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Post by pim on Nov 9, 2012 14:15:28 GMT 10
Yes we do but we're too busy dealing with Matt's push polling on every emotional hot button issue he can think of. It's driving us batty. So it isn't about rats but bats.
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Post by spindrift on Nov 9, 2012 14:22:27 GMT 10
Fiscal Cliff is a short hand term that is taken somewhat out of context as there will be no immediate impact on the state of affairs with the US economy....no matter what congress decides.
No immediate disaster at the beginning of 2013 as some pundits are saying, when tax hikes and budget cuts will kick , all though has the potential to be destructive over the full year. What's important to know is that Congress can act to change laws retrospectively after the previous policy deadline, as a result the fiscal cliff won't necessarily be a hindrance to growth in 2013...we have to wait on Congress and it's choices and compromises on taxes and budget cuts that were set in with the Bush government.
In short Congress could decide on just tax hikes or tax hikes and cutting programs, such as on the military...could be recessionary and a big slice of the deficit cut, or a compromise to maintain growth and a larger deficit.
All in all Obama will sort it out with Congress....don't slash your wrist just yet.
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Post by spindrift on Nov 9, 2012 14:34:40 GMT 10
Your panic is unfounded Buzzo....Congress is more conciliatory to keep the US economy afloat. Works in no ones interest to be negative for negativity sakes as the Republicans have been.
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Post by volk on Nov 9, 2012 16:20:03 GMT 10
I'm glad you can understand it all Buzzock. My tax agent explains my tax return to me each and every year and I'm still bamboozled.
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Post by spindrift on Nov 9, 2012 18:27:22 GMT 10
Someone who claims they operated a large business and now is bamboozled by his tax return in retirement...well I won't sneer or smirk, but it does show how conservatives can be so gullible... Obviously what I wrote earlier just went completely over the heads of you two boffins...blinkered to one view...the sky is going to fall in, and demonize Obama as bad, and cannot find fault with Bush who was the president that created the economic downturn...crazy stuff. For the USA to maintain growth and reduce the deficit its has either to increase taxes or reduce spending. Increasing taxes alone will reduce the deficit but will have a recessionary effect and no growth on GDP, to maintain growth and no recession though reducing the deficit less impact on the deficit, spending cuts and raising taxes is the option. Most would know that wealth in the US is highly concentrated in a few hands, the upper class. The top 1% of upper class households own 35.4% of all privately owned wealth, and the next 19%, managers, professional and small business demographic have 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89% of the privately held wealth, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the wage and salary workers. Now clearly economically it makes sense to tax the rich, which goes against the Republicans ideology of not taxing the rich and having the poor work like peasants, which is the key problem for President Obama because he has to increase taxes and reduce spending, to turn things around. If the Republicans cared for all Americans they would swallow the pill and allow the taxing of the rich,.. the danger is that the Republicans have been belligerent to any reform and would not care if the economy went into recession for their own political gain ...such is the nature of the conservative beast in its current state. Hopefully the Republicans will come to their senses and the need for the rich US to contribute to rebuilding the economy. If not the blame for world economic ruin can be laid squarely at their feet, just as the damage created by climate change and its denial it is human pollution warming the planet is their fault. Greed is no longer good...get over it.
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Post by volk on Nov 10, 2012 4:45:19 GMT 10
Someone who claims they operated a large business and now is bamboozled by his tax return in retirement...well I won't sneer or smirk, but it does show how conservatives can be so gullible... ...... You must be getting me mixed up with someone else Spindrift, I've never operated a large business. Retired yes, a former fitter/machinist & draftsman.
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Post by spindrift on Nov 10, 2012 7:53:34 GMT 10
Volk I thought you was Premier....my mistake.
Buzzo....as I have stated earlier, economist can be corrupt, indeed business itself is intrinsically corrupt in many cases, such as with piracy and govt. subsidies, your not telling us anything new. If it is a epiphany discovery for you need to get out more.
You have skimmed over what I stated about the US economy and the fact that this is not a fiscal cliff moment, it is a fiscal slope for the US with various methods to stop the slide into economic disaster.
Anyhow carry on with the hysteria....
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Post by volk on Nov 10, 2012 14:54:11 GMT 10
Volk I thought you was Premier....my mistake..... No probs.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 10, 2012 17:41:43 GMT 10
You have not taken the blindest bit of notice of what I have been saying. Well....it's like when you have a handbrake nagging at you all the time. After a while, you learn to switch off. You can still hear the handbrake nagging, but what she is saying is all gobbdygook to your brain, because your brain switches to a different bit-rate whenever the handbrake opens her mouth to speak.
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Post by spindrift on Nov 11, 2012 9:09:42 GMT 10
No one doubts a great deal of uncertainty in the US economy especially when its reported as the 'fiscal cliff', what has to be remembered is there are key measures as outline that can reduce the worst effects of the slippery slope.....to announce that this is the end of the US economy they will fall off a cliff is inaccurate, possibility it may, there is no certainty of that as you are telling us Buzz. In that regard you should state there is a possibility, not a certainty.
The worlds leading economies will be flat for some time ahead, most likely decades, growth of around 1.5% , where as China will maintain growth of around 3.5% and in that bracket India, Indonesia will be highest of around 6.5% ..to be sure Australia and the world can deal with all that.
While you are concerned with bird flu there is one big thing that will effect all people and the sustainability of any quality of life itself is anthropogenic climate change. in that bracket
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Post by Deleted on Nov 11, 2012 9:42:47 GMT 10
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Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2012 16:33:18 GMT 10
From the Los Angeles Times....Can the bozos who created the ‘fiscal cliff’ save us from itBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Tuesday, November 20, 2012Congress and the president created the 'fiscal cliff' monster. — Cartoon: David Horsey/Los Angeles Times/November 19, 2012.ON MONDAY, investors on Wall Street sent stocks soaring on the airy hope that the president and Congress will come up with a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff" that looms at the close of the year. This only proves that the masters of finance have all the emotional sophistication of 13-year-old Justin Bieber fans.
Apparently, investors so want to believe that a budget deal will be struck to keep the U.S. from falling back into a deeper recession that they have abandoned informed skepticism and opted for wishful thinking. So, before we give too much credence to earnest promises by leaders in Washington, it might be useful to recall how we got wedged into this precarious corner.
The reason we are where we are is because our elected leaders put us here. The fiscal cliff — a set of automatic draconian budget cuts and tax increases that will start taking effect on January 1st — was purposely created as a way to force the squabbling Congress and president into a budget deal. It is part of the Budget Control Act of 2011 that grew out of the near-disastrous debt ceiling showdown between President Obama and House Republicans.
The idea was that Republicans and Democrats would finally put differences aside and reach a budget compromise because both sides would be motivated by dread of automatic across-the-board cuts and tax hikes that would almost certainly hit the U.S. economy like a wrecking ball.
Well, that was in August of 2011 — about the time the 2012 election campaign was kicking into gear — and it was not until election day passed two weeks ago that anyone got serious about the looming deadline. With all that time wasted, congressional leaders came out of a White House meeting last week insisting that they could scrape together a deal before December 31st.
Much was made of Speaker of the House John Boehner’s conciliatory tone following that gathering, but the specifics of what he said seemed as rigid as ever. Boehner and his caucus — and his Budget Committee chairman, Paul Ryan — still insist they will not allow taxes on the wealthy to go back to the level of the 1990s. (That was a prosperous time, remember, before President George W. Bush arrived on the scene and slashed taxes, thereby adding to the government's inability to pay its bills.)
On the Democratic side, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is saying there is no way she will go for a deal that does not increase taxes on millionaires and billionaires. In less confrontational terms, Obama has said the same thing.
Many folks who claim to be political experts say this is mere posturing and that both sides will give up something to get a deal done — with Republicans giving up more because the president is in a commanding negotiating position having just won re-election. Perhaps they are right, but the kind of hardheaded political calculation that used to get deals done in the days of Lyndon Johnson or Tip O’Neill has given way to ideological purity.
Congress is now filled with people like tea party cheerleader Michele Bachmann who has said that maybe it would not be such a bad idea to let the country go over the fiscal cliff. Boehner will have a tough enough time cajoling Ryan into any kind of compromise; he is unlikely to ever get crusaders like Bachmann and her hyper-conservative compatriots to give him an inch or a vote.
Hard-line liberals will also be difficult to move, especially if a proposed deal threatens the status quo in Social Security or Medicare. What is needed in the House and Senate is a bipartisan effort of folks in the center. That's where all the work used to get done in the old days, but it has been a long time since anyone has pulled together a coalition of rational compromisers.
Given their track record, it is hard to see how the same crew that has run the most dysfunctional Congress in American history can suddenly transform themselves into statesmen in the few waning days of this ragged old year. Prepare to find out what is at the bottom of that cliff.www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-fiscal-cliff-20121119,0,4317319.story
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Post by Deleted on Nov 27, 2012 12:42:21 GMT 10
From the Los Angeles Times....White House not yet ready to declare a ‘fiscal cliff’ impasseBy CHRISTI PARSONS | 2:32PM - Monday, November 26, 2012White House Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Alan Krueger, right, accompanied by White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, speaks to reporters about taxes, spending and the fiscal cliff. — Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press/November 26, 2012.WASHINGTON — Aides to President Obama say it's way too early to declare an "impasse" in the talks to avert the fiscal cliff, a word that cropped up Monday on Capitol Hill.
“We remain confident we can achieve an agreement,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said. “We remain hopeful and optimistic we can reach a deal.”
Despite that insistent optimism, administration officials began to roll out a backup strategy — a public campaign that could pressure Republicans to deal and paint them as the villains if they don't.
Early in the day, the White House Council of Economic Advisors released a report projecting that, if Congress fails to act and middle-income taxes rise, consumer spending growth could decline by 1.7 percentage points.
Economic growth overall would drop by 1.4 percentage points next year, council Chair Alan Krueger told reporters in the afternoon. The automatic tax increases wouldn’t just hurt the rest of the holiday shopping season, he said, but could trim consumer spending by about $200 billion in 2013.
That’s no small matter given that the American economy has grown by a little more than 2% since the recovery began in 2009. “Retail spending is extremely important for the economy,” Krueger said.
Krueger’s team looked only at the pending tax hikes for taxpayers and not at the effects of the drastic spending cuts also set to take effect at the end of the year. He dismissed questions about whether an analysis of those defense and other cuts — already of grave concern to Republicans — would be forthcoming.
Both publicly and behind closed doors, White House officials expressed hope that the environment for negotiations would improve over the coming week. Staffers on all sides are deep in discussions right now.
Just in case, the White House has left the president’s schedule flexible for the week and isn’t disclosing what he plans to do.
One strong possibility? Obama could go back out on the stump and take his case to the people.www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-congress-fiscal-cliff-impasse-20121126,0,5536008.story
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2012 14:08:07 GMT 10
From the Los Angeles Times....Grover Norquist, GOP ayatollah, is losing his grip on the partyBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Thursday, November 29, 2012AYATOLLAHS seem to just appoint themselves and then start enforcing their own brand of orthodoxy. Grover Norquist has been doing that in the Republican Party for years.
Norquist has never been elected to anything. Nobody ever said he should be in charge of the GOP’s true religion (although he claims President Ronald Reagan urged him to found his lobbying group, Americans for Tax Reform). But he certainly has been the Republicans’ key political theologian, making opposition to tax increases the party’s central tenet for more than 25 years.
He got 95% of Republican candidates for Congress, the presidency and state offices to sign a pledge never to raise taxes and he enforced it by getting retribution at reelection time on anyone who failed to keep the promise. Now, though, he is facing a dramatic rebellion in the ranks. The country is teetering on the so-called fiscal cliff thanks to Republican-backed legislation from 2011 that will automatically begin slashing the federal budget and raise taxes on Jan. 1 if an alternative plan is not adopted by Congress. This has everyone a bit freaked out, including quite a few GOP senators and representatives who have expressed a willingness to consider revenue increases for the sake of making a budget deal with the Democrats.
Norquist calls such ruminations “impure thoughts.” He has said anyone who thinks them is “an idiot” and has warned that those who abandon the pledge will pay at the polls. Speaker of the House John Boehner continues to take a no-tax-increase stance and he is the Republicans’ key player in this confrontation with President Obama. Yet, even Boehner has opened a tiny bit of wiggle room by saying more revenue could be found by closing loopholes and trimming deductions. When asked if Norquist might reckon that as heresy, Boehner said he could not let “some random person” call the shots.
Norquist has never been random — he has been the specific guy who kept Republican officeholders in line. He is still trying to play that role, insisting that his guys will hold firm while the president caves under pressure and allows all the Bush era tax cuts to live on. But Obama never has to run for office again. He has political capital to burn while plenty of Republicans know they will inherit a heap of blame if a deal is not reached and the economy goes into a nose dive.
Ayatollahs enforce their authority by threat. In the past, Republican candidates were acutely aware of Norquist’s clout and avoided crossing him. Today, the bigger threat may be what will happen if they fail to reach a budget compromise. The election of 2012 revealed a country in transition and polls repeatedly show a big majority of voters would not be offended if the richest Americans got bumped up to the tax rates they paid in the Clinton years. Minds may be changing and, if the faithful no longer heed his call, Ayatollah Norquist will be demoted to just another Beltway lobbyist.www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-norquist-gop-ayatollah-20121128,0,7052403.story
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2012 14:11:14 GMT 10
There is no hope. Bozos is exactly right - the Bozos who advise Obama are the same Bozos who advised Bush and Clinton and Bush and Regan. The Bozos have made this mess not the idiots elected as president. Tend to agree Buzz. It's a very dangerous situation and Obama bought popularity with tommorrows budget.
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Post by garfield on Nov 30, 2012 14:46:09 GMT 10
Obama has asked NASA to step up the search for intelligent life on other planets, he is hoping he can find an advanced civilization with a banking system so that he can borrow money from them to keep on funding his socialist dream.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2012 14:56:34 GMT 10
Well he can find enough money for 11 lawyers to keep his University records sealed - wonder why?
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2012 19:17:07 GMT 10
From the Los Angeles Times....Fiscal cliff is a trap Republicans have set for themselvesBy DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM - Tuesday, December 04, 2012SATURDAY NIGHT, I attended a wonderfully raucous dinner party where politics was as much a main course as the grass-fed beef. New York Times columnist Tim Egan – a good friend and a superb writer – was sitting two plates down the table from me and, late in the evening, he was expressing disbelief that members of the U.S. Congress would be crazy enough to drive the country off a "fiscal cliff."
Egan made the point that families dependent on unemployment checks, as well as other needy Americans, will suffer unless a budget agreement forestalls the huge federal budget cuts and tax increases that are primed to kick in on January 1st. I raised my voice (there were plenty of raised voices throughout the meal) to argue that members of Congress will take the risk anyway believing that most of the bad things that might happen can be undone even after the deadline has passed.
Tim and I then got caught up framing an analogy based on the climactic scene in the movie, “Thelma and Louise”. If members of Congress can willingly crash and still repair the damage, would it be like rewinding the film after the car flew off the cliff but before it hit the hard ground below? Would they land, but softly on a big, deflating air cushion? Between Representative John Boehner and President Obama, who is Thelma and who is Louise?
Thinking about it now, free of the influence of excellent red wine, it strikes me that the fiscal cliff metaphor has skewed the way people look at the issue, just as the too-easily mocked term “global warming” misleads people into simplistically thinking only of hotter days, not extremes of temperature and weather, rising seas and parched land. What we face at the start of 2013 is not a cliff but a slippery slope. The government will not immediately shut down, nor will defense industries go under or national parks be sold to mining companies. Cuts will phase in gradually and will undoubtedly be scaled way back once members of Congress and the president agree to do so. It is all a question of timing and who gives up what.
At its heart, the current impasse over a budget deal comes down to the GOP’s unwillingness to let George W. Bush-era tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans expire. Obama insists this has to happen and House Speaker Boehner says it will not. The obvious weakness in the Republican position is that the Democrats know they will get what they want — more revenue from the wealthy — either because the Republicans capitulate and make it part of a budget package before January 1st or because that date arrives with no agreement and the tax cuts disappear automatically. This makes them strongly inclined to play hardball. The chairwoman of the Senate Budget Committee, Washington state's Democratic Senator Patty Murray, has made it clear she is willing to brave the fiscal cliff rather than do a deal with Republicans that, as she has said, “throws middle-class families under the bus” while, once again, rewarding the rich folks who have done so exceedingly well in recent decades.
Republicans have to know protecting the upper-income tax cuts is a lost cause, yet they are loath to deal them away. That would amount to raising taxes, something most Republicans have pledged never to do. Perversely, this gives them an incentive to postpone a deal until after the start of the year. They can claim they did not cave to Obama, while Grover Norquist will not be able to hold them accountable for the tax hike.
However, playing the game that way would waste the Republicans’ biggest bargaining chip. Right now, they could trade the rich people’s tax cut for major reductions in federal spending. That is the path to the best deal the Republicans can expect, but their leverage disappears at the end of the day on December 31st.
When Republicans created the fiscal cliff as a means to force a grand bargain on the budget, they must have assumed Democrats would go soft in a game of chicken. Instead, it appears Obama, Murray and the Democrats have looked over the fiscal cliff and are not all that frightened by what they see. Politically speaking, the scariest thing at the bottom of that cliff is the trap Republicans have set for themselves.www.latimes.com/news/politics/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-trap-republicans-20121203,0,2922674.story
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Post by garfield on Dec 5, 2012 19:24:08 GMT 10
Gibbering spamming idiot! ... why don't you blow us all away one day and actually give us a spamless post of your own own thoughts on something for a change ... alternatively you could just paste a picture of a steaming turd, same thing really.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2012 19:27:11 GMT 10
Gibbering spamming idiot! ... why don't you blow us all away one day and actually give us a spamless post of your own own thoughts on something for a change ... alternatively you could just paste a picture of a steaming turd, same thing really. Well, it's quite simple actually.
Those dumb rightie idiots (the GOP) created a time-bomb.
And now that time-bomb is about to blow up in their faces.
Haw haw haw....and do you know what is hilariously funny? They could stop that time-bomb ticking at any time by agreeing to tax rises for the filthy greedy rich. Chuckle....oooops, I forgot....it is automatically going to happen anyway come the 1st of January.
Smate....righties are sooooooooo dumb, eh?
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Post by garfield on Dec 5, 2012 19:30:44 GMT 10
Gibbering spamming idiot! ... why don't you blow us all away one day and actually give us a spamless post of your own own thoughts on something for a change ... alternatively you could just paste a picture of a steaming turd, same thing really. Well, it's quite simple actually.
Those dumb rightie idiots (the GOP) created a time-bomb.
And now that time-bomb is about to blow up in their faces.
Haw haw haw....and do you know what is hilariously funny? They could stop that time-bomb ticking at any time by agreeing to tax rises for the filthy greedy rich. Chuckle....oooops, I forgot....it is automatically going to happen anyway come the 1st of January.
Smate....righties are sooooooooo dumb, eh? I was expecting so much more yet resigned myself to getting so much less, I wasn't dissapointed.
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Post by garfield on Dec 5, 2012 20:04:49 GMT 10
Taxing the rich LOL, they calculated that if they they removed every single cent of Warren Buffet's wealth it would only run the US Government for a few weeks, trouble with taxing the rich is there really aint that many of them around unlike the poor, its so much easier to to get just a few dollars extra off the poor than it is to get a big wad of cash off the rich, of course that doesn't satisfy the burn the witch ( rich ) mentality does it?, and thats the current kooky human nature cycle we find ourselves in.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2012 20:21:45 GMT 10
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Post by matt on Dec 5, 2012 20:27:48 GMT 10
The U.S Federal Government doesn't owe that much. The debt is held within government agencies. One agency lends money to the other agency. Only half the federal debt is held outside the government.
The U.S. Congress could pass legislation tomorrow fiddling with numbers, and the United States could almost be debt free.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 5, 2012 20:37:34 GMT 10
The Federal Reserve is a private institution. Check it out.
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