Where is the US economy headed?

Not all did, but my point is that they could have.Roll your eyes all you want, but common sense trumps your bias. I did not even figure in the fact that buses travel further to get you where you want to go. I also did not figure in the logical point that going to and from work I could pick up things and go to appointments that would have taken even more money for me to do it, plus more fuel for mass transit to deliver me.

Once I tried mass transit, it became obvious that the whole thing was a joke, cyclops.

My wife had a cousin living in New Hampshire, whose husband spent more than two hours going to work in Boston, and that time again going home each day. Nobody is going to convince me that much of what is going on out there in regard to mass transit makes much sense at all. Much of it amounts to government boondoggles, perpetuated by bureaucrats drawing a big salary to feather their own nest.

And you got to read your paper or get a jump start on your work while commuting by rail.

You're responding to Parados, but you put my name in instead. Watch out for stuff like that.

My wife takes Mass transit to work every single day. It's hardly a joke. You couldn't drive there any faster than the train gets her there b/c of the traffic involved in getting over bridges.

Keep an open mind about it, hey?

Cycloptichorn

My sincere apologies about that, cyclops. I will try to do better, but so often your posts are almost interchangeable.There may be situations where it works. I always chose to live close to my workplace, and that worked the best for me. Thankfully I did not have to live in big cities that much, and do not now

The ideal was the situation in which I grew up, a farm. We lived and worked at the same location, and we were not far from town.

Well, that's ideal for you, but not for everyone else, right? I mean, if all the people who currently crowded into the cities went your route, the country would get downright crowded - really quickly. Probably be lots of liberals too.

I also live close to my workplace; it's a 5 minute walk from my house. Not a coincidence, either. Planning!

Cycloptichorn

Had the morning paper in my hand every morning when I caught the train.

Life is much simpler now; I take my newspaper to the local McDonald's (3 blks from my home) for my morning coffee (senior coffee @ .54c) and to read my paper - 7 days a week when I'm home.

After once again touting common sense, okie rambled through this paragraph:


okie and wife have an imaginary relative or friend who just happened to experience every topic brought up.

I once lived in NH, a god-forsaken place if there ever was one. There is no mass transit from NH into MA which okie's paragraph implies. There are two freeway-level routes into MA from NH: 3, which by-passes Nashua and 93 which by-passes Salem, MA. Both are heavily used and always crowded. A commute to Boston from either Nashua or Salem would take two hours by car during rush-hour.

Since there is no mass transit, why does okie -- with his self-proclaimed common sense -- say he is not convinced mass transit works? Does it not work because it does not exist? Now, in a strange way, that statement makes sense.

Or did this conveniently located relative of his wife drop his car off at the Green Line terminal south of Boston and take the subway in? That's a ridiculous route to take! Perhaps, he parked his car in Salem, MA and took the commuter rail from there, another ridiculous route entailing a 30+ mile drive into Salem, Ma from Salem, NH. However, service along that line is every 20 minutes during rush hour. If the relative lived on the NH seacoast, the commuter rail from Newburyport might have made sense although it was closed for several years during the 80s and 90s and only reopened in this century.

No matter what, citing some shirttail relative's auto commute to condemn mass transit hardly makes sense. As Mr. Spock would say, "It is illogical."

When my daughter and I traveled to Sarah Lawrence College for accepted students' weekend, we took the train and watched the traffic jam from the window as we rolled along.

You need to realize that not everyone can make that choice. I would not commute 70 miles from my home if I had the choice.

Furthermore, there are people who chose a community for its school system and not for the convenience of the bread-winner.



Your politics and the sort of economics you support seem more readily aligned with the Monsanto-chemical farming-agribusiness with products sold at supermarket chains model than with the support the family farm model.

When my kids and I commuted into Boston by commuter rail -- we lived about 1/2 mile from the station; my daughter, then in college, and I temped; my older son, then in his gap year, worked at the NE Aquarium -- we got exercise walking to the train. The cost of our monthly passes, which also allowed us to use the subway, was about the same as three days worth of parking in the city.

There are things I miss: the Boston Early Music Festival, the lectures at Harvard, dropping into the MFA, coffee on Newbury Street . . . and riding the subway.

From Mike Lux:

One of the nice things about Republicans when they get into positions of power is that they do our side favors by clarifying very quickly how extreme their ideas are. Newt Gingrich did it in 1995 with talk of sending kids to orphanages and cutting school lunch programs, along with his whining about having to sit in the back of Air Force One and that little shutdown-of-all-government thing. Now Paul Ryan, on behalf of the entire Republican Caucus in the House, is joining Scott Walker and other GOP Governors in doing the same.

With his proposal, Ryan will radically cut and privatize Medicare, ending the guarantee of health care to our senior citizens; radically cut Medicaid and throw it into a block-grant program that will end any guarantee of coverage for the poor, people with disabilities, and many, many children; deliver breathtakingly large tax cuts to the wealthy while raising taxes for the middle class. As far as I can tell, more than 90 percent of his cuts impact either low-income people or senior citizens who are currently middle class but might no longer be if these Social Security and Medicare cuts go through. As to who benefits, while some things remain vague (like which middle-class taxes will have to go up to cut down the revenue losses because of lower taxes in the high-end brackets), it is likely that more than 90 percent of the benefits go to the very wealthy, who not only get to keep their Bush tax cuts but get some big and lucrative new tax cuts besides. As Citizens for Tax Justice notes, under Ryan's proposal, the federal government would collect $2 trillion less over the next decade, yet require the bottom 90 percent to actually pay higher taxes. Ryan leaves a lot details out, but if you read in between the lines, it is clear that the reason certain details are missing is because of how awful they are.

All the hue and cry about this year's budget fight -- whether or not we'll have a government shutdown; whether we'll cut $33 billion or $40 billion out of the remainder of this year's budget -- is a minor sideshow compared to the implications of the Ryan budget. Cuts to vital programs helping low and middle income Americans are morally wrong and bad public policy, but they only impact the next several months, and future Congresses can always (and relatively easily) boost spending numbers in important programs. But fundamentally restructuring programs- or more to the point, destroying them- is a lot harder to for future Congresses to change. Can you imagine any Congress in this dysfunctional era ever passing programs as strong and reliable as Medicare and Medicaid again?

Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Eric Cantor, and the Tea Party Republicans are, to their credit, being crystal clear about their philosophy and goals for the future: they hope to dismantle the last vestiges of the New Deal and Great Society programs which have benefitted the middle class and low-income Americans, and fund the parts of government they like -- military spending and national security, subsidies to Big Oil, coal, and agribusiness companies, trade missions abroad, etc. -- with taxes on the poor and middle class. With Ryan's budget and Cantor's classic quote the other day ("So 50 percent of beneficiaries under the Social Security program use those moneys as their sole source of income. So we've got to protect today's seniors. But for the rest of us? Listen, we're going to grips with the fact that these programs cannot exist if we want America to be what we want America to be.") Republicans want to privatize or completely dismantle Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid; they want to wipe out the labor movement; they want to wipe out even minimal oversight of the financial system, worker safety, and the environment. They want to take us back to the era of Calvin Coolidge, when the advances of the last 80 years simply didn't exist. Everything the last several generations of Americans have fought for and depended on would be gone. And so would the majority of the American middle class.

Without Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, retirees would live in poverty, and family incomes would be wiped out trying to take care of parents, grandparents, and disabled family members. Without unions, wages and benefits would be ever more stagnant, or would decline in many sectors. Without student loans, fewer young and poor people would make it onto the first rungs of the ladder into the middle class. Without rebuilding our infrastructure and investing in our schools, fewer American businesses would be able to compete in the world economy. Without research and other government investments, the technological breakthroughs that have helped fuel our economic growth over the last 70 years would stop happening. And without some restraint on the power of multinational companies, our economy would be rocked by more financial collapses, and our pluralistic democracy will get more and more dysfunctional.

The Ryan budget, Cantor's quote, and Scott Walker's war on unions are just the latest examples of radical conservatism's war on the American middle class. Conservatives want a country where the wealthy and powerful are free to do what they want when they want. They want unbridled capitalism with all restraints taken off, the way America was in the 1920s -- no, better make it the Social Darwinist 1880s, before Teddy Roosevelt came along and did too much trust-busting, food safety legislation, and national park creation. Conservatives want an America where there is complete "freedom" for the rich and powerful, but if you aren't in that category you are on your own. This is what they "want America to be," in Cantor's words. This federal budget fight is part of the same battle with Republicans trying to destroy unions in the states, and part of the same battle homeowners across America are facing with reckless, power-hungry Wall Street banks. This battle is for the future of the American middle class, and we'd better win it.

If that's what the republicans what, cut Medicare for seniors, that's exactly what I want. Why fight something we have no choice in voicing our opinions with our votes, when the GOP doesn't want us to vote on such matters?

How long ago was that when I said that the GOP were terrorists?

They are going to take away health care for seniors, the poor, and disabled.

They're all heart, and no brains!

Demagoguery is alive and well, I see. Reminds me of the Republican victory in 94, the same kind of crap was spewed by you guys then. Frankly the Democrats temper tantrums and hysteria when you lose is growing real tiresome.

Funny you should use such a word as demagogue; whether it reflects 1994 or any other time, today's world is a changed one that has no resemblance to that period, and what the GOP is doing now to Americans is terrorism against its own people. They are destroying the security of Medicare for seniors, children, and the disabled. They are destroying public unions. They are cutting government spending to give the wealthy bigger tax cuts, while our national debt increases to be paid for by our children and grandchildren.

Demagoguery you say!

What I'd really like to see you square up, is the repeated and constant attack by the Republicans last election cycle consisting of telling seniors that Obama and others wanted to 'cut their medicare,' and talking bad about the health care bill for actually doing so; and the current plan by Paul Ryan to destroy medicare completely within a decade.

The two simply are not compatible positions, and the hypocrisy is difficult to explain.

Cycloptichorn

Actually, common sense math trumps YOUR bias.

You speak of hypocrisy, the Democrats have it full bloom. Obama said he intended to pay for Obamacare in part with savings in Medicare, or by cutting Medicare. I think that is on record, cyclops. I am surprised that you were unaware of that when the legislation was being debated.

Here is a job for you. Find out what the actual average occupancy of those buses are, as an average for 24 hours or per week or month, whatever data you can find. It should be obvious that those buses are not always filled to capacity. Also, you need to find an average occupancy for all of the buses in the fleet over a longer period of time.

okie, Why are you repeating what Obama promised back in 2009?



That's been on the plate for several years, and you're still not "up to speed" with this information.

What the GOP is planning to do is cut Medicare funding, and replace it with block grants. This takes away health insurance for seniors, children, and the handicapped, because under Medicare, the patient is insured. With block grants to hospitals, there's no interest for the hospital to see Medicare patients. Believe it or not, that includes you, your family, and your so-called "friends."

Yes, he DID say that. I never said that they didn't. And in fact, that's absolutely what they did do - cut Medicare Advantage, which cost the taxpayers a lot of money and did nothing but subsidize insurance companies.

But, the Republicans attacked the Dems for it, mercilessly. Don't you remember that part? It's not that they were inaccurate (though they NEVER mention that what was cut was a subsidy for the insurance companies and not medicare itself. never.), it's that they are unabashedly doing exactly what they attacked the Dems for just a few months ago.

When were they right? When they were criticizing the Dems, or doing much more than the Dems ever did to harm Medicare?

Cycloptichorn