Suuuure:
I know, I know – he was just asking, right?
:rolleyes:
In any event, even if he was “just asking,” my response is “just answering.” He wants to know how it could be seen any other way, and I offered another way it could be seen.
Here’s another way it could be seen: Newt Gingrich was raped by six black guys when he was a teenager, which fuels a hatred he has for black people, and so everything he does politically and journalistically is meant to hurt blacks-- even if it hurts poor white folk, Latinos, etc. Therefore the fact that a black president got his name attached to this reform bill is the sole reason he’s against it, even though this legislation will ultimately push everyone in the United States into purchasing private sector health insurance (with vouchers for the poor) (which ideologically is in line with everything Republicans in Congress, Mitt Romney, the Heritage Foundation, etc have been advocating for almost 20 years). His hatred for the black guy in the WH is far more powerful than his love for supporting private sector health insurance companies.
Now that’s horseshit. You know it. I know it. Everyone that reads it knows it. But at least I can admit that this imaginative “motivational story” is horseshit, and not just an attempt to distract the reader from actual facts.
Republicans DID endorse this healthcare reform plan…until Democrats passed it. Now they’re selling it as “socialism,” even though it’s actually just forcing more money into the hands of private sector fat cats.
Now show me where Republicans in the past two, four or six years have offered anything that resembles an honest attempt at fixing the economy for the middle class. Tax cuts haven’t done shit for the past eight years but get us deeper into a stagnate economy. Cutting programs doesn’t create jobs or get us out of debt, in fact it has does the opposite.
Republicans argue that “raising taxes” during a downturn will hurt the recovery because it will stunt hiring, that the wealthy won’t create new jobs. Well, profits are up, but still the big dogs aren’t hiring.
And how does cutting the wages, benefits, and jobs of middle class Americans help spark growth and spending? How does laying off thousands of teachers, state workers, city workers, emergency responders, and cutting their wages, reducing their benefits and gutting retirements help increase spending and growth and demand for goods?
Making people that earn $250,000+ pay an extra few percentage points of their income in taxes will be the bullet that kills America, but yet laying off thousands of public workers and reducing their income to zero is the answer to a quick recovery?
Work needs to be done-- roads need fixing, garbage needs picking up, our citizens need to be protected, the sick need to be cared for, schools need to function, paperwork needs to be processed; locally, parks need mowing, trees need trimming, Internet and books need to be provided, pools need cleaning and lifeguarding, roads need plowing-- and people need jobs. The private sector isn’t taking care of any of this shit that needs to be done around here, and they sure as hell aren’t creating jobs. The public sector could fix that, but everything the Right does is admittedly meant to reduce the public sector to a road apple-- cut funding, reduce jobs, lower pay, promote the private sector. All this is meant to…what? Increase the purchasing power of middle class Americans? Reduce poverty? Put more money in the pockets of Joe Sixpack?
Fuck no. It just helps grow money for the wealthy, and they apparently have no obligation, desire or motivation to “trickle it down” to the rest of us. Lowering taxes cuts programs that will benefit millions-- but that extra money in the pockets only benefits a few rich people. The wealthy don’t need public libraries, pools, Medicaid/care, police, parks, basic food inspections-- they can go to book stores and buy books, build pools in their backyards, pay for their own Cadillac insurance, private security, and high-end groceries.
The one industry that’s actually controlled by We The People has the power to create jobs with living wages, but the Republicans are continuing to drown it. They recklessly spend the public’s money when they’re in power (on wars, Medicare drug programs, education reform programs), they lower revenues, and put us deeper into debt. Then they blame the government for being inefficient, convince voters that the private sector is better, and that the public sector is lazy/greedy/etc… profit (for a few)… repeat.
This is a plan for economic failure.
Happy, you make some valid points…
The thing is, everything in business today is how to do with less people. Outsourcing, downsizing, 5-S, Kaizan, rightsizing, Just-in Time Inventory. And really, businesses have been trying to do this for 40 years. This is nothing new.
I agree that there are a lot of public works stuff that needs to get done, but the people we have now aren’t doing a very good job and they are impossible to fire.
Why can’t little Johnny Read? Because it’s next to impossible to fire his incompetant teacher.
More like 20 or so in anything resembling a serious manner. Considering that we crashed because of businesses and banks fudging their numbers to reflect profits on this loser of a model, I don’t think it’s a good example of the neutrality of the practice. In addition, any format when taken to an extreme will become harmful to its employees and the market as a whole.
That’s correct. They lower labor costs, but when everyone does it, they lower the customer base.
I think we’ve numbed ourselves to the effect by the banks giving everyone credit cards…
I don’t have a solution, I wish I did. Taxing the wealthy and putting a lot of people to work, pure Keynesian thought, might be an idea, but I think that there’d be a lot of resistance to that, and frankly, looking at Greece, it doesn’t seem like such a hot idea, either.
There is one public works program that has failed to hire almost any Americans. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, that sadly, has hired more contractors that employ illegal Mexican immigrants than it has US citizens. It didn’t put America back to work, it put Mexico back to work.
I guess we are going to find out [from the White House press conference, in progress]:
Obama draws line in the sand: No budget agreement without revenue increases.
I remember that speech. He looked those bankers wanting bailouts straight in the eyes and shouted “yippee-ka-ya-ye motherfuckers!” before shooting them all.
As far as I know, the welfare clause has never been the basis of affirming or overturning a law. I doubt this court will be the first to take that stance.
Its called the big lie. If you say taht the recession is Obama’s fault loudly enough for long enough, people will perceive the recession to be Obama’s fault. Perception is reality. Or as Michale Jackson put it “a lie becomes the truth”
So are you trying to say that most people who opposed the individual mandate in the health care bill were OK with the individual mandate in the Massachussetts arrangement or is my understanding still lacking in some way?
cite?
It’s been used to support the federal government’s encouragement of policies via its spending power (i.e., highway funds to states with 21 as a minimum drinking age and 55 mph as a maximum speed limit).
I don’t make the claim that MOST people who opposed the individual mandate in the health care bill were okay with the individual mandate in the Massachussetts arrangement. I do claim that some were; I have no idea what the percentage might be.
To get back to the OP, at least one Republican is planning on economic failure:
Cantor can get away with this but Pete Rose still can’t get into the HoF? No justice.
How much? I’m thinking it would have to be really, really substantial to justify the political risk for a man who walks around thinking how comfortably Mr Boehner’s shoes would fit on his feet. Just guessing here, is all, but I doubt it.
Not buying it. He can still get more cash in a single day whoring to the johns on K Street in his current job than in this entire deal. Not worth the risk and fallout.
What is in question? Do you think he filed a false financial disclosure statement?
The firms the K Street johns represent would much rather have a strong economy along with lower taxes. They’d be willing to pay Cantor much more that kind of result than he’d get betting on, and working for, failure. Not that he wouldn’t try to hedge against his failure to deliver, though.
If true, this is still much too penny-ante for him to have done it with actual thought.