Yeah, Elections And Stuff

On the one hand I am glad Republicans had to sweat and are facing harsh realities. They’ve let themselves go and the Three Stooges act in the face of the Foley revelation pretty much assured they were going to lose at least something major. As much as people point to Bush and Iraq, ineptness at saying anything to defend themselves and their lack of principles played a major role.

On the other had it’s a bit like watching a loved one who is headed for a fall and you realize that, sooner or later, someone is going to give them a beatdown. You hope and pray it’s going to finally knock some sense into them but you also cringe at every blow.

So I now brace myself for Pelosiland where I am now defined as a “rich person” and will have to pay around $2k more anually in taxes. I also brace for the sea of pointless investigations so the Dems can prove to themselves (and the Angry left) that they were misled and not complicit in Iraq. I expect Conyers to bring Impeachment around at some point (he’s got a 350 page manifesto on it already) and for it to fail miserably after a long, drawn out battle. I think there’s a trench being dug on Capitol Hill already.

Gonna be a long two years…

So I now brace myself for Pelosiland where I am now defined as a \’e2\’80\’9crich person\’e2\’80\’9d and will have to pay around $2k more anually in taxes.

Touching a little bit on what Scott said (and hopefully not putting words in his mouth): The national debt has doubled in the last 6 years. Doubled. Americans need to understand that the cost of being the world’s bad-ass is that it’s expensive as hell, and somebody’s got to pay the bills. It’s not a Democratic thing to raise taxes at this point, it’s the fiscally responsible thing.

“It\’e2\’80\’99s not a Democratic thing to raise taxes at this point, it\’e2\’80\’99s the fiscally responsible thing. “

Yes, that IS a typical Democratic thing.

You know, you can cut spending and end up with a balanced budget too. And a smaller government.

Just sayin’

Ah, and for clarity, national debt values are in ~2000 dollars. If you ignore inflation, the gap drops to 3.4 trillion.

It\’e2\’80\’99s not a Democratic thing to raise taxes at this point, it\’e2\’80\’99s the fiscally responsible thing.

Under the Bush tax cuts (that Democrats have so decried) tax receipts are UP. The lower tax rate spurs economic growth. Economic growth means more taxes come in. There’s some sort of mythical belief on the Left that higher taxes are required to bring in revenue. Yet the economic rebound from 2001 proves otherwise. I mean, do you think most people would sit on that $2k? Or would they spend it, thus driving the economy?

Furthermore, as blah pointed out, you can trim pork to cut the deficit. A major reason Republicans are hurting so badly today is they’ve not been fiscal conservatives like they promised. You know it’s porky when it took Bush AND Hastert to heft the 2005 budget aloft. I have little doubt that Dems are going to be just as porky but, instead of running up the deficit, they’ll pick your pocket instead.

I’ll stand corrected on the national debt doubling since I don’t have my official communist party pamphlets here with me at work. So only a 1.5x increase. Well never mind then. Let’s throw another hundred miles on that 700 mile fence, just because we can.

Under the Bush tax cuts (that Democrats have so decried) tax receipts are UP. The lower tax rate spurs economic growth.

And with all this additional revenue, the gap between rich and poor continues to grow, America continues to lose ground in education, oil companies continue to set profit records, we are losing the “war” on terrorism, our ports are still insecure, and will nobody think about the goddamned PS3 shortages?

I don’t know if the Dems will be better. But the worst they’ll do is cockblock. It’s a start.

Tax receipts grow with economy, so of course they are up. The problem is that the republicans increased spending at an ever faster rate.

At some point, the rest of the world will simply stop lending us money at the rate they are now, and we will be screwed. enjoy.

There’s this weird myth that government spending just vanishes into thin air.

The reason the economy is booming is because we’re running a huge deficit. That adds dollars to the economy.

It’s like if you decided you wanted to live a prosperous life, so you got a credit card with a million-dollar limit and started charging everything. You’d indeed be able to live like a rich man, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that you might have other problems later on. (Of course, you could always trick your grandchildren into co-signing, so that they’ll have to pay off the loan after you’re dead. But that would be wrong.)

As to whether tax cuts help or hurt the economy…it depends on how the money is spent.

If I get a thousand-dollar tax cut and just stick the money in my mattress, then that will make me feel more secure but it won’t benefit the economy as a whole. If the government decides to invest the money in student loans, then that’ll create more professional workers, growing the economy and producing even more revenue in the future.

So we can’t just mindlessly say that tax cuts are good or bad. We have to look at how the money gets invested on a case-by-case basis.

In the short-term, the best thing we can do for the economy is: (1) Reduce taxes on the poor and middle-class. (2) Increase taxes on the rich. (3) Stop wasting American lives and money defending those ingrate Iraqis and tell them to solve their own problems for a change.

Heartless, I did not know that. I figured that the boost in the economy was due to Keynesian effects. (Keynes argued that running a deficit can build up the economy, and running a surplus can slow down the economy.) But I’m not an expert on economics; that’s just something I half-remembered from classes in college.

Anyway, can you list a couple of the indicators that show that improvements in the economy are due to the tax cuts rather than the deficit?

(Obviously I’m looking for objective indicators, not rants from random right-wing pundits.)

Thanks in advance!

Hey Heartless, something interesting for you to chew on:

“WASHINGTON, Nov 8 (Reuters) – The presumed new chairman of the U.S. House of Representative’s budget-writing committee on Wednesday said that he would push to end chronic deficits and balance the federal budget within five years.
Rep. John Spratt, the South Carolina Democrat who is expected to head the Budget Committee in next year’s Democratically-controlled House, also said that any new spending initiatives his party will seek would not be allowed to add to budget deficits in the near-term.

“We would simply like to go in a measured way toward deficit reduction and a balanced budget within the next five years,” Spratt said in a telephone interview with Reuters.”

Sorry to bust your post election Pelosi doom fantasies, but the Democrats that got elected in to swing states are moderates or conservatives. And they seem much more likely to want to engage in some real conservatism than the Bush administration and his congress has shown.

I’m confused now. I heard from 2004 up until the morning of the election that Diebold and voting machines in general were unreliable and that the election was going to be “stolen”.

Strange, I don’t hear that anymore. I wonder why that is.

More importantly, does this mean no one will be comparing Bush to Hitler anymore?

Conservatives always amaze me. I mean, that line of thinking has worked so well in the past, with the intense fear of anything remotely foreign, a general contempt for reason, and the extreme faith in human instinct. But then again, if you’re conservative you don’t bother to learn from history anyway.

Speaking as a longtime big government liberal, I hope that the new congress can do better than the old, but I’m not so naive as to think they can’t do worse. I don’t hope for gridlock, and I don’t want endless investigations, I’d like to see progress on centrist issues like meaningful immigration reform, minimum wages increase, alternative fuels research and better fiscal discipline, not because I think those policies are sufficent to solve all the problems I see, besetting us, but because they would be a start.

And I weep for the wreckage of conservatism. Great ideas arise from great debate. Hopefully, the right will find where it’s heart and soul have gone.

Blah, people are still saying that electronic voting machines are unreliable. Read the newspapers; there were problems reported all over the country. Hopefully we can get some legislation passed requiring a verifiable paper record for each vote instead of just sticking the results in a fragile and easily-hacked computer chip.

(I was lucky. There was only one mechanical voting machine for my whole precinct, and it broke just before I got there, so I got to cast a paper ballot. Everybody I voted for won; not sure if there’s a connection.)

Go to freerepublic.com if you want to see people complaining that the election was stolen. (I know that historically they haven’t complained about stolen elections, but they just changed their minds recently.)

That’s also a good site to go if you want to see Bush compared to Hitler. His newest atrocity was surrendering to the Democrats by firing Rumsfeld.