Replies to post #148389 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[StephanieVanbryce]

Excellent post!..thank YOU for taking the time to put ALL of that in one post ..

I truly (really ;) ) appreciate that !

[SilverSurfer]

good post -

"So who's wrong? They both are, the right and the left. The political right is wrong for believing we can ignore our credit rating decline from not extending the debt ceiling and not suffer. Almost every financial analyst says otherwise. In other words, go ahead and declare personal bankruptcy for your own family and see if there are not repercussions.

The left is wrong for acting like extending the debt is dealing with the problem of debt.

It's simple. The system has simply grown too big, Murphy's Law if you want to believe in it, says that anything that can go wrong, sooner or later will go wrong. Or another way to look at it is, nothing fails like success. America has had a run of luck. We came out of World War II unscathed like the other countries, the richest most powerful country in the history of the world, with the highest standard of living in the world.

Millions of immigrants would want to venture here and share in these riches. There's nothing wrong with that. But it would work only as long as there were plentiful unskilled factory jobs for arriving immigrants. That has changed. China, a country that has T-Bill investments in the U.S., that helps prop us up, now has the factories that make our goods. Americans companies shipped jobs over there to take advantage of cheap labor.

The unskilled job that aAmerica has simply gotten too big.
llowed the immigrant to achieve middle class status here in the U.S. has gone. But immigrants keep arriving. This is what happened to Ancient Rome. It was flooded with immigrants wanting to share its wealth and whom could not be provided for, so the emperor gave them free bread and circuses.

The middle class in the U.S. is disappearing, and because of this, the rate of people paying into the system as opposed to those receiving benefits is declining. The approach of millions of baby boomers to old age is putting an incredible strain on an already-overburdened system.

Like Rome, the U.S. became the policeman of the world and maintained a large army all over the world. But the U.S. pursued two, not one, two wars at the same time, forgetting Abraham Lincoln's sage advice against going to war with England over a naval incident during the Civil War by cautioning, "one war at a time."

The madness of allowing government officials to mount two open-ended conflicts over ten years or longer without either a decisive military victory or a political settlement at a cost in trillions of dollars not to mention lives lost, and to add millions more to the rolls of newly returning veterans deserving of benefits staggers the mind.

Both Rome and the Soviet Union did not have a Constitution as does the U.S. Both Rome and the Soviet Union were rotten from the top down.

But a Constitution is only as responsive as the people who try to live up to it. It can be undermined by profligate extravagance, attempting to do too much, spending billions on unending wars, billions on space exploration, billions on personal benefits either promised like Social Security, or through entitlements.

Billions here, billions there. It adds up.

It's become too big. And to think, in 1937, the U.S. had a military smaller than that of Bulgaria.

Here are some other similarities. The Soviet Union fought a war in Afghanistan just before its collapse and could not provide adequate food and essential (store) goods for its citizens. In the U.S., the cost of food, gas, housing and even a college education are spiraling out of the affordable reach of an increasing number of citizens. In Ancient Rome, rival factions in the government or rival armies spent all their time fighting against each other rather than working together, much like today's widening ideological schism between the political left and right.

I could go on with more comparisons, but it's too depressing. My hope is that these are mere coincidences." http://www.andmagazine.com/content/phoenix/11177.html

[fuagf]

The Republican Crazy Is Not An Act

Jonathan Chait
July 13, 2011 | 12:00 pm
17 comments



This last weekend, Ross Douthat .. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/11/opinion/11douthat.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss .. argued that Republican intransigence on the deficit was not really evidence that the party had lost its marbles. The party, he postulated, was shrewdly attempting to maximize its leverage. Douthat's argument hinged on the premise that Republicans had to account for the fact that any budget deal would come with future tax hikes when the Bush tax cuts expire:

The White House hasn’t made spending concessions just because the president wants to campaign as a deficit cutter next year. It has made concessions because it knows that taxes are already scheduled to go up when the Bush-era tax rates expire at the end of 2012.

If Obama gains a second term, Congressional Republicans will have to choose between a deal that lets the top rate go back to 39 percent (a $700 billion tax increase over 10 years) or no deal at all (a $3.8 trillion tax increase). Obviously, this dilemma won’t exist if President Mitt Romney occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But Obama’s re-election is the more likely scenario, meaning that any deal struck this summer comes with a very large asterisk attached: *Includes tax increases to be named later.

My TRB column, .. http://www.tnr.com/article/trb/magazine/91863/obama-boehner-debt-ceiling-deficit .. which suggests that the Republicans are in fact nutty, points out that this premise is false:

Press accounts reported that Obama, distressingly, proposed to make future revenue increases from the Bush tax cuts’ expiration—the tax hike Douthat warns will happen later—the source of the revenue in the deal. In other words, he was willing to bargain to get something he could have gotten by doing nothing if he wins reelection. What’s more, Obama offered to prevent any increase in upper-bracket tax rates in 2013, as long as Republicans agreed to close tax loopholes to make up the revenue. That is the deal Republicans refused—a deal to lock in the top-level Bush tax rates, while raising more revenue from a cleaner tax code, while getting Obama’s sign-off on large-scale cuts to entitlements.

Meanwhile, the evidence that's leaked out about internal Republican deliberations suggests the Republicans are not shrewdly trying to maximize their leverage. They're just barking mad. Robert Draper's profile of House Whip Kevin McCarthy .. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/magazine/how-kevin-mccarthy-wrangles-the-tea-party.html?pagewanted=1 .. peers in on the House caucus's thinking about the debt ceiling:

The freshmen have not been shy on this subject, either. McCarthy informally polled them when they first came to town in November for orientation. All but four of them said they would vote against raising the ceiling, under any circumstances. Then McCarthy (along with Ryan and the House Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp) began conducting more listening sessions. The whip recognized that it would be counterproductive to lecture the freshmen about the economic hazards of not raising the debt ceiling. He also realized that it’s one thing to pass a budget — which in the end is a nonbinding political document — and another thing to throw America into default. And so McCarthy has urged them to consider raising the ceiling under certain conditions and thus to view this moment as a golden opportunity to force significant changes from the White House. “We all ran for a reason,” he tells them. “What’s most of concern to you? What is it that we think will change America?”

As a result, the freshmen have begun to move away from a hard “no” on raising the debt ceiling to a “yes, if.” In the conference room, several freshmen have said they’ll vote to raise the ceiling only if the president agrees to repeal his health care legislation. Or if Obama signs into law a constitutional amendment to balance the budget, after all 50 states have ratified it. Or if he’ll agree to mandatory caps on all nondefense spending. Or if he’ll enact the Ryan budget. The whip writes down all their ideas on a notepad.

And Robert Costa at National Review .. http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/271691/leadership-briefs-gop-debt-talks-robert-costa?page=2 .. has more reporting:

Rep. Tom Graves (R., Ga.) says he’s “starting to hear” a sentiment from leadership that is more in line with that of the conservative and freshman members of the conference. “It’s something that we have heard here recently, and we’re starting to hear more of it,” he tells NRO. “Out of today’s discussion it’s clear that the conference is unified behind the need for a balanced-budget amendment.” Graves said the House vote on a balance-budget amendment, scheduled for the week of July 25, would send an important signal to the White House.

Still, not every Republican leaving the closed-door confab was pleased. “Only one word comes to mind right now: chaos,” says one leading House conservative. “There is no plan. Cantor’s cuts would never pass the House, Boehner has walked out and Obama is not serious about anything. There’s nothing.” Another conservative member agreed: “It’s going to be a very rocky few weeks,” he says. “We’re holding, but beyond that, I have no idea what is going to happen.”

The predominant conservative view here seems to be that nothing bad would happen if we fail to lift the debt ceiling. Indeed, failing to life the debt ceiling is simply another way of imposing a balanced budget requirement, which would be good! (Even Mitt Romney .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/romney-supports-cut-cap-balance-pledge/2011/06/29/AGbXD4qH_blog.html .. has endorsed this plan.) Therefore, why should they lift the debt ceiling and allow the un-balancing of the budget, if they don't get a balanced budget requirement in return?

The more we find out about the House Republican caucus, the more obvious it becomes that
they're not just trying to maximize their leverage by pretending to be crazy. They're crazy.

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/91886/the-republican-crazy-not-act

[StephanieVanbryce]

Republicans, Zealots and Our Security

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF July 23, 2011

IF China or Iran threatened our national credit rating and tried to drive up our interest rates, or if they sought to damage our education system, we would erupt in outrage.

Well, wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists.

We tend to think of national security narrowly as the risk of a military or terrorist attack. But national security is about protecting our people and our national strength — and the blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.

House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.

It is not exactly true that this would be our first default. We defaulted in 1790. By some definitions, we defaulted on certain gold obligations in 1933. And in 1979, the United States had trouble managing payouts to some individual investors on time (partly because of a failure of word processing equipment) and thus was in technical default.

Yet even that brief lapse in 1979 raised interest payments in the United States. Terry L. Zivney, a finance professor at Ball State University and co-author of a scholarly paper about the episode, says the 1979 default increased American government borrowing costs by 0.6 of a percentage point indefinitely.

Any deliberate and sustained interruption this year could have a greater impact. We would see higher interest rates on mortgages, car loans, business loans and credit cards.

American government borrowing would also become more expensive. In February, the Congressional Budget Office noted that a 1 percentage point rise in interest rates could add more than $1 trillion to borrowing costs over a decade.

In other words, Republican zeal to lower debts could result in increased interest expenses and higher debts. Their mania to save taxpayers could cost taxpayers. That suggests not governance so much as fanaticism.

More broadly, a default would leave America a global laughingstock. Our “soft power,” our promotion of democracy around the world, and our influence would all take a hit. The spectacle of paralysis in the world’s largest economy is already bewildering to many countries. If there is awe for our military prowess and delight in our movies and music, there is scorn for our political/economic management.

While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts — especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.

It should be a national disgrace that the United States government has eliminated spending for major literacy programs in the last few months, with scarcely a murmur of dissent.

Consider Reading Is Fundamental, a 45-year-old nonprofit program that has cost the federal government only $25 million annually. It’s a public-private partnership with 400,000 volunteers, and it puts books in the hands of low-income children. The program helped four million American children improve their reading skills last year. Now it has lost all federal support.

“They have made a real difference for millions of kids,” Kyle Zimmer, founder of First Book, another literacy program that I’ve admired, said of Reading Is Fundamental. “It is a tremendous loss that their federal support has been cut. We are going to pay for these cuts in education for generations.”

Education programs like these aren’t quick fixes, and the relation between spending and outcomes is uncertain and complex. Nurturing reading skills is a slog rather than a sprint — but without universal literacy we have no hope of spreading opportunity, fighting crime or chipping away at poverty.

“The attack on literacy programs reflects a broader assault on education programs,” said Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic member of Congress from Connecticut. She notes that Republicans want to cut everything from early childhood programs to Pell grants for college students. Republican proposals have singled out some 43 education programs for elimination, but it’s not seen as equally essential to end tax loopholes on hedge fund managers.

So let’s remember not only the national security risks posed by Iran and Al Qaeda. Let’s also focus on the risks, however unintentional, from domestic zealots.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/24kristof.html?_r=1


I'm sorry for all the bolding ...I just 'hoped' everyone would take notice ...