Where is the US economy headed?

Because business controls the government . . . why do you think that advertising principles are used to feed the Tea Totalitarians the garbage they parrot back?

Did you know that during the last presidential election, people who volunteered to help the Republicans were given lists of addresses in different cities in order to write letters to the editor?

Business CONTROLS the government? Really? Do you have any evidence for that absurd statement?
If business controlled the government, I assure you that Barack Hussein Obama would not be president today since most businesses knew that his election would mean the beginning of further destruction of the capitialist system-the best system in the world. The system which, despite the moanings of the welfare crowd and the malcontents draws millions of people to the USA. Do you think there are not millions of people from all over the world who are not on waiting lists to come to our shores.

Provide some evidence for your absurdity please.

It is not necessary for anyone to document anything. However, when people make statements, as you have repeatedly, that have no relation to reality, it is, on a thread such as this one, permissible to ask for documentation and evidence. If you feel it is unnecessary, that's find. I leave it to others to evalute your unsourced one liners!

Incredible post. Liberals freed the slaves, ha ha!! Incredibly ignorant of history and what liberal and conservative is. Liberals of today no more care about your freedom and liberty than they did in 1860. As I keep pointing out, they want you on their plantation and they will take care of you as long as you vote for them, just keep being their little minions and slaves, and everything will be fine for you. And it not only includes blacks, it includes anyone and everyone.

Of course she doesn't. pom is an automatic liberal voice machine. Just push the button and out comes platitudes like "Business is evil, business is greedy, Dick Cheney is a devil, Bush invented WMD, no blood for oil, evil corporations destroyed Wall Street, Walmart sucks, oil companies are raping the earth, global warming will soon kill us all, Israel must be eliminated, the military commits atrocities every day, Bush tortured Gitmo detainees that are all innocent just for the fun of it, China is a wonderful place to live, the greatests health care on earth is in Cuba, Hugo Chavez is freeing the downtrodden, Osama Bin Laden had a reason to do it because of the imperialist history of the evil CIA and the United States, any criticism of Jeremiah Wright is boring, and liberals freed the slaves.

My kids used to have a plastic pink panther toy with a pull string, which when pulled would repeat the same stuff over and over. Lines like "don't wrinkle my fur" and "I am the pink panther." Plain old me reminds of that toy, just pull her string, and out comes the same old stuff, like "business controls government."

ROTFLMOA

Next thing you will tell me that abolitionists and suffragettes were conservative. Pathetic. A demonstration that you have no idea what you're typing. You had better pick up your trousers and zip them up.

Sorry to disappoint you, but Abraham Lincoln was no liberal. Liberals do not have bibles on the Whitehouse desk. He not only had one, he read it, quoted it, and lived by it. He believed in conservative principles, which led him to free the slaves.

Oh, gosh, you poor benighted creature! You think in stereotypes! There are religious people . . . Quakers, Unitarians, Catholics and even Baptists (a religion whose founding principle is that each person interprets the Bible for themselves . . . a surprisingly progressive idea) and more . . . who are liberal in their politics.

Because you believe in stereotypes and not in reality, you just embarrassed yourself with that remark. Do you ever get out and talk to people face to face? Seriously!

The Abolitionists were the liberals of the 19th C. Misconstrue all you want but your personal vision will not alter the truth.

What is your academic background in 19th C American history?

Abraham and Mary were both political animals. They were drawn to each other because of their political interests. The nascent Republican party wanted them to move to the Pacific Northwest and for ABraham to run from there in order to extend the party's base. At that time, the Republican party was the liberal party. Susan B. Anthony famously voted the Republican ticket "straight."

While at least one writer credited Lincoln's impulse to free the slaves to Mary, in my readings on the couple and the time, I have found nothing to substantiate that claim. Rather I credit the pressure on Lincoln from the Abolitionists and from a nation made weary from years of war to act in that way. Just as Americans wearied of Viet Nam and largely turned against that war, so, too, Americans wearied of the Civil War. Although the South has continued to fight it.

I also remember proof reading a term paper my older son wrote while in high school which included an incident following an Indian uprising during the War. Lincoln could have, as the Army wished, simply hung all the captive Native Americans but instead ordered a contingent of lawyers to defend the men which resulted in something like less than four being hung.

Now, Lincoln liked business. He thought business would be good for the nation, help to develop the raw lands of the west. In that, he seems like an early to mid-20th C Republican. However, in freeing the slaves and in ordering attorneys to defend the Native Americans he seems more like a liberal.

Early in my undergraduate career as a political science major, I saw the inadequacy of illustrating the political spectrum as a line with the middle marked and the left and right rays standing in for two ends of the spectrum.

I came up with a model that was a flattened spiral. As time goes on and technology and other factors change the life of a nation, so, too, its politics change.

The righties here carp on the Founding Fathers and yet each of the FFs had elements to their thought patterns that matched today's liberals as well as those that are congruent with conservative patterns.

I say to the right, learn to live in the real world.

What really galls me is the right's mantra of personal responsibility. Does the right claim the titans of Wall Street as their own? Look what happened after the reagan and two bush administrations weakened the controls on those boys. As boys, they acted like boys and brought on Depression Phase II. They did not exercise personal responsibility. Then there is the matter of the environment. How many righties (and lefties for that matter) heat their houses to a temperature above 65 in winter and, yet, as soon as the temperature rises above 55 in March walk the street in shorts and sandals and buy Margarita ingredients?

pom, I will need more time later to address your interesting post. One thought for now however, I think you may be a bit confused about a liberal vs. conservative comparison by applying the definitions of yesterday to those terms. I view the spectrum from today's more current and applicable definition, as we can relate to it now, which means a whole lot more in terms of assessing the merits of the definition of the philosophies.

Another comment until later, even though we disagree, I take you as an interesting and likable person, probably very responsible, but just a bit misguided in your philosophical outlook, and very naive and brainwashed by academia somewhere in your past. There could even be a very solid conservative mindset hidden in your soul.

I know that this is too mundane a post to merit consideration, but here goes anyway.
The Commerce Dept reported today that consumer spending in Feb was up .3%.
That is the 5th straight month of gains but is the smallest gain, by a bit, of the 5 months since September, 2009.
Wages did not rise in February, due perhaps in part to bad weather in the East. People lost some days of work and some days of shopping.
The Commerce Dept estimates that the economy is growing at a 2.8% annual rate, but in order to reduce the unemployment rate from 9.7% to 8.7%, growth must be more in the 5% range. We have no chance of getting to 5%.
Consumer saving in February fell to 3.1% of disposable income from 3.4%.
Consumer spending accounts for 70% of our domestic economy.

I got the results from the Fed Reserve Bank of Richmond's "flash" survey of Service Sector Activity for March. My business is part of that survey. We, as a group, reported very positive growth in sales for the 1st time in a long time. But we also reported making, collectively, deep cuts in our inventories.
If we are starting to recover, inventories will have to be replenished which is good.
-Real(mundane)johnboy

Why do you say stuff like this? We all enjoy your posts!

Cycloptichorn

realjohnboy- I enjoyed your post. I think Cyclops did not like it because it shows how poorly the Obama Administration is doing. Consumer Spending is in the tank because housing is not improving nationwide and will continue to lag because of all the foreclosures. These foreclosures, of course, stem directly from the work of sweet Barney Frank and his cohorts in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, who, during the Clinton years, decided that the evil realtors and the banks were keeping honest decent American citizens from owning their own home even though they had no money for a down payment. Well, the real estate people were blackjacked into giving mortgages to people who had no down payment.

Consumer Spending will not get better until Housing does and that will take a long time--Past the election of Nov. 2nd 2010.

No, your report is not mundane. I think that one of the problems is that people just can not afford to buy anything. I had to tell my family that there would be no presents for Christmas 2008. When Christmas 2009 rolled around, I told my kids that I wouldn't be able to buy them anything but that I could afford presents for my granddaughters. I did buy a token present for each adult child, generally under $10.

I also think that since the Baby Boomers are becoming senior citizens, that, like most seniors, they need fewer things. While we do have kids and grandkids to buy things for, we also have less money with which to make purchases.

plainoldme wrote:

The righties here carp on the Founding Fathers and yet each of the FFs had elements to their thought patterns that matched today's liberals as well as those that are congruent with conservative patterns.

Really? Would you like to give some evidence that their thought patterns matched today's liberals as well as those that are congruent with conservative patterns?

That was also true in Bismark's Germany. Pre-Revolutionary Russia, early Nineteenth Century Italy, Seventeen Century England.

So what????

I am going to apologize to you on behalf of massa who not only misquoted you but created a rather ridiculous political rap that said nothing.

Wasn't the US economy supposed to be spectacular by now? Isn't that what PrezBO promised?
Unemployment numbers were never supposed to get this high under Obama, they were supposed to drop.
No that Obamahealthscam has passed it's only a matter of time before the number of unemployed goes up,
prices rise across the board and then there are all of those new taxes, penalties and fees.

Don't forget V.A.T.

This is not the change you hoped for is it?

Please, dear lady, do not aplogize to anyone for me., I am quite capable of doing that by myself if I see fit but I can tell you quite clearly that I do not see the possibility of making any apology to an ideologue like Cyclops who is still wet behind the ears, recently got married and is still a graduate student at Berkeley.

Like most young people, he has not lived long enough to acquire any real wisdom. As Churchhill famously said--When you are twenty-five if you are not a liberal,you have no heart and when you are over forty, if you are not a conservative, you have no brain"