Are republicans irrational? If not, why is their voting behavior so crazy?

@electronicmail,

electronicmail wrote:

Cycloptichorn wrote:

How do you respond to the fact that several 'red' states are in big financial trouble themselves? Or are you just going to kinda ignore that.

So you can't count, and you also can't read. Definitely a liberal democrat. I'll post one more excerpt for you, talking to you lot is like feeding a baby, a little bit at a time

Quote:
Beyond their short-term budget gaps, some states have deep structural problems, like insolvent pension funds, that are diverting money from essential public services like education and health care.

So what? There are plenty of ways for these states to solve these problems without declaring bankruptcy. You can always raise taxes - which is what IL just did and what CA will do soon.

Quote:

Only blue states qualify. Not a single red state on the danger list.

What a joke. Texas, anyone? They are 25 billion in deficit for the current cycle. And their long-term problems aren't going away anytime soon, either.

You have no real ability to address the problems with getting such a bill passed through congress, do you? Or perhaps you can explain to me how it will go down. You stated that 'the law is getting changed.' But there's no evidence that it is getting changed, in the article you posted.

Cycloptichorn

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Contrary to electronicmail's colorblind assessment that red states are in good shape and blue states are not, just about ALL states are in the deep doodoo, and that includes most of the red states too.

Quote:

To date some 44 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2012, which begins July 1, 2011 in most states. These come on top of the large shortfalls that states closed in fiscal years 2009 through 2011. States will continue to struggle to find the revenue needed to support critical public services for a number of years, threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs.

A survey of state fiscal conditions suggests that:

■2012 is shaping up as states’ most difficult budget year on record. Thus far some 44 states and the District of Columbia are projecting budget shortfalls totaling $125 billion for fiscal year 2012.

While states are anticipating significant shortfalls in the coming year, their options for addressing those shortfalls are dwindling. Federal assistance for states, which has been enormously helpful in allowing states to avert some of the most harmful potential budget cuts, will be largely gone by the end of fiscal year 2011, the current fiscal year. Nearly one-half of the nation’s governors have now released their budget proposals for fiscal year 2012, and their proposals reflect this grim fiscal reality. A number of these proposals contain deep cuts to state services on top of the substantial cuts that states have already made since the start of the recession.

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=711

Look at the map, electronicmail. Note the overlap between states in shortfall and red states. Note also in the above cite the fact that federal assistance for states has left many better off than they would be otherwise, and consider also the fact the VIRTUALLY ALL RED STATES RECEIVE MORE IN FEDERAL ASSISTANCE THAN THEY PAY IN TAXES, WHILE VIRTUALLY ALL BLUE STATES PAY MORE IN TAXES THAN THEY GET BACK. We've been subsidizing you bitching and whinging red state tea party "activists" for years and we're sick of it. Until you can stand on your own two feet , try shutting up and working harder for a change.

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@electronicmail,

electronicmail wrote:

Trying to, it's not easy if you got to talk to people who can neither read nor count like the liberal democrat I'm spoon-feeding right now.... My only point to you concerned the OP.

I can 't read nor count? That is news to me. I sense some deep insecurity....

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@TuringEquivalent,

he was referring to cyclo, not you

1 Reply

Regarding the original post, if anyone wants to see whether or not the Tea Party relies upon the government as much or more than anyone else, just go to a rally and see all the people complaining about Medicare being cut. And count the number of Hoverrounds that you see their fat asses riding in, pretty much all of which were paid for by Medicare.

Cycloptichorn

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@djjd62,

That's right. Like I said to Lash, the OP is an honest man.

I've given up on Cycloptichorn. He can't read or count so he can't understand the difference between one-year-budget-shortfall and deep-structural-deficit-that-means-insolvency.

His buddy Monterey Jack with the map doesn't get it either. How many Tea Party rallies have those 2 attended? I guess zero. They sure got opinions about the attendees, don't they Drunk

Insolvent states are only blue states, not one red one among them. If any of them are waiting for the feds to bail them out they shouldn't hold their collective breath, why should red states subsidize the blue ones? Ain't gonna happen.

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@TuringEquivalent,

I'm sorry, OP = original poster.

You can read and you can count and you're honest.

I think you're Tea Party material and I hope to get you to join us!

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@electronicmail,

Quote:

deep-structural-deficit-that-means-insolvency.

The majority of this structural problem is pension that will never be able to be affordable, promised compensation to state employees that the states are going to have to find a way to go back on because the taxpayers are never going to stand for the tax rates that would be required to actually pay them. THis is a problem that has been known about for 20 years, was never addressed because our political system is too broken to deal with most real problems. It is only now that the boomers are about to begin retiring just as the great recession knocked a lot of value out of the pension reserves and just as the states begin to face up to their limited ability to raise revenue all conspiring to make it impossible to ignore the pension problem .....it is only now that people are beginning to wonder what we are going to do. Since we did not deal with this problem for all of these years and allowed it to get so huge there are only two ways out of this mess, government bankruptcy or unhook the pensions from inflation allowance and then inflate the currency. Both solutions carry huge costs.

This is the kind of situations societies get themselves into when they have governments that do not work, and the people never deal with the problem by installing a competent government.

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@hawkeye10,

Inflation is a tax too and states can't print their own money. I agree with you there's no more pension bailouts and I want to repeat what I also say on my profile in case even the liberal democrats here maybe understand it

Quote:

I'm a Tea Party activist in the U.S.

We support a rollback of the socialist policies bankrupting our country, be they Obamacare, too-big-to-fail bailouts, Afghanistan nation-building, counterproductive wars on drugs, federal government waste on education..... the list is long.

Quote:
"....the late sociologist Robert K. Merton wrote that leaders get things wrong when their "paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes the consideration of further or other consequences" of their proposals. This leads policy makers to assert things that are false, wishing them to be true."

Let's get our country back!

So what's YOUR solution to the problem? I posted mine.

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It seems to me that what characterizes the conservative republican population is their devision into (1) the relatively irrational, poor, and uneducated members who are manipulated by their wealthier party associates into voting against their own economic interests and (2) the more educated and relatively rich who cannot be said to be irrational insofar as their ideology reflects (in a narrow means-end consistency) their economic interests. They lack wisdom, however, since their worldview is selfish and shortsided. Ironically, their "rationality" constitutes danger for Mankind.

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Are republicans irrational? If not, why is their voting behavior so crazy?

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