Quote: Originally Posted By antonsirius on 4/27/2010

Quote: Originally posted by raucous on 4/26/2010
With everyone that I talked to at the Tea Party, most of us (including myself) wouldn't have been there if Bush didn't spend 6 years blowing out the budget and then Obama making twice as bad.

I have two questions for you then:

1) How do you feel about the Republicans blocking the current financial regulation bill, which couldn't get past a cloture vote in the Senate yesterday?

2) If the economy picks up real steam sometime around 2011 or so, and Obama's budget staunches the bleeding in the deficit, would you consider voting for him in '12

1. I am happy about that. Why punish banks that do the right thing in order to pay the banks who **** their money away and expect a bailout? It is the same as the mortgage problem, which has not worked.


2. The economy would have picked up steam by now if Bush then Obama didn't bury us in debt. With healthcare passing, there appears at least a double dip recession with unemployment on the horizon. If Verizon and AT&T are saying it is going to cost around $1 billion each, that is equivalent to 20,000 $50k/year jobs that will cost the US, each. I know that they won't eliminate that many jobs, but higher costs for phone service is coming. Of course it wont just be phone service, it will be everything.

So basically, would I vote for Obama if the economy will overcome his policies and takes off again? No. I could easily be convinced to vote for the evil one (Hillary) or Bayh in '12 though.

Unfortunately, like in 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996, and 1992... I will have the choice of voting for a crappy incumbent or one of the crappier people running.

If I could have chosen,

1992 - Paul Tsongas (D)
1996 - Steve Forbes (R)
2000 - Steve Forbes (R) (I wish I could put in "no one")
2004 - Howard Dean (D) (Holy crap, if 2000 wasn't bad enough)
2008 - Ron Paul (R) (Hillary or Mitt would have been OK too)

I guess because of so many people that were running in 2008 and none of them got past the primaries was very irritating to me.

I would be happy to see a female DH playing at the Major League level some day.

Quote: Originally Posted By swamphawk22 on 4/27/2010
1 It wasnt really Republicans. This bill wasnt going to go through. Everyone knew that it was too quick and they didnt have time to get their ducks in line. The Arizonia law forced dems to do something, and they failed. Give it a few days, a new bill with some bone thrown to the Pubs will come out and pass.

Great. Add pork for the Repugs... and you wonder why I want Elephants to be extinct?

More thinking about 2000 and 2004... Has there ever been a bigger pile of worthless maggots running for President?

Quote: Originally Posted By raucous on 4/27/2010More thinking about 2000 and 2004... Has there ever been a bigger pile of worthless maggots running for President

Bush, Kerry, Gore and Nader? They seem like good people to me?

What exactly about their resumes bothers you?

Bush- Sissy Wimp-*** PussHole. Economically Liberal in conservative clothing.

Kerry - Thurston Howell III. I despise limousine liberals.

Gore - Climate Change Cultist

Nader - Further to the than the above two.

This post could not be converted. To view the original post's thread, click here.

I'm not sure what you're referring to with "the mortgage problem" though.



The mortgage problem is that the government has bailed out some people twice and they still can't pay their mortgage.

Around 60% have defaulted again.

More to the point, I'm trying to understand how -- if the debt is such a priority for you -- you aren't in favor of making sure taxpayers don't ever again get handed the marker for Wall Street's gambling debts, which is the most important part of the bill.


We shouldn't have in the first place. The vacuum will be filled by a responsible bank... Then again, Dodd and Frank forced the banking industry to make bad mortgages. Maybe the debt should have been put on their shoulders, damn f*ckers.

Yeah, those numbers are crap, sorry. The write-downs we saw in Q1 do not in any way reflect those companies best guesses on how much HCR will actually cost them.


Actually, the numbers are not crap. On top of the unionized workers that get the Cadillac plans, the union retirees also get those plans, cost free to the retiree. The CWA straight out refuses to compromise on it. So all of those people will get Vz and ATT a 40% surcharge to the already high costs of heathcare. I don't know if any other unionized labor force has this or not.

That's the part I have trouble with. The jury is still out on whether his policies hamstrung the economy or not. Not enough time has elapsed to make that judgment, and yet you've already gone and made it.


It is based on my education as an economics major in college. Of course, I am not a big Keynesian Economics fan, so my opinion maybe skewed.

1) Yeah, I still don't know what the mortgage bailouts have to do with this bill, which is being explicitly written to prevent further taxpayer-funded bailouts.

2) Not that canard again. Bad mortgages were not the problem. Stupid derivative bets piled on top of bad mortgage bonds were. By the end of things Goldman Sachs and the like were deliberately seeking out new subprime mortgage-holders to keep the bond-making machine going. Nobody in Congress was forcing them to do it -- they did it because they were making a sh!tload of money off it.

As an econ major, you should be able to see through that "mean old Congress made us give out bad mortgages" nonsense. There weren't $150 trillion worth of mortgages floating around.

3) The write-downs are from two things, actually: the elimination of the Medicare D rebate, which will either cost companies more money on retiree prescription benefits or cause them to kick those retirees directly onto Medicare D (three guesses which option they'll pick, first two don't count) and the tax on the Cadillac plans, which isn't slated to take effect for at least six years and may not happen at all.

The write-down numbers were crap.

4) Fair enough. If you're pure Friedman/Chicago School then you're not going to be predisposed to giving Obama's policies on that front any benefit of the doubt.

Quote: Originally Posted By antonsirius on 4/27/20101) Yeah, I still don't know what the mortgage bailouts have to do with this bill, which is being explicitly written to prevent further taxpayer-funded bailouts.

2) Not that canard again. Bad mortgages were not the problem. Stupid derivative bets piled on top of bad mortgage bonds were. By the end of things Goldman Sachs and the like were deliberately seeking out new subprime mortgage-holders to keep the bond-making machine going. Nobody in Congress was forcing them to do it -- they did it because they were making a sh!tload of money off it.

As an econ major, you should be able to see through that "mean old Congress made us give out bad mortgages" nonsense. There weren't $150 trillion worth of mortgages floating around.

3) The write-downs are from two things, actually: the elimination of the Medicare D rebate, which will either cost companies more money on retiree prescription benefits or cause them to kick those retirees directly onto Medicare D (three guesses which option they'll pick, first two don't count) and the tax on the Cadillac plans, which isn't slated to take effect for at least six years and may not happen at all.

The write-down numbers were crap.

4) Fair enough. If you're pure Friedman/Chicago School then you're not going to be predisposed to giving Obama's policies on that front any benefit of the doubt

I always had a hunch you went through a goth phase when you were younger.

This post could not be converted. To view the original post's thread, click here.

Quote: Originally Posted By antonsirius on 4/27/20101) Yeah, I still don't know what the mortgage bailouts have to do with this bill, which is being explicitly written to prevent further taxpayer-funded bailouts.

Basically it is setting up the same thing. You are going to force all banks to fund this thing so the ones that f up can take advantage of it.

We already bail out smaller banks who f up, with the FDIC. The fund would just make sure public bailouts are restricted to the smaller banks.

And yes, like the consumer protection provisions, this means "good" banks have extra costs and regulations to deal with because of the "bad" banks. Frankly my attitude is, too fukking bad.

The industry was given a chance to exist in a relatively unregulated environment, and the industry screwed the pooch.

<<<So your softening your stance. You no longer want all of this privatized, you want these functions to remain in the hands of the Feds, you just want to eliminate a lot of the bureaucracy. Why didn't you just say so?

See, here's the thing about the tea party, I don't disagree with them about cutting government spending. I don't want to pile on more debt. I do have major disagreements about what to cut and believe that a vast majority of tea party people have no clue what they're talking about, much like Swamp.

I've had this discussion before and I get the same initial "cut spending, cut taxes" argument. They got lost when it's time to talk specifics. It's a party of slogans and Palin catch-phrases. Eventually they do come up with similar arguments to Swamps though, cut this department or that department, free up the markets, privatize this or that, blah, blah, blah.

Here are some areas I would start with. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are approaching 1 trillion dollars (how many anti-war tea parties are there?).

They love to yell and scream of wasteful spending yet I haven't heard a peep from them about defense contractor fraud and waste costs well into the tens of billions.

They hate welfare handouts, yet we handout some 150 billion in corporate welfare every year, about the same as cash, food and housing welfare to citizens. Do they protest this?

They claim that some people don't pay their fair share of taxes yet up to 60% of US corporations end up with 0 corporate tax liability (GAO numbers) and 95% paid less than 5%.

Those last two points are particularly hard to swallow since tea partiers are champions of deregulated free markets and corporate welfare flies in the face of the free market concept and goes back to the very birth of this nation (as do government "bailouts"). Tough to call Obama a Socialist when the Washington administration bailed out banks in 1792.

So how about putting people before profits (another catchphrase of the day) and strip away the corporate welfare before we start stripping away public welfare or gutting government programs like the FDA, which are designed top protect the public from corporate greed and negligence. Let's make all corporations pay their fair share before we talk about lowering corporate taxes again. I'd love to see a group of tea partiers protesting in front of a new Walmart site the next time they ask for the community to build a 300 million dollar road from the highway to their doorstep. Hell, I'll grab a colonial hat and join them.>>>

Must have missed this, took your response out to limit post size.

I am nore than willing to go privatize on many things, but I feel that the political climate at this time (Obama) would not allow for this. I made some pull backs to show that I can compromise.

You take our arguments and attack blah blah to them.

We faced a serious problem with our economy, and Obama decided that the way to solve it was government intervention. This is what we as a nation have been doing more and more. No one questions it. I want every decision to expand the government to get as much scrutiny as the idea to eliminate the DOE.


Iraq and Afghanistan cost $1 trillion dollars. About the same as Obama's stimulus. Which has done more good for America? We may have made tactical and strategic mistakes in the way we ran Iraq and Afghanistan, but the decision to invade stands up. No one is for Defense Contractor fraud. Do you have some companies that are stealing from us and getting away with it?

Corporate Welfare isnt really welefare. It is a national policy to support certain areas of business and encourage them. We support certain crops to make sure that we have enough of them for food and bio-feuls. I would be open to anything we spend money on. If you have aproject we should cut lets do it.

Where do you hear Tea Party people talking about not paying enough taxes? This sounds like an Obama point, not a Tea Party point.

And when are Tea Party people talking about welefare at all? You are working off some 1980 Democratic playbook.

One of the things that the government is responsible for is roads. If the people dont want a Wallmart, dont support the road. People want Wallmarts.

Your arguments are all over the place. You seem as disorganized as the people you attack. The problems are big and the answers are complex.

I just want spend less to be on the table. It isnt now!

Does that mean that homeland security (which does what the FBI and CIA are supposed to do) would be eliminated thus saving a great deal of money?

Question for you swamp if the tea party were trumpeting democratic party rhetoric would you support their behavior? Never mind, in today's society the first question asked isn't whether the action is good or bad just what party is in question (all parties are guilty of this) then if the party in question is "your" party excuses and rationalizations abound.

Why don't we just elect Rush or Janine Garafalo president and cut out the middle man.........people make me sick