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Zero Tolerance Strikes Again...

RiverDad said:
If I invent "the handgun" and you use it to kill someone, are we both responsible for murder? If conservatives come up with the idea of ZT for law enforcement and use it there, then they're responsible for those results. When liberals take the same idea and use it as a means for instituting gun control in school zones, which leads us to the policies we're talking about in this thread, then I'm not quite seeing what conservatives have to do with this.

Now I do concede that if I was a liberal, then the provenance of an idea would indicate guilt, hence their repeated calls to hold firearms manufacturers as accessories to murders committed by people actually firing the firearms. For those of us who inhabit the normal world this thinking doesn't make sense.
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What doesn't make sense to me is your analogy.

It seems to me that the zero tolerance policies in schools were written in order to take the decision making power from the administration and put it on whoever made those policies. It's more like an authoritarian position than anything.
 
eohrnberger said:
Shuffling money from one pocket to another isn't creating any sort of a surplus.
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There was a budget surplus.

And promptly over used by the left, as is witnessed by it's far and wide adoption in public school system, dominated by liberal / progressives.
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I posted the proof that ZT came from the right. You make claims you can't prove
 
RiverDad said:
HUH?

Go to the US Treasury website. Here.

Pull up the National Debt figures for Clinton's term of office.

On the day of his inauguration, January 20, 1993, the National Debt stood at $4,188,092,107,183.60.

Here are the figures on this date for his remaining years in office.

January 20, 1994 = $4,500,676,535,249.79
January 20, 1995 = $4,796,537,934,595.60
January 20, 1996 = $4,988,397,941,589.45
January 20, 1997 = $5,309,774,506,681.99
January 20, 1998 = $5,495,525,658,807.45
January 20, 1999 = $5,623,807,213,463.02
January 20, 2000 = $5,706,174,969,873.86
January 20, 2001 = $5,727,776,738,304.64

Now please explain to me how one can simultaneously have a "surplus" while also increasing the National Debt every single year during the Clinton era.
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I see you don't seem to understand that there are things that are not on the budget which affect the national debt.
 
Dittohead not! said:
Amazing how any dimwitted policy or idea brings out the wingers pointing fingers at each other. It's the right wing! No, the left wing!
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It's axiomatic that those on the wrong put forth idiotic policies; and then, when these policies produce exactly the bad results that anyone with better than a room-temperature IQ could have predicted, those on the wrong try to blame those on the right for these bad results. Wrong-wingers will never take responsibility for the consequence of their own policies. It's always somehow the right's fault, they claim, that wrong-wing policies always fail.
 
sangha said:
I see you don't seem to understand that there are things that are not on the budget which affect the national debt.
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Um, so? If the national debt is increasing every single damn year, then by definition there is no surplus occurring.
 
Dittohead not! said:
It seems to me that the zero tolerance policies in schools were written in order to take the decision making power from the administration and put it on whoever made those policies. It's more like an authoritarian position than anything.
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Which is what I wrote above. These policies from Washington rarely just drop from the sky unannounced and without cause. They're almost always reactions to some failure taking place. High levels of school violence were the failure. School principals weren't doing what needed to be done to keep schools safe. They certainly had the authority to expel students, they just didn't exercise that authority. The public screamed "Do something!" Congress did something.
 
sangha said:
Feel free to speculate about that as much as you like. While you're at it, figure out why it took a democrat (clinton) to create a budget surplus.
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Actually, what it took was a Republican-dominated Congress, and a weak-willed Democratic President who was so cowed after the utter failure of his initial wrong-wing policies, that he no longer had it in him to do anything but go along with whatever Congress put forth, and to claim credit himself for the results.
 
RiverDad said:
Um, so? If the national debt is increasing every single damn year, then by definition there is no surplus occurring.
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I see you also don't know how a budget surplus or deficit is calculated. (Hint: debt doesn't enter the equation)
 
Gathomas88 said:
[Is the goal here to raise productive citizens, or docile and subservient "sheeple?" More and more, it looks like public education is aiming for the latter.
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It appears that the goal is to raise children who don't really think too much, because thinking is the gateway drug to independence and self-reliance, and God knows we don't want independent-minded people anymore. They are much too difficult to control. Much better to have a population who is dependent on government- they are much less likely to cause trouble or rebel.
 
sangha said:
I see you also don't know how a budget surplus or deficit is calculated. (Hint: debt doesn't enter the equation)
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Let's tango. If there was a surplus, then what did the government do with the cash? Where did it go? Did Clinton burn the money?
 
sangha said:
The Budget and Deficit Under Clinton

There was a surplus
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No, there wasn't. What did Clinton do with the money? Burn it? He sure didn't pay down the debt, it increased. Total borrowing increased. That's all we need to determine that there was no surplus. Liberal hacks aren't judges here. For god sake's most of them are just liberal arts majors or worse yet, journalism majors. Neither are known for being their high numeracy skills.

What did Clinton do with the surplus? Where did that money go? Did he send it up in the shuttle? Did he have the cash dropped into the ocean? What did he do with it?
 
RiverDad said:
Only in the liberal universe of make-believe does Factcheck.org trump the US Treasury. Good God, give it a rest.
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From the CBO

FederalDeficit(1).jpg
 
sangha said:
tl;dr

I've proven that zero tolerance was devised by a conservative, promoted by conservatives, and supported by conservatives beginning in the 80's
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Oh FFS:doh

Instances of 'zero tolerance' as a form of administrative control have been around for millennia. The Tower of Babel incident and the Great Flood were 'zero tolerance' in action and ever since it's come up again and again only to be proved pretty much a stupid way to handle things. It has never been 'liberal' or 'conservative'. It's just one of those stupid damned things that humans do from time to time.
 
sangha said:
From the CBO
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The CBO, as we all well know by now, is restricted to studying issues under the parameters given them by the House. This is why they double-counted Medicare revenue for two years and assigned it to PPACA - if the money is now counted as revenue for PPACA then it can't be counted for Medicare. The money raised from FICA taxes was designated to go to Medicare, not PPACA, but the CBO was instructed to include two years of this revenue into

The key point is that the savings to the HI trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs. Trust fund accounting shows the magnitude of the savings within the trust fund, and those savings indeed improve the solvency of that fund; however, that accounting ignores the burden that would be faced by the rest of the government later in redeeming the bonds held by the trust fund. Unified budget accounting shows that the majority of the HI trust fund savings would be used to pay for other spending under the PPACA and would not enhance the ability of the government to redeem the bonds credited to the trust fund to pay for future Medicare benefits. To describe the full amount of HI trust fund savings as both improving the government's ability to pay future Medicare benefits and financing new spending outside of Medicare would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government's fiscal position.​

If the CBO was not instructed to double-count the Medicare revenue as part of the PPACA revenue, then there wouldn't have been a dissenting judgment from the Medicare Trustees:

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Obamacare will reduce the deficit, by coupling a multi-trillion-dollar expansion of federal health spending with cuts to Medicare and higher taxes. Now, a new study by a Medicare trustee suggests that the law will actually increase deficits, over the next ten years, by between $346 and $527 billion. Why do the trustee’s numbers differ from those of the CBO, and who’s right? Let’s take a look. . .

In March of 2011, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius admitted that the law double-counts its reductions in Medicare spending, by claiming that the law both reduces the deficit and extends Medicare’s solvency. . . .

The CBO has, quite regularly, issued substantial caveats with its projections, highlighting many of the same issues that Blahous raises in his report. But CBO is constrained by Congress in how it can quantify those issues, in a way that Blahous is not. . . The key point is that savings to the [Medicare Hospital Insurance] trust fund under the PPACA would be received by the government only once, so they cannot be set aside to pay for future Medicare spending and, at the same time, pay for current spending on other parts of the legislation or on other programs.”​

So you're still left with OPINIONS and I'm referencing FACTS. There is no dispute about the Treasury record of the debt at any given point in time. Those are hard numbers, down to the penny. The Total Debt of the United States increased every year of the Clinton Presidency. It doesn't matter what convoluted scenario the CBO had to use to assess the issue, their ANALYSIS doesn't trump the actual DEBT DATA.
 
Lutherf said:
Oh FFS:doh

Instances of 'zero tolerance' as a form of administrative control have been around for millennia. The Tower of Babel incident and the Great Flood were 'zero tolerance' in action
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Actually, those never happened. But a conservative named James Q Wilson did come up with the idea of zero tolerance.
 
'Zero tolerance' is an oxymoron and form of extreme idealism that's based on the premise that by being overly punitive, it teaches some lesson and is a benefit. All it does is punish unjustly and negate any mitigating factors, which are necessary in administering justice.

It's similar to the mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses. Nonsensical.
 
RiverDad said:
The CBO, as we all well know by now, is restricted to studying issues under the parameters given them by the House.
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You're talking about CBO projections. The balanced budget wasn't a projection; it was a fact

The CBO #'s are right, and I don't see how ACA has anything to do with how the surplus was created seeing as how ACA wasn't passed until 10 years after Clinton balanced the budget.

It' looks like more obfuscation from your end.
 
SmokeAndMirrors said:
While that isn't necessarily the safest route of dealing with someone who is self-injuring, I certainly wouldn't expect an 11-year-old to know that, and it is beyond appalling she got suspended for attempting to help someone. I wonder what would have happened if it'd been a gun he was holding instead and she had disarmed him of it. This is just sad.
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I am wondering if it's more because she didn't take the razor blade to a teacher/principal, nor report the incident in a timely manner. As you say, what if it was a gun, would she have tossed it in the trash and not told anyone for a couple days? If she had and someone else picked up that gun.... Same with the razor blade, though definitely less likely.
Expulsion or even the 10 day suspension is waaaaaay too extreme, but I could definitely see a one day suspension for her, because a child trying to harm him/herself should be reported immediately, and a requirement that the cutter not return til some pych had evaluated him.
 
sangha said:
The CBO #'s are right, and I don't see how ACA has anything to do with how the surplus was created seeing as how ACA wasn't passed until 10 years after Clinton balanced the budget.

It' looks like more obfuscation from your end.
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Does everything need to be drawn in crayons for you. The point was clear. The PPACA episode is a clear illustration of how CBO is constrained by the conditions imposed on it. They were instructed to include 2 years of Medicare revenue as PPACA revenue but Medicare still needed that revenue. That's a double counting. But under the rules of the study, CBO had to treat that revenue as flowing to PPACA. That's how CBO must operate - under the rules imposed by those who ask for the study. The lesson is that it's hard to trust anything CBO publishes.

You're like a child holding his breath until he gets what he wants. You can keep claiming that a convoluted analysis trumps actual Treasury Department data but that doesn't make you correct. Take your yapping dog routine and bother someone else who enjoys dealing with this act of yours. I tried to engage you, I asked you questions which you chose not to answer, I tried to educate you by linking you to data and to explanations of how CBO is constrained in the analyses that it conducts, but you don't want to engage, you just want to be right even when the evidence shows that you're wrong. Your broken record schtick is not the least bit interesting to me. Go find a Christian to hammer over the head.
 
Summerwind said:
I am wondering if it's more because she didn't take the razor blade to a teacher/principal, nor report the incident in a timely manner. As you say, what if it was a gun, would she have tossed it in the trash and not told anyone for a couple days?
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We shouldn't be holding young kids to the decision standards of adults. Here the hypothesis is that the child is being penalized for not engaging in long-term thinking, for not understanding the unforeseen consequences. What matters is that she disposed of the razor immediately upon coming into its possession. The weapon is neutralized and away from the victim and its not even in the girl's possession. That's more than enough good judgement from this girl.
 
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