j_b

Not only did Attila have to express his support for Fairweather's use of Fox race baiting propaganda but he also felt compelled to inflict us with his "you are the racist for discussing race baiting by regressives" brand of logic. Wasn't that special?

Government budget shortfall isn't the cause of our economic woes but merely it consequence. Most evidence suggest that cutting necessary spending and economic stimuli will make the crisis significantly worse. The former darling of free markets zealots, Ireland, reminds us daily of these facts.

Check out Fairweather's use of race baiting graphics by Fox about the New Black Panther Party (a tiny group of racist black nationalists). Fox infotainment employees have cited 1000's of times an isolated incident involving the NBPP to incite racial fear and hatred with their elderly white viewers. Only neanderthals of the worse kind would regurgitate that malodorous spew!

Why is it that what JayB claims has no value like tasty, healthy food and the environment is valued by so many? How come JayB's math is so screwed up?

Take note of how our little stormtrooper regurgitates Fox propaganda about election fraud when in fact there have been very few cases of confirmed election fraud. Fox and their minions like FW never discuss evidence of minority voter suppression by the right wing which in turn is very common during all elections (like Florida 2000 or Ohio 2006)

hey Fox watching retard, your story has nothing to do with the initial post. ACORN was cleared of all charges. If "proven" election fraud by individuals was a reason for being driven out of business the Republican party would have ceased to exist many decades ago. And stop lying!

Except that pensions have little to do with the budget deficit today so we should talk about tweeks for the future. Today other things have to be done like increasing revenue, decreasing obvious unnecessary spending on wars, and spend money to create jobs. Cutting programs and the workforce now will make the economic crisis worse and could well kick us into a depression

The country is being bombarded with stories claiming that record budget deficits threaten our children's future and jeopardize the credibility of the dollar. These stories are a serious problem -- they have hugely confused the public about the nature of the country's economic crisis. And both parties share the blame. Starting with the reality behind the scare stories -- trillion-dollar deficits are really huge relative to the money that any of us will ever see in our lifetime. But this is an absurd measure. The United States is a country with more than 300 million people. It doesn't matter that a trillion dollars is a huge amount to any of us individually. What matters is the size of the deficit and the debt relative to the size of the economy. Only people who want to deceive the public would talk about the deficit or debt in "trillions" of dollars. This is a very simple lie-detector test since honest economists and policy analysts always refer to these sums relative to the size of the economy. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficits that we are running are large and the debt that we are projected to incur is substantial, but the deficit level is still not coming close to the levels hit in World War II. Nor is the debt level projected to reach post-war peaks or the levels sustained by countries like Italy and Japan. The idea that we are near some debt-driven crisis is absurd on its face. The United States had the strongest period of growth in its history in the three decades following World War II. This undeniable fact should put to rest the idea that our debt levels will threaten the prosperity of future generations. We hand our children a whole economy and society. If we give them a bad education, a decayed infrastructure, a ruined environment, then we will be jeopardizing our children's economic well-being. However, the debt levels we are currently projecting aren't even large enough to make it to the list of serious problems. The claim that the dollar faces an imminent crisis because of the budget deficit or national debt is readily refuted by the example of Japan. Japan already has a debt to GDP level that is far larger than we are projected to have by the end of the next decade. In spite of this debt burden, investors are willing to hold ten-year Japanese government bonds at just a 1.5 percent interest rate. If these debt burdens are supposed to make Japan a high risk, someone forgot to tell the people who are putting billions of dollars on the line by holding Japanese government bonds. There is another side of this Japan story that makes the idiocy of the deficit scare stories even more apparent. According to the deficit fear mongers, the dollar has been falling in recent months because investors are becoming increasingly worried about the U.S. government's ability to pay off its debt. But one of the currencies that the dollar has fallen against is the yen. Are investors who are worried about the U.S. government's ability to pay off its debt selling dollars to buy the bonds of the Japanese government, which has an even higher debt burden? Let's face it: The deficit hawks will say anything to advance their agenda. Even worse, the media will print it. Dean Baker.Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dean-baker/the-budget-deficit-crisis_b_367867.html

Why are we talking "balancing the budget" with people who dismiss the social and environmental costs of doing business? They don't know what's a budget.

It's a classic bait and switch. Their criminal policies caused the budget deficit as well as the financial crash that broke the economy and caused revenue shortfall. Why are we even talking about programs that have nothing to do with causing the deficit.

Fine but let's start with obvious things. Jobs/pensions and benefits are off the table until they return the loot, until we get single payer health care to get cost under control and we slash the military budget.

We are going to make people pay for the deficit and let Bush's friends enjoy the 2 trillions they didn't pay in taxes. Anybody not bringing up this fact while discussing balancing the budget is a charlatan.

Unlike the economists who want to cut spendings this guy actually warned about the real estate bubble very early on. The Myth of Expansionary Fiscal Austerity October 2010, Dean Baker Recently governments, economists, and international financial institutions have been debating the merits of further fiscal stimulus to combat the Great Recession versus fiscal austerity or “adjustment” – that is, higher taxes and/or lower government spending – to combat budget deficits. Some supporters of austerity have gone as far as arguing that fiscal adjustment could restore economic growth. These analyses are being touted to oppose increased stimulus to boost the economy. This paper examines the arguments for austerity and demonstrates that current economic conditions in the United States do not support the case for fiscal adjustment. http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-myth-of-expansionary-fiscal-austerity JayB forgets to mention that Ireland has already gone through one round of austerity measures and the economy and the budget deficit have worsened considerably. ALso remember how Ireland was praised as one of the best student of the new economic order and had one of the fastest "growing" economy due to deregulation of financial and labor markets before the crash.

Once again, total failure in logic. What these so-called liberals did has nothing to do with conservatives usually being warmongers, like you for example.

2 points: - Krugman is using a euphemism when he says that Obama made a 'mistake'. Nobody makes these kinds of 'mistake' in politics. Obama effectively handed to the looters the opportunity to frame the discussion on deficit reduction. It is perfectly reasonable to ask why he did that and the answer probably has to do with my second point. - there is no mandate to reduce the deficit at this point in time. In fact, reducing the deficit is far down the list of what concerns Americans today. The only mandate is to create jobs, not to cut the social safety net and lay off people like neoliberals and their "small government" sycophants are planning to do.

The Hijacked Commission By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: November 11, 2010 Count me among those who always believed that President Obama made a big mistake when he created the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform — a supposedly bipartisan panel charged with coming up with solutions to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems. It seemed obvious, as soon as the commission’s membership was announced, that “bipartisanship” would mean what it so often does in Washington: a compromise between the center-right and the hard-right. My misgivings increased as we got a better feel for the views of the commission’s co-chairmen. It soon became clear that Erskine Bowles, the Democratic co-chairman, had a very Republican-sounding small-government agenda. Meanwhile, Alan Simpson, the Republican co-chairman, revealed the kind of honest broker he is by sending an abusive e-mail to the executive director of the National Older Women’s League in which he described Social Security as being “like a milk cow with 310 million tits.” We’ve known for a long time, then, that nothing good would come from the commission. But on Wednesday, when the co-chairmen released a PowerPoint outlining their proposal, it was even worse than the cynics expected. Start with the declaration of “Our Guiding Principles and Values.” Among them is, “Cap revenue at or below 21% of G.D.P.” This is a guiding principle? And why is a commission charged with finding every possible route to a balanced budget setting an upper (but not lower) limit on revenue? Matters become clearer once you reach the section on tax reform. The goals of reform, as Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson see them, are presented in the form of seven bullet points. “Lower Rates” is the first point; “Reduce the Deficit” is the seventh. So how, exactly, did a deficit-cutting commission become a commission whose first priority is cutting tax rates, with deficit reduction literally at the bottom of the list? Actually, though, what the co-chairmen are proposing is a mixture of tax cuts and tax increases — tax cuts for the wealthy, tax increases for the middle class. They suggest eliminating tax breaks that, whatever you think of them, matter a lot to middle-class Americans — the deductibility of health benefits and mortgage interest — and using much of the revenue gained thereby, not to reduce the deficit, but to allow sharp reductions in both the top marginal tax rate and in the corporate tax rate. It will take time to crunch the numbers here, but this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward, from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans. And what does any of this have to do with deficit reduction? Let’s turn next to Social Security. There were rumors beforehand that the commission would recommend a rise in the retirement age, and sure enough, that’s what Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson do. They want the age at which Social Security becomes available to rise along with average life expectancy. Is that reasonable? The answer is no, for a number of reasons — including the point that working until you’re 69, which may sound doable for people with desk jobs, is a lot harder for the many Americans who still do physical labor. But beyond that, the proposal seemingly ignores a crucial point: while average life expectancy is indeed rising, it’s doing so mainly for high earners, precisely the people who need Social Security least. Life expectancy in the bottom half of the income distribution has barely inched up over the past three decades. So the Bowles-Simpson proposal is basically saying that janitors should be forced to work longer because these days corporate lawyers live to a ripe old age. Still, can’t we say that for all its flaws, the Bowles-Simpson proposal is a serious effort to tackle the nation’s long-run fiscal problem? No, we can’t. It’s true that the PowerPoint contains nice-looking charts showing deficits falling and debt levels stabilizing. But it becomes clear, once you spend a little time trying to figure out what’s going on, that the main driver of those pretty charts is the assumption that the rate of growth in health-care costs will slow dramatically. And how is this to be achieved? By “establishing a process to regularly evaluate cost growth” and taking “additional steps as needed.” What does that mean? I have no idea. It’s no mystery what has happened on the deficit commission: as so often happens in modern Washington, a process meant to deal with real problems has been hijacked on behalf of an ideological agenda. Under the guise of facing our fiscal problems, Mr. Bowles and Mr. Simpson are trying to smuggle in the same old, same old — tax cuts for the rich and erosion of the social safety net. Can anything be salvaged from this wreck? I doubt it. The deficit commission should be told to fold its tents and go away. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/opinion/12krugman.html?ref=opinion

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One rule of thumb for mushroom picking is to pick only what you know. Picking to identify later is a good way to eat something nasty. Besides the ones already mentioned, black trumpets are quite flavorful and fairly common, especially in Oregon but, in my experience, chanterelles and angel wings are the most common on the west side of the Cascades.

Somehow, all of this while Obama is out of the country ... It wouldn't have happened differently if they had planned on a one term presidency. We may get a worthwhile 3rd party candidacy, so it may not have been in vain after all.

There are those who rhetorically bash the military for its role in the empire, and the real scumbags who don't want to fund veteran health care and benefits at the appropriate level after they sent them in harms way for resources and profits. They usually are of opposite political persuasion and you know which is which. catfood commission proposal for vets and active service members: "want to add co-pays to the Veterans’ Administration and TRICARE, as well as pushing individuals covered by TRICARE into an employer policy. They also want to freeze noncombat military pay for three years. And, they want to end schools for families on military bases, instead reintegrating soldier’s kids into the public school system (because that’s so easy for a military family that moves every other year)."

The two deficit-hawk extremists President Obama put in charge of his fiscal commission released their personal suggestions for cutting the federal budget deficit on Wednesday. [..] [T]aken as a whole, the plan authored by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson would have devastating effects on the government and its ability to help the most vulnerable in our society, and it would put the squeeze on the middle class, veterans, the elderly and the sick - all in the name of an abstract goal that ultimately only a bond-trader could love. Deficit commission proposal Thank you Obama.

yes, also true for many other highly qualified professions where a public employee earns less than his private sector counterpart.

I am for an income tax for everyone if the sales tax is mostly phased out. People have voted for sales taxes before so there isn't a hurdle to voting in taxes. The state and politicians, especially Democrats, have to take responsibility for 1) not confronting the anti-tax demagogues and driving them under the rock where they belong, and 2) not educating citizens about the role of government and taxes. The situation is absurd: rural counties that get subsidy for infrastructure and services they can't afford now prevent us from generating revenue, even though we all shoulder an unfair share under the current system of sales and property taxes. Bezos and co are laughing all the way to the bank.