President Obama Re-Elected - Page 284

On August 14 2012 11:31 Darknat wrote:
I haven't really been following the election. Has one of the candidates said that they will turn the government's focus on defense, NASA and infrastructure?

On August 14 2012 11:41 aksfjh wrote:


Nope. Only Obama has any plan to expand spending at all, and only on infrastructure. Romney wants to cut it all (but not much on military).

On August 14 2012 13:43 Defacer wrote:

Meh, I'm not an economist. It just seems like the Ryan/Romney plan of decreasing regulation AND taxes AND government spending is a recipe for Capitalist darwinism, where every household has to make $150,000 just to cover their expenses, education and have health insurance. I'm sure that's a gross simplification, but that just my two cents.

On August 14 2012 14:15 coverpunch wrote:

Why does low regulation, low tax, and low government spending create social darwinism?

In fact, social darwinism is a doctrine that requires large regulation, high taxes, and large government spending to justify and enforce and entrench wealth. "Too big to fail" isn't a product of capitalism, that's a product of a big government. If you let capitalism do its thing, most of the rotten banks would have just failed and lots of 1%ers would have lost most of their savings just like everyone else. Whether that's desirable is an entirely different question, I'm just saying a free market has no mercy for businesses.

The reason why deregulation is not as good as promised is because when push comes to shove, we do think some businesses are too big to fail and we don't let those bad managers suffer the consequences of their excess risks. If you let those big companies go bankrupt and threw managers who commit fraud in jail, then you'd scare deregulated industries into making better decisions. But if you let managers take the risks of a deregulated industry but then you bail them out after they screw up, that's a recipe for disaster.

So the question for Romney is not to complain that he wants less regulation but to ask where he's going with it. If he's willing to let bad companies fail even if they're large and/or he's willing to enforce the fewer regulations that he'll leave behind, then he's on to something. If he's calling for deregulation to be even more lax out of a terribly misguided sense of what it means to be "pro-business", then he has a serious problem.

I think it's a legitimate gripe to say Obama has just put a lot more regulations on the books that he's not going to enforce. He slaps Iran with fresh sanctions last year and then caught Standard Chartered laundering Iranian money in the US for at least a year, and he's just negotiating a settlement rather than giving them the hammer. And that's horseshit. You can't possibly support Obama adding more regulations and then selling the rule of law for $500 million.

On August 14 2012 20:18 DoubleReed wrote:


"Too big to fail" isn't big government. The bailout is big government, but the companies getting so large that their failure could destroy the US economy is anything but big government. Forcing the company to break up so that they cannot get "too big to fail" is big government. It is the government breaking up a company.

In a capitalist system, it is far easier to for those with money to make more money. So a the low-tax, deregulated, low spending would be socially darwinist, as it would greatly raise the income gaps between people in our society. It would make it even more easier for the rich to make lots more money, and make it much harder for the poor to make more money.

On August 14 2012 20:18 DoubleReed wrote:


"Too big to fail" isn't big government. The bailout is big government, but the companies getting so large that their failure could destroy the US economy is anything but big government. Forcing the company to break up so that they cannot get "too big to fail" is big government. It is the government breaking up a company.

In a capitalist system, it is far easier to for those with money to make more money. So a the low-tax, deregulated, low spending would be socially darwinist, as it would greatly raise the income gaps between people in our society. It would make it even more easier for the rich to make lots more money, and make it much harder for the poor to make more money.

On August 15 2012 02:17 xDaunt wrote:
In case anyone missed it, the debate schedule was announced yesterday. The first one will take place on October 3. Personally, I'm looking forward to the VP debate. Ryan is going to run circles around Biden.

On August 15 2012 02:23 Mohdoo wrote:


How do you see Obama vs Romney going?

On August 15 2012 02:23 Mohdoo wrote:


How do you see Obama vs Romney going?

On August 15 2012 02:23 Mohdoo wrote:


How do you see Obama vs Romney going?

On August 15 2012 02:37 xDaunt wrote:

I think people are going to be surprised at how well Romney does. He was consistently one of the top performers during the primary debates, and very solid overall. I also think that Obama is incredibly overrated with regards to debates. Let's be honest with ourselves: McCain was a weak opponent who pulled all sorts of punches in pursuit of his misguided ideal of having an "honorable" election. Romney is not going to give Obama that same pass.

More importantly, Obama is not going to be able to get by strictly on rhetoric anymore. He has a record that he's going to have to explain. I'm sure that he'll do his best to make the conversation about Romney (just look at all the discussion in this thread about Romney and Ryan's plans and the lack of discussion about what Obama has put on the table [not that there's much]), but, to an extent, he's going to have to face the music.

On August 15 2012 02:48 xDaunt wrote:

I wasn't aware that anyone was going to take seriously a budget that had already been rejected by the senate 97-0. Who says there's no bipartisanship in Washington?

EDIT: Sorry, it was Obama's 2012 budget that was shot down 97-0 in the Senate. Obama's 2013 budget was rejected 99-0 in the Senate and 414-0 in the House.

While the Sessions and Mulvaney bills put forward the same topline numbers as those in the president’s budget, neither offered any specifics. The Sessions legislation was 56 pages long; actual budgets are closer to 2,000 pages long.

On August 15 2012 02:48 xDaunt wrote:

I wasn't aware that anyone was going to take seriously a budget that had already been rejected by the senate 97-0. Who says there's no bipartisanship in Washington?

EDIT: Sorry, it was Obama's 2012 budget that was shot down 97-0 in the Senate. Obama's 2013 budget was rejected 99-0 in the Senate and 414-0 in the House.

On August 15 2012 03:06 aksfjh wrote:




http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/house-and-senate-unanimously-reject-obama-budgets-or-do-they/

Talk about not sharing the entire story xDaunt. I don't know why, but I expected more from you...

On August 15 2012 02:17 xDaunt wrote:
In case anyone missed it, the debate schedule was announced yesterday. The first one will take place on October 3. Personally, I'm looking forward to the VP debate. Ryan is going to run circles around Biden.

Ryan is not a “fiscal conservative.” A fiscal conservative pays for the government he wants. Ryan never has. His early “Roadmap for America’s Future” didn’t balance the budget until the 2060s and added $60 trillion to the national debt. Ryan’s revised plan, passed by the House in 2011, wouldn’t reach balance until the 2030s while adding $14 trillion in debt. It adds $6 trillion in debt over the next decade alone — yet Republicans had the chutzpah to say they wouldn’t raise the debt limit! (I remain mystified why President Obama never hammered home this reckless contradiction by insisting that the GOP “raise the debt ceiling just by the amount it would take to accommodate the debt in Paul Ryan’s budget.”)

Ryan is an extreme “small government conservative.” Ronald Reagan ran government at 22 percent of gross domestic product when our population was much younger. Ryan and Romney want to run government at 20 percent of GDP even as the number of Americans on Social Security and Medicare doubles. Even if we slow these programs’ growth, it’s impossible to shrink the federal role in an aging society this sharply without eliminating vast swaths of what Americans have come to expect from government — not to mention shortchanging already lagging investments in research and development and infrastructure. Over time, Ryan’s “vision” would decimate most federal activities beyond Social Security, Medicare and defense.

When I asked Ryan last October why he thought — in his words — “the historic size [of government as a share of GDP], or smaller,” was sound policy when we’d shortly be doubling the number of seniors on the biggest federal programs, he replied, “Because we can’t keep doing everything for everybody in this country.”

Ryan says that on our current path we will “transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.” But I’ve never understood what hammock Ryan is talking about. If programs for seniors haven’t been a “hammock” until now, simply doubling the number of people eligible for them can’t turn them into a “hammock” tomorrow. We have an aging population challenge and a health-cost challenge. We don’t have a “hammock” challenge.

On August 15 2012 03:19 SkyCrawler wrote:


I'm not surprised. You've always been misleading so I never take anything you post seriously anymore.