This May Be Satire, But It's Deadly Serious to Me!

Yeh, you may drown in money and jobs! Quick, run for the hills!

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well you guys are really a hoot, but the same can be said for the kids on the school playground down the street.

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Mesquite wrote:

Quote:

Sadam had a secular government and oppressed islamic fundamentalists

Saddam had been chased out of Kuwait which he had invaded and was stopped at the border before he icould invade Saudi Arabia. Every member of the U.N., every European industrialized ally, and every member of Congress and the previous administration believed he had and was developing WMD--he had used them before and there is no reason to believe he would not use them again.

And it is documented that he murdered, many in most unpleasant, prolonged, and painful ways, more than 300,000 of his own citizens. This is in addition to diverting for his own use and to pay off supportive cronies billions of dollars intended for food, medicine, and schooling for his people.

According to the polls, more Americans every week are regaining confidence that we are making inroads in the war against terrorism and that we will succeed leaving Iraq a free and independent nation friendly to the U.S. and an example to the rest of the Middle East.

Now if you believe we haven't done a good thing in Iraq that will be advantageous and beneficial to the United States, that's okay. There will always be differences of opinion however tunnel visioned they are. It is unmistakable that Iraq is better off and personally, I prefer to have Iraq as a friend than an enemy.

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Sofia wrote:

Or, what do YOU say sparked this massive economic, employment boom?

What massive economic, employment boom? Here is the development of total nonfarm employment and GDP growth since 1990.

http://www.Economagic.com/chartg/blsce/ces0000000001.gif

http://www.economagic.com/chartg/nipa/t1t1t1l1a.gif

The .gif charts are from economagic.com, but their data sources are the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) respectively.

I can see a massive boom here, but it happened under Clinton, not under Bush. You might argue that Bill Clinton doesn't deserve the credit for the good developments he presided over, and that George Bush doesn't deserve the blame for the bad developments he presided over. But how can you talk about "this massive economic, employment boom" when the data only show us a few good months after four bad years? Or, in the GDP case: 2.5 okay years after a bad year after 8 good years under Clinton?

At least we agree on one thing, Sofia: This is a Bush "accomplishment".

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The tax cuts worked, just as they did for Reagan. Reagan's led to the biggest economic expansion in peacetime in modern history.

I'm trying to be nice to Ronald Reagan this week. (Family tradition of not speaking ill of the recent dead.) But, the Reagan expansion was the result of the dismal situation he walked into, (double digit inflation, some of us on this forum are old enough to remember that Sad

, staggering Dow, intense competition from Japan) but his tax cuts and his spending cuts did nothing but fatten the wallets of the upper earners. (That sounds familiar.) The economy did grow but it had no where else to go. By the time he left office, the deficit was at it's highest (till George W.), spending had been cut by a whooping one percent and the economy had begun another slide.

George HW Bush didn't have a clue about economics, neither do I, I just report the news, so he did what Ron did. Cut Taxes. When that didn't do anything, he raised taxes, but too late. Giant deficits leaning on the economy, four more years of inflation and flat job rates put Bill Clinton in office,(Does the phrase "It's the economy, stupid." ring a bell with anyone?).

Bill, who I love to remind my Republican friends, passed his economic plan (with the higher taxes) without a single Republican vote and he was the one who presided over the strongest eight years of economic growth ever and wiped out Ronald Reagan's red ink. Kneejerk voters, emphasis on jerk, voted in a bunch of Republican stiff-shifts at the mid-term election who then foisted a bogus and expensive series of investigations into the President, but not on his economic plan. Funny, maybe because that was working like a dream.

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I will hope most Americans will get behind any national leader committed to defend us against all enemies, domestic and foreign.

"Enemies domestic" would be the defeatists, the Bush haters, the liberal media, the gay agenda, the anti-war protesters, the atheists, the non-patriots, and those in Hollywood.

The idea that some of you seem to hold that these two guys would run equally unpalatable administrations boggles my mind.

And the story that broke in the WSJ yesterday regarding the Justice Department lawyers advices that the President was legally above international agreements and the existing US military laws prohibiting torture...that TORTURE IS NOW OK, and that the TV stations down there this morning have made no mention of this item while tossing bouquets at Reagan's mixed record, is stark evidence that discourse in the US has become so paltry and cliched that you guys are in real danger of forgetting just who the hell you are.

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Boy you really read a lot of stuff into a comment Blatham. It is the assumptions, totally devoid of facts, that some people make that are so darn frustrating. But then, I'm being blasted on another thread for suggesting that liberals are way more paranoid than conservatives. Smile

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fox

Please, feel completely free to fill in the blanks on just who you thought necessary to refer to in your sentence noting domestic enemies. I confess I did miss 'activist judges' and 'the suspiciously complexioned'. Heck, I'll even refrain from quoting documentation out of the Christian Coalition or Assemblies of God.

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Well lets see. Timothy McVeigh, Al Capone, Terry Nichols, Charles Manson, the Unibomber, and any of several dozen or possibly several hundred or not-beyond-possibility several thousand radical Islamic fundamentalist terrorists holding U.S. education or travel Visas inside our borders all come to mnd.

I could actually come up with quite a list.

Your somewhat snide implication that I meant anything else is rather specious don't you think?

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Well, ok, I'm guilty of being so goddamned angry this morning that I took a hotbutton phrase 'domestic enemies' and did more with it than I had licence to do. You get one half an apology on the matter.

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Yesterday, I looked up some Paul Krugman articles re: tax cuts. There were a lot, and I was trying to figure out which one would be most apropos when I was called away.

Today, he wrote just the one I was looking for:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/08/opinion/08KRUG.html

Quote:

The Great Taxer
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: June 8, 2004

Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office.

We're also sure to hear that Mr. Reagan presided over an unmatched economic boom. Again, not true: the economy grew slightly faster under President Clinton, and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to 2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.

But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.

The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.

The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for even more tax cuts.

I did not and do not approve of President Reagan's economic policies, which saddled the nation with trillions of dollars in debt. And as others will surely point out, some of the foreign policy shenanigans that took place on his watch, notably the Iran-contra scandal, foreshadowed the current debacle in Iraq (which, not coincidentally, involves some of the same actors).

Still, on both foreign and domestic policy Mr. Reagan showed both some pragmatism and some sense of responsibility. These are attributes sorely lacking in the man who claims to be his political successor.

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Hard to blame Blatham on this one.

The way the right wing acts here in America... there is a real tendency to lump groups of people together and label them the same way, to use the same tactics to manipulate peoples opinions.

I'm not being paranoid here, lol. The GOP has done a great job making the average person believe that iraq=al quaeda, that islaam=terrorism, that tax cuts=government saving money...

After you hear the government tell you that Black is actually White, for your entire life, you start to wonder if the people who believe it are really just blind...

Cycloptichorn

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I still think a simple challenge could be interesting.
We each compile a list of all active posts over say the last 30 days. Separate them into two piles: one labeled negative/critical/defamatory/scurrilous or whatever and one labeled positive, forward looking, hopeful, complimentary, optimistic or whatever.

Which pile do you think would be written by mostly those on the left and which do you think would be written by mostly those on the right?

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Thomas, how do you think Clinton's numbers would look if 9/11 had occurred in the 8th month of his presidency?

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I'm still trying to figure out how a satirical article from The Onion (which I love) has ended up in such a serious debate? Oh, hang on a second....this debate seems strangely familiar. Maybe because it's the same debate I constantly read in the Politics forums. Is there really nothing else to talk about? Just curious.

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Well, cav, there are other threads and topics to kick about on. And the issues that satire commonly speaks to are serious ones. And, of course, there are now rather a lot of maimed, burned, and dead people who were not long ago like you and I and our families.

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Giving Blatham a hug as he seems to need one today.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Thomas, how do you think Clinton's numbers would look if 9/11 had occurred in the 8th month of his presidency?

Not much different. 9/11 was a tragedy in humanitarian terms. But from liberal economists like Paul Krugman to conservative economists like Milton Friedman, I've read that 9/11 had a comparable impact on the American economy as the Kobe earthquake had on the Japanese economy. Which is to say there was a huge, local, short-term problem, but in terms of the whole economy, not a big deal.

The assertions that 9/11 changed everything about the economy tend to come from political activists, not from the peer-reviewed economics literature.

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Regarding Sozobe's comment on the Economy and Thomas's comment on the Economy( I answered his question regarding the economy several days ago on another post. He has not responded.

Sofia gave a fine rundown on what is happening on the economic front. No one has rebutted her.

Thomas did, indeed, give two interesting graphs but he is apparently not aware of what is happening to the economy- today.

Neither is Sozobe.

Re-read Sofia's post. One MILLION jobs have been created in the past three months.

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Only TWO MILLION TO GO to catch up, to break even, to have this administration have a jobs net gain. These guys have basically stood around and said two things for the last three and years:
'The tax cut will fix everything.'
(Bogus thinking, rejected even by their hero Ronald Reagan)
'Boo hoo, it must have been 9-11.'
(Cop out - see Thomas' post above and others.)

Have they done anything to stimulate the economy besides giving the richest 1% a ton of loose cash and saying 'Here, help out the economy.' ?Because that richest 1% basically said 'It's not my problem.' and we bled three and half million jobs, some to outside the country, but most just evaporated into leaner jobs/cost=fatter bottom lines. Goodie, more for them. (I'd be interested in seeing how many of the new jobs are the result of the other result of their odd thinking - the war in Iraq,)

The fact of the matter is these new Republicans don't know how to govern. They expect that things can run themselves. That there is no need for job incentives or equipment write-offs or other things that help build economies (See Clinton Economic Plan) you just cut taxes. You don't even have to cut spending (because that would really throw things out of whack) you just throw the money out there and avert your eyes from the godzilla-sized deficits you've created.

Meanwhile, it must have been a little hard to put groceries on the table in Ohio for those past three years, even with that one-time extra three hundred dollar check from GW.

Joe

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This May Be Satire, But It's Deadly Serious to Me!

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