Despite a bipartisan effort...

Quote:

One day you will be drawing your 'entitlement' check just like everyone else. And you won't bitch about it then. Until the day I see Republicans turning down their piece of our social programs, I really could care less about the bitching.

This would crack me up if it wasn’t so scary. For you speak the truth here, don’t you, Cyclops?

This is the 'progressive' wet dream, isn't it? To turn the US into another European socialist-democracy where every citizen is dependent on the government in some manner or another?

Where we all get an entitlement check in one form or another, where the best 'job' one can find is one working for the government? But that’s only if you really want to work; if not, the government (but in reality, those still paying taxes) will take care of your food, medical, and housing needs.

What libs such as yourself never seem to figure out is the government does not produce anything of value. They don’t manufacture anything, or raise income on their own. They only take money from those who already have it.

Someday, the gravy train just might dry up.

Until then, I'll continue paying my taxes (in all the forms they come in) while people like you cash in on my hard work...

Cyclops....stop this 'chump change' BULLSHIT.

You realize that they are borrowing this money right? You realize that every penny we borrow NOW will make it that much more difficult to fix/respond to these types of problems in the future.

People OUR age are getting fucked in the ass and saddled with debt that we'll have to pay back.

And I'll argue that the country was ran into this mess by the Congress your party controlled and have as much validity in my argument as you in yours that a Repub-controlled president did it.

No need for me to do so...a quick google search would reveal that there is more than enough blame to go around in both parties and in all branches of Government. It's your one-eyed partisanship that blames everything on the Bush administration and absolves the democratically controlled Congress from any of the stench...

So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.


Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.


Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.


Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.


The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.


Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.


Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.


Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.


The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.


An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.


Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

What a bunch of assholes those Wall Street Journal people are!

So, basically, what the Economist is saying is that capitalism is unworkable.

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BANG FOR THE BUCK
What a dollar of stimulus puts back into the economy when spent on...

Obama didn't promise an "infrastructure recovery bill"; he promised an economical stimulus package to help the economy. Infrastructure was always just going to be one of the means to do so. You're just making stuff up now.

A Lone Voice wrote:

Quote:

One day you will be drawing your 'entitlement' check just like everyone else. And you won't bitch about it then. Until the day I see Republicans turning down their piece of our social programs, I really could care less about the bitching.


This would crack me up if it wasn’t so scary. For you speak the truth here, don’t you, Cyclops?

This is the 'progressive' wet dream, isn't it? To turn the US into another European socialist-democracy where every citizen is dependent on the government in some manner or another?

Where we all get an entitlement check in one form or another, where the best 'job' one can find is one working for the government? But that’s only if you really want to work; if not, the government (but in reality, those still paying taxes) will take care of your food, medical, and housing needs.

What libs such as yourself never seem to figure out is the government does not produce anything of value. They don’t manufacture anything, or raise income on their own. They only take money from those who already have it.

Someday, the gravy train just might dry up.

Until then, I'll continue paying my taxes (in all the forms they come in) while people like you cash in on my hard work...



'People like me?' Am I to assume that you are implying that I do not pay taxes, just like you do?

It's a good thing that your fantasies have very little to do with the actuality of America. While entertaining, they don't really describe a realistic scenario which resembles anything we see today.

I do speak the truth: in that you will not turn down your part of the so-called 'entitlements.' None of you Republicans will. You like to bitch about the programs, but you secretly approve of them to the same extent that everyone else does.

Cycloptichorn

Despite a bipartisan effort........

Why stop here? A dollar for food stamps puts $1.73 into the economy? Hey, not everybody is entitled to food stamps, and there are restrictions on what you can buy. Let everybody have them, and buy whatever they want. We can use the extra $.73 to retire the national debt. Well, can't we?

Spending tax dollars on entitlements is as useless as Bush's rebate plan was; food stamp and rent money is not going to help the economy recover or create jobs.

Still, isn't the bill just a hodgepodge of unrelated spending? Sure. What else could it be? There's no way to spend $800 billion on infrastructure over the next two years, so most of the money has to be spent on other stuff. But so what? Employing clerks or crossing guards or home care workers counts every bit as much as employing backhoe operators or engineers. Spending money on contraceptives does as much for the economy as spending money on rebar. An unemployment check gets spent on food the same way a paycheck does.