That couple lives down the street from me.
I can hear them all the time, arguing.
There are plenty of dissenting scientific voices on the whole “UV radiation leads to cancer” myth anyway. Why would you punish hard working tanning salon owners like that? Natural alternatives to using tanning salons are inefficient, or else the tanning salons would have already adopted them. Let’s cut down on rules and big brother interfering with our life!
Bricker, since we are natural adversaries, it is only a matter of time until we launch separate and competing capers to steal those trillion dollar coins. If we joined forces, nothing could stop us.
Well, nothing except guards and locked doors.
Renal <> Rectal
My wife is a kidney transplant patient.
…Just imagine what his head went up… painful
John’s desired cuts cause the poor and middle-classed to suffer. Obama’s desire to tax the wealthy cause the wealthy to suffer… much less. A difference of 3% at the top marginal rate is barely felt. A cut to food-stamps means that families go hungry.
In any case, it’s not like Obama isn’t willing to make cuts either. He offered 4 trillion and the Republicans refused.
The stimulus stopped us from going into a depression. Maybe you’re not just uninformed. Maybe you’re mis-informed.
I saw that. The National debt dropped, unemployment went down, foreclosures subsided…
You didn’t understand the analogy.
The problem is not that Barack is spending too much. He has no choice about spending.
CONGRESS decides to spend. Not the President. Congress has told the President, by law, that the government must spend X, but must bring in less than X in taxes. It’s not an option. It’s the law. It has to happen.
Since the government must by law spend more than it makes in revenue, the normal thing to do is to borrow money… but now Congress is proposing to prevent that. So Congress is proposing to, by law, ordering the President to spend money (by passing a budget) but at the same time order him to not spend money (by preventing him from finding the money to meet the budget.)
There’s no legal option for the President if the debt ceiling is not increased; it’s a deliberate trap, meant to provoke a legal crisis.
Although I think you need to throw in something about how John gets all worked up and rants at great length about how Barack made a $1 donation to the local NPR station, as if that’s the real problem with their finances…
Why would you want the debt to go down in a depression?
But, yeah, unemployment went down, and foreclosures decreased.
You’re obviously mindlessly ideological, but allow me to present something simple for you.
You get shot in the thigh. The bullet nicks your artery and you are pumping blood onto that new carpet in your trailer. Your wife grabs a $20 t-shirt and applies pressure, extending your life long enough for the ambulance to get all the way down the county road where your trailer park is located.
The EMTs get you to a hospital and they repair the artery.
Was the $20 for the t-shirt wasted? It didn’t totally heal your wound. It didn’t magically make your leg perfectly whole and scar-free. It didn’t pay your medical bills.
The reason, you stupid fringe, that the stimulus was necessary, is that people who are smarter than you, who actually know things, instead of wallow in stinking mediocrity, know that it saved us from plummeting into full-out depression and possible economic collapse.
Like how the t-shirt saved your miserable and largely wasted life. Get it? No, I doubt you do. But I had to try, because trying to teach a vapid twat to think is more engaging that typsetting the project I have waiting for me. 
It’s a useful analogy, isn’t it?
I don’t agree.
Most government agency budgets are “not to exceed” $X dollars. That is, while the HHS budget for 2012 might be $3.2 billion, they are under no obligation to actually spend every penny. Money unspent at the end of a fiscal year reverts to the general fund with no legal consequences for the agency that failed to spend it.
I grant that there may be some cases where the appropriations language mandates it be spent. But not in the majority of appropriations.
As you must know, there is reasonable debate to those propositions. I certainly agree you can argue as you have, but there is reasoned argument on the other side of those questions. If you’re crafting a fair analogy, you don’t pin it on debatable terms.
I will agree that someone could argue that the wealthy are hurt more than the food-stamp set. But I doubt that argument would be reasonable.
I’m picturing some blustering about* job-creators* or such.
I understand what your trying to say, however, the $20 shirt was put around the patients waist, not thigh. Additionally, the life may have been saved, but the patient lost both limbs due to blood loss.
And that is absolutely, totally, and completely equivalent to being dead. Because both outcomes are equal.
Assuming the BBQ is the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, how do you “cut out” something that happened three years ago?
Hell, it’s entirely reasonable to argue that the wealthy are hurt when SNAP (“food stamps”) is cut too.
SNAP recipients pay the exact same retail price for food as everyone else. The folks who’s voices will be heard loudest when we start really talking about seriously cutting SNAP are Walmart and the other supermarket chains, and agrobusiness like ADM.
It ain’t a coincidence that the “food stamp” program is administered by the Food and Nutrition Service of the Department of Agriculture.
CMC fnord!
This is a distinction without difference. If the DHHS submits a budget request of $5 billion (or whatever) and Congress appropriates $3.9 billion, it’s hardly the DHHS’ fault if six months later it finds out it was only supposed to spend $3.2 billion. You were a public sector employee, so you know very well what costs are the first to be cut in the event of sudden cutbacks.