It was established already:Originally Posted by millennialX
Best...Thought that was transparent.
Cheers
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It was established already:
Best...Thought that was transparent.
Cheers
Of course it is the case. Gingrich would take away food stamps in a heartbeat, along with social security, medicare and all these other "programs to help poor and minorities by stealing money from those who earned it." That's what all those white Republicans in the room during the debates in South Carolina want him to do.
But the real scam is for Gingrich to say he will "create jobs." How many government jobs can he create? How many WOULD he create, given his philosophy? The answer is: NONE. How is Gingrich going to "create jobs?" By subsidizing corporations? He can't do that. By giving tax breaks to "job creaters?" That doesn't work. Gingrich can't create any jobs.
All he can do is take more jobs away with more giveaways to the rich and powerful, and continue the Republican policy of making the jobs people DO have pay even less, and the costs of everything people need GO UP even FURTHER.
The way this race has gone, you can't assume that. Could anything be more obvious, even to a non-astrologer? No, things will change again, and again, and again.... polls in this Republican race have only temporary meanings.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 01-25-2012 at 01:24 AM.
Yes. That was my point. But I wasn't sure what Rani's point was.
My point is--why did he have to discuss going to a group that is for "colored" people? Why not talk to a political group?
But this has been belabored enough.
The president made a proposal to, if I understand correctly, to tax capital gains at 30%. Or he might have said, establish a 30% minimum income tax for rich people. Good ideas, but unlikely to pass any time soon.
I thought about it, and what might fly a little sooner is a progressive capital gains tax, and also include social security and medicare taxes on it. Or just include it in all income and tax it progressively; no separate category.
So if someone made a small or moderate amount of capital gains, (s)he would pay no tax on it or a small amount. If someone makes a "killing," (s)he would pay 38% (the Clinton highest tax bracket).
Plus-- social security and medicare taxes. These are payments for earned benefits to be received later. But if capital gains are not "earned," why should they be taxed less? If Republicans think capital gains income is deserved income because it is beneficial to the economy, why treat it as not being "earned?"
And the SS tax holiday of 4% could indeed be made permanent, if the cap on how much is taxed is removed. And then medicare tax could be raised enough to cover everybody. Make sense?
I am a bit concerned though about Obama continuing to say middle class tax payers "need a break." Right now the government is starved for revenue. I don't think the debt can ever be paid down to a reasonable level, if most people continue to pay so little.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 01-25-2012 at 05:18 AM.
Indeed, quite so.
Who knows.
Here's the full quote:
First he says that the "majority" of Americans prefer paychecks to food stamps. Then he says the ones "satisfied" with food stamps are black Americans. The mind has to do mental gymnastics to leap out of that one. And frankly my mind has better things to do.More people are on food stamps today because of Obama’s policies than ever in history. I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history. Now, there’s no neighborhood I know of in America where if you went around and asked people, “Would you rather your children had food stamps or paychecks,” you wouldn’t [SIC] end up with a majority saying they’d rather have a paycheck. And so I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. And I’ll go to them and explain a brand new Social Security opportunity for young people, which should be particularly good for African-American males — because they’re the group that gets the smallest return on Social Security because they have the shortest life span.
Indeed.
Cheers.
Saw this after
posting...
Best...
I didn't know what he allegedly said until I came here. The quote on this page made me think that and I had to look it up for myself afterwards (from several sources). It's what I do.
Born in 1981 and INFJ Gen Yer
The Rani is an intelligent woman but once in a while she gets on an unfortunate tangent, won't admit it, and starts digging a deeper and deeper hole for herself. That's what happening here.
If you put the two Gingrich statements together--you can't find a community where people would prefer food stamps to paychecks, and I'd like to tell the NAACP that "the African-American community" shouldn't be satisfied with food stamps instead of paychecks--then the logic of the statement is very clear, to wit:
While most people prefer paychecks, the NAACP and/or the African-American community does not, and I have to straighten them out.
To me, Annla, the clear implication isn't the majority of the African-American community, it's all of it.
The statement is ignorant racist pandering because:
1. Most people receiving food stamps are white.
2. Food stamps are not an alternative to a pay check. I believe Wonkette will confirm that many people get both, because their paychecks are so small.
The Rani did make one interesting point, by indirection. Poor people are not a political group in the United States. I would argue that they shouldn't be--they should be regarded the way FDR did: as people who are poor now because of various unfortunate circumstances, not moral failings, and whom we are going to help get into the mainstream of the economy.
OK, I'll stop now too. I would like to hear more comments on the state of the union about which I'm still the only person to post.
David Kaiser '47
My blog: History Unfolding
My book: The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Agreed on FDR comment.
Ha, ha..I'm sorry I think I'm all state of the union out because that's all we were talking about in my house yesterday. But I hope to come back to this. If anything, I noticed that Fox News.com had a pretty flattering picture of Obama and used a strong sound bite for their head line.
""Obama: Rebuild the American Dream"
There was a picture of a smiling Obama shaking hands with a smiling Boehner. Of course, the Speaker was standing above, with the President looking up below....
Anyway, I wonder if this is a positive sign for after we get passed this election.
Just my thoughts...
Last edited by millennialX; 01-25-2012 at 09:08 AM.
Born in 1981 and INFJ Gen Yer
I missed the speech, since I work on Tuesday nights. My husband forgot about it. My seventeen-year-old son watched the whole thing. Sometimes I think he's a closet news junkie.
You do a great job in pointing out Gingrich's condescending and paternalistic attitude toward "the African-American community." And again JPT appears to share this attitude, as he did in describing how the Black vote is all about racial solidarity and fear of displeasing the Great Leaders Jackson and Sharpton.
People aren't stupid. They know when they're being spoken down to.
I'm usually the guy who tries do see how something that was said isn't racist. This time I think what Newt said actually is.
I like how you put it, but personally I would make a small correction. I don't think he meant all of it. All that is necessary is for there to be a problem within the African American community with over dependence on food stamps. The problem isn't whether or not he is racist whether what he said is racist or not is solely based on the truth of the statement. If there is a problem among subculture X I think a presidential candidate should be able to address the issue, but there must actually be evidence to support this and I don't think there is if more white people actually use food stamps.
It is too bad race is so sensitive an issue because it makes it hard not to just label something racist or liberal just based on the results. I wish we could all really be colorblind, but it's not possible until there is a sufficient mix.
Now what Newt said was totally based on stereotyping and prejudice and it was wrong to say.
I guess I live in a Cosby Show bubble, because I don't know anyone who at least broadcast that they use food stamps.
Born in 1981 and INFJ Gen Yer
Did you ever see the episode of "Everybody hate Chris" where they go on food stamps and the mom is really ashamed?
I have white friends who were on them. I'm sure I have white friends that are on them now that I just don't know about. The thing is it's not a racial issue and even if it were kinda true it doesn't matter because it has nothing to do with skin color.
Agreed.
......................
Born in 1981 and INFJ Gen Yer
I don't support it and my sister considers me a racist as a result.
"My generation, we were the generation that was going to change the world: somehow we were going to make it a little less lonely, a little less hungry, a little more just place. But it seems that when that promise slipped through our hands we didn´t replace it with nothing but lost faith."
Bruce Springsteen, 1987
http://brucebase.wikispaces.com/1987...+YORK+CITY,+NY
Newt Gingrich had another attack of "Foot-in-the-Mouth Disease". He tried to say that a robust economy was better for poor people than is welfare of any kind. But one needs the robust economy first, and as a Social Darwinist he believes that economic desperation is a stronger incentive for people to work harder and longer for less so that the super-rich can get even more.
If it's strictly a question of economic vibrancy, food stamps is one of the least disruptive forms of aid possible. Expenditures through food stamps go back into the commercial economy for American-made products. To be sure, recipients can buy highly-processed foods of questionable merit (sodas, chips, pastries) and food items that could be made far-less expensively if recipients did some real food preparation (as in, make your own lasagna and pizza).
One valid complaint is that people can work nearly full time and qualify -- but that complaint is that people can't make a living on the jobs available. The problem isn't that such people are getting food stamps but instead that welfare becomes an incentive to underpay people. That is perverse.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
I don't like Gingrich, but your link is political hyperbole.
Frankly I'm all for taxing capital gains as ordinary income if long term gains have inflation indexing.
If I buy an asset for $10,000 and sell it for $20,000 years later -- but prices have also doubled in that time, in real terms I have gained NOTHING yet I'd pay taxes on half the sale price.
I'd also tax dividends as ordinary income but would allow the business to pass them to shareholders on a pre-tax basis (i.e. the corporation wouldn't pay tax on the amount they distribute as dividends). That would eliminate the double taxation conundrum and would allow dividends to be taxed according to the income level of the recipient. Someone with a modest income and a dividend stock portfolio for retirement income would pay a marginal rate of 15% and someone like Mitt Romney would pay 35% or more on the margin. I think this would encourage dividend payouts, and dividend stocks are less volatile than those that don't pay dividends. Thus encouraging companies to pay dividends with their profits could have a volatility-dampening effect on the financial markets which would improve economic stability.
Last edited by ziggyX65; 01-25-2012 at 12:04 PM.
Good comment. I would like a drastic simplification of the US tax code so that all( at least most exemptions are deleted). Then be sure that all , including the wealthy and big corporations actually pay their taxes. If this were done, the rates would not need to be too high. Just stop the ones who escape taxes while the majority of workers continue to pay their taxes.
When someone makes this idiotic statement, it means that they have no clue what they are talking about. The federal govt's spending is not constrained by its "borrowing."
Try a little experiment that could be very very profitable for you. Take whatever gold, silver, corporate stock, foreign currency, lumber, oil, gasoline, donkeys, brides, children, you name it and try to buy a Treasury from the US govt. For every T-bill you can buy this way, I will match it with 10X the denomination {Now if you take this bet and lose, you need to give me your gold, silver, brides, etc...].
The point here is that you cannot purchase US debt instrument with anything but dollars. Now where did the Chinese get those dollars? Unlike the N. Koreans, they don't print them. They sell crap to us more than we sell crap to them (i.e. our trade deficit) and as a result they get excess dollars. Now the vast majority of those dollars are in the form of electrons that show up on the Chinese sovereign account with the US Federal Reserve. They could exchange those electrons for paper dollars and burn them, but in addition to that being against US law, it would have an impact on their accumulate wealth, no?
The Chinese have three realistic choices as to what to do with their accumulated dollar electrons. They can let them sit at the FED as non-interest bearing security (i.e., dollar) electrons earning no interest (i.e., like a checking account). Or, they can convert those dollars to interest-bearing securities called Treasuries (i.e., like a savings account). Or, they can spend those dollar electrons on goods and services from either the US economy and/or from other economies. Whoever sold the goods and services to the Chinese would then have the same three choices -- and it would make no difference to us.
The point here is that Federal spending proceeds the purchasing of Federal ‘debt’ - how else would anyone have the dollars to buy dollar-denominated debt, duh (this ain't rocket science). As such, only someone completely wedded to a false ideology (such as yourself) and/or a false mythology (most lazy people today), would make the idiotic statement -
"we can only continue to spend by borrowing money from China"
Now, you are getting somewhere, but you have a long long way to go in your understanding.
Currency devaluation is relative to other currencies. Currency devaluation is not always a bad thing and, in fact, many countries purposefully devalue their currency (e.g. Japan) or at least manipulate the value to keep it from rising (e.g. China). They do this to keep their exports high with lower prices so as to meet their employment and internal development objectives. Some have accused the US of doing this as well – usually a good sign that they're just about to devalue their own currency (gee, imagine that!).
Outside of purposeful devaluation, there is the organic devaluation that can come about from inflation - sustained generalize increases in the prices of goods and services in a particular currency. This is complicated by the fact that such inflation (or its opposite, deflation) is constantly going on in all currencies so for determining consequences for currency devaluation, it is not simply a matter of understanding inflation for any one currency.
It is also complicated by the fact that in any vibrant growing economy, particularly with a growing population, there must be a corresponding background rate of inflation. Yes, the average car today appears much more expensive than the average car of 50 years ago, but there is no comparison between those cars in performance or any other objective measure; and one must compare it to average incomes of then and now - usually today's car compared to income is a bargain unless the economy/productivity has not grown sufficiently - along the lines of the “simple math” that M&L has tried to point out to you -
http://www.fourthturning.com/forum/s...983#post417983
-The “problem” of background inflation is barbers... and similar goods and services where productivity gains are somewhat limited but those goods and services are still desired by society today. Back in the 1960s, a barber would need to cut the hair of about 200 heads a month to afford a car. Given that cars cost about 10x more today, do you thing the barber is now cutting 2000 people's hair? If that was true, we would have lost all barbers a long time ago, but we haven’t now have we? So, how does the barber (and similar goods and services not subject to productivity increases) keep up with productivity gains like cars or computers? Think about it.
Now there is harmful inflation, but where does it come from? Looking at this graph of inflation rates to federal govt deficits for the last 80 years -
- we see that there is no correlation (go ahead and lag the inflation rate; many have tried to show correlation that way and have failed). So anyone suggesting that inflation is due to federal deficit spending doesn't know what they are talking about.
If you want to know what has caused harmful inflation to occur on occasion over the last 80 years, here's a hint: while it is measure in barrels, it no longer is transported that way. Oh, and it cost about $100 per barrel today. Got it?
What do you mean by "trouble" and don't give me your Zimbabwe, Weimer Republic, Confederate States, Argentina, Greece, or any other country that is not like the US which, unlike those other countries or any other that you will come up with, is instead a monetarily-sovereign nation - it owes its debts in the currency that it alone has the monopoly to issue within a floating currency regime and with the undisputed ability to tax its own economic production.
And yes, federal deficit spending in the type of situation we have today not only works but it is the only way it will work. It is working now but just barely because of nitwits like you are in the position to keep it bottled up.
Gingrich or any of the other numbskulls running on the Right would likely make that worst by reducing federal deficit spending even more and throwing us back into recession if not something much worst. Given the disproportionate impact such an action would have on minorities, one might be able to deduce racism. I chalk it up more to general stupidity with a dash of ingrained Randian sociopathic behavior - i.e. you don't play well with others.
Last edited by playwrite; 01-25-2012 at 12:31 PM.
"The Devil enters the prompter's box and the play is ready to start" - R. Service
“It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed … so, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money.” - B.Bernanke
"Keep your filthy hands off my guns while I decide what you can & can't do with your uterus" - Sarah Silverman
If you meet a magic pony on the road, kill it. - Playwrite
We need to "blow it"
That's another way to look at it -
http://twentycentparadigms.blogspot....k-us-jobs.html
Steve "Jobs" versus Barack "US" Jobs
Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, Republican response to the State of the Union:
Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.
Perhaps he missed this, in a fascinating story about Apple in Sunday's New York Times magazine:
[A]s Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States and 20,000 overseas, a small fraction of the over 400,000 American workers at General Motors in the 1950s, or the hundreds of thousands at General Electric in the 1980s. Many more people work for Apple’s contractors: an additional 700,000 people engineer, build and assemble iPads, iPhones and Apple’s other products. But almost none of them work in the United States. Instead, they work for foreign companies in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, at factories that almost all electronics designers rely upon to build their wares.
As for those dollars we "borrowed and blew," according to the Congressional Budget Office:
CBO estimates that ARRA’s policies had the following effects in the third quarter of calendar year 2011 compared with what would have occurred otherwise:
They raised real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 0.3 percent and 1.9 percent,
They lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.2 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points,
They increased the number of people employed by between 0.4 million and 2.4 million,
(According to the CBO's estimates, the impact of the stimulus peaked in the third quarter of 2010 at 0.7-3.6 million).
To summarize, US jobs:
Steve Jobs' "noble pursuit": 43,000*
Barack Obama "borrowed and blown": 400,000-2,400,000
Maybe it would be fitting to call the President Barack "US" Jobs.
*Don't get me wrong - I'm a fan of his computers. There's alot to think about in the Times article - see Paul Krugman and Ryan Avent. However, many of the issues raised by it, and by the President's speech, about trade, education and "industrial policy," are really about the composition of employment. The total number of jobs at any time depends mainly on aggregate demand - and when there is a slump (particularly one the Fed can't handle), the appropriate fiscal policy response is indeed for the government to 'borrow' some money and "blow" it.
"The Devil enters the prompter's box and the play is ready to start" - R. Service
“It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed … so, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money.” - B.Bernanke
"Keep your filthy hands off my guns while I decide what you can & can't do with your uterus" - Sarah Silverman
If you meet a magic pony on the road, kill it. - Playwrite
