How to fix the budget deficit!

[mmi]

And don't forget it takes twelve to eighteen months or more just to run for a seat in the Congress … which you may well not get.

Wanna fix the budget deficit? Quit electing teabagging extremists. Their goal is to destroy the federal government by any means, including bankrupting it or causing it to default on its obligations. Obama is clearly a moderate:

• He saved Wall Street because those lying thieves control our financial system. His modest efforts to limit their nefarious conduct are labelled as communism.
• The cost of our healthcare system is out of control. He worked very hard and used up most of his political capital to pass a conservative, business-based reform first suggested by the Heritage Foundation (individual mandate, i.e., no free-loading) and it's called socialized medicine.
• He bailed out the auto industry because of a financial crisis brought on by the lying, thieving Wall Streeters, saving at least a million jobs, and he's said to be destroying the free market.
• He continued Bush's TARP program to avoid a worldwide depression — again communism.

The crap being pushed by Fux Noise about Benghazigate is a scandal that should drive the final nail in the coffin of that clown enterprise. Ask Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell about military assets that could/should have responded on 9/11/12. How many innocent civilians would we have killed if we had sent an AC-130 Specter gunship with its Vulcan rotatory cannons to open up on the consulate grounds? How would Libyans, the vast majority of whom now support the US, have reacted to those deaths? How many Americans attempting to defend the compound would have been killed?

I have no problem with people who insist that the federal government maintain fiscal discipline. Those who are pretty far left, bleeding-heart liberals like myself support that position! But anyone clever enough and analytical enough to understand all the high-tech hardware evaluated in this forum should be able to recognize nonsense when they see it. Let's get back to a system where progressives and conservatives respect each other and work together to advance the national interest. Leave the lunatics and the liars to talk amongst themselves.

[Kaos Kid]

^^^^^ I agree on almost everything you said. I am just more pissed off at our corrupted political system than you ;) ^^^^^

I am one of those "9/11 conspiracy theorists" and know that there is a lot about 9/11 that most people don't know or are just to stubborn to properly research-- like how Dick Cheney committed treason and got away with it when he outed CIA undercover operative Sylvia Plame just because her husband wouldn't go along with his "Niger Yellowcake" scam, or for the most part how he wielded more power than any other VP in US history when he had our whole National Defense System standing down under the guise of a "simulation drill" while he himself was safely ensconced in a NORAD bunker on the exact day that the so-called terrorists struck...coincidence? I doubt it. Smartly, they had Dubya tucked away in Florida reading primers to kiddies so he couldn't ask questions they didn't want to have to explain to him, plausible deniability notwithstanding. I am not a Dubya Bush-basher since he was just a mindless and powerless puppet, rather I am a Cheney/Rumsfeld and PNAC-basher for their conspiratorial influence on creating a New World Order no matter the cost to a the lower classes of this Country. PNAC had the goal of occupying Iraq at least 5 years before the fact, and the 9/11 tragedy was their foot in the door, so to speak--and people don't realize that Al-Quaida was a CIA construct that may or may not have gone rogue, depending on who you believe was issuing the orders. There is a lot about the intelligence we had before 9/11 that shows complicity high up in the Government if you know where to look. How can anyone believe that a little bit of jet fuel could implode skyscrapers into their own footprints, and also bring down WTC7 the same way as well? For an extra bonus, look at the money trail on who got rich(er) off of those asbestos-laden buildings coming down...in addition who is dumb enough to believe that a fragile airplane flown by a hack pilot hit the well-built Pentagon so perfectly that it penetrated multiple wall layers yet had little or no debris consistent with a plane crash? Out of 20 different video cameras around the area that day that could have provided video proof, all you see is one grainy low-res video that was released months later and still to me looks like a silver bullet with a jet plume coming out of its' tail, not an airplane. Look at the entry hole people, that was a freaking missile!

But I digress. Sorry about the swerve off-topic, this should probably have been in a new topic even though the events of today are tied to the travesties of yesterday...

[vbironchef]

8. Do the exact opposite of what the State of California does.

[mmi]

Average of votes in 2000, 2004 and 2008 presidential elections

California, New York, Illinois, Washington, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Rhode Island (biggest little state in the Union ) — all went for the Democratic candidate (including this year), all rank in the bottom half of net per capita federal spending, and in fact all are net contributors to Uncle Sam .

I figure Maryland is an outlier due to its proximity to DC. Hawaii has a lot of military bases. (To be fair, this is a factor in some Red State numbers as well.) Vermont is one I can't figure out. Dairy farm subsidies? Interestingly, Vermont is the only state that doesn't require a balanced budget (actually, that's debatable), and yet has had a balanced budget every year since 1991. True fiscal discipline? Or is Big Brother bailing them out?

more data and analysis

[vbironchef]

mmi, I wish that you could figure out how to get California out of debt. I live in Los Angeles county and our sales tax is going up to 10% and if the chief of police has his way, another .05 tax will be on top of that. I'm not talking about federal debt in this case. The State of California is broke/broken. It needs some serious help. The public pension is draining the State of California to the brink of bankruptcy. Things have to change and if you could help, that would be great.

[mmi]

Hey vbironchef

I'm busy this week doing my part to drain the federal Treasury while collecting data. But I'll run out of assignments in a few days and be able to give more time/thought to a response.

As you can imagine, I'll be no help at all, except perhaps to gather and present some info that may shed some light. We Rhode Islanders love to brag about our state to others, but internally most of us are pretty disgusted. Entrenched special interests, economic and political, keep us mired in a more or less pathetic level of underperformance. Many of our best leave when they grow up, a lot of them to Cally.

Times are tough all over. It's gonna be a long. slow climb ahead. All we can do is be patient, make those improvements we can, and avoid screwing things up as much as possible.

On the federal deficit, here's a panel discussion held a couple of days ago, entitled Economists Look For Ways to Avoid the "Fiscal Cliff" and co-hosted by the New America Foundation's Economic Growth Program and Economists for Peace & Security, that is, imo, extremely informative on a variety of related issues in this area. It's ninety minutes long (the first ninety of a four-hour long video), and I realize you guys will be reluctant/unable to invest that much time. I would, however, call your attention to a segment (21:30-28:00), in which Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser under Reagan, a Treasury official in the Bush41 administration, and, importantly, a supply-sider, comments on the problems we're having in negotiating a compromise and the circumstances that led to our current difficulty. (I tried creating a clip, but got a 404. )