The Republicans today gave the Democrats permission to continue to spend the nation into debt by another trillion dollars, which sum the Dems will demolish by the new target date in January.
The last, best hope for fiscal responsibility in the USA has rested in the spineless Republicans, who cannot resist the Democrat destruction of the economy. Had the debt limit not been raised to reflect the wanton spending of the Democrats, the government would have had to shut down further in order to use that money to pay off the debt payments that come due. That would have likely resulted in a credit downgrade for USA debt and embarrassment for the most prolific spender in US history. And that would be racist. But it will happen, and needs to happen, but it reflects truth. The fear of offending the official Victim in the White House is a politically correct, devastating cancer which has killed the GOP - at least it is dead to me. The unprincipled have destroyed the weakly principled.
I despise the national Republicans for their cowardice and capitulation.
ADDENDUM:
That didn't take long: Redford cries "Raaaaaacism"...
12 comments:
Here's one reason why the Republicans folded like cheap suit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0
Debt deflation? Never!
"Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish. If we do, we may live, and such a return might have one minor advantage. If we believed in the absolute reality of elementary moral platitudes, we should value those who solicit our votes by other standards than have recently been in fashion. While we believe that good is something to be invented, we demand of our rulers such qualities as "vision," "dynamism," "creativity," and the like. If we returned to the objective view we should demand qualities much rarer, and much more beneficial - virtue, knowledge, diligence and skill. 'Vision' is for sale, or claims to be for sale, everywhere. But give me a man who will do a day's work for a day's pay, who will refuse bribes, who will not make up his facts, and who has learned his job."
~ C. S. Lewis, "The Poison of Subjectivism"
Where was all the conservative protest against W spending the nation into debt by trillions of dollars? Crickets. It's only when Obama takes office that I suddenly start hearing about it from conservatives. And it's most certainly not racism. It's simple hatred for the opposing political party. Romneycare was a "good model for the nation" and "the conservative answer to healthcare", according to Romney and conservative thinktanks. That is of course until Obama made it law, and now suddenly it's poison. Not because of anything wrong with the law, but because the opposing political party (Them) made it law and will reap the benefits from it rather than Us. Ug ug ug! Humans do have the ability to stop acting like apes. It just doesn't happen all that often.
Again with the lunacy of the two-party oligarchy and the winner-take-all voting system that leads to it. THIS is what will be the end of America. When Americans view the opposing party, not as fellow citizens, but as the Enemy to be Opposed, worse than any foreign invader.
You can play this idiotic game and beat your tribal drums and ra ra your favorite sports team to "win", or you can choose to opt out. I choose the latter. I hope more people join me until the system changes.
"Where was all the conservative protest against W spending the nation into debt by trillions of dollars?"
Whoa, slow down there, sparky.
Conservative does not equal Republican. While most of the Republicans were cheering Bush, there were a number of conservatives that were not happy at all and began to push against the GOP machine.
Do you think the Tea Party sprung up out of nowhere, like a modern Minerva? A number of the early supporters came from movements that had been pushing back against excessive government spending such as TARP, the Medicare insanity and so forth.
Romneycare was a mess. A number of conservative bloggers, journalists and pundits all carped on how bad it was until the GOP machine started cracking down, shutting up as many as they could.
You can see the rifts between the Republican GOPers and the conservatives in the way the GOP treats members of the Tea Party.
So returning to your first sentence, the conservatives have been protesting since Bush over big spending, this isn't just a Them vs. Us conflict going on, the movements such as the Tea Party aren't playing along with the GOP machine.
In Washington, there is but one party with two faces.
The States are going to have to deal with that, or the police state that arises from an increasingly powerful and all consuming federal government will just continue.
Having read that many fellow conservatives do NOT agree with RomneyCare OR ObamaCare, I take exception with your attempt to frame this debate in terms of "us vs. them". As though it had no merit outside of the fact the Republicans do not care for the Democrats.
It is more, and less, than that.
There are even today examples of cooperation and even genuine like between opposing party members. I will be happy to dig them up if you like, but will grant you that the hype ("blackmail", "extortion" and "terrorism"), the mockery (political cartoons) and the finger-pointing has been indulged by BOTH parties. To their detriment.
If either side has a regret, it is that they were too slow to deliver this or that insult or jingoistic rant.
That said...
The health care plan will place an enormous burden on the American people, particularly the ones who produce our sceintists, etc. - the middle class. It will leave as many or more people uninsured as we have now. And have you seen the plans? I will be insured against catastrophic events - and nothing else. The deductible is ludicrous... $10,000 for my family before the insurer begins to pay out anything.
There is NO such thing as a free lunch. The insurance companies will make even more of a profit under this plan - or they will take their money and go into some other business (many already have). And for what? So Uncle Sugar can take care of all the folks out in the world who don't want a job but would rather live on the dole and steal thousands of dollars of food on effed-up EBT cards?
YES - Mister Bush fucked us with his profligate wars and spending as much as Obama. Conservatives did not like him either, and for the same reasons.
We are too deeply in debt, Martin, to suddenly decide it is a good idea to insure EVERYONE. What good does it do to insure everyone if the effort leaves the system unable to function at all? And if this system takes everything else down with it? What do you gain by ObamaCare, Martin?
I don't want to pay for it. My son worked hard to get where he is in school. If someone came along and knocked down his grades, explaining that they were going to distribute the percentage points to students who were 'differently abled' or unwilling to put forth the same effort, he would be pissed.
And he IS pissed. Several of his university instructors grade on a curve. John is at the top of that curve, through his own intelligence and diligence. He studies while the others party or mingle in protest marches. He has asked me why the instructor cannot simply call a grade a grade and let the chips fall where they may?
I reply that the instructor's tenure is one of those chips, and it is dependent on his students getting their grades bumped up for being in the same class as John.
We are letting political hot air determine what and where our country will be in ten or twenty years. My friend Bill is already stocking up supplies and looking over options to 'bug out'.
Not to indulge in too much of my own hype, but the Zombie Apocalypse is very possible and it will come about when the massive support systems we have in the form of the Federal Government - disappear. That, my friend Martin, is where things will begin to break down.
I submit ObamaCare is hastening that day. It has zero to do with how I feel about Progressives OR the Republican Party.
Steven
I'm not concerned here with whether Romneycare/Heritagecare is or is not a good law, and I'm certainly not singling out conservatives for criticism. They just serve as a current example.
The Heritage Foundation came up with Romneycare/Heritagecare as the conservative answer to the Clinton healthcare plan in the 90s. Later, Romney tweaked it a bit and signed it into law in Massachusetts, and he called it the "Republican answer to healthcare." He said it was a good "model for the nation".
Then, as soon as Obama signs Romneycare/Heritagecare into law, suddenly it's "the most insidious law ever created by man" and every conservative is against it.
We have always been at war with EastAsia.
Don't think of it as "debt" think of it as people investing in the United States. This means banks, retirement funds, businesses, individuals, and even foreign countries. The USA is the safest investment on Earth because we pay and we don't default.
If the US government were to pay off all their lenders and become "debt free" where would all those people put their money? Invest in China? Under their mattress? Goldman Sachs?
And what would people say when the USA hands them their money and tells them "Sorry, we don't want your money, you can't invest in the USA anymore, because we've decided to run our economy like it was a single family household instead of the largest economy in the world. So put your retirement fund somewhere else, we don't want to be an economic superpower anymore."
People (and countries) buy government securities because they want a safe place to store their money while earning a token interest rate. So they "deposit" their money with the US government. They give the US $1 billion, at which point the government now has $1 billion cash and $1 billion of debt. After some predetermined amount of time, the government repays the debt, but at the same time someone else will deposit as much or more money.
As long as the government invests the $1 billion cash in a way that earns a greater rate of return than the interest rate that they pay out, it's a profit center.
Eliminating the debt would be monumentally stupid. It would be like a bank giving back all its deposits and refusing to take new ones.
The goal should be to make sure we take only as much as we can invest well, and the way to do that is to improve the efficiency of our investments. Cutting to the bone makes our spending less efficient.
The majority of US "debt" is owed to Americans. They have invested in America.
On the ACA: Conservatives, for some reason, seem to have come to the conclusion that health care is a luxury. It is not, it is a necessity, that's why it is illegal for emergency rooms to turn people away. So the only remaining question is, who pays for it? Under the old system, health care for the uninsured is paid for either by the insured (in the form of inflated premiums) or by the taxpayer. Under the ACA, people are for the first time required to take personal responsibility to plan for their own (inevitable) health care costs, rather than foisting them on to the rest of us, and somehow conservatives think that is a bad thing. Which is odd, because as Martin points out, it was their idea in the first place.
Aqium,
You said,
” They give the US $1 billion, at which point the government now has $1 billion cash and $1 billion of debt. After some predetermined amount of time, the government repays the debt, but at the same time someone else will deposit as much or more money.
As long as the government invests the $1 billion cash in a way that earns a greater rate of return than the interest rate that they pay out, it's a profit center. “
It’s not a profit center, it’s a pyramid scheme. The government does not invest any cash for “a greater rated of return”, it spends it. Just like GM “paid off” the first part of its bailout by using the second bailout cash to do it.
”Eliminating the debt would be monumentally stupid. It would be like a bank giving back all its deposits and refusing to take new ones.”
That is completely false. The government has a steady stream of income from taxes and fees; it has enough money to operate AND to pay off the debt, unless it overspends wildly and continuously increases the debt load which bears interest which must be paid back.
”The goal should be to make sure we take only as much as we can invest well, and the way to do that is to improve the efficiency of our investments. Cutting to the bone makes our spending less efficient.”
That makes no sense; to operate within the income stream for covering both operating expenses and debt interest is the only solution for the problem of debt transfer to oncoming generations. DC doesn’t care about that at all.
”The majority of US "debt" is owed to Americans. They have invested in America.”
That is only the case because the Fed had bought up the new debt for quite a while now. That’s not investing in America, it is manipulating the economy. The Fed merely prints fiat money to float the new debt that the Administration creates greedily. That money is inflationary, so the government pays back in cheaper dollars. The inflation is covered up by the Administration and the Fed, but is seen daily by mainstreet.
”On the ACA: Conservatives, for some reason, seem to have come to the conclusion that health care is a luxury. It is not, it is a necessity, that's why it is illegal for emergency rooms to turn people away.”
Conservatives think no such thing. They think that healthcare is personal responsibility, and that the truly helpless should be helped. That’s the basis for free people to operate freely and with the expectation of personal responsibility, rather than to be coerced as children by a parental government which wishes to keep the populace as children.
”So the only remaining question is, who pays for it? Under the old system, health care for the uninsured is paid for either by the insured (in the form of inflated premiums) or by the taxpayer.”
And that was morally wrong: the non-infirm should have not been allowed to be leeches and public parasites.
”Under the ACA, people are for the first time required to take personal responsibility to plan for their own (inevitable) health care costs, rather than foisting them on to the rest of us, and somehow conservatives think that is a bad thing.”
Of course it’s a bad thing. It is governmental coercion, a totalitarian control of personal decisions; it is NOT in any way coupled with personal responsibility, and to even think that is a complete inversion of the concept of “responsibility”. In no way is the ACA benign; it is coercive and it is a seizure of personal privacy by a known corrupt government agency. Somehow personal privacy is important ONLY for a woman who wants to kill her progeny – not for anyone else.
” Which is odd, because as Martin points out, it was their idea in the first place.”
First, the ACA is not an identity with the Massachusetts plan. And government healthcare was attempted by Hillary under Clinton’s first term, and the country erupted, and rightly so. She developed it in secret, and the ACA was developed and PASSED as a secret document, crammed down the throats of the nation by a maneuver that was against the rules of the Senate. The cowardly Republicans did nothing (the Dems controlled both the legislative branch and the executive branch). The sense of the nation as a whole is and has been against the totalitarian actions which produced this fiasco.
As the old nation is being driven to the right, the Dems will consolidate the tsunami of illegals into a new type of nation, where anyone who shows up gets all the perquisites that the Dems can throw at them, in return for their votes. (financed by fiat money from the Fed). This is not personal responsibility on parade, it is Messiah/Victim/Oppressor class warfare, and for the oppressor class, things will get ugly.
Since the Left has no fixed moral base, anything they do will be called "moral". Check with Alinsky and the Clintons.
Obamacare is dangerous because it puts control of approximately 1/6th of our economy into the hands of government. Already small businesses are being shut down, laying off employees and cutting work hours and benefits as a direct result of it, and the worst is yet to come. Once the insurance companies go belly-up, the government will practically own the entire pharma/medical industry. Should you suffer injury or some debilitating sickness or disease, your fate is in Washington's hands. Considering how they ransacked Social Security (read: unfunded liability) and cannot even balance their budget, what could possibly go wrong?
Yes. Congress STOLE the retirement money from the Social Security fund. It is now supported in pyramid scheme fashion, with young people paying directly to retired people after the government skim-off. It will ultimately have to be funded with fiat money, too. The government cannot avoid inflationary degradation of wealth forever. It will be brutal.
(The proposed new currency: ammunition. Caveat: never sell it to a Leftist; he will shoot himself in the foot).
Government, Wall Street, the (illegal) Federal Reserve, big banks and crony corporatism all contributed to accumulating $17 trillion in debt, overspending and borrowing, fraudulent loans, deregulation, lobbying, outsourcing, shady backroom deals (*cough* BAILOUT), plus stealing from taxpayer-funded programs, as you said.
Did you hear about how after receiving a $51 billion bailout with Obama's full support, GM will only pay back about $39 billion and refuses to release the data on how many cars they've sold this year? Furthermore, they're going to outsource about 70% of their labor to China.
This country is being demolished from within.
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