The Obama Presidency

[Cheebs]

Cut the spending across the board what ever the debt is 10-15% Including their precious Military.

I honestly don't know why there isn't an uproar over this. We don't have the money yet this is what we're spending:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...y_expenditures

[Doc Holliday]

http://www.gao.gov/financial/citizensguide2008.pdf

[MarsKitten]

Why do you keep acting like they're going to cut anything?
The plan is never "Cut taxes... so that we can cut certain programs!" even though it should be.

Ah the Grover Norquist strat. How did that work out when we shut down the government for a while in the 90s? Anything ACTUALLY get cut? And this was in the days when axing the department of education was apart of the republican national platform.

Spending doesn't deplete revenue. It increases cost. Tax cuts are absolutely free. It's the unfunded programs that fuck things up if you don't cut them when you cut taxes. Go whack all types of welfare for everyone between 18-65 who is not confirmed to be too handicapped to work, and you're likely whole. If some of those lazy assholes still don't work and starve, that'll help reduce costs on infrastructure and the like, since less people will have to use it. Win-win.

edit: The problem is that we need to get the same Baby Boomer idiots who caused the personal credit crisis out of office so that someone who knows how to balance their personal and public budgets can fix their shit.

Welfare really? That's direct stimulus spending right there. Every dollar given to someone on welfare goes right back into the local economy through supermarket spending for gas, clothes, food and other necessities. This keeps local stores open when normally they'd collapse from lack of patronage in poorer areas and in middle class areas it keeps revenue from falling too much, so jobs don't need to be cut to keep the stores open. People on welfare aren't putting the money in the bank. Oh and it has a neat side effect of reducing human suffering.

Sadly the businesses are. United States businesses have the highest liquid holdings on hand since 1959. Faced with economy uncertainty they're holding onto their dollars. Not hiring, not reinvesting, not expanding, uncertainty does that. And this is exactly what happened in Japan during the (1998-2006) stagnant years. People and businesses hung onto money, the economy didn't expand, they actually faced deflation, jobs were hard to come by and everyone was waiting for the recession to end. There they used the threat of inflation (by creating more internal money flow) to basically force people and business to spend money. Inflation makes savings worth less, so when faced with that threat more people spent.

Agreed baby boomer politicians are a plague on this country. But cutting taxes does reduce our ability to pay our debts in the long term. And our ability to borrow money is based on the bond buyer's confidence that she'll be paid for the bond. While this isn't a problem now or even the next few years, 20 years down the road of continued and greater fiscal irresponsibility will seriously harm our credibility with our lenders.

Do remember that the public won't have to pay for tax cuts because we effectively lend money to ourselves. We could end up paying for them in infation but whatevs. If inflation becomes a problem we can deal with that later... if it becomes a problem. One might have reasons to be upset at tax cuts for the rich but worrying about the deficit or future tax burden is not really one of them.

I made this argument jokingly a year ago about how deficits don't matter and how we could make our current debt (national and personal) worthless and trivial if we refused to pay for it and/or just let inflation run its course. The massive downside to this is food, water and internet (the necessities) tend to track to inflation while personal income for the average worker does not track to inflation. At least not during times of crisis. Especially since wages have been stagnant vs inflation for over a decade now.

But in the past we had many things pulling against inflation. The dollar used to be the defacto oil currency used by everyone on the oil markets. Now its the Euro. We used to and still are the # currency in the world. Used in places where the local currencies are worthless. While dollar is still widely used its losing ground to the euro and other currency. This isn't a bad thing overall, but it does make us less stable in the long run (20-50 year sense).

[Cheebs]

Ah the Grover Norquist strat. How did that work out when we shut down the government for a while in the 90s? Anything ACTUALLY get cut? And this was in the days when axing the department of education was apart of the republican national platform.

The department of education has one of those names that makes it impossible to cut. I mean, what kind of barbarian would think school is bad?...is the kind of thing you might hear when you suggest getting rid of it.

But it should be gone. Lower the federal taxes and raise the state taxes accordingly, and let the states handle it on their own. The federal government is just too broad to come up with a plan that makes sense for everybody...because no single plan can possibly fit that many kids in that many environments.

Ditto for God knows how many other federal departments.

[YellerDog]

Dept. of Education needs to go; NCLB is the biggest fuckup I've ever seen.

"Let's cut curriculum down to basic math and basic English, test on that, and schools that fail get their funding cut."

Even if your school "wins" you still lose.

[MarsKitten]

The department of education has one of those names that makes it impossible to cut. I mean, what kind of barbarian would think school is bad?...is the kind of thing you might hear when you suggest getting rid of it.

But it should be gone. Lower the federal taxes and raise the state taxes accordingly, and let the states handle it on their own. The federal government is just too broad to come up with a plan that makes sense for everybody...because no single plan can possibly fit that many kids in that many environments.

Ditto for God knows how many other federal departments.

Yes the NCLB was a national failure because they didn't fund it. No one (rational) had illusions that the schools were going to funded for it and it was just another progress test that was mandated by some legislature someplace. I remember HS in Texas being all about the TAAS test and how we spent about a 4th of the time learning to take that test. I passed it the first time, but we still had "prep" time in classes geared towards it. Which I slept through cause I passed it the first fucking time.

Of course if they didn't do that, schools will just fudge the grades of certain students or grade on a curve as policy to make sure the school doesn't lose funding.

Yes because we need states like Texas setting the national agenda with their text books. Oh wait they virtually already do that. No getting rid of the DoE would mean each state would set its own standards and goals for education without a national minimum. Which would mean middle colleges would be more likely to shun students for certain schools/regions.

But what is the alternative. Defund the schools and redistribute the students elsewhere? Or do we just let failures fail and go into the job market already. That was my biggest joy in college. That it didn't cater to the dumbest guy in the class. You either kept up or failed. People with the talent and work ethic succeed the idiots either pay through the nose or get the fuck out.

And as a liberal I'm totally sympathetic to the problems of wealth and circumstance. But if you're failing in a public school it isn't like you cannot get help, at the school, for free (usually). But from my experience there are always those clowns who refuse to do what they're there for and yet cannot be removed. It shouldn't be education for everyone even if they don't want it, it should be education for those who try. Let the dregs fail out. They, if they really want to can get a GED, goto community college and transfer into a good school. But don't let them bloat classes and waste state funds and people who have a chance time.

Our refusal to allow people, businesses and governments to fail is what lets failure continue and is very expensive to the whole of society.

[Advocate]

Our refusal to allow people, businesses and governments to fail is what lets failure continue and is very expensive to the whole of society.

church.

[MarsKitten]

LoL church. HAIL THE CEILING CAT

[Yoshi]

Welfare really? That's direct stimulus spending right there. Every dollar given to someone on welfare goes right back into the local economy through supermarket spending for gas, clothes, food and other necessities. This keeps local stores open when normally they'd collapse from lack of patronage in poorer areas and in middle class areas it keeps revenue from falling too much, so jobs don't need to be cut to keep the stores open. People on welfare aren't putting the money in the bank. Oh and it has a neat side effect of reducing human suffering.

Sadly the businesses are. United States businesses have the highest liquid holdings on hand since 1959. Faced with economy uncertainty they're holding onto their dollars. Not hiring, not reinvesting, not expanding, uncertainty does that. And this is exactly what happened in Japan during the (1998-2006) stagnant years. People and businesses hung onto money, the economy didn't expand, they actually faced deflation, jobs were hard to come by and everyone was waiting for the recession to end. There they used the threat of inflation (by creating more internal money flow) to basically force people and business to spend money. Inflation makes savings worth less, so when faced with that threat more people spent.

Agreed baby boomer politicians are a plague on this country. But cutting taxes does reduce our ability to pay our debts in the long term. And our ability to borrow money is based on the bond buyer's confidence that she'll be paid for the bond. While this isn't a problem now or even the next few years, 20 years down the road of continued and greater fiscal irresponsibility will seriously harm our credibility with our lenders.

Our refusal to allow people, businesses and governments to fail is what lets failure continue and is very expensive to the whole of society.

You are dead wrong at the top and absolutely perfectly right at the bottom. Welfare may be a way to continue the status quo, but that isn't really what anyone should want, except for those who are the adult equivalent of the students you mentioned who don't want to succeed in school. Let those burdens on society flunk out. Feed them until they hit 18, and then let them die in gutter. Meanwhile, reduce the taxes for the small business that may provide better than the minimum wage jobs you're protecting with welfare. If you did this, there would be less risk and less reason for business to hoard liquid assets. Get people above the poverty line through opportunities provided by small business and hard work. Every entity should have to earn success. As you said, failure to do so should result in unmitigated failure.

[MarsKitten]

The overall good of welfare far out weighs the few who abuse it. It allows people in hard situations to survive at a minimum with a place to stay and food to eat rather than falling further down the bowels of poverty rather than becoming a further burden on the system as a pure dependent with a long road ahead before they recover.

A person on welfare needs a job, possibly education/training. A person on the street needs everything.