Re: Financial topics
Posted: Thu May 15, 2014 2:47 am
democrat logic : The real reason we should temporarily extend these tax breaks is that the short-term deficit doesn’t matter. In fact, it should be larger. These breaks will very mildly help the economy. Instead of giving out $85 billion in tax breaks, the government could have borrowed that amount and put it towards infrastructure spending, which may provide a slightly larger boost to the economy, but Republicans oppose that and every other deficit-increasing policy. The tax extenders are better than nothing. In addition, rising health-care costs and a lack of revenue are driving the U.S.’s long-term debt problem. These tax breaks will not lead to a debt apocalypse.
Why are Democrats making terrible arguments and avoiding a good one? Politics. The public still believes that the deficit is major problem—and expects their representatives to show similar deference to it. That prevents Boxer, Cardin and the rest of the Democratic caucus from arguing for deficit-financed infrastructure spending or business tax cuts. Instead, they're taking a page from the Republican playbook and using discredited arguments to support their position. That may lead to the right policy outcome right now, but it sets a bad standard in the end.
democrat results: http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... 920#p24013
Jonathan Bernstein Nov 04, 2013
Last week’s buzzword was “kludge,” as everyone from Paul Krugman to Michael Lind decided that the Affordable Care Act was a perfect example of “What’s Wrong With America.” It’s an argument that Steven Teles made recently in an important essay at National Affairs . For Teles, a political scientist from Johns Hopkins, the way the United States is governed has become increasingly incoherent and even unworkable in policy domain after policy domain. His diagnosis is that our current state of affairs is the result of the accumulation of “kludges”—a term from computer programming for temporary patches. U.S. policy is dominated, he argues, by these ad hoc workarounds, rather than systematic policies. In the short run, make-do kludges are often good enough. But over time, they pile up, one upon another, and the result eventually becomes impossible for anyone to make sense of. Moreover, even when total policy catastrophe is avoided, ad-hoc “solutions” are rarely efficient, and all those... http://prospect.org/article/long-live-kludge
Remember last year when everyone was talking about "devastating" cuts to the federal budget due to "sequestration"?
As then White House flack and now-CNN Crossfire host Stephanie Cutter defined sequestration last spring, it amounted to a "series of automatic and destructive budgets cuts that you and your neighbors are just beginning to feel."
The horror, the horror: White House tours canceled, military bands not playing, little kids starving, planes dropping from skies (not that they would have had passengers, what with the TSA lines getting infinite due to budget cuts...).
Yeah, no. Not only were those cuts removed through a bipartisan budget deal passed early in 2014, they were hardly draconian to begin with. The cuts slated for last year totaled $44 billion in a $3.5 trillion budget, plus a slightly lower amount for this year and going forward.
So how many federal employees got shitcanned because of reduced funds in 2013? A hundred thousand? A million? More? According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, a grand total of one (1), in the Department of Justice's Parole Commission.
Gilens and Page analyze 1,779 policy outcomes over a period of more than 20 years. They conclude that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
In our country (the former U.S.S.R.) the lie has become not just a moral category,
but a pillar of the State. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Why are Democrats making terrible arguments and avoiding a good one? Politics. The public still believes that the deficit is major problem—and expects their representatives to show similar deference to it. That prevents Boxer, Cardin and the rest of the Democratic caucus from arguing for deficit-financed infrastructure spending or business tax cuts. Instead, they're taking a page from the Republican playbook and using discredited arguments to support their position. That may lead to the right policy outcome right now, but it sets a bad standard in the end.
democrat results: http://gdxforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php ... 920#p24013
Jonathan Bernstein Nov 04, 2013
Last week’s buzzword was “kludge,” as everyone from Paul Krugman to Michael Lind decided that the Affordable Care Act was a perfect example of “What’s Wrong With America.” It’s an argument that Steven Teles made recently in an important essay at National Affairs . For Teles, a political scientist from Johns Hopkins, the way the United States is governed has become increasingly incoherent and even unworkable in policy domain after policy domain. His diagnosis is that our current state of affairs is the result of the accumulation of “kludges”—a term from computer programming for temporary patches. U.S. policy is dominated, he argues, by these ad hoc workarounds, rather than systematic policies. In the short run, make-do kludges are often good enough. But over time, they pile up, one upon another, and the result eventually becomes impossible for anyone to make sense of. Moreover, even when total policy catastrophe is avoided, ad-hoc “solutions” are rarely efficient, and all those... http://prospect.org/article/long-live-kludge
Remember last year when everyone was talking about "devastating" cuts to the federal budget due to "sequestration"?
As then White House flack and now-CNN Crossfire host Stephanie Cutter defined sequestration last spring, it amounted to a "series of automatic and destructive budgets cuts that you and your neighbors are just beginning to feel."
The horror, the horror: White House tours canceled, military bands not playing, little kids starving, planes dropping from skies (not that they would have had passengers, what with the TSA lines getting infinite due to budget cuts...).
Yeah, no. Not only were those cuts removed through a bipartisan budget deal passed early in 2014, they were hardly draconian to begin with. The cuts slated for last year totaled $44 billion in a $3.5 trillion budget, plus a slightly lower amount for this year and going forward.
So how many federal employees got shitcanned because of reduced funds in 2013? A hundred thousand? A million? More? According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, a grand total of one (1), in the Department of Justice's Parole Commission.
Gilens and Page analyze 1,779 policy outcomes over a period of more than 20 years. They conclude that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
In our country (the former U.S.S.R.) the lie has become not just a moral category,
but a pillar of the State. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn