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The Fed Shutdown Poll and Megathread

Started by CountDeMoney, April 04, 2011, 06:12:03 AM

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Who's going to look better?

I think the teabaggers are right to destroy the budget, it's not in the constitution
16 (36.4%)
I stand with our beloved, sane and rational President
28 (63.6%)

Total Members Voted: 42

derspiess

#240
Quote from: Fate on April 08, 2011, 05:21:30 PM
Oh, Drudge.  :lol:



:lol: Pay for your own abortions & whore pills, gals.
"If you can play a guitar and harmonica at the same time, like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, you're a genius. But make that extra bit of effort and strap some cymbals to your knees, suddenly people want to get the hell away from you."  --Rich Hall

garbon

Quote from: derspiess on April 08, 2011, 06:35:19 PM
:lol: Pay for your own abortions & where pills, gals.

I have to admit that while I understand their point, it's hard for me to feel sorry for the people I've heard complain, as yeah, they can pay their own way.

To hear the rhetoric, you'd think the rider was that abortions and birth control would be made illegal.
"I've never been quite sure what the point of a eunuch is, if truth be told. It seems to me they're only men with the useful bits cut off."
I drank because I wanted to drown my sorrows, but now the damned things have learned to swim.

Admiral Yi

I only see one chick in that pic that's ever going to get near a boner.

Nice reboot Speesh. :thumbsup:

Caliga

Quote from: Slargos on April 08, 2011, 05:30:57 PM
It is my understanding that in fact, if you want ham, you can't eat it right away. It needs to be prepared first.
That is correct.
0 Ed Anger Disapproval Points

MadImmortalMan

If PP really does have sufficient funding from other sources I don't see the big deal. We are trying to make cuts, after all. I suspect it isn't true though.
"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

MadImmortalMan

Quote from: Caliga on April 08, 2011, 06:41:58 PM
Quote from: Slargos on April 08, 2011, 05:30:57 PM
It is my understanding that in fact, if you want ham, you can't eat it right away. It needs to be prepared first.
That is correct.

The pigs tend to react when you try to bite them.
"Stability is destabilizing." --Hyman Minsky

"Complacency can be a self-denying prophecy."
"We have nothing to fear but lack of fear itself." --Larry Summers

Jacob


CountDeMoney

Quote from: Jacob on April 08, 2011, 06:55:00 PM
Quote from: derspiess on April 08, 2011, 06:35:19 PM:lol: Pay for your own abortions & whore pills, gals.

You're a classy guy  :lol:

Yeah, there's no war on women or anything.

Razgovory

I've given it serious thought. I must scorn the ways of my family, and seek a Japanese woman to yield me my progeny. He shall live in the lands of the east, and be well tutored in his sacred trust to weave the best traditions of Japan and the Sacred South together, until such time as he (or, indeed his house, which will periodically require infusion of both Southern and Japanese bloodlines of note) can deliver to the South it's independence, either in this world or in space.  -Lettow April of 2011

Raz is right. -MadImmortalMan March of 2017

Neil

I think that abortions are important, especially for poor people and minorities (who are usually poor).  If they had to pay more, your country would be awash in scum, even more than it already is.
I do not hate you, nor do I love you, but you are made out of atoms which I can use for something else.

Neil

Quote from: Razgovory on April 08, 2011, 07:11:09 PM
Quote from: Jacob on April 08, 2011, 06:55:00 PM
Quote from: derspiess on April 08, 2011, 06:35:19 PM:lol: Pay for your own abortions & whore pills, gals.
You're a classy guy  :lol:
I'm sort of with Derspiess here. :ph34r:
In theory I would be too.  It's hard to feel bad for the pieces of shit who go out and protest.

However, the social utility of Planned Parenthood means I'm willing to ignore their sense of entitlement.
I do not hate you, nor do I love you, but you are made out of atoms which I can use for something else.

HisMajestyBOB

Quote from: The EconomistIT IS bad enough that Republicans and Democrats are so divided on how much to spend and tax. But if you want to feel really gloomy about America's ability to tackle its deficit, consider the ideological, almost theological, arguments about tax that are taking place within the Republican camp itself. In the past few weeks these have been revealed in all their dreadful clarity by an esoteric debate about the tax break for ethanol.

To balance the budget you can spend less or tax more. The Republicans are allergic to tax increases, and since their capture of the House of Representatives in November's mid-term elections have succeeded in focusing the debate almost exclusively on what should be cut. One bit of spending that has caught the eye of Tom Coburn, the Republican senator for Oklahoma, is the $6 billion a year the government doles out in tax breaks to refiners who blend ethanol into their petrol. By general consent, this is not money well spent. Farmers may relish receiving taxpayers' money to grow the corn that goes into ethanol, but corn-based ethanol is not the green fuel it is cracked up to be. Almost as much energy is used to make it as when it is burned. Here, you would think, is one subsidy that any Republican fiscal conservative in his right mind would want to get rid of.

Senator Coburn, being in his right mind, has proposed an amendment that would scrap the subsidy. As it happens, he was a member of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson deficit-reduction commission set up last year by Barack Obama. The president has paid scant attention to the commission's report since it was published in December. But Senator Coburn continues to tell anyone who will listen that nothing is more urgent for America than to reduce its Himalaya of debt before the bond markets take fright and slap on punitive rates of interest before they lend more. He is one of six senators, three from each party, working discreetly behind the scenes in search of a compromise. As for ethanol, the senator is under no illusion that scrapping the subsidy is a solution to the deficit problem. It is a drop in the ocean. But, hell, the tax credit is a waste of public money and should be scrapped. Who on the tax-cutting side of the debate could argue with that?

Grover Norquist: that's who. And on the face of it this is peculiar. Mr Norquist is the pugnacious founder of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a mighty pressure group that deems taxes no less of an evil than alcohol was in the eyes of the 19th-century temperance movements. He and the ATR put fierce pressure on politicians at every level of government to sign the "taxpayer protection pledge", a promise to oppose any increase in the marginal tax rate on individuals and firms. No fewer than 237 House members and 41 senators have done so. The aim of the association is to reduce the power of government by making taxes "simpler, flatter, more visible, and lower than they are today". You might think such an organisation would jump at the chance to eliminate a distortion as gratuitous as the ethanol subsidy.

You might think so, but you would be wrong. That is because, in Mr Norquist's book, taking away a tax break has an iniquitous corollary. Ending the ethanol credit will increase federal tax revenues and so make available to the government money that can be spent on other things. And since government spending is the underlying evil on which Mr Norquist believes all policy should focus, the tax break for ethanol (and other such credits, loopholes and distortions) must not be eliminated unless the extra revenue they will put in federal coffers is taken out again in the form of an equal tax cut somewhere else. After all, he told the Washington Post last month, "The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit."

Herein lies the great difference between the philosophies of Mr Norquist and Senator Coburn. The former is a sworn enemy of government spending. The latter would like to cut taxes and shrink the state, but cares most about the need to cut the deficit. He thinks the Norquist position is dotty. "By opposing my amendment", he told the ATR, "you are defending wasteful spending and a de facto tax increase on every American. Ethanol subsidies are a spending programme placed in the tax code that increases the burden of government, keeps tax rates artificially high, and forces consumers to pay more for fuel and energy."

Tax reductio ad absurdum

Senator Coburn has the better of this argument. Even the Wall Street Journal, one of Mr Norquist's admirers, said in an editorial this week that the compelling taxpayer interest in this case is to end a policy that is "driving up the cost of food and fuel with no benefit for the environment or American energy security."

But the significance of the quarrel goes well beyond ethanol. Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser to Ronald Reagan, laments the fact that Senator Coburn is one of too few Republicans who understand the need for higher revenues and not just spending cuts. To tame the deficit by cuts alone would require such deep ones that the Republicans could not hope to pass them without winning back the White House and a filibuster-proof majority of fiscal hawks in the Senate. And it might not happen even in that impossible event. When the Republicans last had full control, in the 2000s, they cut nothing except taxes, and added to entitlements.

At its best America is open-minded and pragmatic. These qualities will be needed in abundance if its political class is to rescue it from its burden of debt. Some mix of spending cuts and tax rises is inevitable. So it is encouraging that a conservative such as Senator Coburn is willing to work with Democrats and take on the fiscal fundamentalists of the ATR. Then again, the senator is not seeking re-election. Very few other Republicans in the Senate, to say nothing of the tea-party-beholden freshmen in the House, will find pragmatism on taxes so easy to contemplate.

Sigh...
Three lovely Prada points for HoI2 help

JonasSalk

Free abortions for minorities; ban abortions for white people. This is the way to fix our Democrat problem.
Yuman

DGuller

Quote from: JonasSalk on April 08, 2011, 08:48:00 PM
Free abortions for minorities; ban abortions for white people. This is the way to fix our Democrat problem.
That crosses the line just a tad, don't you think?

derspiess

"If you can play a guitar and harmonica at the same time, like Bob Dylan or Neil Young, you're a genius. But make that extra bit of effort and strap some cymbals to your knees, suddenly people want to get the hell away from you."  --Rich Hall