I missed a major speech or two(Ann Romney's and one other I think), but I'd say this was the best speech so far out of both conventions. Not a fan of Obama nor the Democrat policies, but Clinton really unleashed the beast with this one. Even if you ignored the crowd's fanaticism, his delivery was top notch. The bastard still has it.

Convention should stop right there. There's no way Obama's topping it.

Also, is it just me or are all the people at the Democrat convention fatties? Welfare gone amok.

Clinton is still the best politician of our lifetime.

Too bad we can't have another clinton term.

Fuck the 22nd Amendment the Democrats hate the Constitution anyway. Clinton 2016

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best politician of our lifetime, possibly yes, best president no even close, at least of my lifetime.

Is there the part where you post a pic of your Reagan fuck doll?

Don't get me wrong, I thought he was a good president... however, we would need another bubble.

The 90's were just an all-around good time, no one really had control over it.

Getting Cranky Ol' HW out of the White House was a good start. Nirvana released "Nevermind" the same year!

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this is in no way a knock on Clinton or the job he did as president, but he did GREATLY benefit from the exploding .com era during that time and that went along way to helping his economic success, and I believe whoever had been president be it HW or Clinton would have had nearly the same boost to the economy.

In my lifetime, I have yet to see a Republican that believes that in order to reduce the deficit you need to bring in more than you spend. It's always let's cut taxes and that will stimulate the economy and result in more tax revenue. While that has worked in the past to an extent and Reagan's tax cuts actually did end up with slightly more revenue, W's cuts were a disaster on that scale.

Because in addition to W's cuts in taxes were increases in spending.

If we were to tax the wealthy ($250,000 and up) at 100% we would not bring in enough money to pay for government spending for a full year. We MUST cut spending.

I agree, but we also need to stop catering to the "me" attitude in America by promising to continue cutting taxes in order to get elected.

At this point a broad tax increase needs to be applied to everyone above the 40k a year mark in conjunction with spending cuts across the board. Yes its painful but last time I looked we are all in this together and not for personal gains.

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
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Yes, the economy is interconnected and we're reliant on others to make the wheels spin...
However, I'd say take a second look, as almost everyone is in it for personal gains regardless of what they say =p

Welcome to Capitalism

Math time.

I went to WSJ.com and told it I make 250,000 a year and it said I was in the 96th percentile. Call it 4 percent who make that or more. The US census bureau says there are a little over 311 million people in the US now. 4 percent of that is about 12.5 million people.

380,000 * 12.5m = 4,750,000,000,000. That's 4.75 trillion bucks.

Media reports say that the 2013 budget is tied with 2011 for a record high (then) of 3.8 trillion dollars. fraser.stlouisfed.org says the 2012 budget was 3.7t. It was 1.6t in 1996, climbed to 1.9t before Clinton left office, went from 2t to 3.1t under Bush, and from there to 3.8t under Obama.

So actually, we could totally pay for the whole federal budget by taxing only 4 percent of the population, if we wanted to be totally insane about it.

Why say, "We MUST cut spending?" Both sides agree that we need spending cuts. It's the tea party Republicans that refuse to consider an kind of revenue raising that force us into this gridlock. With a trillion dollar deficit... if we just cut spending by a trillion dollars next year, with no raise in revenues, it would cause our economy to plummet like a lead balloon and destroy the lives of millions of people. Ask Europe how their austerity programs have been doing so far.

All options need to be on the table. Raising taxes AND cutting spending needs to happen, in order to do it with a minimum of pain.

you could raise more revenue by actually cutting the corporate tax.

Cut the rate down to 23% (from almost 40% now) and eliminate the loop-holes and that would generate a lot of tax revenue.

That would help small to medium companies and provide less incentive for the large companies to work to avoid taxes.

Or you could leave the corporate tax rates where they are, and still close the loopholes.

It's the loopholes that raise the revenue, not lowering the tax rate. Saying, " you can raise it by lowering how much you take" is ridiculous.

And yes, I know all about are argument "if you lower taxes, the economy will boost and that means more revenue will come in overall." I also know it's generally been bullshit in practice over the last several decades.

In actuality the drop in tax rate and the boost to the economy usually cancel eachother out and does not help.

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

The Bush tax cuts resulted in one very interesting statistic. The number of workers making more than 200,000 and legally paying zero taxes increased from 2,300 to more than 22,000.

You are mistaken, it is the loopholes that corporations utilize (and pay lobbyist millions of dollars to secure) to pay little or no taxes.

The US has among the highest corporate tax rates in the world. Why do you think that major corporations are spending so much on lobbying and tax shelters in those loopholes. The loopholes mostly benefit the large corporations. Lowering the corporate tax rate benefits mostly the small and medium sized businesses. Eliminating the loopholes makes it where companies like GE would have to pay taxes. Reducing the rate in addition to eliminating the loopholes makes it better for all.

You're both making the same argument, the way I read it. I thought what Fribur meant was:

I'm saying that when we are in a huge deficit, we should both close the loopholes (in which krby and I agree), and also NOT lower the tax rate (in which we do not agree).

He seemed to say earlier that lowering the tax rate would somehow raise revenues. I said we've heard that argument before, and it hasn't really worked out that way.

Yeah, I don't buy it either. It used to work, but now the places where all the benefit can be siphoned off are so well-known that none of the benefits of that strategy reach the middle class. I'm with Fribur here -- leave the tax rate alone, but fix the loopholes and glitches that make it not enough.

I think what Krby is concerned about are the smaller businesses being killed off.

Yes, thats how I read it as well.

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Yes. Small businesses are being killed right now. My dad ended up closing his business he owned for the over 40 years. He had four full time employees and several contractors that worked for him. It is the tax code that made it impossible for him to survive. He couldn't grow because that meant adding more people, who he couldn't afford. Many of his contract were with government and public entities and with him not being a union company (nor are the manufacturers of the product he sold/serviced/used) he kept losing out on bids to union groups, even when his bid was the same or lower. He couldn't sell the business all he could do was sell off the assets to pay his liabilities and to give to of the people that worked with him for many many years a last bonus. In the end, all my dad got was a clean tax bill and had to get a job. His only benefits came from the VA. His only savings was his house, the house I grew up in, with his mortgage paid.

I helped run the business when my dad was sick with cancer about 20 years ago and when I was growing up I learned his business, while going to school. It was then when I realized that there would be no way that I could support a family through that business. It wasn't because it was a bad venture, it was because the limited growth opportunities and the exponentially grown government regulations that nearly doubled the cost of doing business.

Which is exactly why progressive taxing and the trickling up of federal and state revenue is the only viable solution. But since corporations are people and money is speech, Wal-Mart can just buy a couple of senators to make it so that they can replace small business with another mega-store, while receiving more income and paying less taxes than the small businesses would have, fuck the police y'all.

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With thousands of businesses still in business and making money in the United States, I find it hard to place all the blame for your father's loss on "government regulation doubling the cost of doing business."

I heard businesses never fail on their own, they just get stomped out by government. But if they succeed, they did it all on their own.

To test that theory, I'm opening an Apple Store in the middle of darkest Africa. Clearly without government to get in my way, and since I don't need any of that silly infrastructure or anything, I'll be raking in the bucks in no time.

Death by 1,00 cuts.

You were not in the business. You did not see the additional expenses due to the regulations. In this instance, you do not know what you are talking about. OSHA, EPA, and the like were knocking on the door nearly every month. What was in compliance one month was not a few months later. We would be able to do a job one way with no issues and then a few months later have to change the way we handled the job due to new regulations in regards to run off water and such.

A couple posts ago it was because of losing bids to union groups. Not having any work sounds like a fine way to go out of business.

I ran a small business. Municipal infighting killed it, though, not the federal government. It seems to me that if the truth about small business were bad enough, Paul Ryan wouldn't have felt the need to inflate the figures in his speech almost 30 times.

Again, though, krby, the problem is that there are many other businesses that are under the same regulations, yet they are successful.

Can't you make the same point about individuals?

Interesting juxtaposition.

Conservatives: Individuals should take personal responsibility for their failures.
Liberals: Business owners should take personal responsibility for their failures.

Same concept. Polar opposite. I agree with Fribur, but I also apply that concept to individuals. A little moderation goes a long way.

I'm not sure I understand. I am a liberal, and I certainly believe that individuals should take responsibility for their failures. Believing that basic humanity should lead us to create a safety net for those who run into trouble when you have the resources to do so does not mean individuals should not take responsibility for their failures.

I think the issue is that entitlements are far more than just a safety net, and out of control, and regulations are also out of control. I agree that the safety net is important and, frankly, a fundamental part of American values. I also think we shouldn't stack the odds against small business owners.

Well, I do not agree that entitlements are out of control. I agree, though, that we shouldn't stack the deck against small businesses.

It's a problem with no solution.

We're using two different terms here for the same thing -- "safety net" and "entitlements", depending on which side of the argument you occupy. It's Schroedinger's Assistance, though; its state isn't knowable in any one case until you open the box. Public asssistance is a safety net when it's used as directed, and it becomes what we're calling an entitlement when it's abused.

The government is in the terrible position of having to provide support without being able to prevent abuse. One side of this argument is defending the practice of providing abusable support; the other side advocates removing or curtailing that abuse by removing or curtailing the assistance. We take those sides because no one's come up with a way to provide assistance at need, but control abuse, without violating privacy principles.

So, thought exercise. Imagine that we create a social services department of the federal government with the following characteristics:

- Budget determined annually by the Department of the Treasury, but only in its entirety -- the DoT has no authority to impose earmarks or assignment directives on the money allocated.
- The new agency would require people applying for public assistance to sign an agreement empowering this agency to collect whatever information it wants pursuant to determining that person's eligibility for assistance, out to the limits provided by the privacy rights of others who have not also signed that agreement. (This power would not trump espousal or attorney/client privilege.)
- The new agency would be obligated to provide the IRS with information regarding who received assistance, what class the expenditure belongs in (dependent child care, subsidized education, etc.), and the amount and kind of assistance provided. This information would be provided in a timely manner for tax purposes, and at no other time, and for no other reason.
- The new agency would be forbidden to ever disclose anything else, to anyone, ever. Security and intelligence agencies could not be exceptions; absolutely no one would have the power to compel this agency to divulge so much as your blood type.
- Members of the new agency who are discovered to have disclosed information they are not authorized (and are therefore forbidden) to share are guilty of malfeasance punishable by 20 years in federal prison without parole. This is commensurate with lighter domestic espionage sentence guidelines.
- The agency would be required to maintain this information in a fashion that provides for high availability, including inert offsite backups, kept under high physical security. This is less expensive than it sounds; such a system would cost maybe ten million dollars to create, and less than that per year to maintain. That's less than the budget overruns in oversight and security efforts now. If intrusion is detected into these systems, the understanding is that this information came from somewhere, and it can come from there again -- automatics would be set to destroy it before anything can be read.

That's the kind of thing it would take, and still no one would trust it. I'm sitting here reviewing my own paragraph, wondering how you keep such a thing from becoming corrupt when it's so well-protected from external oversight.

So it will probably never exist. So we're stuck with this bullshit argument.

how can it not be considered out of control? we are literally on schedule to not be able to pay for them.

I think there should be a plan to eliminate social security within the next 50 years or less.

Retirement, as the concept currently stands, is an unworkable Ponzi scheme, and the ones who profited from the idea have long since died, and now the current workforce is paying for the retirement of the elderly. Without any additional income, Social Security doesn't provide an income sufficient to maintain a lifestyle, so why do we maintain it? Phase out the program completely and provide more incentive for private retirement accounts. We should also flat out deny anyone SS payments if they are receiving any other type of government retirement (military or pension, for example). We need to keep Medicare around, at least for a longer term than SS.

Welfare 'abuse' is a more complicated discussion since welfare is handled on the state level, but I'm pretty sure that welfare abuse doesn't happen on the scale that Republicans say it does, much like voter fraud.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

Well, I would rather that we stop treating Social Security as a retirement package. Social Security benefits for the disabled and truly challenged we need to keep in place.

I could go along with most of that.

Agreed, make it so.

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

How about increasing effective tax rates on every taxpayer by about 10% while we're at it, and halving the defense budget?

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]

You can't mimic the same conditions for every business, consisting of various groups of people, and come out with the same result. Moreover: different regulations for different businesses, etc.

That said, I tend to agree with the sentiment that those who strive to be successful and put every ounce of effort into what they do tend to be the ones that come out on top, regardless of what kind of opposition comes their way. Those that are purely driven to succeed will find some way to do so. Still, it doesn't mean we can't do better with regard to making an environment conducive to more success for the less fortunate amongst us. The issue that the US is no longer the unequivocal top dog in that department.

funny thing about slashing the defense budget, wanna know where those slashes go ?

military will cut its civilian contractors and govt service jobs first while redoing their budgets.

the base we are at currently is projecting a loss of 40,000 jobs for GS and contractors when those budget cuts go in effect, while active duty members and programs and research and funding to weapons programs etc will be at same level or increased.

so middle class civilians who work on base or for the military will be much more impacted by slashing defense budgets, much more that what you think, the military will still fund with its budget what it prioritizes for national defense.

Congress can set the budget and slash it etc, but the individual depts of the branches still set their own Fisca Year agendas and budgets

No matter what you cut, it's going to hurt someone. I agree with that, and we have to suck it up and do it.

However, if we insist on not raising revenues and try to do balance the budget ENTIRELY with spending cuts, the economic ramifications would be unnecessarily devastating.

Republicans say "cut taxes" to increase economic activity and fix everything, but tend to ignore that putting hundreds of thousands or even millions of government contractors and government employees out of work through budget cuts to balance the budget would be much more devastating than a 5% hike in income taxes for the top 2%.

Balance my friends. What Obama has been pushing for years. We need a combination of revenue increases and spending cuts if we are going to get back to a balanced budget. As long as part of the right wing continues to sign stupid "I will not raise taxes" pledges, we will keep barreling straight into the abyss.

my point being those who think slashing the defense budget, slashes money going into weapons development, new aircraft, ships or what have you aren't getting it.

slashing the defense budget is the same mantra as no new taxes

Good. So you agree, then, that we should both slash the defense budget and raise taxes. I think we are getting somewhere!

I have no problem with a 5% tax hike on the top 2%, and no problem with the closing of all loopholes in the tax code, also have no problem with banning ALL lobbyists, and their like.

yes I'm a republican, though as I've stated much more toward center than right wing

I'm not in favor of slashing the defense budget at all.

mostly because politicians, (D) or (R), can't seem to stop getting into fucked up, wrongheaded wars/interventions.

You can cut a significant portion of operating costs of the military by closing foreign military bases, not to mention bringing in income by selling off the assets at those bases.

Our defense needs aren't being served by having military bases in foreign countries. Those just become targets, and only really serve offensive needs. "Defense" doesn't mean "easily able to invade a foreign country" it means "being able to repel idiots who try to invade the US"

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World of Warcraft: Kallaystra, Gweila, Steakumn, Tarathia [ Feathermoon/Horde ]