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Thread: The US budget debate: why a little knowledge is worse than none |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 33
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BladeD
Ace Cruncher USA Joined: Nov 17, 2004 Post Count: 28976 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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the blame is on both side's. But; what is worst is the american voter's put them there to do this and that corruption. Remember you the voter's are to first to blame. do your home work prior to voteing. Also remember they work for you the voter so do something about it...... I find it mind bogging that the GOP signed a contract not to raise taxes with some guy not elected to anything! ---------------------------------------- [Edit 1 times, last edit by BladeD at Feb 27, 2013 8:31:02 PM] |
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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You shouldn't let the politics taint what are objective economic issues. Certainly economics is not a hard science and it is oh soooo sooo easy to play politics with it. You can cook up statistics and theories to justify just about anything, so it is doubly hard to be objective. But if you make the effort, there are some things that resemble economic fact out there.
----------------------------------------The politics however almost seemed designed to work at cross purposes. 1. small amounts of money buy influence that reaps rewards worth 10^9, or even 10^12 USD and more for the industries and lobbyists that pay for that influence and it is rarely in the best interest of the economy generally which means you in particular. 2. politicians focus on the best interests of their district and state even if it is to the detriment of the country - this is why you have defense contractors in every state and why no one in either party wants to make cuts to program that even the PENTAGON says to hell with. 3. politicians have NO, ZERO, NADA interest in the long term. Their horizon extends as long as the next primary cycle and maybe, just maybe if there's a challenger, the next election. Otherwise they are myopic as in CYA and see no further. I could go on but I'm getting depressed.   |
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nanoprobe
Master Cruncher Classified Joined: Aug 29, 2008 Post Count: 2998 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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So, if you look up economic stimulus, what you will find is that most economists believe that govt are SUPPOSED to spend during recessions and save during expansion - exactly opposite of what intuition tells you but there are solid reasons for that. Our problem is that we tend to spend on BOTH sides. So if you want to complain about spending, I'm right there with you - but you're doing it at precisely the WRONG time. What Oblameo and his minions are doing is right out of the Alinsky play book. There will never be any expansion under the current administration because they lie about everything and then blame it on the someone else. Here's another perfect example. GAO report says Obamacare not paid for, despite presidential promise GAO Report: Obamacare Adds $6.2 Trillion to Long-Term Deficit
In 1969 I took an oath to defend and protect the U S Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Domestic. There was no expiration date.
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Remember you the voter's are to first to blame. do your home work prior to voteing. Also remember they work for you the voter so do something about it...... Don't think voting will solve it as long as the USA uses electoral system. Need to go back to popular vote. But then again, I believe the voting system is corrupt to the point they put in who THEY want, not us.
Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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Bearcat
Master Cruncher USA Joined: Jan 6, 2007 Post Count: 2803 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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IMHO the current stiuation is very much a black and/or white thing. If the government doesn't stop spending trillions more than it has to spend then we will go bankrupt. No amount of raising taxes will fix thier current drunken sailor spending spree. I have to live on a budget. Why should the government be exempt from doing the same? Because the sheeple in this country won't stand up and hold these dirt bags responsible for their actions. But those who do raise the red flags and try, either disappear or join those underground who tried!
Crunching for humanity since 2007!
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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There's no doubt that the system is broken and that the kabuke theater provided by CSPAN is barely on a par with the WWE. But that should tell you something. Both sides are morons and the people in the center who could actually do some good are either brow beaten into submission with truck loads of cash given to challengers in primaries or elections or and this is the really sad part, people like you guys and the vast majority of other Americans are too polarized to even listen to them. We've gotten to the point that if you don't have a side, you may as well slit your own throat because you'll die in the cross fire.
----------------------------------------And honestlly I don't understand how it happened. It didn't used to be this way. The 2 party system DID used to work. People had respect for their differences and recognized that there wasn't ALWAYS just ONE right way. That different approaches had their own advantages and disadvantages and that where this thing . . . what do you call it, oh yeah "compromise" came into the picture. But one day, the financial world came to an end, almost and some dipstick on CNBC, the lobotomist's financial snooze network, Rick the [rhymes with stick] Santelli goes on his brain dead rant about tea bags and the cursed phenomenon is born. But what lead up that? Virtually none of you know the history, not one and it had NOTHING to do with the federal deficit, not initially. That was definitely the seed though and who do you think planted those seeds and when? If you don't even have a clue than you need to do some reading before you do any more typing. [Edit 1 times, last edit by twilyth at Feb 27, 2013 9:59:20 PM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
So, if you look up economic stimulus, what you will find is that most economists believe that govt are SUPPOSED to spend during recessions and save during expansion - exactly opposite of what intuition tells you but there are solid reasons for that. Our problem is that we tend to spend on BOTH sides. So if you want to complain about spending, I'm right there with you - but you're doing it at precisely the WRONG time. What Oblameo and his minions are doing is right out of the Alinsky play book. There will never be any expansion under the current administration because they lie about everything and then blame it on the someone else. Here's another perfect example. GAO report says Obamacare not paid for, despite presidential promise GAO Report: Obamacare Adds $6.2 Trillion to Long-Term Deficit So glad you quoted that section and then wrote "Oblameo." If you listen to the smartest economic minds that say when there is a down turn you spend to help get the country out of it, and when you are in an up turn you save the excess capital for when there was a down turn. Now lets consider what happened with the last two people that held the presidential seat. Bush inherited a budget surplus, and the times were good, listening to the smartest minds in economics tells you that the US should have used that extra money to pay off the debt. What did Bush do? He cut taxes to unsustainably low levels, which even his advisors were telling him were too low, then a down turn hit. Obama comes in and times are bad, he does exactly what the smart people says he should do by spending a lot of government money to help get the country out of the mess. He also realized that taxes were set unreasonably low and he is trying to adjust them to a more reasonable level. While I agree spending does need to be cut, but you consistently blame Obama for doing exactly what the smartest people in that field say you should do, while defending bush for doing the exact opposite.  And before you start calling me a Libritard which is apparently anyone that doesn't agree with you. Like I said spending does need to be cut, and I honestly think most of the rich are taxed enough. The biggest thing I want to see done on the tax side is implemeting a small minimum tax that every US citizen over the age of 18 must pay. It is scary to realize that about 50% of the "Tax payers" in the US get every penny they pay as Income Tax to the US Gov't back and sometimes more. Consider if the US got some small amount of 10 or 20 dollars from each of those people each year? That is more fairness in taxation than letting half the country pay nothing and asking 10% to pay more and more and more. (Although I fully understand that in relative terms that 10% can reasonablly "afford" to pay an additional percent or ten of their income than those other 50%). There is a lot more to say but I will see where this thread goes.... |
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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A lot of people worked very, very hard to screw things up as bad as they did and I mean hundreds of thousands of people. Certainly some deserve to be in the deeper pits of hell than others, but it was a virtual pandemic of greed and stupidity. Some of Bush's policy's were undoubtedly just . . . unwise. For example, had he not permitted more lenient, as in much more lenient reserve requirements for institutions selling all manner of derivatives (does the name AIG ring any bells?) the failures in the MBS market wouldn't have had anywhere near the impact that they did.
----------------------------------------I cherry picked that one, but there's lots of other low hanging fruit too. Of course everybody else helped out. I don't want to leave anyone out. The fed did it's part by keeping rates low way past the point that doing so served any purpose (and I was stupid enough to defend Greenspan at the time - idiot, idiot, idiot!!!!). The rating agencies had no idea what was in the securities they were rating and praise the lord, finally the govt has gotten around to suing one of them for it. No perp walks though. It's not really cathartic w/o a perp walk - ya feel me? Of course do I even have to sing the praises of all those mortgage bankers like Bluntrywide? Tirelessly writing worthless mortgages to anyone with a pulse (not sure they always checked that you were human, but I think you at least had to have a pulse). So many people working together day and night to make this country . . . oh, wait . . . |
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nanoprobe
Master Cruncher Classified Joined: Aug 29, 2008 Post Count: 2998 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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While I agree spending does need to be cut, but you consistently blame Obama for doing exactly what the smartest people in that field say you should do, while defending bush for doing the exact opposite Smartest people in the field? Really? I think people having the most to gain would be a better title.New Study Proves We Can't Spend Our Way to Prosperity It's just more Keynesian BS that has never worked and never will. Defending Bush? Show me where I said anything about Bush. Just for the record Oblameo called Bush un-American for racking up 4 trillion in debt in 8 years. Oblameo has rung up 6 trillion in 5 years with no end in sight. What does that make him? And before you start calling me a Libritard which is apparently anyone that doesn't agree with you. I never called you or anyone else on this forum anything. The libitards are in DC running this charade. “You cannot spend your way to prosperity. You cannot build prosperity by going into debt.” Ronald Reagan
In 1969 I took an oath to defend and protect the U S Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Domestic. There was no expiration date.
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twilyth
Master Cruncher US Joined: Mar 30, 2007 Post Count: 2130 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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You see, this is part of the problem. You think that something says it's a "Journal" or a "center for policy study" or "unbiased" and you believe it.
----------------------------------------**** dude. The people that published that tripe have been humping that plastic doll for years andit's all bull. I can vaguely follow the equations but the summary is pretty hard to misunderstand: Man, oh, man, and I thought the St. Louis money equations were bad; not only does this regression have an extremely restrictive lag structure, it is so restrictive that there are only contemporaneous effects (i.e., no lags -- perhaps problematic, given the excruciatingly low DW statistic, but this did not seem to trouble the authors, so I won't dwell on it besides noting the inappropriate use of conventional standard errors to make statistical inference). Anyway, for those of you wondering why I wasted brain cells on this, apparently some people take these results (and the Phoenix Center) seriously, including these periodicals: [1], reprinted in [2], [3], and [4]. *edited to appropriate forum language - ErikaT [Edit 1 times, last edit by ErikaT at Feb 28, 2013 12:56:53 PM] |
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