clinton was in office, I really don't blame people for thinking this hatred is rooted in racism (although I do not subscribe to that theory myself, I'm more a "Karl Rove's spin machine f*cked everything up by making people care more about opinions and spin than about actual facts" kinda guy).

With the few remaining sane republicans almost instantly eliminated more than a year before the presidential elections, Obama remains the least worst of the 2012 candidates by far. Perry has his heart in the right place but is just a dumb puppet of corporate interests (just like the previous Texas governor) and Ron Paul and Herman Cain belong to that rare breed of republicans that do have half a brain (maybe John Huntsman too, but he was eliminated at the get go for being sane) they are just too far out there with their free market fundamentalism that would condemn 90% of the population to poverty (robber baron age style), finally, Romney is a dirty corporate whore who'd sell his own mother and publicly declare eating cyanide is healthy, if his corporate donors asked him to.
 


No, he said that if he could start a new country from scratch he MIGHT give it single payer universal healthcare (which is still not nationalized healthcare, such as the British NHS, because the state does not own the hospitals and does not employ doctors). He has never promoted a bill that would introduce a single payer system, not as a senator and not as president and he has repeatedly said that a universal healthcare system with insurance companies (like Germany or the Netherlands) is the best way to go for the America that exists today.
 
The point being, he is advocating government involvement in what is NOT a US Government job, at the forced expense of American taxpayers. No thanks. We need reform, but that's not it. Reform isn't about finding "somebody else" to pay for it, it's about lowering the costs. Get rid of the layers of bureaucracy, the ambulance chasers, call insurance companies to heel, all of the above; but any recent plan I've heard ADDS cost.
 
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