Yeah, remember when Righties were all aghast at a General disagreeing publicly with the President? It feels like it’s been forever.
-Joe
Well, isn’t what Obama’s doing a fudge? Haven’t we thrashed it out here that America would save a shedload if it moved to a UK or French style health system?
Perhaps they should make lawful immigration from Europe easier? Has anyone looked at what it takes to lawfully immigrate to America?
Nah. Bring them home.
Abortion is a tremendously emotive subject. I disagree with them but I can respect their position.
And finally, one with which I agree.
Well, if we make immigration from Europe easier, we also have to make immigration from Mexico, Latin America, and the Third World easier (unless we revive the old openly racist national-origins quota system); and at present, all the immigration pressure is coming from Mexico, etc.
Conservatives talk about smaller government and fiscal responsibility but they don’t deliver it. The Democrats have become the party of fiscal sanity by default.
Our health care system is broken. If conservatives have suggestions for fixing it, they should put them on the table. But “keep things the way they are” is not a solution. So again, the Democrat Party plan may be far from perfect but they’re ahead on this issue by default.
The environment isn’t for sale.
I’d support that as long as there were equal protections enacted to protect workers rights.
Try opposing illegal immigration by offering a program of legal immigration.
Listen to the professionals when they tell you what you don’t want to hear as well.
I agree with this in principle. But I’d want details about what “effective action” is - I haven’t seen a lot of it.
Completely opposed on this one. DOMA is an unwarrented violation of personal liberty. The government has no business regulated people’s family lives.
I oppose rationing or denial of health care also - which is why I support public health care. As for abortion - again this is a personal matter that the government should not be regulating.
I think it’s a bad idea but it’s in the Constitution so I support the right to own firearms.
In the US, do you pay tax on the increased value of shares when you sell them or when they increase in value?
If the former, the tax will be paid on that profit, as soon as it is actually converted from equity to cash. If the latter, it has already been taxed, no matter what you say. If neither, then you’re technically correct but you’re going off on a wild goose chase which has nothing to do with the problem you’re “trying” to fix.
Conservatives talk about smaller government and fiscal responsibility but they don’t deliver it. The Democrats have become the party of fiscal sanity by default.
The democrats established that reputation based on one man: Bill Clinton. Right now, the Democrats are doing a darn good job of making the Republicans look good.
The Republicans do need to jettison supply-side economics in favor of what actually worked for them. They need to reach back to Calvin Coolidge: reduce spending, then shower tax cuts on the public. This creates political momentum for even more spending cuts because people want more tax cuts. When Reagan disconnected spending from taxation in the public mind, it created a rather sick incentive: the public wanted ever higher spending and ever more tax cuts.
The good news is that the public is catching on again. There’s a lot of resistance to deficits and high spending out there, which might create momentum for a saner fiscal conservatism.
It sure takes a special kind of mind to look at a list that includes “fuck Mexicans, fuck gays, fuck Arabs, and start World War III by invading Iran” and conclude that the problem with it is support for gun rights.
But they want spending even more. What are you going to cut? The “government waste” that mysteriously always vanishes when the people who say they want to cut it get into office?
Like it or not, people want the government to do all sorts of things for them. And you can’t cut spending without eliminating those things, which will make people angry at the party doing the cutting. Nor for that matter can we cut taxes after the Republicans went out of their way to dig us into debt; we need to raise taxes, not lower them. Especially on the wealthy.
But they want spending even more. What are you going to cut? The “government waste” that mysteriously always vanishes when the people who say they want to cut it get into office?
Well, there is a huge amount of waste, but your point is taken, it’s hard to cut because you need competence to cut it. Something which is in short supply in the government.
However, fiscal conservatism is easier than it sounds. GDP grows at 2-3% per year. Spending can usually grow 5-6% per year and maintain the same % of GDP. Grow spending a little slower, say at 2-3% of GDP, and the budget starts to approach balance relatively quickly. This was what happened during the 90s. As spending’s share of GDP gets lower, you can cut taxes, since revenue almost always grows at the same percentage of GDP in non-recession years. the fact that spending on interest also drops as a % of GDP every year that spending grows at a “mere” 3% creates a positive feedback loop.
Of course, in order for spending to grow slowly you have to reform entitlements. As in, not adding news ones until the old ones are put on a path to sustainability.
More importantly, you need to come up with something that you can get people to agree IS waste. I’m sure there’s any number of things that you would cut because you think they are waste that I value; I’m sure there are many things I’d cut since I think they are waste that you value. I expect there’s a whole lot less that both of us agree are waste. Multiply that by millions of people, and there you have the real problem; much of that “waste” is waste only to a minority.
“Waste” more often than not is just a euphemism for “something that I don’t benefit from”. It’s easy to rail against waste when you aren’t in a position to cut anything. It appeals to people because everyone imagines that you are speaking of their own definition of waste. Actually try to cut any of that so called waste, and you are faced with actually cutting things people care about, instead of making speeches about unspecified “waste”.
And as for competence; if you want competence in government, the last people you should vote for are conservatives. People who hate government and want it to fail aren’t going to be competent government officials; they’ll make a point of not being competent. As the Bush Administration demonstrated.
Reagan raised the budget massively after Carter, Bush raised it higher, Clinton lowered it, and Bush raised it back up. After five presidents and thirty years, you start to establish a pattern.
What’s “waste”? Is the army an example of government waste? We’ve spent billions on it and it’s never turned a profit. High time we shut it down.
My point is that the government is not a business. Its function is to provide service to the people - establish justice, promote the general welfare, provide for the common defense, ensure the blessings of liberty, etc.
Too many conservatives act like it’s an indisputable fact that government is inherently wasteful and incompetent. Don’t assert it - prove it. Provide some evidence - I see a country that’s been functioning pretty well for over two hundred years. Better than most. I think we deserve some credit for having done a good job of running things. Where’s the incompetence and waste?
More importantly, you need to come up with something that you can get people to agree IS waste. I
Improper federal payments are certainly waste. Wasn’t there a recent study that found that 20% of all federal payments were improper? That would easily put us in surplus + tax cut territory if it could be rooted out. How you do that is difficult, because you’d have to replace a whole bunch of beauracrats with people interested in going after all that fraud. And the public sector unions have real power.
And as for competence; if you want competence in government, the last people you should vote for are conservatives. People who hate government and want it to fail aren’t going to be competent government officials; they’ll make a point of not being competent. As the Bush Administration demonstrated.
That’s true in the Bush administration’s case, but some conservatives do want an effective government, they just want it to do core missions: law enforcement, national defense, and a few things that the private sector just cannot do, like education and a social safety net. And I don’t think the Bush administration was incompetent because they hated government, I think they were incompetent because Bush’s team was 90% political experts, 10% policy experts. It was the most politicized White House ever.
There’s a flip side too: it’s not as if the goverment was a model of efficiency when liberals were in charge. When you love government and believe in it, you might have a tendency to make sure it works, sure. You might also have a tendency to cover up or apologize for the very real deficiencies. If you are really attached to the idea of a benevolent government, you might also tolerate a little graft to serve the greater good. Liberal politicians have long used bribes to get votes for progressive legislation. Mary Landrieu’s vote to proceed on health care reform cost $100 million, for example. Somehow I don’t think that will be counted as an “administrative cost”, even though it is. Liberals have also tolerated graft in big cities and used all those federal tax dollars they greedily rake in to buy votes pretty brazenly with payoffs to constituencies.
Reagan raised the budget massively after Carter, Bush raised it higher, Clinton lowered it, and Bush raised it back up. After five presidents and thirty years, you start to establish a pattern.
Reagan and two Bushes are a pattern. Clinton isn’t. Carter’s budget policies were not sound. LBJ’s were atrocious. Obama is looking more like LBJ than Clinton.
Too many conservatives act like it’s an indisputable fact that government is inherently wasteful and incompetent. Don’t assert it - prove it.
That’s pretty simple, although I’d say that with CW on the “government sucks” side, the burden of proof might be on your side.
For starters, how about the huge amount of improper payments? The government is ridiculously easy to defraud. The fact that the penalties are huge, much huger than you’d face for defrauding say, Aetna, doesn’t seem to deter anyone because it’s rare to get caught.
While we’re at it, why don’t we look at the military. It’s clear we need one. And it’s really, really good. It also costs $500 billion. You’d be amazed at how good something can be if you are willing to throw unlimited funds at it and don’t worry too much about waste. And boy, can the Pentagon waste money! Same goes for the space program. Billions upon billions of dollars has made it look pretty sexy. Yet a couple of kids from Spain managed to spend $100 and take pictures of space using a weather balloon. A couple of tech geeks managed to win the X-prize for a tiny fraction of what the government spends to put something into space. And this is what government does WELL!
It’s hard to get a direct apples-to-apples comparison though, because the government doesn’t really compete directly with the private sector. I actually hope a public option passes, because I’m going to enjoy watching political appointees compete with insurance company executives on a level playing field. That will be instructive on many levels. But until that happens, we can’t compare directly. All we have is extensive, and I mean really extensive, anecdotal evidence that the governments of the world are generally incompetent. I could post a story a day here, sometimes several stories a day, but it would become quickly annoying. How about jobs being created and money being appopriated in Congressional districts that don’t exist? This had to be uncovered by the press. In a private company, payments going to vendors that didn’t exist would be uncovered by accounting and there would be some answers gotten in a hurry or people would lose their jobs. Who is losing their job in the government because stimulus dollars disappeared?
No, they were incompetent both because they were just plain stupid and because they indeed hated government. When you put someone who opposes FEMA in charge of FEMA, naturally FEMA won’t work. And while there may be some conservatives who don’t hate government ( except as a tool for oppression and slaughter; they love that ), I see no reason to think they are anything but a tiny minority.
And most conservatives oppose any form of safety net, except for the part that happens to be benefiting them personally. Everyone else can starve and die. And most oppose government education as well.
The “left” has generally run the government better than under the conservatives. I say “left” and not “liberals” because liberals have seldom if ever had much power in America, much less run the government. The Democrats are mostly moderate conservatives, not liberals; that’s part of their problem.
And conservatives don’t? Conservatives hand out bribes like money was water. $100 million is nothing compared to the wealth showered on the favored of the Bush Admionistration.
And the military is something I think we should cut back by, say, a factor of ten. We don’t need one anywhere near as large as we have. Most of it is just waste as far as I’m concerned. Oh, wait, you don’t think that most of the military is waste? There we go with being unable to agree on waste again.
And it’s something that the government still does far better. Let’s see them send a balloon to Jupiter.
Judging from other countries, those government employees would grossly outcompete the insurance scum on anything like a level playing field. Which is why I doubt one will ever be allowed. We’ll end up with a system still designed to favor the insurance companies.
Yeah, sure they are. That’s why the rest of the West embraces bigger government than ours; they’re all masochists.
Oh, please. Most likely the accountants would be under orders to make those payments. Companies aren’t any less prone to corruption than government. Often they are worse.
No, they were incompetent both because they were just plain stupid and because they indeed hated government. When you put someone who opposes FEMA in charge of FEMA, naturally FEMA won’t work. And while there may be some conservatives who don’t hate government ( except as a tool for oppression and slaughter; they love that ), I see no reason to think they are anything but a tiny minority.
Bush didn’t oppose FEMA, so much as he preferred to appoint cronies to positions rather than qualified individuals. And most conservative do support the government, when it’s limited to the activities it was meant to do.
And most conservatives oppose any form of safety net, except for the part that happens to be benefiting them personally. Everyone else can starve and die. And most oppose government education as well.
In a pure philosophical sense, probably. Practically, not really. Most conservatives have reconciled themselves to the successes of the progressive era of governance. There’s plenty from that era that doesn’t work well to be worried about what does.
The “left” has generally run the government better than under the conservatives. I say “left” and not “liberals” because liberals have seldom if ever had much power in America, much less run the government. The Democrats are mostly moderate conservatives, not liberals; that’s part of their problem.
Have Democrats run the government better? If you leave out Bill Clinton, I’d say no. Clinton is an outlier, a man who liberals never really had much use for and were quick to jettison his legacy in 2008, yet he’s the only reason the Democratic Party had any success before 2008, and if Obama doesn’t shape up, he’ll still be the only successful Democratic President most people ever lived to see.
And conservatives don’t? Conservatives hand out bribes like money was water. $100 million is nothing compared to the wealth showered on the favored of the Bush Admionistration.
Granted, but it’s not part of the basic philosophy of conservative governance. An honest conservative government won’t hand out bribes. An honest liberal government still needs to grease the wheels to get things done and satisfy all those competing constituencies. Conservatives are united by a philosophy. Liberals are united by interests. Those interests have to be massaged to keep the coalition together.
And the military is something I think we should cut back by, say, a factor of ten. We don’t need one anywhere near as large as we have. Most of it is just waste as far as I’m concerned. Oh, wait, you don’t think that most of the military is waste? There we go with being unable to agree on waste again.
I think we can cut back the military as well, although I wouldn’t do it quickly. I’d be more inclined to see both domestic and military spending dropped by about 1% a year.
**And it’s something that the government still does far better. Let’s see them send a balloon to Jupiter.
**
If a private company ever sees a profit in sending a probe to Jupiter(perhaps to harvest some rare element from one of the moons?), it will be done at 10% of the cost of the Voyager mission or less. Yes, it’s an assertion, but I think we’ll live to see that assertion verified.
Judging from other countries, those government employees would grossly outcompete the insurance scum on anything like a level playing field. Which is why I doubt one will ever be allowed. We’ll end up with a system still designed to favor the insurance companies.
Government doesn’t compete with the insurance industry anywhere. Government creates a monopoly for basic services in most cases, and allows the insurance industry to handle supplementary services. The public option is truly a new idea in that it would involve a basic insurance option to compete with private basic insurance options. The fundamental job of an insurance companies executives is to assess risk. Government insurance in foreign countries doesn’t have to make a profit. It doesn’t even have to break even. the US public option will have to break even, it won’t be able to rely on federal funds. So we’re going to find out who can better assess risk: experienced insurance company people, or political appointees? I know who my money would be on.
**Yeah, sure they are. That’s why the rest of the West embraces bigger government than ours; they’re all masochists.
**
That’s complicated. Most of the West’s governments have been slowly shrinking from their peaks in the 80s. To the extent that voters in the rest of the West do allow their governments more power, it’s because those governments are more trustworthy than ours. The US government is less competent and has more corruption than Canada or Europe. the US is also more challenging to govern, in part because of our size and in part because of our culture. The administration of social programs is more politicized here than in Europe or Canada.
Oh, please. Most likely the accountants would be under orders to make those payments. Companies aren’t any less prone to corruption than government. Often they are worse.
People are people. People working in government aren’t any less or more corrupt than people working in corporate boardrooms. The difference is in the incentives. A corporation that can’t account for large portions of their money goes out of business. A government does not. It’s not their money and they can always get more, or borrow more. There’s just no incentive to make sure it is spent well.
Again, if you ever get a chance to look at a corporate expense statement, you aren’t likely to find large payments to places and people who don’t exist. and if you do, there will be answers and you will probably get promoted for finding out about the waste. In the government, such diligence is likely to get you fired.
I still remember one of the 1988 Bush/Dukakis debates, when George Bush (the elder) was asked to specify some defense programs he would cut. Of those he mentioned, at least two had already been cancelled, but you had to be pretty on-the-ball to know about them. He even called it the “DIVAD”, instead of its better-known name, the “Sgt. York”.
Cite.
Politically, it’s brilliant. He got to look aggressive about cutting spending, even willing to make the hard choices about conservative sacred cows. And it was without risk; no one could feel threatened, no one could lose a job working on a project that didn’t exist. It probably didn’t cost him a single vote.
It is also bullshit. He was either ill-informed to believe it, or cynical to think the people would. And I never heard anybody call him on it.
Which according to them is kill and oppress people. And little else. They want lots of police to beat down dissent and control what people do in their bedroom, to beat down the liberals and gays and blacks and uppity women. And they want a big military for conquest and slaughter. But not much more.
No, they haven’t. They’ve recognized they can’t politically survive just cutting them, but that won’t stop them from things like deliberately crashing the economy to “starve the beast”. They want to end it all, drag us back a hundred years at least.
And I’d say yes. Running government better than the malignant and criminally incompetent Republicans is no challenge at all.
Of course it is. Steal from whomever you can, hand it all over to yourself and your friends; that’s the conservative idea of proper money management. In and out of government.
Not unless the government builds the infrastructure and gathers the data needed to accomplish the goal first. And probably not for “10% of the cost”, unless the government is backing them and the company is neglecting to count that as part of the budget.
No, in most countries the insurance industry doesn’t handle basic services because no sensible person would choose them, so there’s no market. The “monopoly” exists because the government is far and away better at it.
The fundamental job of the insurance company is to make a profit, which is most efficiently done by taking your money and finding an excuse to refuse you any services in return. Failing that, to perform as cheap and limited a job as they can. Something insurance companies are quite good at. The great advantage of having the government do it instead is they don’t have the same motive to screw you. The government does not profit from your death; the insurance company does.
So? The people in charge have golden parachutes, why should they care?
And in corporate life as well, despite your fantasies about corporate competence.
When you sell them. In my example, no tax is ever paid unless the beneficiary inherits an estate larger than the limits of tax-free inheiritance.
And it takes, well, a condescending robot to think that that was the only item I might have had an issue with on the list. It was a joke, for cryin’ out loud.
Since I obviously wasn’t clear, I don’t necessarily feel that additional weapons regulation is necessary, but was commenting on the language, which makes it sound as it the authors think all existing regulation should be rolled back.
You do see that the second quoted bit negates the first, don’t you? Based on history, principles stated by Republicans go no further than that – statements mouthed, not followed.