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Impeachable Offenses -- Part The XVII

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Fenian_Bastard, Jul 10, 2007.

  1. PopeDirkBenedict

    PopeDirkBenedict Active Member

    Fenian,

    I have a few legit questions for you. Had Nixon's offenses come to light in the summer of 1975, do you think he would have served out his term? Had Clinton's offenses come to light in the summer of 1999, do you think the GOP still would have gone through with the impeachment?

    At this point, Bush is more irrelevant than he has been at any point since 1998. He cannot get any major initiatives through Congress -- I daresay that any major bills, sans the budget, will have to be a consensus bill -- and is lamely trying to sell his dead parrot of Iraq. I think that the reason that impeachment isn't on the Dem agenda is because why spend enormous amounts of political capital and bring everything else grinding to a halt in order to take out a president who is increasingly losing his party? I am all for subpoenaing AG-squared and embarassing him, but actually trying to remove the ship of fools is giving them more credit than they deserve.
     
  2. D-Backs Hack

    D-Backs Hack Guest

    On 9/12/01, 90 percent of the country was fully behind George W. Bush.

    So, roughly two-thirds of the nation have abandoned him, simply out of petty partisan politics?

    Gosh darn, these people hate the president for no good reason!

    Seriously, you take a look around the last five years, and this is what you believe?

    Some people are hated irrationally. Some people earn the hate they receive.

    I wouldn't expect people who would praise Bush for being in church if he was caught red-handed stealing from the collection plate to understand this.

    But that's how it is.
     
  3. I don't claim to be an economist, but I play one on the Internets ... err while in school to get my Econ degree.

    We actually went over what a tax increase would do to the economy (the professor, who is the Ph.D advisor at a large state universityz, went as far as saying "What If Hillary is elected?) This is upper level Macroeconomics. Basically our national savings rate goes up with her planned reversal of GWB's tax cuts for the top 1%, which leads to lower interest rates, more money to lend businesses to invest, more capital outflows and a lowering of our $830 billion trade deficit (which is tied to national savings). So the economic theory says that a tax increase would be good for the country on its own merits.

    And yeah, I'm for doing whatever it takes to get a true national healthcare system in the U.S., including a tax increase like the one Bill Clinton instituted that raised the level on the top tier and lowered it on the lower tiers. But such a tax increase would also help the economy's overall health.
     
  4. zagoshe

    zagoshe Well-Known Member

    Fixed.

    Dude if you believe all that gibberish I have the deeds to a few bridges I can sell to you.

    I remember when Clinton was giving his ridiculous campaign speeches about how his tax increases would lower your interest on credit cards -- which is the biggest pile of horseshit laid out by a president prior to "I did not have sex with that woman" or the weapons of mass destruction nonsense.

    All a tax increase will do is put more of your money into the hands of politicians who will no doubt waste it and worse, will create new ways to spend it while re-organizing the debts of our country and claim we are balancing the budget.

    And I'm not sure after seeing the disaster that is public housing or the abortion known as public schools why anyone would want public health care, particularly when health care in this country was both cost effective and affordable to every one BEFORE the government started to create monopolies by passing the HMO act in the 1970's.

    And what's even funnier is the same Republicans who rebuked Hillary care in 1992 then went on to pass much of it little by little and guess what -- our health care system is more fucked up than ever.

    But that's OK, you keep telling yourself that tax increases will be good for the economy -- they won't, perhaps in the very short term but not in the long term -- and that you'd rather have your government invest (waste) your money than you doing it yourself.
     
  5. I would seriously doubt the guy's a flaming liberal. Economists believe in letting the market work rather than government interference on nearly any issue. But they also believe in fiscal responsibility, and when you run huge budget deficits, you also get huge trade deficits. It's a fact. Clinton left W with a surplus and he's turned it into a huge deficit with his tax cut and war. A tax hike would lower those deficits, known as the twin deficits in economics. But you keep telling yourself that you know more than every economist living today. Next time you post, maybe you could be your "medical doctor personality" and tell us all how modern medicine is all gibberish just because you say it is.
     
  6. zagoshe

    zagoshe Well-Known Member

    The budget surplus was one of the greatest myths of our time. It didn't exist regardless of how much the Repulicans in Congress and/or Slick Willy wanted to tell the world it did. Tax increases in the short term do indeed help the bottom line obviously -- in the short term. In the long term they take money away from citizens and private enterprise and slow the growth of the economy and the problem is they aren't used to pay down the debt and all the other stuff we're promised -- they are used to beef up the already bloated pork projects on the books.

    And Economists that are liberal swear by them because, well, they are liberal and if the guy is a college professor, I'd be willing to be a helluva lot he's a liberal. And economists that are conservative swear by tax cuts.

    Ask your professor this question -- if there was this "surplus" why did the national debt increase by billions and billions of dollars every single year of the 1990's? How can you have a surplus when your debt is growing?
     
  7. zagoshe

    zagoshe Well-Known Member

    Here is an excellent article on the subject by the late Harry Browne, who you might not agree with his politics, but it is hard to argue with when it comes to fiscal matters given his overwhelming success as an investor and financial advisor. He cuts through a lot of the partisan bullshit and lays it out for you very simply.

    Arguing over Non-Existent Budget Surpluses
    by Harry Browne

    President Bush has sent Congress a $2.12 trillion budget. It might appropriately be titled, "We're All Big Spenders Now."

    Of course, neither President Bush nor members of Congress are the least bit alarmed by the size of the budget. All the attention is focused on the supposed disappearance of those wonderful budget surpluses. Congressmen who have never given a thought to fiscal prudence are suddenly distressed that the government will be squandering trillions of dollars of surpluses it was supposed to enjoy over the next ten years.

    But they needn't get so exercised. In reality, there hasn't been a true federal surplus since the Eisenhower administration — nor a series of surpluses large enough to be worthy of the name since the 1920s.

    Background

    Since its inception, Social Security has taken in more money every year than it's paid out to Social Security recipients.

    So the Social Security Administration lends the excess money to the U.S. Treasury to cover the Treasury's budget deficits. The reasoning is that it's better to keep those reserves in Treasury bonds than to play the horses with them.

    For the first thirty years of Social Security, its accounting was kept separate from the regular federal budget. But in the late 1960s, the politicians decided the chronic budget deficits wouldn't look so large if they counted the excess of Social Security receipts as regular budget receipts.

    (Have you noticed how upset politicians get when some private company dips into its employees' pension funds? Well, they've been dipping into the retirement funds of their "employee" taxpayers since the 1960s.)

    Even with this shell game, the budget deficits persisted, but they were no longer so huge.

    Nirvana Arrives
    And, lo and behold, as of 1998 this creative accounting finally produced a series of budget "surpluses."

    In the process, the politicians claimed that two contradictory events were occurring at the same time:

    The federal budget was finally in surplus.

    The Social Security trust fund was absolutely safe — stashed away in a "lock box," in Al Gore's immortal words.

    However, any householder knows that if you run a surplus, your debt diminishes. If your debt is rising, you must be running a deficit.

    And here's what's happened to the federal debt over the past five years.

    Gross Federal Debt(in billions of dollars)

    Year Debt Debt change
    1997 5,370 + 188
    1998 5,479 + 109
    1999 5,606 + 127
    2000 5,629 + 23
    2001 5,770 + 141


    (These statistics are available at the website for Economic Indicators, a government publication produced by the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. The Gross Federal Debt is in the next-to-last column of the linked table.)

    Can't Have It Both Ways

    Perhaps the politicians should count excess Social Security receipts as regular budget receipts. But if so, they can't say that Social Security is safe — because the trust fund is being squandered. And when the Baby Boomers retire, they will quickly run through the remaining Social Security reserves — leaving later generations with nothing for all the money they've put into Social Security.

    Or maybe it's okay to say that Social Security is safe. After all, the Social Security Administration gets Treasury bonds in exchange for those excess receipts. But if so, then it's obvious that there are no budget surpluses — just more and more deficits.

    Whichever way you choose to count things, the politicians are lying — either about the surpluses or about the safety of Social Security.

    You'd think the politicians' creative accounting constitutes an interesting fiscal scandal, but who in politics or the press is interested in calling attention to it? Do you know of a single politician (other than Ron Paul of Texas) who hasn't joined in the self-congratulation about the "budget surpluses"? Do you know of a single journalist who's pointed out that the Emperor's budget has no clothes?

    Remember . . .

    And, oh yes, these politicians who have been lying about the federal budget and Social Security for so many years?

    They're the same ones on whom we rely for news about the progress of the War on Terrorism.
     
  8. dog428

    dog428 Active Member

    Rico, don't bother with this. Zag's only means of survival in a discussion on something like this is to break things down into terms he can understand. Guy says tax increase (that will have absolutely no negative effect on him whatsoever) will help the economy = Guy is flaming lib.

    Just let it go. It's his process and it makes him feel as though he's winning a few debate points here or there. Pat him on the head and let him go.
     
  9. zagoshe

    zagoshe Well-Known Member

    Will have no negative effect on me? Yes, you are a genius dog and your problem is you are so busy trying to be clever and keep your little buddies happy that you'd rather make idiotic little sideline comments than actually try an educate yourself about how your government operates and how it affects your life.

    There is no such thing as a tax increase - directly or indirectly -- that doesn't have a negative effect on me or anyone else. If you don't understand that then you don't understand basic economics and you certainly aren't smart enough to be in this discussion.

    Let me ask you this -- who do you think pays for a tax hike on corporations? How about a tax hike on the richest 1 %? You really think we'll get a break? Actually those taxes hurt the middle class more because the expense is passed down the food chain and usually not at a discount.
     
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