Will Republicans take the Senate in the election?

@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

It doesn't matter, just merely talking about those changes will be enough to get senior citizens in a frenzy to keep it from happening.

You might want to keep in mind exactly how "liberal" the AARP can be, regardless of how their positions may affect it's own membership. Not saying they have overwhelming influence on their own membership and seniors, but they do represent themselves as representing all of us.

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@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

... The point being is that you guys still need the guy you hate if you want your congress to "do something" of any consequence. Or they can start another Ken Star investigation and spend the remaining years impeaching the president for some trumped up charge.

Some trumped up charge ! The known facts pretty well establish that President Clinton did indeed get a blow job in a room adjacent to the Oval Office from a very young and inexperienced female government employee. He went on to lie about it under oath in a sworn deposition, and his political machine did a pretty good job trashing the young woman's reputation to protect him. The perjury was a high crime and the blow job in a government office was certainly a misdemeanor. Could that have been the real start of the "war on women"?

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@georgeob1,

There is no way I am going down the road again. It's been done to death.

1 Reply

@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

There is no way I am going down the road again. It's been done to death.

Not to mention that with Hillary in the blocks for another run and so far campaigning on womens rights and selling the womens victim story this is not a good time to talk about how abusive the Clinton's have been towards women. As Gore pointed out, some truths are inconvenient.

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@hawkeye10,

It is just so yesterday, I doubt anyone besides diehards care about any of that.

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@revelette2,

revelette2 wrote:

It is just so yesterday, I doubt anyone besides diehards care about any of that.

We shall see. There is already a sense that Hillary is a shill and a panderer, and while she got little pushback when she pulled out her up with women performance as Sec State I have a feeling that she will be challenged this time. She will be painted as a phoney by the R's and I think there is enough facts and tape to make it stick since it tells a story that people already are predisposed to believe. Who ever is tellingher that she lost last time because she did not play the womens victim card and she needs to go big on that this time I think is giving her bad advice, because of her history this is not a card that she can play successfully in a run for the POTUS chair. The biggest problems are that the clintons never admitted to abusing women, and never apologized for it. We have not forgotten.

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@hawkeye10,

You are right, we shall see. So far she is ahead in most of all the polls of those she running against. She is smart enough to know when to push the women's issues and when not to emphasis it so much and concentrate on the economy and foreign matters.

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@Baldimo,

Fear mongering would be to claim something that isn't true. Since there is no plan for where to get the money from, it wouldn't be fear mongering to point that out. It would be truth telling.

Fear mongering would be claiming the ACA authorizes death panels to kill old people.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

revelette2 wrote:

It is just so yesterday, I doubt anyone besides diehards care about any of that.

We shall see. .... We have not forgotten.

Yeah, but you're a diehard and the story is so yesterday. Therefore it doesn't matter. That's enough for a true believer in all that BS.

As the Democrats in the Senate recently discovered that sort of contempt for the people works, ... up untill the moment it doesn't work.

Hillary, and the Democrats generally, may have become the principle (and only) consumers of their own propaganda, -- a dangerous situation that invites unpleasant surprises. Her book didn't sell very well ...

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

What exactly are you talking about here? We do indeed have a complex combination of problems involving high public debt, with entitlement programs likely to make it far worse, and a still sluggish economy

Total US Public debt. - 12,865,785,085,508.34
Money owed to Social Security and other trust funds from not enough taxes on income - 5,070,854,619,867.12

The problem isn't the entitlement programs. The problem is the lack of taxes in the general ledger that have borrowed from the money collected for entitlement programs.

Quote:

Neither political party has shown great courage in addressing these issues, thosugh the Democrats have clearly been far more vigorous in making promises we can't keep

I don't know about that. I remember a certain Republican promising that the war in Iraq would be paid for with Iraqi oil revenue. That was a $2 trillion promise that we have paid for by borrowing.

Quote:

Obama had tried to create a highly regulated economy to advance his political power and fund raising capability through the leverage implied in the regulatory scheme

I love your idiotic statements. Can you provide us with a list of those regulations that would create a "highly regulated economy?" Coal is NOT the US economy.

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@georgeob1,

Perjury is a regular crime. And the perjury was never proven in a court of law because it was so vague it wouldn't have survived a prosecution.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Yeah, but you're a diehard and the story is so yesterday. Therefore it doesn't matter.

Hillary has been in the window for a long time, she does not have the ability to completely reinvent herself.

Quote:

If she wants to ride the populist wave, Reich said, she needs to focus on growing economic inequality, wage stagnation, and the decline of the middle class. While he said her husband could get away with “alluding” to those issues, “now the situation has changed. It’s got to be central.”

His suggested platform includes some ideas Clinton already supports (paid family and medical leave, increasing the minimum wage, reforming student debt), some she might come out for (a tax hike on the top sliver of income earners), and some she’s unlikely to ever endorse (reinstating the Glass-Steagall banking regulation).

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/robert-reichs-advice-hillary-clinton-ride-the-populist-wave

Great idea, except that Bill CLinton's bank deregulation scheme directly contributed to both the massive skimming of wealth by the financial institutions and global meltdown. Also both of these two have been very close to wallstreet 1%ers for a long time. This is just one example of how doors close for her because of her history, and because we know the history because they have been living in the public eye for decades. Trying to be the champion of the downtrodden is too big a jump. If Hillary went this route it would ring like the Bush supermarket scanner debacle, you cant be that clueless about how the little people live and claim to be out to save the little people.

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@parados,

parados wrote:

Total US Public debt. - 12,865,785,085,508.34
Money owed to Social Security and other trust funds from not enough taxes on income - 5,070,854,619,867.12

The problem isn't the entitlement programs. The problem is the lack of taxes in the general ledger that have borrowed from the money collected for entitlement programs.

Social Security has been a Ponzi scheme since its inception in the late 1930s - the "Trust Fund" was a fiction at inception. Nothing new there.

The "not enough taxes" is your conception, not mine, and not part of the original plan.. The original rationalization was that population growth would take care of the built in rise in cost. Slow population growth and increased longevity have given the lie to that notion. President Bush made an attempt to address this issue but was vigorously opposed by the Democrats. You are, of course free to contribute extra taxes to do your share, I cordially decline.

parados wrote:

Quote:
Obama had tried to create a highly regulated economy to advance his political power and fund raising capability through the leverage implied in the regulatory scheme
I love your idiotic statements. Can you provide us with a list of those regulations that would create a "highly regulated economy?" Coal is NOT the US economy.

I suppose I could do so by researching the Federal register a bit, but you aren't worth the effort to me. In case you haven't noticed the Dodd Frank Bill, the ACA, recent far-reaching regulatory actions of the EPA, the Labor Department, and the NLRB have added enormously to the useless chicken **** imposed by the Federal government on businesses of all sorts across the country. It is a serious drag on economic growth and inhibits investment and risk taking by businesses that would otherwise do so to the benefit of the economy.

About 48% of our electrical energy is produced by burning coal. This is certainly not the US economy as you say, but it is economically significant. Politically significant as well, as several Democrat Senators have recently discovered. I believe we are seeing reduced public willingness to put up with the authoritarian rule of progressives who believe that only they know better than the rest of us what is really good for us.

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@georgeob1,

I just wonder where you get your information on the social security trust fund.
It was common knowledge a few years ago that the trust fund will last until about 2031 at current income and spending rates.
The trust fund is managed by the US Treasury, but the US government borrows from this fund to pay for its cash/income tax shortfalls. This problem of overspending has been ongoing during both administrations, and both have failed to increase payroll taxes or to increase the age of benefits; those are the two options available to ensure the viability of social security.

As a matter of fact, many different issues developed during the past years that increased social security for people who never paid into the system; that was government mandated, and they never increased taxes to pay for those additional benefits.

The only ponze scheme about social security is that both parties 'borrow' from the social security trust fund and don't pay it back. Surprisingly, there was a surplus in 2013. I think the job recovery had something to do with it.

From SSA.

Quote:

Some benefits could be paid even if the trust funds are depleted. For example, under the intermediate assumptions, annual income to the trust funds is projected to equal about three-quarters of program cost once the trust funds become depleted. If no legislation has been enacted to restore long-term solvency by that time, about three-quarters of scheduled benefits could be paid in each year.

Let's see if the GOP congress does anything to bring the social security trust fund into solvency.

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@cicerone imposter,

There is not, and never was, a fenced fund of money held in reserve by our government exclusively for the payment of Social Security benefits in a way comparable to what commercial pension and insurance funds are required by law to set aside in relatively liquid investments, based on actuarial standards for their expected future obligations. The government created something it called a "Trust Fund" without setting aside ANY moneys exclusively for its future obligations. Instead FICA taxes are collected and delivered to the Treasury to be used, along with the proceeds of bond sales to meet the current financial obligations of the government. This "Trust Fund" is in fact an accounting fiction that would be illegal were any bank or insurance company to do it. Instead current benefits are paid out of curent revenues independently of their source. This is the essential definition of a Ponzi scheme.

We allow government to do it because it is our common borrower of last resort, with all of its borrowings collected in a single pool called the national debt, though even there, in some of our statistics, we segrate our social security debt (but not the FICA revenues that feed it) from the published value. In doing so we trust government and our political leaders to act prudently.When they don't we get situations such as we saw a few years ago in Greece
.
I wonder where you get your understanding of these things.

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@georgeob1,

It's called the "social security trust fund."

From SSA.

Quote:

What are the Trust Funds?

The Social Security trust funds are financial accounts in the U.S. Treasury. There are two separate Social Security trust funds, the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund pays retirement and survivors benefits, and the Disability Insurance (DI) Trust Fund pays disability benefits.

Social Security taxes and other income are deposited in these accounts, and Social Security benefits are paid from them. The only purposes for which these trust funds can be used are to pay benefits and program administrative costs.

The Social Security trust funds hold money not needed in the current year to pay benefits and administrative costs and, by law, invest it in special Treasury bonds that are guaranteed by the U.S. Government. A market rate of interest is paid to the trust funds on the bonds they hold, and when those bonds reach maturity or are needed to pay benefits, the Treasury redeems them.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

This problem of overspending has been ongoing during both administrations, and both have failed to increase payroll taxes or to increase the age of benefits; those are the two options available to ensure the viability of social security.

True, but I'm pretty sure only one administration has ever lowered the employee contribution. Wait. That might only apply to the Medicare portion of payroll taxes.

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@cicerone imposter,

You are merely repeating a semantical fiction. You cling to your illusions with a remarkable tenacity, but they are still illusions. There is no Trust Fund: what we have instead is a large collection of IOUs from the Federal government.

Increasing the FICA Tax rate would likely have a seriuously negative effect on the economy. More ec onomic growth is a far better solution than higher tax rates. Unfortunately our current government doesn't understand that.

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@georgeob1,

You would have to question the Social Security Administration who administers the funds. Here's a direct link: http://www.ssa.gov

My fiction and tenacity are quite real according to the Social Security Administration. You'll have to prove them to be false - with reliable evidence.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

Quote:

You would have to question the Social Security Administration who administers the funds

Wait just one cotton picking minute (why dont we say this anymore?), you think there is a trust fund to back your checks? Laughing

You buddy have lost the right to claim to know anything about economics.

2 Replies

Will Republicans take the Senate in the election?

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