The CNN reporter seems to be the smartest person there.
Okay this cracks me right the hell up. My DAD owns a goddamn general store, and I’ve hung out with other general store owners all my life, and frankly as far as I can tell all the sole proprietorship and partnerships are worth WELL less than the $1mil minimum for estate tax to kick in. Maybe medium business owners are affected.
(kudos to my dad for still pulling in north of $70k out of a store work less than 400k in a town of 221, bitches.)
How about the rates from the 80s, with 51% highest and the deficits were STILL obscene?
If I borrow a million dollars for hookers and blow, it will benefit me … so I should do it, and worry about the debt burden later on, right?
It all depends on how you define “benefit.” If we mail every citizen a check for ten grand, that’s a “benefit” to Joe Citizen. It does not then follow that such payouts are a wise use of funds.
Is building a little league sports complex in Puerto Rico a good thing? Sure, why not. Benefits Joe Citizen (in that town, at least) and creates 43 temporary jobs.
But is it worth borrowing $150 million dollars(plus interest) to do it? That’s another question entirely.
Lather, rinse, and repeat the same question for each of a few thousand provisions in the bill.
Ah, yes. Your illumination of one piece of pork in the entire bill has opened my eyes. I have seen the light.
Hardware stores only, 5 minutes on Google, all ~1.5 million. Biggest one has 12 employees.
http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/Home-and-Garden-DIY-Store-For-Sale.aspx
http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/Middle-Tennessee-Profitable-LumberHardware-Store-For-Sale.aspx
http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/Reduced-Outdoor-Power-Equipment-Off-Road-Vehicle-Business-For-Sale.aspx
http://us.businessesforsale.com/us/Home-Center-Hardware-Store-In-Central-Virginia-For-Sale.aspx
Depending on the area, a nice piece of commercial property alone can be well over a million dollars.
Better yet, how about the 90s when it was 40% and we actually balanced the budget by exercising some discipline? That sounds swell to me.
That’s what I figured 1) ignore the larger point
2) when given one example, as requested, you dismiss it. If given fifty, it’d be “only fifty.”
G’bye.
I felt an incredible surge of anger this afternoon as I passed by a throng of suburbanites heading to the Capitol to protest.
Our men and women are fighting two wars right now, getting killed and torn up and post-traumatized all over the damn place. They are making huge sacrifices beause many of them believe they are doing their part to help the country. We should all be grateful.
And then I see these lard-ass fools fucking up traffic in their big-ass trucks and SUVs, coming into a city they never visit because it’s “ghetto” and there aren’t any deer to shoot up, marching down the street in their ugly-ass Crocs and camo pants, all so they can complain about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Most of them aren’t seeing any increases in their taxes and in fact will be getting a small bump in their take-home pay. I don’t buy the “we’re leveraging our children’s future” argument either. Because if that were the case, their freakin’ heads would have been spinning during the last 8 years. They would have been protesting in the streets every day.
No, this is called “We’re whiny, self-entitled babies who talk a good game about patriotism and supporting the country but can’t be called on for shit when it’s time to finally walk the talk.” Apparently killing Muslims is easier to do than being a willing tax-payer.
What’s really ironic is that if it weren’t for these bone-heads and their stupid voting habits, we wouldn’t have Obama and there would be no need to protest!
One of these jackasses was on NPR this afternoon, spewing forth about taxes and how it’s so unfair to tax rich people. The reporter mentioned that the guy was solidly middle-class. “Well, I wanna be rich someday,” he said. So basically that’s the position, distilled to its rawest form. They aren’t looking at what’s best for themselves and their families today, nor what’s good for most Americans. No, they think they’re incipient rich people, just a few months away from making it big with the next Sham-Wow or Snuggie prototype they’ve been jiggering with in the basement for the last decade. Meanwhile their kids’ teachers are being laid off and their local emergency rooms are shutting down and they’re going to have to run the register at the Golden Corral well into their 80s because they don’t have a retirement plan that’s worth anything. Fuck the real reality. We’re living in virtual reality, folks!
I hope they all get car-jacked on their way back to the boonies.
I don’t see what the people fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have to do with any of that, although I’m in general agreement with the rest of what you said. I’m “grateful” that there are people who join the military, whose purpose is supposed to be to protect America, but I’m sure as hell not “grateful” that they are there in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making “huge sacrifices” because of a stupid war that we shouldn’t be fighting - a war that Obama’s supporters claimed would end under the new presidency, but which shows no signs of doing so.
It’s already happened. Ten days ago, here in Pittsburgh, a young man who was convinced the government was going to take away his guns got into a shoot out with the police. He survived; three police officers didn’t. This article has the initial information.
Maybe I’m not telling you anything new, but your post talked about something I’d already seen. I share your anger, your sorrow, and your frustration. It’s ironic that a young man who was afraid of the government taking away his guns has done things that have resulted in more people calling for the government to take away people’s guns.
That’s a bogus project that isn’t getting $150 million in stimulus money. It is reportedly from a list of potential projects released by the Council of Mayors and I cnnot find it ANYWHERE on the website. There is absolutely no chance this project is getting that amount of money if it gets any. That stimuluswatch website lists all sorts of pie-in-the-sky projects. It is not a list of projects that are getting money.
Perhaps I smell the stench of hypocrisy from these people, since they were in full support of the wars and sending young people off to die for “freedom” (while pretending they were doing something meaningful by plastering magnetic ribbons on their cars). But now that its time to do something for our economy, for our own people, with a small fraction of us having to pony-up extra to support the effort, these same people are whining and saying they’re being asked to do too much. And they can’t even articulate what that “too much” is.
Hypocrites, the whole lot of em.
Nah, that’d be a waste of good whiskey.
Yes, and gee, where DID the Clinton surplus go? I wonder where what we did with it? I don’t suppose you have an answer that.
Dude, have you even READ some of the posts over at Free Republic? They have actually said pretty much the same thing. Photoshops of Obama in a Nazi and/or Soviet uniform. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me.
Siege-did you watch any of the footage? We had the TV on all day. It was absolutely heartbreaking to see. I think all of downtown Pittsburgh was pretty much shutdown for the funeral procession.
Sigh . . . Going off on some bullshit tangent about respecting the troops even when you’re talking about something totally totally different. Not just for Freepers anymore. And yelling personal insults about protestors for protesting something you happen to agree with.
OK, I think I get it. I was wrong in my first post in this thread. Free Republic didn’t marry the Democratic Underground. They’re just shacked up and playing kinky games while wearing each other’s clothes.
Allow this former young person who actually served in the army to do his humble best to articulate his position for you. We don’t think that the stimulus package is going to work. That doesn’t mean we all don’t want it to work, and it doesn’t mean we hate the president for being black, and it doesn’t mean we loved the job Bush did. It means We. Don’t. Think. It. Will. Work. And we’re kind of wondering where all the money is going to come from way down the road to unfuck this program after it doesn’t work. And we’re not sure, but we kind of have an idea.
On edit: Oh, and by the way, monstro, before you cry too much harder for the troops, quite a few of them disagree with the stimulus too. I think they’ll be able to live through the tea parties.
Exactly! Thank you!
I call them “Cargo Cult Conservatives”, after the Cargo Cults of the Pacific Islands. They appeared after WWII. The Allies brought airplanes filled with goods the people of the islands had never seen before…food, clothes, metal tools, etc. Then, the war won, they disappeared, taking the goods with them. The Cargo Cults concluded, logically enough from their point of view, that the way to get the goods - the “cargo” - to return was to perform the same rituals. So they built landing strips in the jungle, air control towers, even headsets out of bamboo all to convince the airplanes filled with cargo to return.
The “Cargo Cult Conservatives” believe that if they vote like rich people, they will become rich people. It makes as much sense as the islanders.
Yes. Yes, you should.
I think the better way to think of them is like peasants. Matt Tiabbi says it best http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21289 here.
The money quote: It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.
They have a right to protest.
I have the right to call them jackasses for it.
And yes, it is hypocritical to blindly support two expensive wars and the administration who concocted them, but then kick and scream when it’s time to pay the check and mop up the mess they helped create. Where was their critical eye and their passion when we were flying over pallets of money to Iraq for 8 yars? In what bizarro world is tax money and gun rights more important than illegal wars on foreign lands and kids being sent to die for bullshit reasons?
It’s not a bullshit tangent in my eyes.
See, that’s why I can’t condemn these tea parties altogether. It’s not like the other side is a model of rationality. For one thing, what the hell do gun rights have to do with the stimulus package or two expensive wars in Iraq?
For another thing, maybe I’m typing in Korean or maybe your reading comprehension is a little off tonight, but people are protesting because they don’t think this is going to work! They don’t have confidence in the president. The fact that the republican president was a fucking lamebrained idiot does not in any way mean that the democrat prez is going to do any better. You won’t catch me there, and I never miss a chance to diss the freepers, but I’m looking at this guy’s first three months in, and I’m just shaking my head at his cabinet picks, at this stimulus thing, and quite a bit besides. When I said he was the better candidate above, I didn’t actually mean that this was necessarily saying a lot.
If I thought the stimulus was actually going to work and help with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and get this country back on its feet, I’d support it regardless of my political views, and so would a lot of other conservatives, including many at those protests. I’ll say it again, though; the republicans’ fuck-ups and bad ideas in no way excuse the dems’.
snerk
So glad I was at work being one of the 10% that pay 70% of all the U.S. federal income taxes so you can sit at home watching TV being one of the 50% that pay no U.S. federal income taxes.
Forgive me for caring about local heroes who were killed in the line of duty. God, you’re a shithead.