The Debt Ceiling

[Kalalau]

It just drones on and on. America is the bastion, the holiest of holies, the high temple of CAPITALISM. Capitalism depends on paying your debts. I mean, whats the point, how can you possibly run a capitalist economy if people don't pay their debts? And here is America, prepared to become a deadbeat debtor. Why? Just politics. The usual. Republicans trying to embarrass Obama, trying to crash the economy so they can win in 2012. Just the usual again. The government trying to destroy the country it rules, in essence. Nothing wrong with that. ? Right ? I am being driven inevitably to the conclusion that this constitution does not work. As much as I have respected, loved, and treasured it, letting dimwits vote in reckless irresponsible a. holes like the teapot people guarantees failure. It guarantees the value of your life savings will plummet once the nation defaults. Yes, all those decades you worked and saved and invested so responsibly, shot to hell when prices quintuple or whatever they will do. They say, never watch either sausage or bills in congress being made, maybe this is just such a horrible, nauseating process, maybe it will all be ok. Gee I sure hope so. You pay your debts. Doing anything else is stealing, and nobody trusts you, only an idiot would loan you money. Why would China or Japan possibly keep their money here if we don't pay our debts?

And yet...the teapot people say no big deal, there will be plenty of money coming in in August to pay off the Chinese and Japanese investors, to pay social security and medicare, and military salaries. So...who's left. Just the contractors I guess, bridge maintainence, stuff like that. The last guy I knew who blew off paying his debts as a youth ended up paying over 13 % on his mortgage when he was lucky enough to get one.

I guess we will see what we shall see. I don't like this one bit, though.

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

Behold~~~one of the most obnoxious teapot bozos in congress, Walsh or is it Welsh from Illinois, exposed as a dead beat dad, owing over $117,000 in CHILD SUPPORT. What a swell guy. So a deadbeat like him has no problem making this a deadbeat country. Pathetic. What a monument to teapot voters.

[TuNnL]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

The usual. Republicans trying to embarrass Obama, trying to crash the economy so they can win in 2012. Just the usual again. The government trying to destroy the country it rules, in essence.

I find it absurd that you would paint Barack Obama as a victim in one breath, and lambast the “government” for trying to destroy the country in the next. Whatever happened to a U.S. President taking responsibility for his country? Obama could easily lay out his plan and vision for extending the debt ceiling in a responsible way. Instead, he has kept these details close to the vest in a shroud of secrecy. So much for Barry’s broken campaign promises of more “openness” and “transparency” in government. Nearly every decision he has made has represented the opposite.

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

There is the need to think seriously about what a default would mean to you. Quit playing games. It means inflation will rise at the same time businesses will be closing, it means your personal prospects dim considerably. It is not a game. This could have been done 6 months ago, but you have these losers in congress, deadbeat dads, speculators shorting US gvt. securities like Eric Cantor looking to profit from the collapse he is helping to promote, saying they won't extend the debt ceiling without a balanced budget amendment to the constitution, and how long does it take to amend the constitution? It is not a game. Your personal fortunes will suffer because of this little show. How much is the only question. Hopefully not too much, but if you want an education about economic holocaust learn some history about the Great Depression.

[Walkoff Balk]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

Y2K11:The Movie

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

One of the easiest lessons from the Great Depression is you do not fire public workers when the economy is going down anyway. You need as many people employed as possible to buy things made and sold by the people who are employed. When the stock market crashed in 29 Hoover started firing federal workers to balance the budget. The song of canaries never varies. Guess what. It didn't work. Some economists think the only thing that got the country and the rest of the world out of the Great Depression was WW2 and whether deliberate or not, the war did do that. But what a hell of a price to pay. The Depression was so grim...you know today virtually no Anglos pick California crops, its almost entirely Latinos, mainly Mexicans, the work is difficult in hot summer conditions, but during the Depression people were migrating halfway across the continent to FIGHT for those jobs, they had to fight because so many people wanted them. People were eating their pets. Not everybody to be sure, but some people had no other choice. How to produce a Depression? Fire lots of gvt workers when the economy is on its way down on its own. And you do need a lot of these workers. They aren't all bean counting pencil pushing bureaucrats, they are teachers, fire fighters, police, and now instead of giving the community their services, collecting their honest pay and buying things from the rest of us and paying taxes, they are collecting unemployment Insurance, competing with the rest of us for what jobs remain, and maybe moving out of their houses onto the street never to be a productive member of the economy again. All just to make the economy suck so Republicans can beat Obama in 2012. This is the picture of a government destroying the country it rules. So where do you think China and Japan and Saudi Arabia will put all their money when they get out of US securities?

[Mahi Waina]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

The recession isn't over until the Koch brothers say it's over!

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

My guess is that the way this crisis resolves is that the Democrats cave again. Republicans will get to steal the Social Security and Medicare trust funds for their pals on Wall St. There is just too much money at stake for the people who actually matter. SSI & Medicare have been a thorn in the side of Republicans since they were created, plus all that lovely money is just waiting for the privileged elite to steal it and the Democrats have not had much in the way of guts since Truman. I can't swear it will end this way of course, but thats the most logical scene. The public will barely notice their SSI & Medicare gone, some well timed manufactured sex scandals will distract them. The media will help.

I remember how people, well media people anyway, took it as such a joke back when Al Gore said the SSI trust fund needed to be in a "locked box" meaning it couldn't be "borrowed" to finance wars and tax breaks for billionaires.

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

The Koch brothers produced this whole disaster by producing and financing the tea potty so why shouldn't they have to pay for it? Not that they have enough money, only a few billion each, but by all means every penny of it should be taken and applied to the cost of their little foray into political control. Of course that won't happen. Koch bros also installed the republican governors & legislatures mainly in the midwest like Michigan & Wisconsin, firing public workers and smashing unions to enrich the rich, they actually got people to vote for this with cute slogans, "Taxed Enough Already", all the demonstrations professionally staged. The media obediently reported it as if it was spontaneous rather than a staged choreographed show. They subscribe to wacko ultra conservative John Birch Society right wing cult theories, the dad was in on the founding of the John Birch Society--Eisenhower a conscious agent of the international Communist Conspiracy, that kind of insanity. Thats what produced the tea party, thats what became a cancer in the congress, thats why the US is on course to default. They should be made to pay for the cost of their disaster.

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

I do see a potential positive to this, a replay of 1996, when the voters were so furious over childish petulant Republican harping on elected President Clinton's private sexual escapades that they turned out the Republicans in record numbers. Maybe, hopefully, this time the voters will have the vivid memory of childish petulant Republican enthusiasm to obliterate the whole economy just out of their racist (or whatever) spite that they will again turn the Repubs out of office. I hope so, anyway. Thats the most optimistic read I get on this sicktuation.

[TuNnL]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

The Koch brothers produced this whole disaster by producing and financing the tea potty [sic] so why shouldn't they have to pay for it?

The problem with liberal extremists like yourself is people like you are always trying to “punish” those who don’t conform to your views. The Koch brothers are HEROES in my view, for financing new blood into Congress at a time when the American public had almost given up on being active participants in politics. The Tea Party should separate from the Republican Party and form a new one. Perhaps they can pool their resources with Libertarians. There is nothing wrong with having a healthy debate about the future of our country.

Like Ron Whitfield said earlier, we have experienced decades of wasteful spending. Now we have to pay for it. Neither the Dems nor the GOP have produced a solution. Our President, Barack Obama, has sat on the sidelines. All you have to do is look at the details of what is being proposed to see that Sen. Harry Reid intends to exacerbate the problem. His “solution” raises the debt ceiling by $2.7 billion, but only cuts $2.2 billion. So in other words, by passing his bill, America will be potentially $500 million more in debt. Now that is the definition of stupidity.

[Leo Lakio]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

The Tea Party should separate from the Republican Party and form a new one. Perhaps they can pool their resources with Libertarians. There is nothing wrong with having a healthy debate about the future of our country.

This is one area where I can agree with you, TuNnL. I feel that the current control held by two not-very-dissimilar political parties is what keeps us from accomplishing the greatness this nation once knew.

[matapule]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

There is nothing wrong with having a healthy debate about the future of our country.

Americanselect.org The Progressive answer to the teapublicans.

[Kalalau]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

Plutocracy: If Corporations and the Rich Paid 1960s-Level Taxes, the Debt Would Vanish. By Sam Pizzigati, Campaign for America's Future, July 25, 2011.
Once upon a time in America, back a century ago, our nation's rich paid virtually nothing in taxes to the federal government. And that same federal government did virtually nothing to better the lives of average Americans.
But those average Americans would do battle, over the next half century, to rein in the rich and the corporations that made them ever richer. And that struggle would prove remarkably successful. By the 1950s, America's rich and the corporations they ran were paying significant chunks of their annual incomes in taxes — and the federal projects and programs these taxes helped finance were actually improving average American lives.
America's wealthy, predictably, counterattacked — and, by the 1980s, they were scoring successes of their own.
Today, the rich and their corporations no longer bear anything close to their rightful share of the nation's tax burden. The federal government, given this revenue shortfall, is having a harder and harder time funding initiatives that help average working families. The result: a “debt crisis.”
This “debt crisis” in no way had to happen. No natural disaster, no tsunami, has suddenly pounded the United States out of fiscal balance. We have simply suffered a colossal political failure. Our powers that be, by feeding the rich and their corporations one massive tax break after another, have thrown a monstrous monkey wrench into our national finances.
Some numbers — from an Institute for Policy Studies report released this past spring — can help us better visualize just how monumental this political failure has been.
If corporations and households taking in $1 million or more in income each year were now paying taxes at the same annual rates as they did back in 1961, the IPS researchers found, the federal treasury would be collecting an additional $716 billion a year.
In other words, if the federal government started taxing the wealthy and their corporations at the same rates in effect a half-century ago, the federal debt to investors would almost totally vanish over the next decade.
Similarly stunning numbers have come, earlier this month, from MIT economist Peter Diamond and the University of California's Emmanuel Saez, the world's top authority on the incomes of the ultra-rich. These two scholars have shared some fascinating “what ifs” that dramatize how spectacularly the incomes of our wealthiest have soared over recent decades.
In 2007, Diamond and Saez point out, taxpayers in the nation's top 1 percent actually paid, on average, 22.4 percent of their incomes in federal taxes. If that actual tax burden were to about double to 43.5 percent, the top 1 percenter share of our national after-tax income would still be twice as high as the top 1 percent’s after-tax income share in 1970.
So why aren't we taxing the rich? Why are we now suffering such fearsome “debt crisis” angst? Why are our politicos so intent on shoving the “fiscal discipline” of layoffs and cutbacks — austerity — down the throats of average Americans?
No mystery here. Our political system is failing to tax the rich because the rich have fortunes large enough to buy off the political system. Again, some numbers can help us better visualize that plutocratic big picture.
In 2008, the IRS revealed this past May, 400 Americans reported at least $110 million in income on their federal tax returns. These 400 averaged $270.5 million each, the second-highest U.S. top 400 average income on record.
In 1955, by contrast, America’s top 400 averaged — in 2008 dollars — a mere $13.3 million. In other words, the top 400 in 2008 reported incomes that, after taking inflation into account, amounted to more than 20 times the incomes of America’s top 400 a half-century ago.
But 1955’s top 400 didn’t just make far less than 2008’s top 400. The rich in 1955 paid far more of their income in taxes than today’s rich. In 2008, the new IRS data show, the top 400 paid only 18.1 percent of their total incomes in federal income tax. The top 400 in 1955 paid 51.2 percent of their total incomes in tax.
The bottom line: After taxes, and after adjusting for inflation, 2008’s top 400 had a staggering $38.5 billion more left in their pockets than 1955’s most awesomely affluent.
Multiply that near $40 billion by the annual tax savings the rest of America's richest 1 percent have enjoyed over recent years and you have an enormous war chest for waging class war, billions upon billions of dollars available for bankrolling think tanks and candidates and right-wing media.
In the face of these billions, should the rest of us, America's vast non-rich majority, just toss in the towel? Our counterparts a century ago certainly didn't. They challenged their rich, on every battlefront imaginable. They eventually prevailed. They sheared their rich down to democratic size. We can do the same.
Sam Pizzigati is the editor of the online weekly Too Much, and an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. © 2011 Campaign for America's Future All rights reserved.

[Pohaku]

Re: The Debt Ceiling

http://www.virtualshackles.com/235