The Debt Ceiling

ace, dear, if this was a stalinist context, you'd be a stalinist and point at the common sense experience of other stalinists to justify your stalinism.

if this were the nazi period, you'd be a nazi and point at the common sense experience of other nazis to justify your nazism.

you like a neo-fascist media context for whatever reason(s) and point at the common sense experience of other neo-fascists in some to justify your neo-fascism.

nietzsche referred to people who do that as slaves.

 

We can rant and rave all we want - and that's all we're going to accomplish. We're like the two roads bit.... I'm going to say what I have to say and I'm through with this topic and y'all can do with it what you will. This country is more divided at this point than it was immediately prior to the Civil War - don't believe me? Get your asses off the coast and out of the rust belt and check out the big chunk of dirt that's left. In our part of the world people still work - we don't expect a handout from the government every time someone sneezes or farts for that matter. We do just fine without unions and would do even better without big government. We're the kind of people who believe that you can still succeed if you are willing to work for what you want - we're not sitting here on our asses waiting for the government to give it to us. Now I don't give a rats ass what you call the Tea Party - actually, it's far from being a "party". It's an idea. It is a fundamental belief that "we the people" are still the ones who should be in control of our government - and not the other way around. In my opinion, both of the political parties have far outlived their usefulness. In my opinion, there are very few who are now a part of big government that should be sent back to Washington after the next election. In my opinion, there should be definite term limits - perhaps something in the line of two terms in the House, followed by two in the Senate, followed by a chance to run for higher office. I believe that an elected official should be paid a decent wage - and out of that wage, he or she should pay taxes, Social Security, and their share of their health insurance - which, should be no better than that the rest of us peons have. And when they're through, they are through - no pensions for elected officials - if they've paid into Social Security - and put what they are allowed into their 401 K they can retire on that like the rest of us are expected to do. I believe - that if one of them is caught taking anything illegally they should cut off their hand and send them to jail (just like they would you or I under the same circumstance). I believe that anyone elected to public office should be held accountable for what he or she does - just like the rest of us are. That's my two cents. Oh yeah! one more thing I believe - I believe that Obama is about the same caliber of a president as Jimmy Catuh. They're in a tie for the absolute worst.

 

I'm a bleeding heart liberal and I don't expect the government to give me squat. You're throwing up a common strawman argument that's complete and utter horse shit. People sitting around their houses expecting the government to give them stuff? Seriously?

 

Wow. That is quite a rant, liquor dealer.

I do agree it demonstrates what is wrong with the public policy debate both in Congress and across America.

Where I disagree is the suggestion that the Tea Party represents "middle America" or the "real America" as some like to call it. Most polls would suggest that most Americans do not support your solutions or your extemism.

Emotionalism and extremist ideology is never the solution to the problems facing the country.

Public policy requires compromise and consensus building and putting the country above party or ideology. We certainly have not seen that with the contributions of the Tea Party members of Congress, many of whom distort the facts as we have seen and either have no clue or no interest in acknowledging the adverse impacts of their extremist solutions.

I think we'll see in 2012 that the Tea Party one trick pony is a flash in the pan..

 

If the Tea Party became aware of what a big threat the Tea Party was to the Tea Party, you can bet the Tea Party would be mercilessly attacked by the media on behalf of the Tea Party regardless of the merrits of the Tea Party's claims.

Then Obama would compromise.

Welcome to politics.

 

This is simple. The bottom 80 percent of U.S. households still hold 12 percent of total privately held wealth. An effort that began in earnest on January 20, 1981, to leverage hard earned and well organized political influence to take a significant bite out of that last 12 percent is finally about to achieve that long sought goal. Pass the popcorn....

 

I believe this may be a different Ustwo.

 

I agree that spending is part of the problem. It isn't the problem. If spending were the only problem, then we could just disband the government and never have to worry about it spending any money again. The real problem results from the combination of facts: we need the government to do things, we disagree about what some of those things are, and some people are more inclined to abuse their power than others.

The idea that this is just a spending problem is more a result of confirmation bias than a reflection of reality. I've never heard a tea partier talk about the conditions that would be sufficient for us to stop cutting taxes. Maybe that's a function of the public discussion we currently have in this country. I think that it's entirely likely that we'd never reach a point where the "taxed enough already" party would become the "taxed just the right amount" party.

This is too simplistic.

This is also too simplistic. It's also kind of funny. According to you, the fact that an undersized government stimulus plan implemented roughly 2 years ago hasn't had much of an effect on the economy is evidence that government spending can't stimulate the economy. However, the fact that supply side economics have been in effect for over a last decade and haven't done anything to stimulate the economy is in no way evidence that supply side can't stimulate the economy.

Your interests are tied to making money. That's why you haven't hired anyone, because it doesn't make sense to do so. Because there would need to be more demand for you to need the labor of an extra person. As a tea party person, you're advocating policies that do nothing to increase demand. In fact, by supporting the firing of tens of thousands of public sector workers, you're actually hurting demand- increasing unemployment hurts demand. You're advocating policies that will hurt your ability to make money in the long run. Good luck with that.

You should really qualify this statement, because it doesn't actually make any sense with respect to reality. Government action can slow or kill job creation. It can also spur job creation. Private industry action can also slow or kill job creation. Do you think off shoring speeds up or slows down job creation? You can't pretend to be the rational person you seem to think you are if you can't even begin to acknowledge the fact that private business often fail to act in way that are in the best interests of the economy.

 

what makes the tea party dangerous as a movement, really, is not only the non-falsifiablity of its theoretical world or the reality impairment that follows from that. what makes them dangerous is the degree to which politics is a matter of personal identity and the extent to which that identity is tied to disappearing signifiers--"real america" and its variants--that responds to something very real---the reorganization of capitalist production enabled by neo-liberalism--in this case by the transformation of indices people are told about that measure economic well-being away from measures of production to measures of capital flows, from gdp indicators on the nightly news through the early 1970s to the dow from about 1972 onward. so when folk appeal to data to explain their situation and rely on "common sense" indicators, they are nudged to collapsing the interest of capital with their own interests. that entirely by-passes the reality of the situation---for the rust belt---for steel and its related industries for example---the vaporization of entire ways of life came about in part through the rise of the corporate raider (steel was a space in which bankruptcy specialists learned their trade) and the fragmentation/internationalization of such production as remained. there was also the internationalization of the stock trade in the early 1970s so ownership became less and less national. these factors combined with the conservative Horror at working people who actually organize themselves into unions (thatcher is the prototype) to enable what is now laughing called "globalization"

had anyone been paying attention to the social costs of this process, it's unlikely that it would have happened as it has. but people were persuaded, in the main, by the ideological domination of neo-liberal horseshit that behind the apparent destruction of their ways of life lay some mysterious benefits---which may have been the case were you a holder of capital----but if you were a working person, you came out of this period fucked. it's astonishing is the degree to which exactly the neo-liberalism that enabled the wholesale destruction of the old manufacturing sector in the united states also came to function as the explanation for it for some folk who were its primary victims.

the evil state. the bad outsiders. the eternal, fatuous conflict between "real americans" and others. like you have nothing left but some vague sense of identity. no power, no hope, just some arbitrary beliefs about who you are. this is the center of the neo-fascist component of the tea party and other far right outfits. it's like bodkin said before, the space of petit-bourgeois resentment channeled by a very very well-funded rightwing media apparatus toward ends that set the neo-fascists against others who are also, often, fucked over by the same things and sets them to yelling at each other while, over all our heads, the plutocracy does what it wants.

 

You talk like the people living on either coast are just sitting around their house waiting on their welfare check each month. Do you really think anyone who doesn't live in the the middle section of the country are sitting around and "expect a handout from the government every time someone sneezes or farts?" I have many friends still living on the west coast. A few of them have lost jobs, careers really, due to the economic down turn. I don't know of any of them who are sitting around waiting on a government check. They're too busy working two and three jobs to pay the bills. I'm sure people in your "part of the world people still work." I think you should understand that's true on the "coasts" too.

Just like your rant about the left "giving it all away" by "the bail outs" this rant here is at best misinformed and basically factually incorrect.

 

It's peculiar that he specifies "people on the coasts" as sitting around being lazy. Care to look at some state-by-state GDP numbers? California, New York and Florida are 3 of the top 4 in the nation in GDP (Texas being the fourth).

It also turns out that states like Alabama, Mississippi and West Virginia lead the nation in "federal welfare", meaning they take in far more federal tax dollars than they produce themselves (Alabama takes in over 2.25x more tax dollars than it produces). New York, New Jersey and California, on the other hand, produce far more tax revenue than they use.

 

were this particular type of "real american" to get to power, i expect that people who wear glasses and live in cities would get rounded up and sent for some quality time in the country digging giant holes or moving rocks from one pile to another.

 

Exactly. The main debate really focuses on what the government spends money on. Most people agree we need the federal government, though I know some who honestly think just getting rid of the whole thing would be a good idea. I think that's pretty insane. I used to vote GOP at times and I've never been a member of either party. I haven't voted for any GOP candidate in years. All the options in my district have simply fallen in the nut job category. Though to be fair there's been several Dem I refuse to vote for either, David Wu being one of them. I remember a few years before moving to Mexico there was a DEM running for county council. He had absolutely no experience that would qualify him for the position. I think he worked for a local paper mil. How he ended up as the DEM option on the ticket I have no idea, probably becasue the GOP who'd been in the office just received his 3rd DUI and was being investigated for accepting bribe. I attended one debate where the general public could ask the candidates questions. The DEM was clearly out of his league, like no idea what administrative rules were, how the county budget worked or even where most of the counties funding came from. Someone asked him "you don't seem very up to date on any of the issues facing the county, how do you intend to resolve these issues if you don't understand them?" His answer was basically "I plan on hiring assistants and aides who do understand these things." At that point I walked out thinking "wonder if he could give us a lists of the names of these people he's going to hire, that way we could just vote for one of them." The GOP guy won the election and 4-5 months later was indited on the bribery charges, when video came out of him accepting and talking about the bribes he resigned and the governor assigned someone else to fill the seat until the next election.

On the issue of "what's the right amount of taxes?" That's where I have serious problem with the Tea B'ers and the extreme right. The answer seems to be zero or close to it. Yet they want things from the government too. Ask most of them about the DOD or the Iraq/Afghanistan wars and they'll tell you they were wars of necessity. Paying for those wars? Not a necessity. Sorry if you want the government to do things you have to pay for those things and thinking you can do so by cutting taxes or simply gutting anything you can label a "social program" is not a realistic approach.

 

well, while it's hard to say how this will play out, right at the moment the combination of the united states seeming to have lost its mind by the administration's capitulation to the lunatics in the tea party, problems in the euro zone to do with the danger that italy and spain could get eaten up by "the euro-zone" crisis:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/04/debt-crisis-economics

and expectations that tomorrow's figures on the united states economy will show exactly the opposite of what anyone in their right mind would want to see just after some unnecessary austerity program was enacted for no rational reason:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/aug/04/stock-markets-exchange-plunge-business

it appears as though those heroes of capitalism, the Investors, in whom the slaves who worship their financial betters place all their faith, these folk are starting to panic. and the us information isn't even out yet (non-farm employment numbers).

some big players inside the EU are trying to stave off panic by calling this "the great capitulation"===but it doesn't seem to be working.

these things can be fleeting, but at the moment things look pretty dire.

of course the american press is playing it vague. don't want to panic those heroes of capitalism too much i guess.

a plot summary, from atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/the-global-economy-is-falling-apart/243114/

 

In light of recent activity, I hereby approve my household debt ceiling to be increased to $1.1 billion. That should cover any expenditures through my children's lifetime...

 

um, what?