Hope that clears up your confusion.
Everyone fully understands the larger context. But his comment, even in context, shows a philosophy, as I said, that for many Americans is at adds with what the country stands for. The argument that Obama wasn’t referring to “business” is wanting. For that explanation to make sense, one would have to think that Obama was correcting the notion that conservatives believed that they, in fact, built the infrastructure. This makes little sense.
At worst, his comments say that successful businesses are only successful because they have the advantages society and government provides. You can disagree, but it’s not a radical or un-American idea.
What is clear to me is that the conservatives that twisted the words of the president had precisely the idea to implant in others the caricature that you are pointing here. In the end one has to go for what the president clarified, other speculations are just spin.
It wasn’t just about “infrastructure”, unless one extends the term beyond any semblance of meaning. His point was that no man is an island entire of itself. Whether it’s teachers, friends, inspirations, supports, we all get there together and there’s no such thing as a self-made man.
And, in a narrower context, that the “me myself and I, mine, mine, MINE !” crowd should maybe shut the fuck up a bit. So that backfired a bit, granted.
That is, indeed, exactly the notion he was correcting. I agree it makes little sense, but then, nothing about the modern Republican Party makes much sense these days.
I never heard a conservative or republican voice that opinion. Can you point to any conservative or republican who believes that THEY built the infrastructure? As you say, it makes little sense. Little sense that Obama are anyone else would think that that attitude had to be corrected.
Oh, just go to even Wikipedia and you can find people arguing both sides of the issue. You’re not proving anything here other than there exist some people who agree with your position. There was even the guy from Salon.com, and another from The Atlantic who agreed with my interpretation.
Right-wingers are so amusing with their black-and-white reasoning, and slippery slope arguments. Point out that taxpayers built roads? “So the taxpayers deserve credit for anything anyone ever did!” Raise a tax rate from 18% to 19%? “So you want to steal every dollar I have!”
Your approach is lazy: Black-and-white “reasoning” eliminates the need to think.
Anyone will sound like a fool when clauses are taken out of context. Hillary was pilloried for a half-sentence that implied she wasn’t interested in solving Benghazi, despite that the complete sentence had the opposite meaning.
I would have thought you were smart enough to know that, Brickhead. Yet you join the liars and ignoramuses to celebrate the taking-out-of-context of a man you’re not fit to lick the boots of. This reminds us once again that you’re 100% partisan bullshit, 0% sincere or competent thought.
But then what’s the difference between a successful business and an unsuccessful business? If Person A and Person B both open a Widget company on the same day, on opposite ends of the big city where there is plenty and identical opportunity, and one succeeds and one fails, whose fault is it If Person A fails? Is it the owner? Or is it the owner and “society”. If Person B succeeds, who deserves the credit for it making decisions that differed from Person A’s business? I say it’s the owner, not the
owner + society". You might as well credit the Big Bang, as well. And the Oxygen.
Your approach is dishonest. No one would have a problem with the statement, “taxpayers built roads”. The problem is with the statement “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that.”
Everyone agrees who builds the roads. Everyone. The notion that Obama was correcting some misperception along those lines makes no sense.
In this case we have the word of the speaker himself clarifying, your attempt at making you the one that can interpret better what Obama said is silly, pressing the issue after the one that made the remarks clarified virtually on the same day is really dumb.
Sorry, I was a little sloppy in my last post. That’s not what Obama is saying. He’s not saying that Republicans are claiming responsibility for the infrastructure, he’s saying Republicans are ignoring the infrastructure. By constantly cutting taxes to help businesses, they’re in danger of hurting businesses by underfunding critical services that all businesses depend on. That’s his point - not that individual business owners aren’t responsible for their own success. He specifically says that small business owners are responsible a few sentences later - but for *any *business to succeed, no matter how well or how poorly run, that infrastructure has to exist, and the Republicans aren’t going to take care of it.
You may feel that’s an unfair characterization of the Republican attitude towards taxes. If you want to get angry at Obama for that, go ahead. At least you’ll be complaining about something he’s actually done, for a change.
I ask those who set a high bar for charges of racism to read the OP of the thread Rumsfield claims a trained ape could manage war better than Obama and answer two questions:
(1) Did Rumsfeld use the phrase “trained ape” to pander to racism?
(2) What is the chance that Charlie Wayne is a racist? (I’m not asking if you could convict him of racism in a court of law, but how you privately assess the chance that his invective against President and First Lady is due in large part to their race.)
There’s no confusion on this end. The “you didn’t build that” referred to the infrastructure part he was speaking of earlier, not the “if you’ve got a business”, even though it was next to the statement. This is clear if you read the whole quote.
So no, Obama did not mean anyone didn’t build their business.
magellan’s putting a lot of effort into maintaining his misunderstanding.
Seriously. The conversation at the time went something like this:
GOP: Job creators! Job creators! 51% pay nothing! Tax the moochers, leave the job creators alone! Job creators create wealth! No taxes on job creators!
Obama: You job creators can only create jobs because of the taxes everyone pays, because those taxes help us build infrastructure and hire teachers and stuff, so yeah, we’re gonna make you pay taxes. I mean, good job on creating jobs and all, appreesh, but don’t get ahead of yourselves.
GOP: OMG OBAMA SAID JOB CREATORS DON’T CREATE JOBS!
Can you name any conservative or republican who believes that job creators shouldn’t pay taxes?
No. Nor can I name any Republicans who think that sentences can be created without verbs. If that’s what you think is significant in my post, teh winnar is yuo.
I, and you, can name plenty who believe theirs shouldn’t be raised, since they’d then have less “incentive” to create jobs (and what are they waiting for meanwhile, hmm?).
Plenty of them are paying little or nothing already.
Those dots are close enough together that you can connect them yourself.