What the fuck is with the conservative obsession with voting objectively failed businesspeople in to office on the grounds that they somehow have a better grasp of economics than the opposition? The fact that Fiorina is actually in the market for any kind of position with more responsibility than managing the swing shift at a McDonald’s is prima facie ridiculous.
Fucked up a company recently? Laid off a bunch of workers? Sent half of your market cap down the shitter? You’d be perfect for the GOP ticket.
Because messing with old people is political suicide. No candidate is talking about what makes sense right now, they are all talking about what they think will get them elected.
Has the Dope ever seen such a disingenuous, lying, dishonest, full-of-shit Pitting as this?
You put paid to your own lies:
Obviously she doesn’t need to do any of those things, nor do you really give a rat’s ass about them. Asshole. It’s people like you (unprincipled, holier-than-thou demagogues) who have been and are continuing to fuck this country up.
Ha! So now I’m supposed to care what a partisan douchebag like you thinks? Sorry, son, ain’t gonna happen. If this is your first exposure to someone holding their nose and voting against someone who they are less politically aligned with, consider yourself ten times wiser than when you clicked on this thread.
A species can only be endangered if it hasn’t gone extinct yet. (No, Snowe and Collins aren’t moderates.) How it works in the GOP is that if you don’t toe the party line, you get crappy committee assignments, and never get to chair anything. Would-be moderates consider that fact, and vote just like Sam Brownback.
The thing is, when else are they going to tell us what they’re going to do? If they don’t have the courage to tell the electorate what they plan to vote for, then they should stay out of the fucking kitchen. They don’t have to get into every specific, but a bare-bones outline of a feasible approach isn’t too much to ask for.
The problem is that they want to do things that the electorate doesn’t want. A solid majority of the electorate is good with raising taxes on the rich, and increasing infrastructure spending to put people back to work. People don’t want Social Security privatized, or Medicare cut.
The GOP’s approach is basically to try to put one over on the electorate - to be unspecific about what they’d do before the election, then cut the stuff that most voters want afterwards.
Although I’m on the opposite side of the political spectrum from him, I can sympathize with the OP. It’s frustrating when you’re angry at the opposition party, but your party’s candidate sucks. As someone who typically votes Democrat, I’m deeply familiar with this particular flavor of pain.
Although I hate to recommend that anyone vote for Fiorina, who I think is beyond terrible, I do think there’s a place for voting for the person closest to you ideologically and then trying to steer them toward actions you support, with letter writing or muffin baskets or whatnot.
Because yeah, I’m sick to death of all this bullshit talk about smaller government and lower taxes without any reference to specific cuts or changes. We’d all love lower taxes – the trick is choosing what to give up to get them, obviously.
That is without a doubt the worst graph I’ve ever seen that was not actually produced by a slow elementary school student. What the hell does it mean? What’s the vertical axis? Are the values cumulative? What in God’s name is “nondefense consumption and investment”?
And it says here she’s the junior senator from CA! The senior is Dianne Feinstein (since 1992). I have nothing against either of them, they’re Dems, I probably would vote for them if I lived there . . . Still, the idea of term limits does suggest itself.
Countries that have gone through deficit reduction have done it in a similar way.
In New Zealand in the late 80’s, they had a huge debt, and government spending was quite high. The party in power raised taxes and cut services. The next election, they were tossed out and the new party… raised taxes and cut services. They were then tossed out by an angry public. BOTH parties were doing what was required in order to get the country back on track. Eventually the public clued in that it did not matter who was in power, they were going to have higher taxes and lower services because that was REQUIRED.
In Canada many years ago, the Conservative party was screaming about DEBT, DEBT, DEBT every chance they got. The Liberals under Paul Martin as Finance Minister essentially stole that platform from them, and started reducing the deficit. The Conservatives were a bit blindsided - they could not suddenly change tactics and say now that reducing the deficit was unimportant - it has been a major policy of theirs for years.
Essentially the political parties have to forget about the competitive politics, and about “winning” at all costs, and start thinking about how to govern the country.
No, it doesn’t. There are more candidates on the ballot for that Senate seat. Sorry, but “Vote for me. I’m not the other guy” is hardly an inspiring campaign slogan, and “Anyone but Boxer” is a poor way to vote. Especially when you lambaste the person who is going to get your vote for not being specific about what she wants to do if she gets elected. Reminds me of when Wolf Blitzer caught Christine O’Donnell in Delaware with this one. “Please state what you intend to cut if you’re elected, and don’t say ‘waste, fraud and abuse’ because that’s too general.” She couldn’t answer anything but “Waste, fraud and abuse”.
I actually didn’t notice that the axes weren’t labeled. The site I got it from had other BEA graphs that were labeled. My apologies.
The vertical axis is spending as a percentage of nominal GDP. The spending in question is federal spending on goods and services (as opposed to transfer payments, like SS). Actual government spending on goods and services as a percentage of GDP is quite small; what spending exists is mainly defense related.
Non-partisan-douchebag here. Er… wait. Non partisan-douchebag? I am neither partisan nor a douchebag!
Voting for people who you think are shitty candidates because they’re part of your tribe and you must fight the other tribe no matter what is exactly the sort of thing that gets incompetant assholes running your country. If there’s essentially nothing your own side can do that will overshadow your need to fight against the other side, your side can do anything they want - elect the most incompetant people, screw their own constituency, whatever - and you’re complicit in it.