I see peoples lives turned upside down. Millions of jobs lost. I programs cut that help millions of people. I see our lands being turned over to the highest bidder. I see families losing sons and and daughters in a God forsaken war.
Convince me things are good. Show me the silver lining. Prove to me my government has us in mind and not big business and big contributors.
It won’t be hard to do will it?
You are a partisan pessimist, among other things. Short of giving you sacks of money, you will never be convinced of the things you ask. It is supremely disingenuous of you to ask a question that you know will never be answered to your twisted satisfaction.
Convincing you looks difficult. OTOH convincing a majority of the voters will be a piece of cake.
I’m about the furthest thing from a Bushista, but I’ll play.
I personally know maybe 20-30 people who I keep in touch with regularly. Most work in oilfield services, domestically, out of Houston. Some are involved with parmaceuticals, in a training and development capacity. Some are in property management. A couple are retired. We’ve laid a couple people off recently; I’m curious why, if Bush is supposed to be so great for the oil industry, that our domestic business, which is dependent on drilling activity, has been down. Well, actually one of our best marketing folk quit, so that put kind of hitch in things. We’ve hired two more in the past couple of weeks, and it looks like one of them will work out pretty well.
My sister just got a rather high-paying job after about 6 months of on-and off searching. Her Aussie boyfriend has been out of work for a while, but this is mainly because his chosen field is in an area where most of the available work is with government agencies requiring a security clearance, which as a foreign national he apparently can’t get. He’s currently trying to pick up some consultancy work.
I know a few strippers; they say things suck right now, but the stripping business always sucks in August.
In all the above, I really can’t see any influence of the Bush presidency one way or another.
I don’t personally know anyone in the military, much less among the occupying forces in Iraq, so I can’t comment on that.
I’ve seen things a lot worse. Houston’s economy seems to be perking along reasonably well.
I’m afraid I’m not entirely sure what the OP is on about.
Convince me you’re not lying.
Is that possible? Or is the only point you’ll be making in this thread going to be that you are not going to change your opinion?
In the Administration’s defense, I have been quite impressed that there have not been any major acts of terrorism within the United States since September 11. Whether it is right to say that President Bush has anything to do with this, I don’t know, but the fact itself stands in wonderful contrast to the hysterical predictions of gloom and doom that gripped the country immediately after the 2001 attacks.
I don’t really have a dog in this fight but…
Stock markets up 25-30% since March!
As demonstrated by Brutus et. al. the pubbies have so lost their tenuous hold on the realities of life in America, that they respond to anything that could conceivably challenge their worldview with personal attacks on the source of the irritation, rather than rational discourse. From the standpoint of turning the country around, things couldn’t get much better than that.
We’ve already done this in another thread. The fact is, almost all the major leading economic indicators are up. The Dow is up, consumer confidence is up, inventories are down, manufacturing investment is picking up, etc.
A survey of 55 leading economists has the median estimate for economic growth next year pegged at 3.6%. That’s a good growth rate, the highest since 9/11. Not as high as the late 90’s, but then that was a bubble economy, and growth rates like that shouldn’t be expected. Not as high as it could be - there’s probably room for another percent or percent and a half before you’d have to start saying the economy is ‘hot’, but maybe the best we can hope for at a time when every business decision is made in the shadow of the spectre of another major terrorist attack throwing the economy back into recession
If that growth rate holds next year, You’ll see serious job pressure building in in the first-second quarter of next year - just in time for the election!
Sleep tight.
Talk about “losing their tenuous hold on reality,” this statement by december takes the cake:
Reality check:
Enjoy the cake.
In the world I see, we are stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.
We’re planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
Is this a debate?
Silly me, Reeder posted it, so of course it isn’t. Can’t you even trouble us with one of your partisan screeds like you usually do, Reeder? You disappoint me.
No worldviews were challenged by Reeder’s fatuitous question, I can assure you that.
He is asking for the unanswerable.
-Does he want actual economic facts and numbers? Extremely doubtfull, but those were already provided in December’s thread.
-Does he want just anecdotal stories about how great things are? Fine: My big concern now is whether to get a BMW, Volvo, or Lexus. How is that for anecdotal ‘evidence’ that things are great?
(Hint: Anecdotal stories about how a person is doing mean jack-shit when discussing the state of the economy)
And never use the phrase ‘rational discourse’ when talking about one of Reeder’s posts. If he asked serious questions, he would have gotten serious responses.
I have to be honest, Reeder: I’m a liberal, but I can think of a dozen different ways I could have written that OP that would have gotten actual, serious answers, rather than understandably annoyed snipes.
If you actually want your threads to get serious responses, I’d suggest thinking harder about that next time.
I wonder why this is
Perhaps another thread.
I voted for Bush in the last election, and judging from what I can see so far from the Dems, will likely vote for him again. My work and my social life have almost nothing to do with which party has their man (or woman, someday) in the Whitehouse. As much as our country has way more government than I would want, it’s still a miniscule aspect in my daily life. The best thing the gov’t can do for me is leave me alone and let me get on with my own business. I don’t expect a president to create jobs-- I expexct private individuals to do that. I only hope that the gov’t will not raises taxes much and keep interest rates low. That seems to be happening more or less.
I expect the gov’t to keep our country safe and keep criminals at bay. As mentioned above, we’ve not had any serious domestic terror attacks since 9/11. That’s good. Let’s hope it stays that way. The Iraq situation is a messy business, and while I was not a fan of invading Iraq, I do believe the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein. And for all the noise being made about how Bush has isolated the US from the so-called international community, I see no evidence that our traditional allies are any less willing to work with us on our key objectives. The situation in NK is tenuous, but the world still looks at the US to take the lead. Ditto with the Israeli/Palestinian situation. Problems in Liberia-- who you gonna call? Hint: It wasn’t the French or Russians.
The last time I checked, there was still a longer line of immigrants wanting to get into this country than any other country on earth. People are not stupid when they choose where to go to better their own lives and those of their children.
Reeder: Don’t worry. It’s only one more year before you get to vote for your favorite Democrat. That’s one of the great things about this country. Enjoy it.
Not to give too much gravitas to the OP (Leaper summed up my view perfectly), but would it be too much to ask which way the stock market was going before March?
Not if Bush cancels the election!!! Or steals it again like last time!!!
Although I’m sure most people recognised the quote, if you are going to quote from films or books (say, **Fight Club** for example), it’s best for you to acknowledge the source in your post.