Here’s me, right now: I take back my previous retraction and amend it. You are a lying nitwit who can’t stop lying at any point.
BTW, the joke about your “dubious morals” was a play on your claim that:
I think you have only enhanced the dubious quality of the morals that you draw with this current thread.
There’s no point in my commenting about your Reagan diatribe. I already explained the source of my error, apologized and retracted it, the moment you pointed it out. A courtesy you rarely offer anybody.
Do you even remember what you said. You never said anything about Reagan. You specifically excluded Reagan because it fit your needs at that time.
Own up to the fact that you made an assertion by speaking out of the top of your hat, and are just trying to spin and dance and change the assertion to fit the actual data now.
What kinda crack are you smoking? Seriously, this is a President that slashes revenue and boosts spending. Hello??? Sure, the bill may not come due until he’s out of office, but make no mistake it will come due. Or Sam, do you mean to say that slashing revenue (via tax cuts on top of the economic slowdown that we’ve seen in the internet bubble fallout [not Bush’s fault]) and increasing spending (fed programs not to mention Iraq which no one is willing to put a price tag on) is a good thing and won’t come back and bite us in the ass? I mean you’re probably old enough to have lived through the mess that was Reagonomics, and if not you have to look no farther than Japan.
How much money does each and every US citizen/taxpayer have to fork over for our little Iraq adventure? Why don’t you take the cost of Iraq and divide by what 280 million, and you’ll have it.
If the US was a company instead of a government, it would be on the way to bankruptcy. Hey, come to think of it, didn’t the company that Bush used to be CEO of go bankrupt because it had less revenue than liability?
Let me try again. I think it is perfectly fine to only present data which is advantageous to your position. What I don’t support is drawing conclusions based on that, obviously incomplete, data set. It is fine to say that the US has comparatively good SO[sup]2[/sup] emissions levels(well, as good as having a bad thing can ever really be). If you think of debate in the terms of vector physics this data would advance your position in the forward direction by a magnitude of 10. But this data isn’t the only vector on the table. There is another vector, the concentration of urban areas which produce this pollutant. It would be a vector in the opposite direction with magnitude 4 or so. Net gain of six towards the “The US is going a good job” position. This arguement is still a net gain for your side but is presented in a manner which does not immediately open it up to criticism as drawing overbroad conclusions from the data. Representing the magnitude ten vector in the direction you want while ignoring the magnitude four vector in the other direction undermines assertions based on being at the +10 position in a certain direction. If your position is indeed superior then it serves you best to provide all the context possible so you can draw a stronger conclusion once all the vectors are summed.
That experience and context is not available to everyone in the discussion. It is well and good to speak towards your area of expertise, but let’s not forget that not everyone is working from the same background. Context needs to be provided in the thread to be sure everyone is on the same page.
Most of this is true. Had you stopped short of drawing the conclusion “you’re going to find that the U.S. is better than many industrial nations on most [environmental indicators].” it would all be true. You present your data as the final word, the nail in the coffin. That just ain’t so, especially with shallow analysis as the genesis of your conclusion.
Sure it is, but it should be subjected to some analysis before being considered the final word. Reprinting it word-for-word and then claiming the debate is over is bullshit. That list fell all to pieces under even minimal analysis(I blame the bullet points, hate bullet points). And your response to those who dared to analyze the bulleted list was just plain wrong. I’ll quote it again, just to refresh your memory.
Now if you care about debate then you should welcome analysis of the data you bring to the table. Ideally you’d do some yourself so you don’t come with a house of cards. Instead we see you disparaging the motives of those who bothered to do deeper analysis than you did. Respectful rebuttal of data points is kind of hard to do when one side has already proclaimed them conclusive and that anyone who would question them is “engaging in Shadenfreude.”
Friend, you have never seen me deride someone. When I do I promise you’ll know it. Call people on their conclusions based on cherry-picked and poorly analyzed data? Yes. Hell I do the same to the leaders of the free world, not-so-free world, completely un-free world, etc.
China Guy: What am I smoking? I said the economy is not bad, and you bring up stuff about paying for the Iraq war, and the deficit? These are not economic indicators. When I say the economy is not bad, I’m talking about…
And with the latest report, there have been 1.1 million jobs created in the last year.
The economy is not just good, it’s roaring. And the faster-than-expected growth may cause the deficit forecast for next year to be reduced by 100 billion dollars. The deficit may be cut in half in four years if spending is held to the rate of inflation, because of high GDP growth and increased tax revenues.
The economy is not just good, it’s great. But in Great Debates, it’s taken as an article of faith that the economy is ‘terrible’, and whenever I try to claim otherwise people like iamme99 go ape.
And now let’s see if iamme99 is representing me fairly.
I claimed that I did more than use one data point in my argument. This is iamme’s response to that, posted above:
Here is that entire post by me, posted in its entirety. I’ll leave it up to the readers to decide if iamme’s characterization was fair:
Notice I said, “Have a look at THESE GRAPHS”, and then reported SO2 numbers from China, Canada, Belgium, and a whole bunch of other countries. The source document I linked has the hard numbers for all of them.
Note that I also did not claim that this was proof that the U.S. was cleaner. In fact, I was quite careful with my language, saying things like, “For an example of some comparative values”. At no point did I try to suggest that SO2 emissions were the be-all and end-all of the discussion. I offered them as an EXAMPLE. And later in the thread, linked to an article by Greg Easterbrook at the Brookings Institution, and said, “The article goes on to discuss other ways in which the Bush administration has been good to the environment, and a few in which the Bush administration has not been so good. In other words, a balanced picture.”
At this point, the discussion devolved into an accusation of my ‘statistical sleight of hand’
In the meantime in that thread, the following claims were made by others:
Hentor: I see I did make another comment about your mistake. I didn’t remember it, and missed it on preview of the thread again. My apologies.
As for the rest, I’m done with it. All the relevant data has been posted. You are, quite simply WRONG. Your claim that NASA’s budget was ‘pretty consistent’ was EXACTLY what you are accusing me of - statistical sleight of hand. The numbers in real or constant dollars CLEARLY show an increase under Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II. And a DECREASE under Clinton. This was my original point, and it was correct. We have now wasted huge amounts of time and effort on this nonsense, because you insist on trying to parse sentences with a microscope and play word games. In the meantime, you emit howlers like, “the budget was pretty consistent”, AFTER the raw numbers which show this isn’t the case had already been posted in that thread.
Once again, I encourage anyone to go back and read my message with cited data above, or read the original thread again. If they haven’t all gone running for the exits already - this thread is getting tedious. And that’s all I have to say about that.
Maybe we should take the economy back to the Great Debates and see if all those “great” proof points hold up.
Obviously we have a different definition of the economy being good or bad. I mean, if you buy a big house with 10% down, a new flash car on credit, have 2 credit cards on the limit buying cool electronics, and two more credit cards at the limit covering the gap between your monthly payment and income. Yep, it sure looks like you’ve got life made, but that bill will come due.
Not to belabor things (well, maybe a bit ), but a couple of items:
Much of the data you presented regarding the US economy is, at first glance, a strong indication that the US economy is doing well. However, where I take issue with your data is that it doesn’t present a full picture regarding the robustness of the US economy. To illustrate but one example - while it’s true that:
“And with the latest report, there have been 1.1 million jobs created in the last year”
this overlooks the fact that this 1.1 million is well below the expected level of jobs that the economy should be creating based on the number of new people entering the workforce. Plus, there has actually been a net decrease in the total number of jobs within the entire economy. Not to mention that the current batch of new jobs created is well below what the current adminstration had initially projected (which was roundly criticized by some economists as wildly optimistic).
Of course, it’s not your job to point out the above (that’s for those don’t agree with your assessment).
The above I just don’t agree with you. I’ll concede that the economy is not terrible - it’s clearly getting better, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that’s it is “great” or “roaring”. Maybe in another 6 months if conditions continue to improve, then yes, maybe “great” or “roaring” could be use to accurately describe the economy. But I think that’s just a difference in opinion or word usage.
Real life considerations are making it damn near impossible for me to participate in this discussion, but I’m following it keenly. In all brevity, I want to respond to a couple of points.
Regarding the debate on NASA:
Well, it will probably come as no surprise to you that I agree with Hentor: you’re exaggerating. You continue to insist on doing so, for reasons known only to yourself. Zoe makes this point quite clearly: NASA clearly did not receive “substantial funding increases” under Bush I and II, and decreases under Clinton. Rather, the variations in NASA’s budget reflect variations in total federal expenditures and in particular a steadily growing (or shrinking) federal budget.
If, as you say, Bush had initiated a “huge, substantial, massive” funding increase for NASA, one would naturally expect to see this increase in terms of NASA’s relationship to the total federal budget. If Clinton had slashed NASA’s budget to .5% of total federal expenditures, while Bush had increased it to 1.5% of those expenditures, then you would have a strong case. As is, the rise and fall of NASA’s budget merely reflects the generally spending philosophies of the presidents in question: ironically, you appear to be praising Bush because his NASA budget reflects his propensity to spend more across the board (NASA included), and criticizing Clinton because his NASA budget reflected a tendency to reign in expenditures across the board (NASA included).
Like many other examples presented in this thread, you take a single “data point” in isolation (in this case, NASA’s budget) and draw very broad, often overly broad, conclusions from it. This tendency opens you up for charges of partisanship, since it appears that you tend to start with preformed conclusions and then go out of your way to locate evidence to support them, instead of the other way round.
Regarding this:
Don’t mince words, Sam. The point is that you chose to focus on one particular pollutant in isolation, and you did this despite the claim you made in the previous paragraph that such factors, taken in isolation, can’t really tell us much. You may have hummed, and hawed, and hedged your bets, but its clear that you wish to communicate with this particular example that the US is significantly cleaner than other countries.
In closing, I just want to commend Mtgman for his concise, clear-headed responses in this thread. Very impressive, I must say.
Cite please. In particular, what are you assuming in regards to the Bush tax cut sunsets and the alternate minimum tax? And also, how do you explain how we are going to hold spending at the rate of inflation…given the rate at which it has been increasing during the Bush years, particularly for the military (which is a major chunk of the discretionary budget)?
A cite is particularly necessary since a White House spokesman in a statement today talked about the budget deficit being cut in half over 5 years:
And, this estimate of being able to cut the deficit in half over 5 years is based on smoke and mirrors, as this Washington Post article from 3 months ago explains:
There might be a little bit of revision in the positive direction since February now that payrolls are finally expanding. But, I doubt it will be enough to offset all of these other things.
Here is a CNN/Money Magazine article on Bush’s claim to cut the deficit in half.
For the second time in this thread, I point out to you that your original point had nothing to do with Reagan. Please stop lying. In fact, here is your original point from the thread, which I have already repasted several times and bolded for your own and Shodan’s edification. THIS IS YOUR ORIGINAL ASSERTION
You needed to make the point that the Bush NASA proposal was not simply election year pandering, but an honest, deeply felt issue on the part of W. So you claimed that “[t]he Bush family has always been nuts about space.” In service of this assertion, you claimed that they represented the only two times that NASA received “larger than average” increases. Including Reagan would not have served your purpose of portraying a specific NASA interest by W. So you didn’t. You excluded him. Yet you continue to claim that he was part of your original claim.
I want to be done with this too, so I offer you the following: Your current claim is that your original point was
Here is my offer: If you can find any reference to Reagan in your original point (again, linked here)as you now claim, I will quit this board.
If you cannot, you are simply following up on a lie with a further lie.
And Shodan, where have you gone? No interest in defending your claims in this thread?
There are a great number of conservative posters and liberals here. I’ve never felt the board tilted one way or another. When I felt I was a conservative, there were plenty of posters I felt were liberals that I respected. Now, I don’t know what I am, but I’m definitely more liberal, and there’s plenty conservative posters I respect.
Mostly, though, they don’t post much. Because the average GD thread is as “great” of a debate as, well, nothing. It’s IMHO with cites. Boring, pedantic, and completely unable to be resolved because it is either too timely or too shallow. There’s nothing great-debatey about bashing a president, or supporting him, in general, though I admit a president’s actions might rekindle debates on how to handle issues that nations face time and time again (war, poverty, research, etc).
Most GD threads are political wanking. Stop reading them, Sam. Just stop. Personally, I think your post quality has dropped significantly in the past year or so. If you’re frustrated, just stop. Get your head together, stop chasing liberal bogeymen and return to civilized debate on long-standing topics that will be important even after Bush leaves (which, face it, he must in at most four years). Bush rallies and Bush bashing aren’t longstanding issues that conservatives and liberals face.
Obviously my own bias and interests show through here, but there was a time I really respected you. Lately you seem to be a parody of your former self.
), but a couple of items: