Indeed, the right is usually much better organized. Short sighted, reactionary and wrong. But very well organized. Gotta give em that.
Gee, I don’t see “L” next to his name.
I guess he’s Libertarian when people need him to be…like being gay for pay.
[quote=“Lobohan, post:178, topic:550207”]
P1. Food is necessary. Why don’t we have a universal food system? One that is run by the government? It should cost much less, according to you.
Clothing is necessary. Why don’t we have a universal clothing system? One that is run by the government? It should cost much less, according to you.
Housing is necessary. Why don’t we have a…oh, whoops. Sorry. We pretty much do, with the GSEs. It’s already cost us a couple hundred billion, and is destined to cost a couple hundred billion more at least. That confuses me. According to your logic, it should cost much less.
P2. Let’s try a little thought experiment. It might help me and Uzi, since we’re obviously so stupid.
Let’s pretend GM didn’t get the government bailout and declared bankruptcy. I’m going to assume for a moment that you know what that means. That’s a bit of a stretch, I realize, given your last dozen posts or so.
I’ll try and help with some hints. In short, it means that it’s liabilities are wiped out and its assets are seized by its creditors. The plants, tooling, blueprints, intellectual property rights, etc. are all owned by its creditors, in exchange for taking a haircut on the company’s liabilities. There will also be a few tens of thousands of skilled employees hanging around with the knowledge of how to build cars.
So the assets are still there, but owned by different people. The employees are still there, presumably, unless they picked up and moved on to somewhere else.
What might happen next?
Profit!
Too stupid; didn’t read.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s o.k.-we like you despite that. Would it help if he used smaller words?
Your post is not too stupid to read; just too stupid to take seriously. I guess that is an improvement.
Just to round things out -[list=A][li] do you believe (as some do) that Obama shrunk the deficit? []Which number is larger - $1.2 trillion, or $1.56 trillion?[]Do you believe that loans from the federal government that are repaidfrom company earnings have the same effect, or a different effect, on the deficit?[*]Do you believe that Obama is a Keynesian, who believes in deficit spending during a recession but reducing the deficit when the recession is over?[/list]Thinking thru your posts in light of these few simple questions may go a long way in reducing their abject stupidity. [/li]
Regards,
Shodan
TWEEET!
Enough with throwing around the word “stupid” and its derivatives.
[ /Moderating ]
Sorry, Czarcasm, but your beliefs are based on lies. Try and do some basic research and get back to us when you understand the issues.
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan, the next personal attack will receive a Warning.
Stop it.
[ /Moderating ]
You know what I believe, and what my beliefs are based on?
That certainly qualifies you to apply for this.
Edited to add: Sorry boss, didn’t see the warning.
tomndebb, if you would like to attempt to explain why a personal attack is sometimes not a personal attack, you can do so in this thread.
Regards,
Shodan
Wrong thread.
I think you are purposefully misunderstanding here, but in case you aren’t:
HCR and the student loans WILL cost less than the systems that WERE in place. Obviously there hasn’t been time yet for them to lower the deficit. What people are saying is that these changes WILL lower the deficit. Not that they already have.
So in the future, the deficit WILL be smaller than it WOULD HAVE been had these changes not been made.
There is a system to distribute food. However, you should know that not everything is the same. Health Insurance isn’t selling widgets (or McBurgers), it’s paying someone else’s medical bills. It isn’t subject to the same market forces that widget (or food sales) are. And as it happens, a government system, with a large risk pool is much, much more efficient. That’s what happens to every other industrialized country with universal care. Why would you pay more for a worse system, just because it resonates with your ideology?
See above, not everything is the same. So some things, which are not the same, require different ways to deal with them. Simple answers to complex questions are almost always wrong. There is no one stop, once sentence solution for running an economy.
See above, you continue to make the same mistake.
I don’t think either of you is stupid. I think you’re misinformed.
The arguments for and against the government bailing out the auto makers were done to death. And you know, it is actually a policy decision. It’s the kind of discussion we should be having. Instead, from the right we get overkill arguments based on fantasy.
But the fact is that the auto bailout, regardless of your opinion of the wisdom of it, isn’t going to drive the long term debt in any real way.
While we’re on the subject, can I get an admission from you that your other line items, HCR and the Student Loan changes will in fact lower the deficit? Which means your argument above was completely wrong?
Also, the Stimulus was completely necessary. Proper economic policy isn’t to suck up a depression because it would correct the market or whatever, any more than proper knife fighting technique is to try to break the other dude’s blade on your sternum.
I guess then, that you agree that it is not true that “Obama shrunk the deficit”, and that $1.56T is larger than $1.2T.
Which brings us back to the same point - Obama’s ideas about what the stimulus would accomplish turned out to be wrong, rather badly. (See previous about the 7.6 million jobs that didn’t show up as Obama expected, etc.)
So, the basis that Obama used in his thinking about the economy was wrong. What he predicted did not come true.
In the same way, his has made a prediction/promise/commitment/whatever you like to call it about cutting the deficit in half by the end of his first term - that is, to about $585 billion or so, or by about a trillion dollars. Since he made that prediction/promise/commitment/whatever you like to call it, he has increased the deficit. So, far from being on track to fulfill his promise, he is heading in exactly the wrong direction.
So he stimulus package that he pushed failed. But I am expected to believe that his promise to cut the deficit to $585 billion is going to be fulfilled, even though he is pushing pretty hard the wrong way.
Obama care, as I have pointed out in the past, will only reduce the deficit if cuts are made to Medicare. Those cuts, under the Medicare Sustainable Growth act, have been proposed every year for the last eight or nine years. And have been voted down every time, including times when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and in times when they controlled both houses and the White House.
And Obama is proposing a large increase in spending and in the deficit. He is not, to say the least, on track to fulfill this idea you have that he will shrink the deficit. Instead, he is on track to increase the national debt by more than every other President in history put together.
Based on all this, I am expected to accept as gospel the notion that Obama is going to reduce the deficit.
Unfortunately, some of us look at the price tag on the Brooklyn Bridge before we sign the purchase agreement.
Regards,
Shodan
Obama has not done anything unnecessary to raise the deficit. How does that work for ya?
I notice you haven’t addressed the numerous posts where the mistakes in your assertion here were explained to you. Why is that?
It’s been told to you several times why this is the case.
Again, the stimulus was utterly necessary. Why not read up on it, so you can make an informed statement? <–PDF
It didn’t fail in that we didn’t descend into a great depression. As to whether he manages to cut the deficit, I guess that remains to be seen.
Most of the cuts are to Medicare Advantage. Why don’t you read up on it?
In particular, the Medicare Sustainable Growth act argument is Republican misinformation.
That’s a particularly poor statement of reality. Obama needed to perform the stimulus, or the country would be in a depression now. Tax revenues are down due to the recession. Why would those costs be carried forward? You do understand that, right? So you comment is utterly without merit.
No, but you should look at the actual reality of the situation.
Some of us aren’t so silly as to buy it. 
There aren’t any such posts. None of my assertions are mistaken - Obama does have a 7.6 million job shortfall, the deficit is going up, not down, unemployment is higher than Obama thought it would be with his stimulus, TARP is being repaid while the stimulus isn’t, etc., etc.
No, I am afraid what I said was exactly true, as your own cite mentions -
See how it works? When I say something, and you call it disinformation, and your cite says the same thing that I did, that means that I was right and you aren’t.
Do you understand what the word “debt” means? If you do, then you understand why the costs of the stimulus and all the deficit spending Obama is doing (except for much of TARP, which is being repaid at least in part) are carried forward.
Obama is borrowing huge sums of money, far more than any other President in history. Much of it has been squandered on a poorly focused mess of a stimulus package, much of which was mere pork for Democratic constituencies. This package did not have the eff4ect Obama said it would - unsurprisingly, since he lacks the relevant business or economic experience to actually do anything much worthwhile.
Even though much of the stimulus was wasted, we still have to pay it back. Unlike TARP, as I mentioned, it is pure spending. So now we have to pay all that back, plus interest.
Government costs have to be paid for, or carried forward. Obama is pretending not to know this. but the adults have to keep it in mind.
Regards,
Shodan
I can certainly relate to Shodan’s rage and fury at being lied to, I feel much the same, and have felt so for a very long time. But its not specific in my case, I can’t put my finger on the precise moment that it came to be. He has the advantage of me there, in his case, his commitment to veracity and candor came about in January, 2009.
And yet so many suggest that the election of Obama has not improved our political discourse, when so many…so very many!..have rediscovered a firm insistence of complete truthfulness on the part of our President. A pity, perhaps, that it did not arise sooner. But so it goes.
Why would the stimulus be repaid? It’s emergency spending. Also, you have been shown that your argument is mush. You are pointing to a fact that does not show what you are saying it shows. That’s why you’re wrong. Get it?
Again, it’s amazing that you didn’t bother to read the cite. If you had, you’d understand that the Medicare Sustainable Growth act argument you like to drag out isn’t actually true. The Medicare Sustainable Growth act has nothing to do with the cost of the Health Care Reform. Health Care Reform is a separate bill that is accounted for. The MSGA is a cost cutting measure with no teeth that has an unrealistic equation. Two separate issues. Get it?
Sure, I had thought you were talking about the deficit, since that seems to be your focus. Obama’s increases to the debt seem unlikely to be more than every other president combined. Care to drop us a cite?
In any case, the Stimulus was still necessary. So only a complete partisan would try to hold that against him. If you get stabbed and your wife opens up a pack of gauze to plug your wound, the gauze isn’t wasteful spending.
Meaningless dig with no substance.
Laughable. The stimulus saved us from a depression. The projected unemployment numbers were based on info available when they made the projection. The actual more accurate info that came later showed the situation was worse than they thought at the time, hence the worse unemployment numbers. This is really simple stuff, yet you ignore it time after time. Can your ideology stand up to actual facts?
Of course we have to pay it back. Because the vast majority of economists think that deficit spending is better than a depression. If you don’t agree with that, well that’s all well and good, but thankfully you’re not in a position to make those choices.
I appreciate the dig, but I am an adult, and I want to have a discussion with real arguments.