Yep. Anyone who thought Bush wasn’t absolutely determined to go to war was deluding themselves. It was obvious.
We all knew Bush was going to war no matter how the vote went. At the time, the patriotic correctness demanded that we all stand behind Bush and give him the tools to do the job. That he deliberately lied to make the case for war wasn’t determined until much later.
Nothing solves the debt crisis unless we can back to a normal economy. Remember when we discussed how Japan’s lost decade could be our future, well, we are almost halfway there.
Is this the old “kill medicare” Ryan plan or the new and improved "oh I didn’t mean it, I ant to give you a choice between the medicare you have now or some piece of shit plan that noone is going to elect unless they have retiree health care benefits from work (and thereby shift costs to a strained pension system).
In a normal economy (and if we fix medicare, a BIG if; we could fix social security tomorrow if we wanted to), the deficit is about 250 billion as our receipts go up and our spending on stuff like unemployment goes down. We can just repeal the bush tax cuts for the rich and close about a third of that deficit.
I liked McCain’s plan to offer each joint chief a discretionary budget equal to 50% of the cuts they propose to their own programs. So if they cut a weapons system they don’t want, they can use half the money they cut for other things they DO want. This is estimated to be worth about 100 billion/year.
I like Universal health care as a method of reining in national medical costs. Something like France would be a good start, then progress to something like Canada’s system.
I think this needs to be repeated. Somehow, deficits have been connected to recession. The connection is tenuous and separated by several degrees. We should be running huge deficits at these rates.
Whatever it takes. The public debt would have to be over 100% before I started to get concerned. Ideally our public debt would hover at around 20% of GDP.
I think there is a consensus that the tipping point floats with the interest rate and the bigger concern isn’t so much the debt as it is whether we will have the long term discipline to reduce our debt when we have a surplus rather than “give it back” to the taxpayer in the form of more tax cuts “for the rich”
And may the Good Lord Above protect us if we elect another Republican President and who really does find evidence of an enemy planning to use WMD against us, but doesn’t quite have that evidence in final and definitive form just yet…because I think we’re all going to die before this Congress accepts evidence that’s not lock solid.
(I phrase it like that because I think it’s only a little less likely that there is a Good Lord Above to protect us than a Congress that will in these circumstances.) IOW fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, we won’t get fooled again.
Are you saying that a Republican president by would have no credibility because of what George Bush did (well maybe Nixon too)?
For these Democratic legislatures, I think so. In time, another flock of Democratic legislators may be willing to get gulled, and GOP legislators are always going to spread their legs for any GOP Prez who waves his dick around, but these guys now have gotten BURNED. I’d hope they’d be the most skeptical bunch of people ever to a GOP President who came crying to them with vague reports of WMDs somewhere. If they were to go for it again, I’d impeach them before I’d impeach the President–they know better.
Before going to far into the CBO analysis of Ryan’s plan make sure you realize that Ryan told them what assumptions to use on Revenues and spending:
Yeah, Hillary is a cautionary tale about what happens when you trust Republicans.
Okay so this is post convention, but it is evidence as to how the Romney campaign is employing deceit as their primary tool. Romney recently said that the auto bailout proceeded exactly per his recommendations. Apparently, let Detroit go bankrupt meant engage in a managed bankruptcy in the fashion that Obama enacted.
Of course, this isn’t the first time he’s wanted to take the credit for it. It’s a new level of pure bullshit though.
The problem with Romney’s plan is that his plan would have led to the liquidation, not reorganization, of GM and Chrysler. Reorganization at that point in time required a willing lender or equity investor. There were none. GM would still be dead although some parts of it might have been scavenged by whatever remained of the rest of the US auto industry.
Liquidate, reorganize, whatever…the important thing is that there be some consultants overseeing the details who walk away with a couple of million dollars apiece.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Too late.
It would be great if anyone was actually saying that. Does Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan, or any other mainstream politician propose eliminating local fire departments?
I can say no with high confidence - though their policies could lead to closing some fire departments, somewhere.
However, the unfortunate fact is that I can’t say the same for all Republicans out there. There may be a few out there who believe that, and we can’t rule it out.
In any event, we all know it was an analogy.
I assume you understand that the post you’re responding to was giving an analogy, not reporting literal republican policy proposals.
On the analogy, “not needing government money to pay for fire departments” corresponds to reducing funding for various infrastructure and safety net programs.
Hey, I didn’t start the fireman analogy.
But I did finish it.
LEONARD BERNSTEIN!
What? Oh…
Birthday party cheesecake jelly bean BOOM?