quote:

ORIGINAL: Termyn8or

Who won ? Nobody.

You think $250K is alot ?

Try a $300K mortgage, AC, all the trimmings of useless shit (you know what that is), a new car every two years and two kids in college. That money is fucking gone. And if not, if you have an olady that knows you're making that much you will be in debt up to your ass. She also needs clothes from the finest boutiques that charge a grand for ten bucks worth of muslin, new cars all the time and ways to treat her suitors, like you do your mistresses. That money is long gone before you even get it.

What we need is a steep regressive tax on those who make a million a year or more, and that won't even do it. They will find ways to shift their money out of the country. They are not stupid, and they are greedy to the core.

Well so am I - now. Fukum.

We can't do a fucking thing about it. That's a fact.

T^T

quote:

ORIGINAL: StrangerThan

quote:

ORIGINAL: erieangel

The Economic Policy Institute research states that the debt deal will cost over 1,800,000 jobs. It will also bring our GDP by 1.5%. With the GDP growing at only about 1.3%, that is a 0.2% drop in GDP.

In the past week, the stock market has gone down steadily, reaching a decline of about 700 points on Tuesday, Aug. 2.

Tea Partiers won the battle, but they will not win the war. When people begin to realize the TP policies have a negative impact on the economy, jobs and the nation, these people will be voted out of office. These all the same policies Hoover tried to employ and they took us into the G. Depression. Why do people not remember history?

The problem is the nation is at that proverbial point of being between a rock and a hard place. Either we control our debt, or it will control us, and we're running out of options. We can't simply keep driving the ceiling up and borrowing more. The negative impact of doing so is about the same as not spending, and therein lies the crux of the problem. Spending drives economies. That's why we had a stimulus. It didn't matter that reams were written by plenty of folks from right to left over why it wouldn't work, and why we'd end up needing another, and another and another. What mattered is that it helped push the economy along in hopes that the jump-start would stave off a steeper drop and level things off long enough for the economy to recover on it's own.

It didn't. It sputtered a few times, but never caught and took off. If we keep borrowing to try and get it started, not only will the politicians pushing it suffer, so will we if our credit as a nation starts seeing downgrades - and eventually it will. Don't borrow and spend and the economy suffers. Borrow and spend, and the economy suffers. Just keep printing money as the Treasury seems to enjoy doing, and the economy suffers.

We've driven ourselves to a point where the options are limited and no one likes them. It isn't much different than the dislike you see in other economies across the globe like Greece and Ireland, where steep cuts have to be made regardless of who likes it or not.

Honestly, I don't see an easy fix. I do see a lot of suffering and anger ahead in global terms, not just in the US. What drove the Tea Partiers to power, as I have said many times, is that there is a fairly large contingent of people in the US who simply do not understand the level of anger that exists in much of the population. You can laugh, deride, generate as many snide remarks as you want, but the tidal wave that swept congress, did so for a reason. Those reasons have not gone away. Out of the entire body of house, senate, and presidency, the only ones who truly stuck to their guns and wrangled a compromise that suited them more than anyone else, were the TP folks. Good, bad or indifferent, everyone from the Republican establishment, the Democratic side, and the president did little more than demand, threaten, and eventually capitulate.

Shrug;. The problem with the nation isn't the tea party. It's that there's one one tea party. There should be a dozen or two because if anything is clear in this entire mess it is that neither party has the answer. Both led us to this clusterfuck. Both share equal responsibility in it. Both are determined to stay in power at all costs, and run like little sheep the instant they think they might lose an election. 

I do believe the tax structure needs an overhaul. I do believe wealthy folks should pay more. I'm not so sure on the definition of wealthy however. 250k isn't that high of a goal post, certainly not high enough to start pointing fingers and screaming at the like the mob standing out in front of a guillotine. I think the Republican insistence on no taxes for anyone has been driven by dems successfully to point out that the target they're trying to protect are the wealthy. I think that doesn't fly well with Aunt Mildred who is living in fear that the meager amount of social security may see cuts or declines while those folks hang on to more.

Like I said, I don't see an easy fix. What I do see is that the clowns in power don't need to be there.