Shutdown

[cgk_iii]

Whatever though. I just want to talk about e30's from now on lol. Everyone thinks im crazy but we all have something in common right? We all love our cars and what makes us happy. Im tired of all the negative energy.

[nando]

So since when was InfoWars considered fact?

Did you actually do any research to see if Alex Jones or whatever site reposted those parts are full of it or not?

http://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-fema-coffins-plastic-grave-liners.904/

Why don't you re-enter reality man?

Just because people are capable of understanding what is BS and what is fact doesn't mean they are closed-minded, it means they are capable of thinking for themselves and processing information instead of regurgitating hot air from someone else.

I like how far off they were in their estimate - 500,000 vs 80,000.

facts, indeed.

[BraveUlysses]

And I'll be laughing once you're detained and worked as a slave for our "free" country.

And if this were to happen why do you think you wouldn't be one of the slaves too? Derp.

Whatever though. I just want to talk about e30's from now on lol. Everyone thinks im crazy but we all have something in common right? We all love our cars and what makes us happy. Im tired of all the negative energy.

I too think you should leave and stop posting garbage here.

[cgk_iii]

And if this were to happen why do you think you wouldn't be one of the slaves too? Derp.



I too think you should leave and stop posting garbage here.

[tjts1]

I believe that Marshall law will soon be declared. It's all happening slowly. All i can say is stock up on ammo and dont let your guard down.

Ammo won't protect you when Jezuzzzzzsss is coming to get you.

That shitz immortal mother fuker!

[DatUtahGuy]

Who is down to move to Canada-land? Shutdown roadtrip 2014

[mrsleeve]

Stop embarrassing yourself there's no comparing the country's debt to credit cards.

You're out of your fucking element.

I understand the difference, you seem to fail to see the similarities

Too much debt is still bad no matter how yous slice it or on what scale you compare it

[nando]

I understand the difference, you seem to fail to see the similarities

Too much debt is still bad no matter how yous slice it or on what scale you compare it

how much is too much?

[BraveUlysses]

how much is too much?

Silly nando, that doesn't matter. Impotent outrage matters more!

Here's a link that would be informative for sleeve but who knows if he will actually read it and interpret it correctly.

Does the $16 Trillion Debt Matter? A Remedial Lesson in Public Finance Economics for the GOP (the CATO institute is a conservative think tank)

Everyone has a cross to bear in life, some sort of burden or obligation, often self-imposed.

For some inexplicable reason, I’ve decided that one of my responsibilities is to educate a backwards and primitive people who seem impervious to common sense, simple logic, and strong principles.

As you’ve probably guessed already, I’m talking about Republicans.

I’ve already identified them at the Stupid Party, but they seem especially ill-informed and clueless on the topic of government borrowing.

I’ve specifically warned that they are economically (and politically) misguided when they focus on deficits and debt as America’s main fiscal problem.

I even created a “Bob Dole Award” in hopes of getting this point across. Simply stated, fixating on debt opens the door for higher taxes.

And does anyone think our economy would be stronger, or our fiscal position would be better, if we replaced some debt-financed spending with some spending financed by class-warfare taxes?

Especially since the higher taxes almost certainly would trigger more spending, so government borrowing would stay the same and the only thing that would change is that we’d be saddled with even more waste.

Notwithstanding all my educational efforts, Republicans couldn’t resist jumping up and down and making loud noises earlier this week when the national debt hit the $16 trillion mark earlier this week (a google search for “$16 trillion debt” returned more than 24 million hits).

So let’s walk through (again) why this is misguided.

First, let’s clear up some numbers that cause confusion. Republicans are complaining about something called the “gross federal debt.” This number is largely meaningless (see table 7.1 of the OMB Historical Tables if you want to look at the details).

It is the combination of a somewhat meaningful number of more than $11 trillion known as “debt held by the public,” which is a measure of how much the federal government has borrowed over time from the private sector, and a totally irrelevant number of about $4.5 trillion known as “debt held by federal government accounts.”

The latter number is simply a total of the IOUs that the government issues to itself, most notably the ones at the Social Security Trust Fund. But the “assets” in the Trust Fund at the Social Security Administration are offset by the “liabilities” at the Treasury Department. This is an empty bookkeeping gimmick, just as if you took a dollar out of your right pocket, put it in your left pocket, and left an IOU in exchange.

That being said, it is important to recognize that politicians have imposed poorly designed entitlement programs, and future spending on these programs will skyrocket far beyond current revenues. That growing gap, which is explained in this short video, is sometimes known as “unfunded liabilities.”

This number depends on a whole range of assumptions and can be measured in current dollars, constant dollars, and present value. I prefer the middle approach, which adjusts for inflation, and it’s worth noting that “unfunded liabilities” for Social Security and Medicare are more than $100 trillion.

That’s a number we should worry about, not the make-believe $4.5 trillion of IOUs that comprise part of the “gross national debt.”

Now let’s get to the most important issue. The reason we should worry about that $100 trillion number is that it is an estimate of how much the burden of spending will climb in the future. That additional spending will weaken the economy whether it is financed by borrowing or taxes.

Sort of helps to explain why entitlement reform is completely necessary if we want to keep America from a Greek-style fiscal collapse at some point in the future.

Here’s my video on the topic. In an ideal world, Republicans would not be allowed to talk about fiscal policy until they were first strapped in chairs, given a bunch of ADD medicine, and forced to watch this on automatic replay about 50 times.

Now for the all-important caveats. Yes, a nation can reach a point where debt becomes a problem. All you have to do is look at the mess in Europe to understand that point.

And I’ve shared numbers from both the Bank for International Settlements and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to indicate that almost all nations – including the U.S. – are going to face similar problems if government policy is left on autopilot.

What I want people to realize, though, is that governments only get into that kind of mess because there’s too much spending.

Government spending is the disease. The various ways of financing that spending – taxes, borrowing, and printing money – are symptoms of the underlying disease.

[tjts1]

So the teabaggers shut down the United Stated Government for a little over 2 weeks and got precisely nothing in return.

It was unclear if Boehner's leadership position will be at risk in the political fallout, but opinion polls show Republicans have taken a political beating in the showdown as they head into next year's congressional elections.

"The deal we've got, you know the old saying 'we may have left a little bit on the table?' We left everything on the table," Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said. "This has been a very bad two weeks for the Republican brand, conservatism."

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/16/us-usa-fiscal-congress-idUSBRE99F0Q120131016

Way to go boehner heads.

[z31maniac]

So the teabaggers shut down the United Stated Government for a little over 2 weeks and got precisely nothing in return.


Way to go boehner heads.

It's great, perhaps they will quit being so insane.

However, I doubt it.

[BraveUlysses]

Well, they did accomplish this too:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/16/study-congresss-budget-battles-have-cost-us-700-billion/

Study: Congress’s budget battles have cost the economy $700 billion so far

This is an eye-popping claim: A new report from Macroeconomic Advisers argues that Congress's budget fights, debt-ceiling stand-offs, and spending cuts have cost the U.S. economy nearly 3 percent of GDP since 2010. That's roughly $700 billion in lost economic activity — all thanks to Congress.

But is this true? Are lawmakers really doing that much damage to the U.S. economy? A dramatic claim like that needs unpacking, and there's ample reason for skepticism, so let's break this report down piece by piece. There are two big arguments here:

1) Spending cuts have taken a bite out of economic growth. First, the report estimates that the fall in spending driven by Congress since 2010 has shaved 0.7 percentage points off annual U.S. economic growth over the past three years:



In the chart above, the dashed red line is an estimate of what U.S. growth would have been if discretionary spending had stayed constant as a share of GDP since 2010.

But, of course, spending didn't stay constant. For one, various stimulus programs began winding down. Then, in August of 2011, Congress enacted the Budget Control Act, which set hard caps on discretionary spending and set things in motion for the sequestration budget cuts of 2012. All told, this shrunk U.S. federal discretionary spending from 9.4 percent of GDP in 2010 to 7.3 percent of GDP.

The authors argue that this sort of fiscal drag is harmful when the U.S. economy is still struggling far below full employment. As a result, they argue, the spending slowdown cut annual GDP growth by 0.7 percentage points and cost "the equivalent of 1.2 million lost jobs."

(Remember, that's a drop in yearly GDP growth, so the losses compound over time.)

2) Increased "policy uncertainty" due to congressional showdowns also hurt growth. But the economists aren't done yet. They also estimate that all the turmoil and uncertainty due to Congress's fights over the debt ceiling and the "fiscal cliff" has put a smaller dent in growth. Here's their second chart:



The authors use the Economic Policy Uncertainty Index constructed by Stanford and University of Chicago economists and argue that it correlates with slower growth:

Although uncertainty might directly discourage households from spending and businesses from hiring and investing, we’ve found little evidence of such a direct link.

Fiscal policy uncertainty is, however, inversely correlated with stock prices and positively correlated with private 'credit spreads.' Hence, by undermining wealth and raising private borrowing costs, fiscal policy uncertainty can indirectly undermine household spending as well as business hiring and investment.

Their implication is that growth would be higher without all this brinkmanship. The increased policy uncertainty, the report claims, "lowered GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points per year, and raised the unemployment rate in 2013 by 0.6 percentage points, equivalent to 900,000 lost jobs."

When you add these two effects up — and account for compounding growth, as Paul Krugman does — then the report essentially implies that Congress's budget battles have cost the United States roughly 3 percent of GDP, or around $700 billion of wasted economic potential since 2011.

Potential criticisms of these numbers

There are a lot of criticisms you could make of the Macroeconomic Advisers report. For one, the authors assume that the Federal Reserve hasn't been able to offset most of the economic pain from Congress's "fiscal drag."

But is that really true? The central bank has taken a number of steps this year to boost the economy — including another round of quantitative easing. If the Fed's moves had a bigger effect than people think, then it will turn out that Congress's spending cuts may have done less damage than Macroeconomic Advisers is estimating.

Similarly, some experts have criticized the idea that "policy uncertainty" is really hurting growth. For one, the uncertainty index stabilized dramatically in August 2013, but the U.S. economy didn't surge as a result. What's more, as Mike Konczal has pointed out, those touting the index may be reversing the causality here — there's reason to think that poor growth causes policy uncertainty, rather than the other way around.

It's entirely plausible that Congress has throttled the U.S. recovery, either by cutting back on spending prematurely or increasing the amount of uncertainty in the economy — or both! But a solid estimate of the impacts is hard to come by, and a lot depends on the assumptions used in these economic models.

[illest318i]

I believe they came or gonna come to an agreement, I'm trying to find the source I saw this from, but I can't seem to find it.

I'll keep looking.

[illest318i]

I believe that Marshall law will soon be declared. It's all happening slowly. All i can say is stock up on ammo and dont let your guard down.

I agree with you man. I know it sounds crazy to some people, but from what I know this is the plan and more things to come.

Although it's good to have ammo I don't think civilians will stand a chance against the governments millions worth of ammo. Also I think everyone will get arrested and sent to these FEMA camps, the people who fight will get killed if anything.

It freaking sucks, I hope it's BS, but it makes sense in every way and everything fits in perfectly from what I have learned.


I will now walk back slowly before anyone thinks I'm a dumbass and am full of shit... Good day :pimp:

[nando]

FEMA camps... *facepalm*