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House GOP blocks bill to extend jobless benefits

Let's bring all of our troops home.


Does Afghanistan really need a 500 million dollar embassy?

US to spend 500 million dollars on embassy in Afghanistan

November 4, 2010 by legitgov

ShareThisAnother day, another unreported budget-busting bl*wjob for US corporaterrorists: US to spend 500 million dollars on embassy in Afghanistan --Embassy expansion contract worth 511 million dollars awarded to US company, Caddell Construction Inc. 03 Nov 2010 The United States is bolstering its presence in Afghanistan with a 500 million dollar expansion of its Kabul embassy and the construction of two consulates, it announced Wednesday. Washington's Kabul embassy is already its biggest in the world, with about 1,100 employees, projected to rise to 1,200 by the end of the year, officials said. [See also: The Obusha AfPak Money Pit By Lori Price.]


US to spend 500 million dollars on embassy in Afghanistan | Citizens for Legitimate Government
 
Did I say I wanted taxes to be raised? Point to anything in my post where I said I was for raising taxes. I did not. I merely made counter-points to your argument concerning the limited tax credits, extensions or reductions made under Pres. Obama. Can't help it if my objectivity ruined your "I hate Obama" tiraide.

I tend to look at a given situation and support concepts that are intended to either remedy the situation or mitigate it to some degree, i.e., tax cuts/credits that are specific for the economic situation of the day. The reason I'm against making any tax cuts permanent is because we live in a capitalistic society where the state of our economy is always changing, constantly in flux. A 10% tax increase today (depending on what the increase was for) might not be as affective 5-10 years from now. So, why make them permanent if chances are the nation's economic situation may very well change in the not too distant future and we find we have to either increase or decrease that same tax because the economics of the day have changed? It's why our tax code is 20 years out of date! Our economy has changed. Now, imagine if made the tax code from 1990 permanent and could not change them to meet today's economic challenges? This is why I think what Republicans are advocating is disasterous to the future of our nation's economy. It's foolhearty to think any other way!!!

You don't see the difference between the Bush and Obama tax cuts? Obama's were targeted and thus didn't provide incentive to all. Bush's were tax cuts for all Americans and provided more income on each paycheck. Apparently you don't understand the difference.
 
Let's bring all of our troops home.

that would be a start. stop wasting money in ****holes like Iraq and Afghanistan. take all the troops deployed overseas and put em on the damn mexican border to keep all those illegal jotos from streaming in.

cut research grants into studying how cow farts contribute to global warming

stop funding "the arts"

get rid of the dept of education. (let the states handle it)

no more pork barrel "bridge to nowhere" projects

cut welfare to able bodied people
 
It is noble to whine and complain about what someone else makes and to penalize them for their income? How does raising the taxes on the top 2% benefit you or the country?

It benefits the country by helping to pay down the national debt.

It benefits me by allowing me to "keep more of what I earn". Otherwise, taxes would need to be raised on ALL of us, a concept I have no problem with personally, but when I earn less than X annually and someone else who earns X4 my gross income but has been receiving tax breaks for 2-3 decades, I'd say they've had more than their fair share of "investment income incentives" to move the economy along.

The Bush tax cuts didn't work because the rich didn't reinvest in this country's future. Instead, it would appear that they followed the Wall Street montra of "greed is good". If you doubt it, how do you explain the recession? You'll of course say it was homeowners who bought homes they couldn't afford, but let's not forget in most cases it was banks and mortgage lenders who convinced these people they could purchase their homes at low APR and refinance later (2-3 yrs). How'd that work out for low-income families who's only real mistake was trying to live the American dream? Yes, they should have read the fine print and better understood the conditions of the mortgage contract they signed, but let's be real here. By a show of virtual hands how many honestly know the full details of your mortgage contract? I sure don't! But I knew enough to insist on something better than an ajustable rate mortgage. So, I guess I was smarter than most average Joes out there. Still, my point is this isn't an indictment on those top 1-2% wage earners. It's a call for them to give back to the country who helped make them millionaires in the first place in providing the very investment opportunities and tax shelters they've come to enjoy so much.

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." For once, I'm asking where's your :censored patriotism?
 
You don't see the difference between the Bush and Obama tax cuts? Obama's were targeted and thus didn't provide incentive to all. Bush's were tax cuts for all Americans and provided more income on each paycheck. Apparently you don't understand the difference.

true, but the point is moot, academic waste of time

47 house dems and a half dozen blue senators have declared---they will join with republican patriots to extend the cuts to ALL americans

it's increasingly looking like pelosi/reid/obama will PUNT once more this central issue, the precise, numerical relationship between each american and the INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE

and this time it's boehner to whom they're kicking, and the orange dude will NOT fair catch

the party still in power is completely nonplussed, impotent, pathetic
 
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that would be a start. stop wasting money in ****holes like Iraq and Afghanistan. take all the troops deployed overseas and put em on the damn mexican border to keep all those illegal jotos from streaming in.

cut research grants into studying how cow farts contribute to global warming

stop funding "the arts"

get rid of the dept of education. (let the states handle it)

no more pork barrel "bridge to nowhere" projects

cut welfare to able bodied people
Agree, except fine tune it a bit...states take care of education, but standards and curriculum should be overseen by the feds. otherwise, you end up with some states doing a good job, and other states growing a new welfare class.
As for cutting welfare to the able bodied, find them jobs, even it it is only cleaning up the highways and public lands, and if they don't show up, cut off their welfare..
 
No, you don't get it, why let any of the tax cuts expire? Are you one of those that continues to believe what Obama tells you in spite of not one of his claims being accurate? How much are those tax increases going to reduce the deficit? Where is the evidence?

You haven't cleared up anything yet so let's see you answer my question?

which question
 
You don't see the difference between the Bush and Obama tax cuts? Obama's were targeted and thus didn't provide incentive to all. Bush's were tax cuts for all Americans and provided more income on each paycheck. Apparently you don't understand the difference.

Sure, I see that. And back then maybe it made good economic since to provide those tax breaks across the board to every American. But we're NOT living in those sensable economic times right now! The poor and the middle-class cannot afford to pay more in taxes, but the wealthiest of Americans can! The economics of today dictates that those who can provide should provide. You yourself have constantly espoused this same philosophy through public/private/corporate charities. I see no reason why in today's hard economic times the wealthiest of Americans would not be willing to step up to the plate in support of their country even for 2-3 years. Believe me, if the tax cuts are targetted towards those who have the greatest mass buying power - the consumers - demand will be fostered and businesses will being to thrive. And ask sells begin to increase, so will the GDP. And as the GDP increases, unemployment rates decrease. And as unemployment rates decrease, the economy begins to heal itself.

It's really that simple.
 
The government was out of the way from 2001 to 2008 and look where that got us.

objectively this is incorrect. regulatory interference under Bush increased mor than it did under Clinton. heck, measured in terms of regulatory spending, it increased more in each of Bush's individual terms than it did in both of Clintons' combined. Mark Crain estimates that compliance with regulation cost American businesses $1.172 Trillion (to put that in terms, total corporate tax revenue was $304 billion) in 2008 alone. Clinton cut regulatory staff by 969 employees; Bush added 91,196 people.

Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University: "The Bush team has spent more taxpayer money on issueing and enforcing regulatios than any previous administration in U.S. history."

Don't get me wrong, Bush had his good points. but small-governmentalism isn't one of them.
 
Agree, except fine tune it a bit...states take care of education, but standards and curriculum should be overseen by the feds. otherwise, you end up with some states doing a good job, and other states growing a new welfare class...

standards and curriculum aren't really overseen by the feds now, the fed dept of ed is worthless. all we get from them is useless BS unfunded mandates.
 
objectively this is incorrect. regulatory interference under Bush increased mor than it did under Clinton. heck, measured in terms of regulatory spending, it increased more in each of Bush's individual terms than it did in both of Clintons' combined. Mark Crain estimates that compliance with regulation cost American businesses $1.172 Trillion (to put that in terms, total corporate tax revenue was $304 billion) in 2008 alone. Clinton cut regulatory staff by 969 employees; Bush added 91,196 people.

Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University: "The Bush team has spent more taxpayer money on issueing and enforcing regulatios than any previous administration in U.S. history."

Don't get me wrong, Bush had his good points. but small-governmentalism isn't one of them.
Adding regulatory staff doens't always mean more regulation....too many of them sat at their desks all day, every day, doing nothing....
Look at how many times Madoff was ratted out , and our govt regulators did nothing...
 
standards and curriculum aren't really overseen by the feds now, the fed dept of ed is worthless. all we get from them is useless BS unfunded mandates.

IMO, the Education dept would need about 100 employees to create and oversee a set of standards. Enforcement would come about by making sure that the parents in each and every school district are kept informed about how their schools are meeting those standards.
We used to live in a small town in Idaho. The parents THOUGHT the schools were doing a good job. Problem is, the standards were so low that almost every HS student was on the "honor roll", even those who couldn't spell or punctuate properly. They did have a "high honor roll" that meant something. When these less than high honor roll students went off to college, many of them had to take remedial classes to make up for their pathetic HS education....
 
IMO, the Education dept would need about 100 employees to create and oversee a set of standards.
....

maybe a couple of representatives from each state. from my personal experience "educators" are the last people you want in charge of educational standards.

how freaking hard could it be?

basic math
english proficiency
science (chemistry, biology, physics, earth/physical science)
some general history
economics and government

and then let the states decide which "electives" they want to teach in their schools
 
It benefits the country by helping to pay down the national debt.

that, at least, is true. or, it would be true, if it did help pay down debt. the likelihood is that it won't, so this would be one of those good-initiative-bad-judgement routines.

It benefits me by allowing me to "keep more of what I earn". Otherwise, taxes would need to be raised on ALL of us, a concept I have no problem with personally, but when I earn less than X annually and someone else who earns X4 my gross income but has been receiving tax breaks for 2-3 decades, I'd say they've had more than their fair share of "investment income incentives" to move the economy along.

you've recieved a tax break right along with them; the rates were lowered for everybody.

The Bush tax cuts didn't work because the rich didn't reinvest in this country's future.

this is objectively not true. not only did revenues increase after the tax cuts, but the share of revenues paid by the wealthy increased. not only did the shares of revenue paid by the wealthy increase, they increased ahead of their pre-cut projections. according to none other than Christina Romer (President Obama's former lead economist), the tax cuts on the wealthy had a 'large and consistent positive output effect' (IE: it grew the economy, and continued to grow the economy).

Instead, it would appear that they followed the Wall Street montra of "greed is good". If you doubt it, how do you explain the recession? You'll of course say it was homeowners who bought homes they couldn't afford, but let's not forget in most cases it was banks and mortgage lenders who convinced these people they could purchase their homes at low APR and refinance later (2-3 yrs).

gosh, gee wiz, now why would a bank deliberately lend money that it knew it had a low chance of getting back.

i'm sure it had nothing at all to do with the fact that that was precisely what they were being ordered to do by the government.


the current recession is the result of an almost Perfect Storm of factors which came to be mutually-reinforcing. the politcal push to have lending institutions put more low-income people into housing (incidentally, no one ever mentions the greed of someone seeking a house above their means) combined with increased local property restrictions and a loose-money policy to send housing prices into a bubble. the desperate desire of the banks to be rid of the risk that the government had pushed them into combined with an implicit government backing of freddie and fannie to create a market for selling mortgage-backed securities. all it took was one pause (the jump in gas prices helped), and the whole ponzi scheme was revealed. once housing prices stopped skyrocketing upwards, flippers and those who had bought way above themselves walked away from the houses that now had more debt on them than they were worth. this sank not only the value of those securities, but everyone else's property value; which banks hold as worth to cover their investments. a simple alteration to the mark-to-marketing rule would have saved banks the vast majority of their losses in this case, but there you are.

then government tried to 'fix' it; which so far has worked about as well as it did under Hoover and FDR. massive debt-driven 'stimulus' plans served to soak up all investment capital. instead of looking for ways to invest in the American economy, foriegn and local holders of dollars invested in government debt; which means that instead of being spent on businesses and recovery; those dollars were spent on bridges to nowhere and studies on robot bees.

IE: we had a financial bubble, caused by government distortion of market signals (both from Congress and the Fed; as well as local governments). and then, when it popped, government took all the capital that would have normally led to recovery and spent it all on Congresscritters favorite pork projects. And so here we are today.

How'd that work out for low-income families who's only real mistake was trying to live the American dream?

that wasn't their mistake; i have a low-income family, and we are living the American dream. we will be buying a house the right way; not the greedy instant-gratification-gotta-have-it-now way. as for low-income families who lost out, they are suffering; which is typical of what happens to them when government tries to 'help' them by giving them something. minorities, for example: local organizations were given veto power on bank expansions in order to provide a means of forcing that bank to loan certain percentages and amounts to minorities. buuuut, minorities often couldn't afford as much. soooo, the banks created fancy new ways (ARMs, etc) for them to be able to afford to get a mortgage so that the government wouldn't punish them; and then sold those mortgages off as fast as they could. those targeted minorities, meanwhile, were left holding half the potato when the music stopped playing, and suffered accordingly.

It's a call for them to give back to the country who helped make them millionaires in the first place in providing the very investment opportunities and tax shelters they've come to enjoy so much.

they already do that, by paying more taxes than any other comparable demographic in this nation and providing much of the economic expansion and dynamism that drive our economy.

however, for an idea of what the impact of your proposed tax hike will be, go back through the argument for 'raising taxes on the rich', and everywhere you see the word "rich", remove it and replace it with the word "employers".
 
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Adding regulatory staff doens't always mean more regulation.

well in this case it certainly did. 7,000 pages worth to the Federal Register, to be more precise.

one searches in vain for a major piece of deregulation that passed during the last eight years. On the contrary, it was the Bush administration that pushed through Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory measures. Overall, the Bush administration has added more than 7,000 pages of regulations to the Federal Register. By almost every measure, government grew bigger, more expensive and more intrusive under President Bush and the Republican Congress.

...too many of them sat at their desks all day, every day, doing nothing....

gosh i wish they did. A) they would do less damage and B) we could then more easily be rid of them.
 
It benefits the country by helping to pay down the national debt.

It benefits me by allowing me to "keep more of what I earn". Otherwise, taxes would need to be raised on ALL of us, a concept I have no problem with personally, but when I earn less than X annually and someone else who earns X4 my gross income but has been receiving tax breaks for 2-3 decades, I'd say they've had more than their fair share of "investment income incentives" to move the economy along.

The Bush tax cuts didn't work because the rich didn't reinvest in this country's future. Instead, it would appear that they followed the Wall Street montra of "greed is good". If you doubt it, how do you explain the recession? You'll of course say it was homeowners who bought homes they couldn't afford, but let's not forget in most cases it was banks and mortgage lenders who convinced these people they could purchase their homes at low APR and refinance later (2-3 yrs). How'd that work out for low-income families who's only real mistake was trying to live the American dream? Yes, they should have read the fine print and better understood the conditions of the mortgage contract they signed, but let's be real here. By a show of virtual hands how many honestly know the full details of your mortgage contract? I sure don't! But I knew enough to insist on something better than an ajustable rate mortgage. So, I guess I was smarter than most average Joes out there. Still, my point is this isn't an indictment on those top 1-2% wage earners. It's a call for them to give back to the country who helped make them millionaires in the first place in providing the very investment opportunities and tax shelters they've come to enjoy so much.

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." For once, I'm asking where's your :censored patriotism?

So you think the 70 billion that liberals claim it will generate will actually happen and if it does it will be used to pay down the deficit? 70 billion dollars out of 1.3 trillion deficit? Do you realize how insignificant that is and that it will never happen? Why do you continue to buy the rhetoric which history is a better guide?

How do you know what the rich did with their money? Further explain to me how the Bush economy grew by 4.5 trillion during the disaster liberals claim he caused? How were 8.5 million jobs created between 2001-2007?
 
Higher fees for state services and licenses too. The point is, it isn't free to live in Texas.

It is business friendly, unlike a lot of other states. You'd think more states would get a clue from Texas.
I come from a state that had state tax. I don't really notice other things being higher here, though I'm sure they are. I sure don't miss filing state income tax. I swear that was more a pain in the ass than trying to figuer the federal taxes.
 
from Oscar B63

from my personal experience "educators" are the last people you want in charge of educational standards.
sure thing. And you probably would not want to have plumbers having anything to do with actual issues about plumbing. Or stay away from former athletes who actually played the game when you are assembling a team. Or forget about doctors and nurses when writing standards for the medical profession. And when we are engaged in military activity never ever ever consult actually professional military people who know more about it that you do. ;)
 
It is business friendly, unlike a lot of other states. You'd think more states would get a clue from Texas.
I come from a state that had state tax. I don't really notice other things being higher here, though I'm sure they are. I sure don't miss filing state income tax. I swear that was more a pain in the ass than trying to figuer the federal taxes.

State income taxes are easy in Illinois. But yes, Texas is obviously business friendly. The unions do have a lot of power in Chicago.
 
well in this case it certainly did. 7,000 pages worth to the Federal Register, to be more precise.

one searches in vain for a major piece of deregulation that passed during the last eight years. On the contrary, it was the Bush administration that pushed through Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory measures. Overall, the Bush administration has added more than 7,000 pages of regulations to the Federal Register. By almost every measure, government grew bigger, more expensive and more intrusive under President Bush and the Republican Congress.



gosh i wish they did. A) they would do less damage and B) we could then more easily be rid of them.

guess I should have added....Adding more regulations is of little use if they are not enforced....and penalties should be severe, this idea of white collar criminals getting easy time for a few years is counter-productive...
 
It is business friendly, unlike a lot of other states. You'd think more states would get a clue from Texas.
I come from a state that had state tax. I don't really notice other things being higher here, though I'm sure they are. I sure don't miss filing state income tax. I swear that was more a pain in the ass than trying to figuer the federal taxes.

yeah, but you have to live in Texas, part swamp, part desert, part in tornado alley, part in the path of Hurricanes, muggy and buggy from one end to the other....

My sister that lives in Kingwood compains about high property taxes and high home insurance...guess no place is perfect...
 
Yes, Texas has no state taxes, I use to live there..... but Texans still pay federal taxes.....so as I said, that is Maryland's problem...the big issue here is federal taxes...

Odd how many are so concerned with the plight of the rich, having to pay more taxes and all, when they are not one of them....

We all should be concerned with the plight/flight of the rich.

Donald Trump, who knows something about making money, says of course the rich will leave when hit with higher taxes. "I know these people," he told me. "They're international people. Whether they live here or live in a place like Switzerland doesn't really matter to them."
You haven't left, I told him.

"I haven't left yet. ... Look, the rich people are going to leave. And other people are going to leave. You're going to end up with lots of people that don't produce. And then that's the spiral. That's the end."

And that's another good reason for us to get on with reducing the size of government.
(John Stossel writes for Creators Syndicate.)
More taxes will send the rich packing - dailylocal.com
 
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