Obama's Undoing

[Fairweather]

I've had profs who taught shit-faced drunk, profs who forgot what they were lecturing about mid-class, profs who stood up in front of classes and said "Hey, they can't fire me. I've got tenure".

 

Academia is just as full of buffoons as any other walk of life.

 

I'm glad you're willing to verify Joseph's claim, but I think you're being a little hard on the old guy.

 

 

[tvashtarkatena]

I actually know someone in one of FW's classes. Apparently, he fawns over his maestro sporting a short little skirt, with the words "Love" and "U" henna tattooed to his fluttering eyelids.

[tvashtarkatena]

NTTAWWT

[Fairweather]

NTTAWWT

 

??

 

I'm not up to date on my textspeak.

[tvashtarkatena]

Read up

[prole]

You'll have to talk to the good people at UW about that, but a search with your full name + professor reveals nothing. Your writing skills and general disposition also give me pause vis a vis your claim.

 

As someone who's done a fair bit of editing in an academic context, I can tell you this statement would be much stronger if you began it with "methinks".

[Fairweather]

Nice to see those Seinfeld reruns are helping to fill your lonely days.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

That's funny, since I learned it at a local university. But the real issue here is the shrinking radius of your aging, LSD-addled brain.

 

fixed that for ya

 

 

 

[JosephH]

Quite a fixation on LSD for a guy that doesn't know the first thing about it.

[tvashtarkatena]

Also, the 'radius' of a human brain doesn't exactly bespeak of even simple training in geometry, which as I recall was taught in grade school, methinks.

[tvashtarkatena]

Perhaps our FW is going rogue with the language.

[Fairweather]

Methinks the aggregate distance from your own hypothalamus to surface structures is receding as well. Did she take the CD collection too?

[StevenSeagal]

 

Right, I get it. The religious folks are the real bad guys.

 

No. The point was that religious beliefs or non beliefs are one thing, while political activism on behalf of one's spiritual views is another matter and one for which no single group can be blamed.

 

But the joke is actually the liberal's declaration of tolerance which masks his intolerance. A day may come when religious preference of belief and action is reduced to mere window dressing to appease the liberal's sense of the state-imposed ideal society. What was written (the purported demonization) is the same medicine the liberal tries to force on his opponent whether it be the conservative, the libertarian, or whatnot but suddenly he doesn't like the taste of it?

 

I wasn't trying to bring politics into this, I was speaking purely of religious matters; clearly the two are inseparable for you. Was this paragraph copied from a conservative talk radio host's best selling manifesto? purported demonization- what exactly was ambiguous in what you wrote? "Medicine"...I see then, you were just using histrionics and gross exaggeration to make your point, is that it?

 

You may not be a politically active atheist but there are definitely those that are militant in imposing their view intent on silencing religion. Some think that hate crime legislation may be the beginning of the regulation of religious belief.

 

I admit that it perhaps seems odd to separate one sort of murder from another in spite of the fact that we have long done this (1st degree, 2nd, etc.) Then again, I believe that a strict interpretation of the bible calls for homos to be put to death, so I can see why fundamentalist Christians would find a law making it a special circumstances crime to assault or kill people for being gay a form of persecution.

 

If you are libertarian in mind, then none of this applies to you. So why bother? We do after all have the establishment clause of the first amendment which supports the separation of church and state. No one forces you to believe anything regarding religion.

 

I never said I felt persecuted by the law or the system, and I'd like to keep it that way. The social culture in this country however is not so accomodating to open discussion on matters of faith without politics and demonization being quickly brought out as we have seen here. It's a strange contradictory paradigm of "you can believe what you want here but just remember this is a Christian nation". And it is, but I firmly believe all the good "Christian values" that we all can agree upon can be retained no matter what kind of nation this is or might become.

 

 

[tomtom]

[video:youtube]XN-ui28SlHU

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Quite a fixation on LSD for a guy that doesn't know the first thing about it.

 

Interesting, I could say the same thing about you and your fixation on God.

 

 

[JosephH]

Not at all. The conversation here was gods, not LSD. That again and again that's the only comeback you seem capable of mustering just points out how weak your arguments are in general. You seem to have some fundamental problem with people having taken hallucigens or climbing on them, but again, without even the slightest notion of what you're talking about. When you've done some 5.13 climbing with (or even without ) it I'd be more inclined to consider your opinions as anything but fearful hobgoblin fluff.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

You seem to have some fundamental problem with people having taken hallucigens or climbing on them,

 

yes, I suspect the drug has permanently fucked up your brain

 

and your style of debate on several topics, including the Almighty only reinforce my suspicions.

 

 

[billcoe]

Your children are about to get hosed down in a big way with the big gov't schlong sans lubrication. We, reading this, will be seeing this pain all of our life as well more than likely. Thank both Bush and Obama.

 

Wave of Debt Payments Facing US Government

 

Published: Monday, 23 Nov 2009 | 6:29 AM ET

Text Size

By: Edmund L. Andrews

The New York Times

 

The United States government is financing its more than trillion-dollar-a-year borrowing with i.o.u.’s on terms that seem too good to be true.

 

But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.

 

 

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

 

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

 

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

 

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.

 

The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.

 

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.

 

The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

 

“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”

 

So far, the demand for Treasury securities from investors and other governments around the world has remained strong enough to hold down the interest rates that the United States must offer to sell them. Indeed, the government paid less interest on its debt this year than in 2008, even though it added almost $2 trillion in debt.

 

The government’s average interest rate on new borrowing last year fell below 1 percent. For short-term i.o.u.’s like one-month Treasury bills, its average rate was only sixteen-hundredths of a percent.

 

“All of the auction results have been solid,” said Matthew Rutherford, the Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary in charge of finance operations. “Investor demand has been very broad, and it’s been increasing in the last couple of years.”

 

The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.

 

“What a good country or a good squirrel should be doing is stashing away nuts for the winter,” said William H. Gross, managing director of the Pimco Group, the giant bond-management firm. “The United States is not only not saving nuts, it’s eating the ones left over from the last winter.”

 

The current low rates on the country’s debt were caused by temporary factors that are already beginning to fade. One factor was the economic crisis itself, which caused panicked investors around the world to plow their money into the comparative safety of Treasury bills and notes. Even though the United States was the epicenter of the global crisis, investors viewed Treasury securities as the least dangerous place to park their money.

 

On top of that, the Fed used almost every tool in its arsenal to push interest rates down even further. It cut the overnight federal funds rate, the rate at which banks lend reserves to one another, to almost zero. And to reduce longer-term rates, it bought more than $1.5 trillion worth of Treasury bonds and government-guaranteed securities linked to mortgages.

 

Those conditions are already beginning to change. Global investors are shifting money into riskier investments like stocks and corporate bonds, and they have been pouring money into fast-growing countries like Brazil and China.

 

The Fed, meanwhile, is already halting its efforts at tamping down long-term interest rates. Fed officials ended their $300 billion program to buy up Treasury bonds last month, and they have announced plans to stop buying mortgage-backed securities by the end of next March.

 

 

Eventually, though probably not until at least mid-2010, the Fed will also start raising its benchmark interest rate back to more historically normal levels.

 

The United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt. Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.

 

Even a small increase in interest rates has a big impact. An increase of one percentage point in the Treasury’s average cost of borrowing would cost American taxpayers an extra $80 billion this year — about equal to the combined budgets of the Department of Energy and the Department of Education.

 

But that could seem like a relatively modest pinch. Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, estimated that the Treasury’s tab for debt service this year would have been $221 billion higher if it had faced the same interest rates as it did last year.

 

The White House estimates that the government will have to borrow about $3.5 trillion more over the next three years. On top of that, the Treasury has to refinance, or roll over, a huge amount of short-term debt that was issued during the financial crisis. Treasury officials estimate that about 36 percent of the government’s marketable debt — about $1.6 trillion — is coming due in the months ahead.

 

 

To lock in low interest rates in the years ahead, Treasury officials are trying to replace one-month and three-month bills with 10-year and 30-year Treasury securities. That strategy will save taxpayers money in the long run. But it pushes up costs drastically in the short run, because interest rates are higher for long-term debt.

 

Adding to the pressure, the Fed is set to begin reversing some of the policies it has been using to prop up the economy. Wall Street firms advising the Treasury recently estimated that the Fed’s purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities pushed down long-term interest rates by about one-half of a percentage point. Removing that support could in itself add $40 billion to the government’s annual tab for debt service.

 

This month, the Treasury Department’s private-sector advisory committee on debt management warned of the risks ahead.

 

“Inflation, higher interest rate and rollover risk should be the primary concerns,” declared the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee, a group of market experts that provide guidance to the government, on Nov. 4.

 

“Clever debt management strategy,” the group said, “can’t completely substitute for prudent fiscal policy.”

[JosephH]

"Wave of Debt Payments Facing US Government"

That's what happens when you get an entire population self-inducing hallucenations about their god-given right to infinite prosperity.

[ivan]

"Wave of Debt Payments Facing US Government"

That's what happens when you get an entire population self-inducing hallucenations about their god-given right to infinite prosperity.

rimshot!

[billcoe]

Blame the victim.

 

Actually, I believe you made a poignant observation on paying for these wars a couple of years ago. The bill for all that used ordinance is coming due and is still being put off as yet, thus the larger budget figures and accumulating debt......

 

Last night I finally finished off the book, "Lenins Tomb". Basically the fall of the USSR and of the Communist party becoming illegal in Russia. The party and the USSR economy got rocked in Afganistan, and it couldn't afford the bill and the psychic wound. There are those in Russia predicting the same for us now. Total collapse of the capitalist system.....I don't buy into it, but there are plenty of reliable institutions and people mapping out gloom and doom scenarios for our country in the next few years.

[JosephH]

I agree with that. But I also think that recent conservatives have deliberately employed economic bubbling as cover for and as a distraction from their adventurism. From my perspective a good deal of the bill we're paying now is for Reagan outspending the Russians; funny how conservatives thought that bill would only come due for the Russians. In reality that little contest weakened both the U.S. and Russia and played no small part in China's recent ascendency.

[Pete_H]

 

and your style of debate on several topics, including the Almighty only reinforce my suspicions.

 

 

Yup. Joseph's utilization of reason and logic pretty much confirms he isn't a right-wing religious ideolouge such as yourself.

[prole]

Your children are about to get hosed down in a big way with the big gov't schlong sans lubrication. We, reading this, will be seeing this pain all of our life as well more than likely. Thank both Bush and Obama.

 

The rest of the world will be relieved to have a place to lay their blame.

 

The United States will not be the only government competing to refinance huge debt. Japan, Germany, Britain and other industrialized countries have even higher government debt loads, measured as a share of their gross domestic product, and they too borrowed heavily to combat the financial crisis and economic downturn. As the global economy recovers and businesses raise capital to finance their growth, all that new government debt is likely to put more upward pressure on interest rates.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Yup. Joseph's utilization of reason and logic pretty much confirms he isn't a right-wing religious ideolouge such as yourself.

 

yeah, just like on his tirades on climbing style

 

the dude is a kook