and John Huntsman, and misc. other reasonable and logical conservatives. I'm not one of them (I think) but I don't think their value can be understated.
Humility is vital to the advancement of civilization and the ability to recognize and act on the flaws of your "tribe" is far more valuable than blind intransigent loyalty.
For the same reason Muslims should cast out the heretical extremists from thier tribe, as the christians should from theirs. And so on and so forth.
... a stunning 35 percent to 40 percent of everything we buy goes to interest. This interest goes to bankers, financiers, and bondholders, who take a 35 percent to 40 percent cut of our GDP. That helps explain how wealth is systematically transferred from Main Street to Wall Street. The rich get progressively richer at the expense of the poor, not just because of "Wall Street greed," but because of the inexorable mathematics of our private banking system.
Yes, it's that stuff again:
By 2010, 1 percent of the population owned 42 percent of financial wealth, while 80 percent of the population owned only 5 percent of financial wealth. Dr. Kennedy observes that the bottom 80 percent pay the hidden interest charges that the top 10 percent collect, making interest a strongly regressive tax that the poor pay to the rich.
Romney's whining about how "you can't beat free stuff" shows me that he still doesn't get it.
Yeah, particularly when Romney promised an extra 2 trillion to the military industrial complex that the defense department wasn't even asking for.
and Romney cited gifts from the government like requiring insurance companies to extend coverage for people's kids until they are 26 years old when citing the free stuff the government gave out. I guess by that standard, anything a president does that benefits any group is a "free gift" I'm just in a Romney presidency, he'd just be doing things to people's detriment
The term "entitlement" means, in the context of budgets, spending that cannot be reduced. Social Security is an entitlement in that sense largely for the reasons Gary and Dave state: the recipients (and people like Gary, who's paid into it for 40 years, and me, who's paid into it for 45+ years) already "paid" for it.
While not all entitlements are bad, the presence of a large number of entitlements hamstrings attempts to get the budget under control. It's in that sense that a proliferation of entitlements becomes destructive to national well-being.
To my way of looking at things, the set of entitlements includes many more elements than either party will usually admit. It includes not only Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, but, for example, the mortgage interest deduction, mail service, etc.
While it takes a great deal of both cooperation and political courage to control entitlements, it can be done. We used to view the presence of domestic military bases as entitlements, but Congress devised a way to reduce their number -- and the consequent waste of defense dollars -- in a way that gave political cover.
As I keep saying, we need to fix the actuarial insolvency of Medicare and Social Security while we can do so with tweaks, rather than when they run out of money. Just because I've been paying for them for 45 years doesn't mean that I and other potential recipients paid enough to fund the benefits they promise. That may require governmental breach of contract, but it reflects economic reality.
Wasn't Clinton rather involved in the formula to reduce the number of military bases, after the 'end' of the cold war? Just as he was essential to ending deficit spending in the 1990s? Notably, this was after the radical Republican house of representatives had a lot of the wind taken out of its sails by the defeat of its confrontational behaviour in 1995, and its losses in 1996.
Can anyone link me to that map/picture of the Middle East that shows a new ocean created right over the Iran area - ground zero - as a result of dropping a nuclear bomb?
I think maybe I saw it here a couple of months ago.
Too funny, TGT. My reference a few posts ago to "when California was a western state" reflects this native Californian's belief that people fresh off the boat (so to speak) from the big cities back east (i.e. anything east of the Sierra -- or at least the Rockies) brought their destructive partisanship with them to the once Golden State.
If you actually read what the Obama Administration objects to in the NDA2013, 98% of it attempts, mostly by republicans, to keep spending defense money Obama wants to cut - most of it pork, but a some of it ideological dreck as well.
Dr. F: I knew them SheepBuggerers were lite and all, but why did you pull your posts from the thread where you were calling Sully an A-Hole? What happened? Snail eye? Sheep eye? Sober up?
I sobered up Russ
I didn't know Sully was girl, and a regular ST poster
If she talked to me, like she wanted to, then it would have been a done deal
But in the heat of the debate, I thought that she was some lame ass Right Winger dude, like the rest of them
Thank God I can Apologise when I'm wrong,and admit it like a Man!!
Sully, I'm sorry for calling you an a-hole,or a dick, for not coming up to me at the Josh Fest, and saying Hi like you wanted too...
I will look for you at the next event, and personally say I'm sorry, and ask that we can be friends.
Let us know!