Oh, you don’t want to bring up the NASA funding thing again, or I’ll have to link to the actual thread and make you look foolish.
Oh yes, because the ‘rightarded’ web sites are just a-buzz with efforts to make Clinton’s unemployment look like 6.3%. Give it a rest, already. I made a silly math error that didn’t even change the point I was making.
Oh for God’s sake. I quoted another web site in that OP, and when someone posted contrary facts, I withdrew the claim. Oh, the horror. The ‘lie’ about Obama quotes was a rhetorical device, and I identified the quotes in the same message. It may not have been a good rhetorical device, but it wasn’t a ‘lie’, as any reasonable poster would see (i.e. someone other than you).
Clinton took in a high unemployment rate when he was sworn in and nearly halved it during 8 years. Bush took that low unemployment rate and nearly doubled it in another 8 years.
Yes, on average they scored the same, but Clinton started low and got high and W started high and plummeted; implying that they had equivalent performances is absolutely disingenious.
And Bush left us with a world economic crisis that is causing massive job losses world-wide. It’s impossible to debate with Sam honestly because he’s just trolling for his ‘side’ and is quite happy with any form of deception so long as his side ‘wins’.
Like Shodan too. Bricker is the only conservative with even a half honest approach.
Let’s do. I’d just love for you to take me to the woodshed again like you have in this thread. (I actually came across it all again last night while doing some searches prompted by your posts here. I’m very happy to review it again for everyone else’s entertainment.)
A 1.1% change in unemployment makes a fairly big difference (and also makes it look like Clinton had done worse than Bush. Setting aside, of course, the difference in trend that Ale cogently pointed out later.) The sad part is that Obama is going to get tagged with Bush’s leavings, which is now up to 8.1% and is predicted to top 9.4% over the year.
And apparently, you made a couple of “silly” math errors, since your second effort was as wrong as your first. By the way, if you google “Bush Clinton unemployment rates” about all you will find are righties trying to make the argument that Bush’s unemployment numbers were better than Clinton’s.
Actually, someone other than me already called you a fucking liar in that very thread. Unless of course you are accusing me of being or using a sock.
the first cite I posted gave increases over a 20 year period - so this is not an issue over the past few years. My discussion of the prisons were to demonstrate that the problem with the California budget is not “liberal” spending. Liberals were not behind 3 strikes. Whether it is a good idea or not, it is an expensive one - and with a better prison situation, I suspect the guards would have less clout.
The purpose of the article was to show that the problem on the spending side did not lay with a state legislature out of control, but with the people of California passing expensive initiatives without having to worry about the consequences. What we have in California is the right yelling that the Democrats in the legislature are awful, and then take away a lot of their authority with the initiative system (which started as a socialist thing, by the way) and proves that the people do a worse job than elected officials do.
The cause of the crisis, by the way, was not a big increase in spending, but a big decrease in tax revenue thanks to the recession. Unemployment here is above the national average. The reason we became a laughing stock (and rightfully so) is that the Republican legislators, with their no tax vow, were unwilling to compromise either with the Dems of the governor of their own party.
If prison costs were 5% of the budget, it would be no big deal. An increase of under 5% is a big deal.
You’ll notice in your link a reference to Prop 98 costs. That is a set amount of the budget guaranteed for education. That is from yet another initiative. This is a liberal one, but the reason it got passed was education getting ripped off thanks to Prop. 13. When Davis was governor, there was strong, strong support for restoring the cuts made in education after Prop 13. People wanted that, but didn’t want to pay for it. To a certain extent the problem comes from the fact that relative funding per district was frozen when the state took over education, and hasn’t changed even when the demographics changed. My district, which was more rural back then, gets ripped off relative to a district up the road. This imbalance means that there will be a large number of people dissatisfied no matter what the funding level is.
Another item in the Mercury News story was the money to make up the cut in vehicle license fees. Cutting that is something Ahnold ran on. The reason it shows up here, and not as a decrease in revenue, is that the money went to localities, and had to be made up from general funds. This was something the governor could fix with a stroke of the pen, and which would improve the budget picture a lot. So you can’t blame this one on liberals either.
The point of all this is that you responded, out of nowhere, how the liberals screwed up California, which shows either a lack of understanding of our situation or a willingness to ignore the complexities of the problem for a kneejerk statement. I thought I was being charitable - there is no reason you should be an expert on the California budget.
Well, this thread seemed to be about you making stuff up, so it seemed like the right place…
Actually, new taxes frequently help growth (for the same reason raising interest rates do), and I have no idea why you think the reductions from waste, fraud, and abuse are illusory. We successfully addressed this under Clinton’s Reinventing Government initiative in the 1990s, and there’s no reason to believe there’s less opportunity now for efficiency savings.
Look, a president’s proposed budget is always a load of hooey, in that Congress, a co-equal branch of the government, actually gets the write the real budget that becomes law. So you can complain that this program or this idea won’t get implemented, but you have to actually show that there’s reason to believe that Obama is still going to be signing into law budgets with trillion-dollar-plus at the end of his time in office, even though that is explicitly not his plan. Or you can admit you completely made this whole thing up. I’m not expecting you to, but how quickly you backed off your unemployment claim gave me a glimmer of hope.
Jesus, you guys are like pyromaniacs running amok in a field of straw men (to quote George Will). I’m not interested in debating the relative dynamic performances over time of the Bush and Clinton economies in this thread. What I was responding to was the claim that the economy was perceived to be horrible by many liberals on this board in Bush’s first term. I would point out that actually it was a pretty good economy, and for my trouble I’d be accused of ‘cheerleading’.
At the time, there were no 8 year trends to extrapolate, and no economic collapse to blame on Bush. There was simply the static economy of that time, which the liberals on this board kept claiming was horrible. The only reason I brought up Clinton at all was to point out that in the Clinton economy the opinions of the left were reversed, and yet the macro indicators weren’t all that different.
But I should have known that even the slightest comparison between Bush and Clinton would kick off another round of outraged yowling about how horrible he was. Even stipulating that he was, it has nothing to do with the point I was making in this thread.
Great. Please post the link.
Oh, please do. Maybe we can make it a two-fer. Bear in mind that this won’t be good for your blood pressure, as the last time to tried to dredge that up to score points it backfired in your face, because A) you distorted my point, and B) I posted a zillion cites that disproved your case. As I recall, even people who started on your side on that one were backing away from you by the time that thread ended.
Maybe we can save time - you post the link to the original thread, I’ll post the one where I smacked you down when you tried to pull the same lame stunt you’re trying now, and neither of us have to do any more heavy lifting. We can just post the links and let other people read them if they decide they’ve got way too much free time.
On the other hand, you could accept that at best we fought that one to a draw, and that it happened years ago, and we could just forget it. But hey, if you want to go at it again, be my guest.
Yes, there was an economic collapse to blame on Bush, the one that was coming when we said “It’s fucking coming!” and now is here. A static economy is pretty bad when you absitively posolutely need growth. When you add in a ruinously expensive military adventure paid for on credit, you have the recipe for a nasty economic fever.
And even that would not have been so bad were it not for the creative financial voodoo unleashed by deregulation and an attitude of benign neglect, fostered by the perfectly ridiculous notions of a Free Market that corrects itself by magic.
[brief diatribe]
Ever see Casino, DeNiro flick about him being a casino boss? The line goes something like “The dealers watch the players, the pit boss watches the dealers, the floor boss watches the pit bosses, the manager watches the floor bosses and the cameras in the ceiling watch everybody”. Why? Because they are handling money, And these guys are only handling a few piddling millions. Even less, on a slow day!
Financial institutions must be boring and staid. They must be kept that way by relentless scrutiny and nit-picking regulation. The ideal money manager is not a go get 'em entreprenuer. Not a lion tamer, but a certified public accountant. The really solid credit that a capitalist system *must *depend upon relies on financial institutions. That system is nothing more substantial than simple trust, and it must be absolutely grey, dull, and leaden.
Correctly run, there isn’t enough risk to generate much profit. Not enough profit to satisfy a greed freak, by a long shot. Which is precisely as it should be, which is precisely why relentless scrutiny and regulation is absolutely necessary.
Ah, that George Will, always being so autobiographical. I’ve got a smashed watch that is correct more often than he is.
The seeds for the awful economy were planted when Bush took office and planned to invade and occupy Iraq. At that point our economy headed down the road to ruin. It did not manifest itself clearly 2007/8.
I can appreciate why no one would want to try to defend a comparison of the Clinton and Bush economies for the Bush side. It is indefensible. But you did make the comparison. We did not make up a “straw man” and put those statistics into your post for you, you did. You have shown great wisdom in refusing to try to defend it further. You will join the left side, the Chimperor has foreseen it.
