Don’t know as how he has any kind of dialect at all, his voice sounds like the white guy from nowhere in particular. Material ain’t all that hot, either, he could use better writers.
You teach your children that this is the way to solve their problems?
Even if we assume Obama is a “Marxist” (though I’m sure he’s read Marx and liked some of the things he said, I’ve read Jorge Luis Borges and like a lot of things he said-- does that make me a “Borgesist”?) Anyway, assuming he’s a Marxist, why is that considered such a ghastly word in the US? Because it is associated with the Soviets, Mao, the North Koreans, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, etc . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [pause for a really long time here for effect] . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . none of whom actually are/were Marxists.
Assuming we give you #2, because we’re feeling generous… perhaps you could point to Obama’s framing of history as class struggle, or better still, his advocacy of proletarian revolution.
No?
Please stop talking then, or at least say something sensible.
It’s also associated with Marx, who summed up Marxism as . . . .
. . . the abolition of private property.
I honestly don’t think it’s all that strongly associated with Marx, who never ran a country, a killed anyone to my knowledge.
- He’s a professor of economics, former US Treasury official and somebody with a track record of being right over the past decade, especially about the housing bubble, the economic meltdown, and particularly about how the recovery from the meltdown would go. As far as his qualifications to understand the US budget and his actual track record of predictions compared to how things turned out go, it would be really difficult to find somebody better than this guy.
- 9/11 cost the economy about $100 billion, or roughly what it cost to fund the Iraq war for a few months back when it was in full swing.
And it really was the GOP who took an actual budget surplus, scrapped PAYGO and went on the biggest unfunded spending spree in history. A huge chunk of the spending for the wars came in the form of budget supplementals and wasn’t even included in the official US budget numbers.
The same party that then scrapped PAYGO rules when a Republican president got elected.
In other words, it is not true that “it was the Democrats who put teeth in PAYGO and used it to turn a record budget deficit into a record surplus.” That statement is false.
Regards,
Shodan
The rich Repubs hate Obama because he may cost them money. The Bush tax cuts fell into their laps and they love it. If Obama gets the tax bill changed so the super rich don’t suck up more tax dollars, it would cost them. It is obvious why they hate him. The religion of money.
No, it’s dead accurate. It was the Deficit Reduction Act of 1993 that laid the foundation for the budget surplus, before the GOP won in 1994. It raised taxes and the GOP were dead against it, telling us the tax increases would lead to economic meltdown and fiscal disaster. That turned out not to be the case. We only got the economic meltdown and fiscal disaster when they took the White House, abolished PAYGO, etc. etc.
Black is white, up is down, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
:shrugs:
Regards,
Shodan
9/11 and the two wars are inextricably linked, at least for the first several years. And let us not sweep under the rug that fact that Democrats overwhelmingly supported both wars, the just and the unjust, and did not stop funding of them at any point, even when they took control of both houses of Congress. As I said, didn’t Pelosi run on a pledge she would show old man Bush who was boss? How’d that work out for Democrats?
Reciting conservative dogma isn’t a valuable contribution to the thread. 
You’re better than that, Una. How on earth is 9/11 linked to the second war?
There’s hardly any time for that with all the effort required to teach them to smoke, drink, run up debts they can’t pay back, and practice unsafe sex. Obviously you don’t have any children.
Let’s say that the two wars really were linked to 9/11, something that is debatable at least as far as the Iraq war goes. Even then, the Iraq war especially was almost all funded by budget supplementals, which don’t show up on the official budget numbers :
In his address last night on the economic crisis, President Barack Obama made it official: No more budgetary sleight-of-hand at the Pentagon.
As we have noted here before, the U.S. military has largely paid for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through emergency spending measures, in effect keeping wartime costs off the books. In addition to masking skyrocketing budget growth at the Department of Defense, this process has allowed the services to treat budget supplementals as a piggy bank for new procurement. Members of Congress may have grumbled about poor oversight, but they have largely acquiesced.
Obama’s message? Not anymore.
“That is why this budget looks ahead ten years and accounts for spending that was left out under the old rules – and for the first time, that includes the full cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “For seven years, we have been a nation at war. No longer will we hide its price.”
Now again it’s a blog, but like mt previous blog link it’s referencing actual facts and evidence, in the first blog post a CBO report and in this one the fact that most of the Bush administration’s war funding was done off the books.
Easy. The Republicans linked them. Over and over and over. Weren’t you listening?
Review what I wrote:
See that last part? Why would I include that? Because it was not factually linked, but politically linked. For the first few years after 9/11 support for punishing the 9/11 murderers, politically speaking, meant supporting the wars. As far as politics goes, it was all that big ol’ Axis o’ Evil. As time dragged on, opinions changed and people changed, and as a result it was possible for politicians to sever one from the other.
For your first part, see my answer above. For the second part, are you saying that President Bush, with no Congressional oversight or any Congressional possibility of stopping it whatsoever, was able to unilaterally spend hundreds of billions of dollars, and the Congress could do nothing about it? I don’t buy that for a second.
Which is my point - Bush may have forced the War in Iraq on us, may even have done so unethically, but again let’s see if the SDMB hardliners can stop pretending like the Congress - including Democrats - did not hand it to him on a silver platter. Even after the Democrats controlled both houses.
I’m glad Obama is changing things. It should have been changed on Inauguration Day, just like many things he promised but did not deliver on.
Bush funded the war through supplementals and every time he had to get one of them signed off by congress he threatened the Dems with being painted as denying funding for the troops if they didn’t vote for the supplemental. Yes, the Dems could have stood up to him and blocked funding for the troops but for craven political reasons they didn’t. But that’s irrelevant to the point I’m making which is that Bush’s wars were largely funded in this way and because of that their cost didn’t feature in the official budget numbers.