Well, I feel guilty contributing to yet another successful Bricker Diversion™, but how do you feel about the government bailing out the most successful time and again, after they’ve successfully raided the piggy bank? TARP bailouts. Savings and Load bailouts? AIG bonuses?
A good part of our current economic difficulty was caused by Wall Street making bets that they knew would be covered by the Feds if their horse foundered. I don’t recall anyone asking me if I wanted to cover those bets, but, of course, by the time the shit hits the fan, there’s no real choice. From a purely pragmatic sense, I want the rich to pay more taxes because they’re the ones who are most likely to be kicking over the economic applecart every time we have a sufficiently regulation-free cycle of government.
There is no equivalency here. The GOP and Romney in particular lies and distorts like a bodily function. They have no principles or morals, they’re like a virus: their only goal is to perpetuate itself. If tomorrow they feel they need to be pro-gay marriage to be viable, they’ll do it. Romney will divorce Ann and marry Bruce.
When the entire convention is built upon a distortion of a statement that was taken out of context (REAL out of context, not “I like to fire people” which is true except that Romney doesn’t want people to think it meant regular joe’s), then that party has no ethics, no principles, no morals that it stands for. The GOP stands for itself, whatever that is, whatever it takes to keep in power. That’s it
So, we trim off a few! Texas, Alaska. New Jersey won’t be missed, nobody knows where Rhode Island is. Nobody lives in North or South Dakota Mississippi is an embarrassment…
And I also believe that he’s well-aware there are fifty states, and the general history of states’ admission to the union. So while his literal statement was false, I don’t think it reveals anything except the kind of verbal blunder we all suffer from time to time.
Then why don’t you give him the same credit with the “you didn’t build that” thing? Obviously he doesn’t mean that the federal government goes out and starts businesses for people who think they are doing it for themselves. He simply meant to say something like “you didn’t do it all alone; the government did things that made your business possible.” Why play these games?
Well, I read the whole first page of the first link and I don’t even see the term "military or “defense” there. I’m happy to play along in this debate, but if you’re going to make assertions in your own thread you should be willing to put the time into backing them up.
If you mean this:
Please note the dates. I’m not going to believe any projections out to 18 years int the future, much less 38 years. And the document states that Ryan only gave them numbers out to 2022, with the rest based on projected grow rates.
They are totally different. He actually said the 57 state thing. The build it thing is only a gaffe if you edit out what he said before.
Bricker is just having a hard time admitting that the party he loves has turned into a nest of lying scum. I’m sure he’ll come around eventually. The thing he wants to debate, the exact percentage different income classes should pay, is a reasonable topic of debate. He might actually admit that in some cases taxes could need to be raised. Like Reagan and unlike his present party.
John Mace: I did put time into backing them up. I found you not only the underlying CBO report, but a nice summary of it. And you complain to me about the length of the CBO report and offer a half-hearted ctrl-f search. :rolleyes:
Since you seem to be suggesting I’m blowing smoke, here’s the exact quote from the first page of the second cite:
If you want to reject the CBO’s analysis because you’re “not going based on projected grow rates,” then more power to you. I don’t know what kind of magic you’d prefer to rely on for estimating the impact of that budget plan. And I don’t care, because I wasn’t trying to persuade you of the accuracy of this point. The whole tangent was whether there was an objective basis for Obama’s claim. Obviously there is.
ETA: And, by the way, the percentage of GDP going to spending in 2050 is based on Ryan’s own parameter. It isn’t a projection.
It is an incontrovertible fact that Ryan proposed to reduce discretionary spending by 75% over four decades to a level below current defense-only spending. It is an incontrovertible fact that this would spell the elimination of at least some of the things Obama is identifying (Ryan, naturally, refuses to say which).
I don’t know why this is so hard for people to grasp. Whenever people are presented with Ryan’s actual proposals they seem to instantly reject them as so outlandish that it must be some kind of misrepresentation or liberal fantasy.
No politician would ever actually propose such a thing, right? No, that’s wrong. Ryan proposed it and Romney endorses it. So Obama has to spend time explaining why roads are important.
Nowhere did he say it was Obama’s fault. What he basically said was that Obama campaigned on a false promise. Note that Ryan also said right in the speech that this was 2008, when Bush was President, and that Obama made the claim before he was president.
Also, the plant was still operating until April 2009, and in fact the GM restructuring committee had it as one of its proposed factories for retooling to make GM’s new small car. Janesville lost. So to claim that it Janesville’s fate was completely out of Obama’s hands is just not correct.
In addition, the ‘fact-check’ makes the assumption that once a plant is closed, that’s it. It’s closed forever, and there’s nothing Obama could do about it. In fact, closed plants are retooled and re-opened all the time. The Chevy Volt is currently out of production, for example. Production is slated to begin again as soon as (if) demand picks up. Until that final decision was made by the restructuring board, Janesville was not ‘closed’ - it was on ‘standby’, which means production had stopped, most workers were furloughed, but the plant facilities were being maintained so that it could be re-tooled and re-opened. It was under Obama’s watch that the decision was made to re-open another ‘standby’ plant and permanently close Janesville.
And in fact, the changing of the plant to standby status was announced in June of 2008, but AFTER that, Obama went to Wisconsin and gave another speech in October in which he said: “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”
In other words, even though he knew it was scheduled to close, he was telling voters that if they voted for him, he’d work to re-open their plant. Yes, he used the words 'plants LIKE the one in Janesville", but he was speaking to a Wisconsin crowd and he mentioned ‘good paying jobs in Wisconsin’, so he was clearly implying that they should vote for him if they wanted their plant saved.
But again, Ryan never said the closing was Obama’s fault. He said that Obama was campaigning on the rhetoric of not allowing a closing like Janesville to happen under his policies. And in fact, Janesville was closed because his GM restructuring board chose to close it instead of retool it.
I have my own criticism of that part of the speech - Ryan left the impression that it’s the president’s job to prevent such closings, which goes against his own philosophy. He did the same thing when he talked about the ‘entitlement mentality’, then almost immediately after reaffirmed the ‘promise’ made to seniors that they would get their medicare. But that’s exactly what an entitlement is. So he was being hypocritical.
But the GM ‘lie’ is pure Democrat spin, or if you want to be charitable, an error by the ‘fact-checkers’ who didn’t dig deep enough into the history of it.
No, I’d say that Ryan knows more about what happened than the supposed ‘fact checkers’.