Exactly how does that prove my statement false? Its relevance is tangential at best.
Maybe I should say, “Another false statement, see weather.com” the next time you make a claim. It would make about as much sense.
So in your mind, reading and understanding the Constitution is giving up sacred cows? That’s a rather odd way of viewing the Bill of Rights.
… for sulfur and similar pollutants. It does not necessarily follow that what a person supports for some situations is what they support for all situations. I support women wearing sexy clothes in the bedroom with me. That doesn’t mean I support women showing up to work in lingerie. In the same fashion, Republicans supporting something to combat acid rain doesn’t automatically mean they must support the same thing to fight CO2.
Actually, I tell a lie, I would support women going to work in lingerie. At least the attractive women. But still, you get the point.
BZZZZ Wrong answer. In the 90’s, it was supported by only 20 Republicans, at a time when there were over 270 Republicans in Congress. Which means over 90% of Republicans never supported it. By 2009, only 4 of those Republicans were still in office. In the eternal spewing of talking points, claiming HCR was a Republican plan ranks up there with death panels on the ‘just plain wrong’ scale.
Are you going away, or not? Kind of make up your mind.
We have not been undertaxed for ten years. We have overspent.
Put it this way - if we were undertaxed, why was the deficit so low for that period?
Regards,
Shodan
What, the fact that it disagreed with your reading of the Constitution meant that it was never a sacred cow to many liberals?
You realize that makes no sense at all.
And out in the real world, as opposed to in either of our minds, the courts for many decades have construed the Second Amendment as being consistent with some if not all gun control legislation. That was certainly the state of play ten years ago, so more recent SCOTUS decisions aren’t exactly on point.
They most definitely popularized the principle of cap-and-trade rather than command-and-control-style regulation.
The notion that you set limits on how much of a pollutant you’re going to allow, and let the market find the most efficient and least costly way of keeping production of that pollutant under the limit, rather than setting rules telling everyone what they must or can’t do, regardless of cost, was most certainly a Republican idea - and a fundamentally sound one, as well.
If there was a coherent argument made during the current Congress of why cap-and-trade somehow wouldn’t work for CO2 the way it had for sulfur and CFCs, I sure missed it. All I heard was a lot of sloganeering about “cap-and-tax.” Feel free to educate me if I missed something here.
The Heritage Foundation, which you may have heard of, was proposing this idea as late as 2003. (Don’t have the link handy, I’ll try to dig it out later.) And of course there’s Mitt Romney in Massachusetts a couple years later. Last I heard, Romney was a Republican, and Heritage is most certainly on that side of the ideological divide.
Folks at Heritage helped write the Romney plan, Romney presented it AT Heritage (I was in the audience). I think that Moffit was the driver at Heritage.
http://www.heritage.org/Events/2006/01/Massachusetts-Health-Care-Reform
There might have been some input from Galen as well.
I wish the Republicans would have supported Romney more, and would instead be pushing for the ability of states to more easily implement their own programs. Let the 50 state experiment begin.
Yet more witty repartee and meaningful insight of the type you specialize in.
As usual, you refuse to debate honestly.
My heartiest regards to you.
Until recently the interpretation was not as clear as you seem, or have you entirely read out the first clause out of the second amendment. Now I happen to think that the second amendment gives a personal right to bear arms but I can see how that first clause provides a legitimate argument that the second amendment is a state right against the federal government.
It certainly doesn’t mean that we can’t have gun control. ALL the constitutional rights have limits. The right to free speech may in fact be abridged and the free exercise of religion may in fact be prohibited if the law that runs afoul of teh first amendment meets the applicable standard of review. Similarly the right to bear arms can be infringed if the law that infringes on that right meets the appropriate standard of review. So yes, the Democrats could in fact have continued to pursue gun control even if they interpreted the constitution exactly the same way you did (which they don’t).
In 1993, 23 Republican SENATORS, including then-Minority Leader Robert Dole, cosponsored a bill introduced by Senator John Chafee that sought to achieve universal coverage through a mandate that is, a mandate on individuals to buy insurance. There were only 43 Republican senators at the time. Perhaps you were misinformed about how well subscribed this proposal was amongst Republicans at the time.
It had nothing to do with the House. The house was held by Democrats in 1993, they could have passed anything they wanted with a simple majority.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. Is that what you were looking for Sven?
She might have been looking for something approximating the truth. What federal and state agencies have increased staffing recently?
I don’t know if you’ve forgotten already but the budget deficit before the tax cuts were… oh wait we had a surplus for the two years prior to the tax cuts in the 100-250 billion dollar range.
Whatever you think about the math behind that budget surplus it is the exact same math that was being used to determine Bush’s “low” deficits of between $200 and $400 billion/year.
Bush’s last budget and supplemental spending passed while he was in office (fiscal year 2009) pushed the budget deficit to 1.416 trillion dollars and the projected budget deficits for 2010 was over 1.5 trillion dollars.
Was this all the result of a trillion dollars of additional spending in 2009 authorized by Bush? Of course not. We couldn’t spend a trillion more dollars in a year if we tried (and we tried). As conservatives often forget, the budget deficit is the amount by which spending exceeds revenues.
So what happened between 2008 and 2009. WTF was the difference? Well, spending definitely increased, we passed BOTH the first stimulus AND TARP during Bush’s last year in office. These two things account for much of difference between 2008 and 2009, but not all… We hit a recession and federal tax revenues dropped $400 billion+
So then Obama took over and he had his OWN stimulus and as we all know, the economy was still shitty. So in 2010 his projected deficit is $1.29 trillion (down from a projection of $1.5 trillion) and the tail end of the stimulus bill will keep the deficit high into 2011. Then we get back to baseline and our deficits are projected to be around $400 to $600 billion per year.
That my friend is how we ended up with a 1.4 trillion dollar deficit last year with a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit expected this year. We expect a $900 billion dollar deficit next year as we spend out the last of the stimulus and then between $400 to $600 billion per year after that.
This level is still too high but we can get to a reasonable level if we cut the military (remember we spend over $800 Billion on the military and security), increase taxes incrementally as the economy permits (we can increase taxes on those making over $250K today and we can couple it with some spending cuts if it will attract even a single Republican vote). We should slowly phase the Bush tax cuts out of the system entirely (and couple it with even MORE spending cuts if that will get a fgew Republican votes). We should phase some additional taxes into the system over time (and couple it with spending cuts if thats what it takes to get the votes).
If you want to fix health care so that it cover catastrophic coverage (and I assume you also want to cover things like check-ups pre-natal and neo-natal care) instead of going the whole 9 yards, we can talk about that, that is a reasonable counterproposal but we have not seen any reasonable counter-proposals coming from the Republican side.
You’re an optomist aren’t you?
The problem with cap and trade as currently proposed by this administration is that it wants people to pay for all their carbon emissions from day one. The Republican scheme gave everyone carbon credits on day one based on their current emission and then reduced their credits by some percentage every year so they could either improve emissions or buy credits from someone else. The current plan raises energy prices overnight for people who get their power from coal. This fact alone makes this plan a bad idea, its got no transition.
All of the Republican’s best ideas are from when they were in the minority and they immediately abandon them when they are in the majority.
Is there such a plan? I’ve never actually seen a cap and trade bill.
Skipping the gun argument because it’s totally off topic, but if someone had principles that violate the Constitution and had to compromise them, then I don’t have much sympathy that they had to give up their scared cow.
The argument isn’t if it would work or not. It would work on controlling CO2, pretty much everyone accepts that. However, cap and trade ain’t all sunshine and happiness. As with many government regulations, there are negatives to it. So the question is if the benefits of using cap and trade to control CO2 is worth the drawbacks of it. Cost benefit analysis’s are always cut and dried. ‘It would work, but the cost is too high for the benefits’ is a perfectly valid position.
You mean Mitt Romney, the guy who had major problems in the 2008 primaries, in part specifically because of his support of a HCR like plan? The one that Republicans rejected, in part because he supported a HCR like plan? The one that is getting his ass stomped in polls by a retarded Alaskan, in part because he supported a HCR like plan?
For the love of Cecil, can gun banning/gun owner rights debates not hijack another thread?
Can you educate me on the cap and trade program for CFCs? I do not ever recall such. The Montreal Protocol is often called a cap and trade program, but I do not think it compares with the CAA Amendments of 1990, nor with the provisions of the moribund cap and trade program in the Senate. I’m not asking a rhetorical or gotcha question, I just want to know what program you’re talking about. I don’t typically deal with CFC-type regs.
The difference between CFC’s, sulfer, and other pollutants and CO2 is that these other byproducts are generally created in small amounts, and can be feasibly scrubbed from exhausts with reasonable costs, while CO2 produced in massive amounts and is the inevitable byproduct of combustion. It’s not a pollutant, and exists in large quantities in the atmosphere.
The sheer quantity of it and the inevitability of its production for the generation of electricity given today’s power infrastructure means that cap and trade basically becomes a tax on all productive activity instead of an incentive for the dirtiest industries to clean themselves up a bit.
The other argument against cap and trade is that unless it’s a global program and no one cheats, the real world result of it will be to push energy-intensive manufacturing out of the U.S. and into countries that are even less clean and less energy efficient. The result could even be an increase in CO2 production, while damaging the U.S.'s competitiveness.
This is a feature , not a bug and was predominantly the reason that we in Canada raised the retirement age. We are a little too healthy, and they would love it if we just stuck to the median life expantancy and passed away at a decent age, so that we don’t tap into the pension for too long.
The person that you are describing above is now inconvienent.
Declan
The way to handle differences in job difficulty is to offer supplemental programs for earlier retirement. This can be done privately or through government. So the retirement age is set to maybe 67 for people under 50, and to 69 for people under 40, and to 70 for people under 30.
If you want to retire earlier, you just buy supplemental age coverage. So if you want to retire at 65 still, and you’re 45 years old, you have 20 years to save enough to equal two years of retirement. This would not cost a lot of money Probably 1-2% of income at most. You can add government subsidies of maybe half of that to people under certain incomes.
If you’re 25 and you want to retire at 65, you have 40 years to save enough to cover four years of retirement income. Again, this would be a very small amount.
Set the retirement ages appropriately, and you should be able to make the amount constant for everyone. So maybe the ‘retirement 65’ program costs everyone 2% of their salary. If you don’t opt in, you don’t get Social Security until the higher age. Of course, you can still retire early - it’s just up to you to save your own money to cover the gap.
Really, these changes aren’t that brutal. They’d make a huge difference in the cost of entitlements overall, and they’d allow for more choice in setting up your own retirement. And actually, jobs that burn people out early and send them of to early retirement or disability in greater than average numbers impose an externality cost on society, so it would be more efficient to make them pay extra to allow workers in those industries to retire earlier.
your first paragraph is the best argument I’ve seen for top-down, across-the-board, one-size-fits-all regulation being applied to cases other than CO2. The amounts are small, the costs of technologies like smokestack scrubbers reasonable, etc.
You need cap and trade with CO2 precisely because it would be expensive in a goodly number of situations, so you more than in other situations need a way to get the CO2 reduction to gravitate to the least expensive means, to minimize the harm to the economy.
As far as your last paragraph goes, the solution is a carbon tariff. If, say, China persists in not limiting their carbon output, then you estimate what the cost saving is to them, and apply an appropriate tariff to imports to even things out. End of free ride.
But hell, even that doesn’t matter. The most important thing right now is for us to try to DO something about the problem before it’s irreversible. The choices have all but been made that will condemn my son’s generation to live their lives in a world where global warming is out of control. The costs of inaction are tremendous.
I don’t know where the 7.1% federal increase comes from… brand new agencies maybe …gee that makes me feel even better?
Any other questions…?
Union representation?
Affect that unions have?
Agencies merging or being eliminated like in the private sector?
SSA, and its ODAR component in particular.