Shutdown

[z31maniac]

Not likely.

The stronghold of Republicans is the South nowadays, and most of them are Tea party supporters. They can maintain enough sway in the House, thanks to districts gerrymandered to fuck, that these types of crises are likely to continue and the wackjobs instigating them are still going to get into office.

So, this is, like, what the future will be like.

Nope, there is approx. 40-45 "Tea Party" R's in the House, once the rest of the party sees that these nut-jobs who believe in the Rapture (Made up in the 1800s), cause the rest of them to lose their seats, they will quickly send them back into the shadows.

[nando]

that's pretty bad logic.

so if one person does it, that makes it OK? whoever said it was a good thing if democrats did it?

[mrsleeve]

Yes and the Dems have never gerrymandered a district to the width of a street to keep control of a seat before

[einhander]

Not likely.

The stronghold of Republicans is the South nowadays, and most of them are Tea party supporters. They can maintain enough sway in the House, thanks to districts gerrymandered to fuck, that these types of crises are likely to continue and the wackjobs instigating them are still going to get into office.

So, this is, like, what the future will be like.

[nando]

maybe they will finally get their act together on entitlement reform and taxes so we can end this cycle of nonsense.

but, I don't have my hopes up.

[tjts1]

I don't think the GOP can survive as a single party without pulling this kind of BS again.

[rwh11385]

Shutdown over, debt ceiling pushed to another day. Hopefully they start focusing on the real concern that has been known since the Reagan administration - the costs of George's generation retiring.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-1...sign-bill.html

Congress acted the day before U.S. borrowing authority was scheduled to lapse as lawmakers engaged in their fourth round of fiscal brinkmanship in less than three years.

The agreement will put federal workers back on the job, prevent a potential default on U.S. debt and make no major policy changes sought by Republicans. Lawmakers didn’t resolve their long-term divides on fiscal policy and will have to return to the same issues over the next four months.

‘Didn’t Win’
“We fought the good fight,” House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, said today on Cincinnati’s WLW, a radio station in his home state of Ohio. “We just didn’t win.”

I'd say there weren't any winners from this but certainly the Tea Party lost:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-1...self-down.html

The meltdown on Capitol Hill doesn’t mean the end of the Tea Party. In fact, most of those lawmakers accurately point out that they are doing what the constituents in their painfully drawn, one-sided, overwhelmingly white, aging, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, science-denying districts want. Still, there are emerging signs -- from declining poll numbers to the breach with the Republican Party’s traditional business allies -- that the act is getting old. Mess with Democratic totems such as Social Security and nutritional programs for pregnant mothers, send Sarah Palin to Washington periodically to pour salt on open wounds, but don’t mess with Treasury bills and the markets.

Brain Freeze

There was no convincing extremists ahead of time. Like excited children at the fair, the Tea Party had to eat too much ice cream and see the whole party get sick, and even then, they couldn’t stop themselves. But some of them had to be queasy when they saw an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll last week: Only 24 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the Republican Party, the lowest ever. By eight points, the public said it preferred a Congress controlled by the Democrats over one in Republican hands. Positive feelings toward the Tea Party fell to an all-time low.

[rwh11385]

Again just because they don't raise the limit does not = a default on debts outstandig

Did you actually run the numbers on that, or just repeating what the village idiots are putting in articles? Or consider that extraordinary measures already push back some debt payments to later?

we borrow roughly 30% of every dollar spent. so, if the house refuses to allow the treasury to issue additional bonds to fund current spending levels, the government has to cut spending. it won't have enough money to cover wages, programs (solyndra?), and $40k toilets. cuts will have to be made because there would be no ability to borrow any longer.

so, where does the messiah chose to cut? he cannot legally refuse to pay on debt obligations of the US government. it is in the constitution. social security is not technically a direct obligation of the US treasury. but federal law mandates treasury honor the IOU's it issued Social Security when demanded, so he cannot legally refuse to pay Social Security obligations either. that's why this whole argument is about spending, not about defaulting. republicans like to spend our money, democrats are republicans on steroids.

he knows all this, and yet he spins a different tale. stupid? or lying for effect?

Hey George, why don't you actually put down numbers for where cuts can and would come from instead of just throwing around assumptions? Is it because you can't do math or just would rather live on assumptions? And look like an idiot by relying on calling the president "messiah" instead of actually making a real case?

George, you never had the guts to back up this claim as I asked. Are you not capable of doing so, just rocking out with your assumptions again, or what? Or afraid that we'd point out how you did it wrong like you mentioned before?

never let the facts get in the way

Or apparently basic math.

So, if the US borrows 30% of what it spends, where do you want to cut?



So to not borrow anymore, you'd simply have to shut down every federal agency or source of discretionary spending, including all of defense. And hope there's not a disease outbreak or natural disaster or terrorist attack or North Korea being opportunistic. And no need for GPS or air travel. Or military family housing and the $66.5 billion in discretionary spending for the veteran administration.

I guess George thinks that sounds reasonable? To simply eliminate all of it.
No more farm support. No more science (not that George ever cared for it). And no more Labor department that George and Jack Welch called BS on. No more SEC. No one to keep plants from dumping waste into rivers. No immigration enforcement. No more interstate maintenance. No more FBI.


All because angry old men like George parrot dumb "reasoning" that they are told to believe instead of thinking for themselves and using facts / math / logic.

[illest318i]

Um, yeah, it is BS and it does sound crazy because it is.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/4312850

The Evidence: Debunking FEMA Camp Myths

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/23656/

That's who you are using as a source...

And let's remember that FEMA is the same organization that took 5 days to get water to the Katrina victims yet is organized enough to overtake the country... riiiiiight. It's like all of the Truthers, believe a youtube video based on speculation but ignored facts or science.

Actually no, I wasn't using that as a source.

Here's something kinda relevant that I was talking about.

http://www.pressfortruth.ca/video-reports/civil-war-and-the-litmus-test-will-you-shoot-americans/

[rwh11385]

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)

But 'tis better to repost good facts and info that simply present simplistic and angry opinion.

I am pretty sure that I posted some of these before... although probably ignored because facts and logic from NYT are not trustworthy to people who enjoy Faux News.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/op...-trillion.html

So, let’s talk about the numbers.

The first thing we need to ask is what a sustainable budget would look like. The answer is that in a growing economy, budgets don’t have to be balanced to be sustainable. Federal debt was higher at the end of the Clinton years than at the beginning — that is, the deficits of the Clinton administration’s early years outweighed the surpluses at the end. Yet because gross domestic product rose over those eight years, the best measure of our debt position, the ratio of debt to G.D.P., fell dramatically, from 49 to 33 percent.

Which... if you want to simplify and put into household terms... if you make more money, your mortgage payment can go down to only a third of your income instead of half, even if you have a more expensive house that brought on more debt.

But if you are dragging the economy down fighting over PBS and NSF instead of talking about the real problem, you are doubly hurting yourself. That's like worrying about dropping cable or Popular Science subscription while caring for a handful of retirees and finding out you need to pay for their hip replacements.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/gone-deficit-gone/

First, fluctuations in the deficit tend to be driven by the business cycle; when the economy slumps, revenues fall and some kinds of expenditure, like unemployment benefits, rise. You want to take out these “automatic stabilizers” when assessing the underlying state of the budget.

Second, we don’t have to balance the budget to have a sustainable fiscal position; all we need is to ensure that debt grows more slowly than GDP.

So CBO is now out with its latest report on automatic stabilizers. It estimates that in fiscal 2013 these stabilizers will amount to $422 billion, accounting for just about half of a projected $845 billion deficit. So the cyclically adjusted deficit will be $423 billion.

How does this compare with the deficit consistent with fiscal sustainability? Well, there’s about $11.5 trillion in federal debt in the hands of the public. A reasonable, indeed fairly conservative guess is that nominal GDP will in future grow by 4 percent per year, half from real growth and half from inflation. This means that the sustainable deficit is 4 percent of $11.5 trillion, or $460 billion. Hey, we’re there!

Yes, late this decade deficits will start to rise again thanks to rising health costs and an aging population, yada yada. But I have yet to hear a coherent argument about why the long-term problem of paying for the benefits we want — which will eventually have to be resolved through a combination of cost savings and revenue increases — should constrain our fiscal policy right now, in the midst of what remains a terrible economic slump.

[austerity instead of being proactive to the actual problem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/11/op...-disorder.html

Bear in mind that the budget doesn’t have to be balanced to put us on a fiscally sustainable path; all we need is a deficit small enough that debt grows more slowly than the economy. To take the classic example, America never did pay off the debt from World War II — in fact, our debt doubled in the 30 years that followed the war. But debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell by three-quarters over the same period.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/us...debt.html?_r=0
Budget Office Warns That Deficits Will Rise Again Because Cuts Are Misdirected

Annual federal deficits will continue to fall in the short term, the budget office reported in its yearly long-term outlook, because of the recent spending cuts in military and domestic programs and rising tax collections in a recovering economy. The report projected the deficit in 2015 to be equal to 2.1 percent of the economy’s output, or just one-fifth of the peak shortfall at the height of the recession in 2009.

But starting in 2016, deficits are projected to rise again as more baby boomers begin drawing from Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — the fast-growing entitlement programs, which Democrats and Republicans cannot agree on how to rein in.

Budget experts have been warning since at least the Reagan era that in the early 21st century, aging baby boomers will drive entitlement spending — chiefly for Medicare and Medicaid, and to a lesser degree for Social Security — to levels that will crowd out all other military and domestic spending. Interest on the debt will also be a major and growing expense.

What is different now is that the Republican-controlled House and the White House have been on a two-year run of deficit reduction that has resulted, because of their inability to agree on entitlement reductions and higher tax revenues, in deepening cuts in the budget areas that are not responsible for the projections of mounting debt. Those discretionary spending programs — which include things as varied as Pentagon weapons purchases, air traffic control, science and research, education and national parks — are being squeezed even as entitlement spending grows automatically.

The budget office said that by 2023, the annual deficit would rise to an estimated 3.5 percent of the G.D.P., which is just beyond the level that many economists consider sustainable in a growing economy. By 2038, it would be 6.5 percent.

Under a nine-year plan starting in the 2011 fiscal year, discretionary spending was already being reduced annually. But the across-the-board “sequester” that took effect in March, when Republicans and Mr. Obama could not agree on alternative deficit reductions, has pared domestic and military programs further, resulting in increasing layoffs, furloughs and service cutbacks.

Federal spending for the major health programs and Social Security will equal 14 percent of the G.D.P. in 25 years, double the level of the last four decades, the budget office projected. While federal revenues are projected to grow — to 19.5 percent of the G.D.P. by 2038, compared with the 40-year average of 17.5 percent — that rise is not enough to offset the spending for federal benefit programs.

In contrast with entitlement spending, discretionary spending for domestic and military programs by 2023 would fall to 5.3 percent of the G.D.P., from the 7.3 percent of this year — the lowest levels in about 70 years.

But then again, why talk about facts and the real issues when it is super easy to stir up outrage in the simple folk?

[Farbin Kaiber]

FARBIN: Good shit bro. Highly entertaining posts, would read again. It wouldn't be the same though if you didn't used to see the world through those eyes and moved on from it and have the perspective to comment on his.

Thanks! I'm sure I'm coming off as an ex-smoker would to a two pack a day smoker, but it's not like I don't know what I'm talking about. It's OK, I'd have done the same thing seven years ago when I was the guy I spoke of in previous posts in this thread.

[rwh11385]

Wow. An op-ed.

So what?

So the minority of Americans who want the Tea Party to crash the country can defend the hostage taking and still blame Obama for not backing down.

http://dailycurrant.com/2013/10/14/house-republicans-schedule-obama-impeachment-hearings/

"All this clown needs to do is repeal the most important law he ever passed, and then this will all be over. Why is that so hard? The Tea Party represents almost 22 percent of Americans. Only a dictator would refuse to give us everything we want. Obama should be more than impeached -- he should be in jail."

I usually like Sowell's pieces but he ignored a key bit of fact:

So House Republican leaders made sure no such vote could happen.

[rwh11385]

I'm not rich nor am i an arrogant asshole like yourself. I live in a fucking apartment on the peninsula. but im happy because of the way i live my life and work hard to earn every thing i own. my parents cut me off when i was 13 and ive had to venge for myself ever since. so dont think just because i live here i think "im the shit"


If anything you're the one with the douche bag attitude right now. i said i wouldn't leave California because i love it here. Because i said that, i get beat down by you assholes? get a life.

I think we would disagree with your assessment there. You are very much a dbag right now, and one that believes in loony conspiracy theories at that. I think they have more of a life in their locations and don't try to puff out their chest that they are slaving away just so they can brag about where they live, unlike you. California is cheap as hell compared to one of the places I lived and people worked hard too to pay for it... but didn't carry your attitude that it was the holy land or they had to validate their living choices by putting down other people's.

Then again, I'd rather reside somewhere cheap and spend 4 hours to get to the mountains to ski or maybe a little longer for a beach or have fun in Vegas. Or like, enjoy freedom of not being in CA. Or having money for motorsports.

Yea if you go ahead and look it up you will see that where i live is one of the most expensive places. its not just me saying it its the whole US saying it.

http://www.citymayors.com/features/cost_survey.html

Except for all the people in NYC... and all the other cities in the world which are lots more expensive but don't get off on talking down to cheaper LA or SF.

FARBIN: Good shit bro. Highly entertaining posts, would read again. It wouldn't be the same though if you didn't used to see the world through those eyes and moved on from it and have the perspective to comment on his.

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:

Um, yeah, it is BS and it does sound crazy because it is.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/news/4312850

The Evidence: Debunking FEMA Camp Myths

http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/23656/

Okay. So Jim, who is the woman that made the tape and we heard her voice a minute ago where she said spooky stuff and it scared me.

MEIGS: Yes.

GLENN: Who is she?

MEIGS: I believe her name is Linda Thompson. I’ve got to double check that last name. I’ve got it in my notes here.

GLENN: Okay.

MEIGS: Linda Thompson. She was one of the leaders of the militia movement. You remember the militia movement, you know, the black helicopters and the idea that, you know, our

GLENN: This is right after Timothy McVeigh if I’m not mistaken.

MEIGS: It led up to Timothy McVeigh. He was certainly a part of that and it continued into the Nineties and among other things that she promoted was the idea that her followers needed to go to Washington and start shooting senators. And a lot of people in the militia movement even kind of renounced her as being too extreme. But again no one

GLENN: Hold just a second. Wait, wait. Wait, wait. I just want that to sink in. So the lady making the tapes on the FEMA camps.

MEIGS: Right.

GLENN: Is a woman that was kicked out of the militia movement that said go kill senators because she was too extreme?

MEIGS: I don’t know if anybody can really be kicked out of a loose movement like that but, yes, there was some

GLENN: Right, yes, okay. We want to get our facts right that she wasn’t excommunicated. They just kind of went, yeah, don’t really talk to her; shun her a little bit because she’s crazy.

MEIGS: Right. But what’s interesting is here’s this video she made ages ago, and a lot of this is actually kind of repurposed. A lot of this fear about prison camps originally started when the UN was going to come and do this. Well now after Katrina we’ve got a new villain. You know, FEMA is the all purpose villain and certainly FEMA has plenty to answer for, but the but you’ll see the same things reemerge with kind of in new bottles. And so here you see this fear that there’s going to be some kind of takeover of our government. A lot of it honestly goes back to the movie Red Dawn. Do you remember Red Dawn?

GLENN: Yes, I do.

MEIGS: And it’s a very enjoyable movie but it’s a movie. And I think sometimes you see it’s maybe shaped people’s world views a little more than any movie should.

GLENN: Isn’t there, isn’t there one of these FEMA camp things that actually has footage from that movie?

MEIGS: There may be. I haven’t seen that clip yet but, you know, people will take this stuff, they will reedit it. So people might be looking at listening to Linda Thompson’s voiceover from this footage that she made and think it’s a newscast or they don’t exactly know where it comes from. And again it can sound credible if all you do is just look at a video on YouTube.

That's who you are using as a source...

And let's remember that FEMA is the same organization that took 5 days to get water to the Katrina victims yet is organized enough to overtake the country... riiiiiight. It's like all of the Truthers, believe a youtube video based on speculation but ignored facts or science.

[cgk_iii]

All I heard was that noise the teacher from the Peanuts specials makes.





I guess you must be crazy enough not to realize satire.

All i can do is laugh at your arrogance

[Farbin Kaiber]

Yea if you go ahead and look it up you will see that where i live is one of the most expensive places. its not just me saying it its the whole US saying it.

You think this is the ONLY place i have ever been? ive been to plenty of countries (Holland, UK, Greece, france) and ive seen how hard people have to work, but then again places like Greece for instance have so many luxuries too, but i assume you think they have "nothing in life" and its "hollow" and "fake" ?my ancestors come from poor countries/families. My Grandpa fled Greece so he didnt have to be involved in the wars and came to California and worked his ass off to get me where i am today. I'm not rich nor am i an arrogant asshole like yourself. I live in a fucking apartment on the peninsula. but im happy because of the way i live my life and work hard to earn every thing i own. my parents cut me off when i was 13 and ive had to venge for myself ever since. so dont think just because i live here i think "im the shit"


If anything you're the one with the douche bag attitude right now. i said i wouldn't leave California because i love it here. Because i said that, i get beat down by you assholes? get a life.

All I heard was that noise the teacher from the Peanuts specials makes.

oh and I'm crazy???? :rofl:

I guess you must be crazy enough not to realize satire.