RE: What do YOU get out of it..

RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (Full Version)

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philosophy -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/19/2006 10:33:53 AM)
"A "Sovereign Nation?" Well, Saddam was "Elected" by 100% to 0% now, wasn't he?" ...apparently so......and apparently Bush won California......people in glass houses ought not throw stones.

Archer -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/19/2006 1:40:51 PM)
Lets see the CONGRESS specificly thew HOUSE controls the budgeting at least last time I saw the constitution it still worked that way. A republican controled House forced Clinton to ballanced the budget much moreso than Clinton's own ideals, who's initial budgeting including the Billery Healthcare was way outside of ballanced. In fact raised taxes and spent all of that until the 96 elections and the "Contract With America" gave the house to the Republicans. Now granted the Republicans have lost their way with spending, and now resemble the same politicians who they wanted to save us from back in 96.

Termyn8or -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 12:39:32 AM)
One thing Bush has done for me is that when I bitch about the government, alot more people listen. T

UtopianRanger -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 1:42:27 AM)
quote: In order to fund his war and his tax cuts, Bush simply borrows money from the Chinese and prints more to pay it back. The down side of this for you and I is the money we earn working for a living is now worth less. The word for that is "inflation." I would fathom that less than five percent of the public cares about or even understands the concept and eventual outcome of such a massive trade imbalance and the borrowing of monies from creditors like the Chinese / Japanese. They're financing our ultimate demise..... - R

UtopianRanger -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 2:12:24 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Estring Well, I look at it as more of what good has he done for the country. Two things stand out. One was tax cuts. And the other is that he actually has taken the fight to the islamo fascists. On the other hand, I wish he didn't spend like a Democrat, and I wish he would do something about the border. If during the Bush tenure the dollar has depreciated between 35 - 44 percent, wouldn't you agree that the Bush tax cuts are in large part fictious? Wouldn't you further agree that if the above figure is correct, we actually have a net tax increase? http://www.economyincrisis.org/showarticle.asp?ID=51 As the article mentions.....stick around for a while and wait and see what happens when either Japan or China divest their central bank reserves of dollars and move into gold or the Euro..... Also.... Lou Dobbs mentioned the other day, that over the time frame of the next eighteen months, over two trillion dollars worth of balloon payments on adjustable and interest only loans are going to come due - Man.... that's going to be intersting, huh? - R

SirandMadam -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 2:36:13 AM)
re: "I glad that he's finally taking a stand against these ragheads" - Is this what is considered an acceptable remark on this site? It seems to have passed without comment so far.

bills944 -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 3:04:54 AM)
Local Costs of the Iraq War [image]http://nationalpriorities.org/images/M_images/printButton.png[/image] [image]http://nationalpriorities.org/images/M_images/emailButton.png[/image] Tuesday, 15 August 2006 Click on a state to find a list of the cities, towns and counties for which we have calculated the taxpayer cost of the Iraq War. For more information about the cost of the Iraq War, and what to do if you don't find your hometown, click here. http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=61

TahoeSadist -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 7:11:49 AM)
Well, I am not someone who could call himself a "pro-Bush" person. What I would call myself is a freedom loving conservative constitutionalist (I'd have been in the Anti-Federalist camp back in the day, but that's another thread) but I hopped in just as a reply to the tax cuts: My taxes went down, and I consider myself just a blue collar, middle class working stiff who can't afford to buy a house yet. However, I have hope now, as it seems that I am "wealthy" since those cuts only affected that class(so I guess my Mercedes and Beemer are on the way, and somewhere my mansion is being built.....I just wish someone would tell me where it is) Personally, I think the tax cuts and the President's stand on terrorism are the main pluses. I, for one, am of the camp that believes that presidents get more blame and credit than they deserve for the economy of the country. To counter balance the positives there has been the appalling increase in the Federal Gov't size and scope, spending like a drunken sailor by Congress, and no control of the borders. Eric

LaTigresse -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 8:43:53 AM)
Great anticipation for the next election!

stockingluvr54 -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 8:59:37 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: SirandMadam re: "I glad that he's finally taking a stand against these ragheads" - Is this what is considered an acceptable remark on this site? It seems to have passed without comment so far. sorry to offend... I'll change that to cameljockeys

LaTigresse -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 9:01:07 AM)
personally I find both rather repugnant

lillostslave -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 9:06:33 AM)
This one wishes to ask a question to Eeveryone, why does Everyone seek a skinny slave.this one is a bit heavy and has bee ntold some very hurtful things since shes been a member , she is honestly to the point of leaveing the ; lifestyle shes been in this for almost 9 yrs and this has been the worst.[sm=frown.gif]

sweetnurseBBW -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 9:11:00 AM)
They dont all seek skinny slaves.maybe its where you are looking. Try posting in BDSM or other forums.

peterK50 -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 10:00:14 AM)
Which "Ragheads" are you referring to? Hamas? Hezbullah? Al-Quida? Three different organizations, with three different agendas, none of which like or even talk to each other. The Administration just calls them "terrorists" & has a policy of "kill them all let Allah sort them out".

Amaros -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 10:34:52 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Estring I don't need to be an expert on economics. I just need to listen to what most economists say about tax cuts. It usually has a positive impact on the economy. In case you haven't noticed, the economy is doing quite well. Ok, sorry, I gotta call bullshit here: if the top 1% are making money, the economy is doing good right? What is your metric here? Define "quite well" - incomes growing? Quality of life improving? Test scores? Crime? Which economists? No glittering generalities or half truths please, link to primary sources. quote: ORIGINAL: Estring And unlike you, I don't blindly repeat the mantra that only the wealthy benefit from tax cuts. Everyone who pays taxes benefits. Now it seems logical to me that the more taxes you pay, the more you benefit from a tax cut. Do you know the percentage of taxes the wealthiest pay compared to everyone else? For your homework, look that fact up, genius. You may find that when you avoid mindlessly spouting rhetoric that belongs on a bumpersticker, and check what the facts really are, you may learn something. Yes, everyone who pays taxes benefits, though of course the people that benefit the most are the ones making the most money - lemme tell you how that works: in Adam Smiths day, there was no public infrastructure, everythign was privatley owned, including the roads - if you wanted to manufacture and sell goods, you needed to use a toll road, and that goes for everything, bridges, ferries, etc. Without public infrastructure, you can invest all you want to and manufacture your ass off - if you can't get it to market, it's all for shit - you don't make a dime until somebody buys it. To continue: in Smith's day, there was no public education, if you needed skilled labor, you had to train them yourself, and hope somebody who wasn't paying for training didn't use that savings to offer them better wages and hire them away from you. 'Course this didn't actually happen a lot, because under the feudal system you couldn't be in business without a charter from the crown, or at least the local strongmans say so, and these entities would essentially grant monopolies, and take their cut, which was whatever they decided it was - if they happened to need money to fight a war for example, pony up pal, you can be replaced. So now, we have public infrastructure, public education, and a regulatory business environment designed ideally, to prevent monopolistic practicesadn keep us from backsliding into feudalism, corporate or otherwise. Not a lot of progress in those times, though it suited some people, to be sure. So who benefits from all these taxes, regulations, and infrastructure? Everybody, but the more money you make off all that, the more you are benefitting from it, both technically and practically speaking - this is called "the benefits principle" and you will find it in any decent economics textbook. In different terms, taxes are part of the cost of doing business - all businesses have what is called "inputs", i.e., the percentage of profit they have to reinvest to stay in business or expand - the economy as a whole works in a very similar way, and I didn't even mention research support, which shoulders costly basic research into things like nuclear energy, computer science, materials, etc. - you see basic research is extremely expensive, and it produces nothing in terms of profit - ther eis no profit in researching and defining markup languages unless you have a monopoly on them, or doing basic physics research with no immediate applications - there is a great deal of profit to be made in applied research that turns discovories made in basic research into products and commodities - even very large companies seldom invest much in basic research, all the pharmacuetical research you hear touted is based almost entirely on publically funded basic research. Now the beauty of this is, this research is available to anyone, usually for no more than printing and shipping costs, you can get the same research Phizer is using to develop multibillion dollar pharmacueticals and develop your own, if you want to, and are capable -and Phizer can't stop you, because of the regulatory environment. You're also probobly going to want property rights, an educated labor market, and soem way to transport your good to market, no? quote: ORIGINAL: Estring And one more thing, this President is actually spending more than a Democrat. Look that up too. Um, no, the pubs are spending rather more than democrats ever have, by at least an order of magnitude - and since none or very littel of that is actually being spent on infrastructure, public education or basic research, all programs which have been cut, the impact onthe economy of all this spending will be negligable, while the opportunity cost of not doing them will be considerable in decades to come.

Chaingang -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 10:57:32 AM)
Amaros: I usually refer to this as "standing on the shoulders of giants" and make the observation that "no man is an island." Lots of wealthy and successful people aren't the geniuses they or the public may think they are - they often get lucky, build upon something that is regarded as public domain (until they get to it and subsequently demand patent or copyrights), provide the final piece of a puzzle worked on by many others, have very good people around them that actually make them seem better than they are, etc. Mainly it's just BS chest-beating. But most people are so fucking dumb that can't recognize their own behavior for what it is much less what another might be doing or why. Between Estring and stockingluvr54 the temptation runs high to recommend that others not feed the trolls. Oh, we see the blinkered and bigoted things they have said - but what's the point in responding ultimately?

Amaros -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 11:11:23 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Archer Government revenue since the tax cuts has GROWN just as it has with every major tax cut since Kennedy's. 1.75 trillion at the point where it was signedin 2003 to 2.15 Trillion for 2005. I keep hearing about places where the State raised their taxes in response and wonder what their State budgets look like? Here we held the line on taxes for the most part at the state level and had a Governor who turned a uge deficit into a Surplus in the 600 million range. If you bother to keep up with it you find that the date the budget gets back to ballance with the tax cut is moving steadily back towards us. They said 12 years out and 2 years later it's about 8 years out. Funny how that math works. Eee, the sam thing they said about Reagan. One small but important fact left out of this particular bit of spin: tax revenues have increased in every decade since records started being kept - they grew faster in the Seventies, even when it ended in double digit inflation and a couple of years of negative growth, more than doubling, while they somewhat less than doubled in the Eighties - they doubled again in the Ninties, before dropping off - and much of that went to paying down the debt that Reagan accrued. If you look at GDP, I think you'll find a similar curve , but here's the tax data for you: http://www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.pdf#search=%22tax%20revenues%22 More interesting yet, productivity increases are higher in high tax decades than they are in low tax decades, no doubt due to investment in infrastructure. You see, it's all relative: revenue growth is just a statistic, and a statistic in a vacuum are pretty much meaningless, you have to have something to compare it to. Inflation was mentioned, but perhpas you didn't know that the inflationary spiral that we remember from the Seventies was started by the Kennedy tax cuts, which triggered consumption, demand pull inflation - now this was actually very good for consumers, debtors, because inflation erodes the value of money, which means it also erodes the value of debt - this means that at say 3% inflation, whatever debt you owe will decrease by that much one year from now, and you'l be ahead provided your wages keep up with the inflation, because debt is fixed, while prices and wages are not. On the flip side, it's very bad for creditors, and the higher it is, the worse it is, because the money you owe, is their money, and it's decreasing every year. Hence, no republican will ever make the mistake of cutting everbodies taxes, ever again, the entire concept of supply side theory was formulated to shift the tax burden onto the middle class and keep both inflation and wages down - i.e., creditors make more money, while you get deeper into debt. In fac they have a whole slew of tools to ensure this happens, chief among them is interest rates, controlled by the Fed - raise interest rates and it increases the cost of money, firms delay expansion and lay off workers, loosening the labor market and driving wages down - it's no secret, hell they announce publicly that's what they're doing and why - still, when it comes to raising minimum wage, that's "distorting" the market - please, the market is already distorted, raising wages is a correction to that distortion. Federal debt, interestingly, tends to also lead to increases in interest rates, whish is what is driving the current interest rate hikes. Even more interestingly, tax cuts for the wealthy are paid for by borrowing from the SS trust fund - in other words, the wealthy weren't paying "too much" taxes, as the "surplus" was entirely in the SS trust fund, which are payroll taxes that you pay, not the wealthy - 15% off the top of your income taxes. Of course, this means that social security is in trouble, and we'll have to raise payroll taxes or cut benefits - well hell, why not both? Finally, Private debt is in the form of tax free bonds, sold in 200K lots - who do you suppose is collecting the interest, tax free, off of the debt that has accrued from tax cuts? The upshot of all this is, taxes need to be what they need to be to keep debt to a managable level, and pay for infrastructure and services that ultimately benefit everyone - record high under Clinton was still barely over 10% of GDP, and any businessman will tell you that doubling your size with 10% inputs is unheard of - you'd be on the cover of Fortune for the next five decades. Inflation is a market adjustment: if it's over say 5 or 6% for very long, it's probobly not an absolute good, but a spike here and there is nothing to get your panties in a knot over, economically speaking.

Amaros -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 11:13:14 AM)
quote: ORIGINAL: Chaingang Between Estring and stockingluvr54 the temptation runs high to recommend that others not feed the trolls. Oh, we see the blinkered and bigoted things they have said - but what's the point in responding ultimately? I'm doing it as a favor to Socrates.

stockingluvr54 -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 6:45:22 PM)
quote: ORIGINAL: LaTigresse personally I find both rather repugnant that was mild compared to what I'd actually like to call and do to the sob's that killed 3000 of our citzens...cut off peoples heads...hang our guys from bridges,etc. I have no intentions of sugar coating anything towards an enemy that wants to kill us......just for the sake of being politically correct or sensitive.

Amaros -> RE: What do YOU get out of it.. (9/20/2006 7:40:15 PM)
Well, your probobly right, I guess they're ok guys, and the fact that some Americans were killed means that the republicans are right on top of things economically and Adam Smith was all wrong - course we've directly killed about 48,000 Iraqis through direct military action, upwards of 100,000 though incidental complications, destroyed their families, tortured their people, raped their children, stolen their money, and still don't feel really safe - perhaps because the Iraqis had nothing whatsoever to with 9-11 maybe? I dunno - what the hell was your post about? Oh yeah, us and them. Forgive me if I can't always tell exactly who is who, I think you can relate. Oh yeah, we're the ones with the SUV's, and they're the ones with the oil, simple!

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