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U.S. Politics, 4


TerraPrime

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As for the economy, jobs are sorta turning around. I believe the US is now either loosing them at a lower rate or slowly gaining them.

The problem is, most companies are nervous as all fuck right now and are hoarding cash like a motherfucker. They are also cutting back on everything "non-essential" they can, which includes new hires. Why hire new workers when you can just force your current workers to do more work for the same salary? What are they gonna do, quit and get another job? :lol:

There's also a big issue with the Fed currently pursuing policies that still still encourage companies to horde funds. There seems to be a movement to try and turn this around, but Obama is getting his nominees to the Fed board blocked (like every other nominee of his for anything) so they can't push that angle.

There's also a huge swath of both America and both parties that don't actually understand anything about economics, making pursuing economic policies difficult.

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Where are y'all getting this idea that a Republican majority congress would impeach Pres. Obama? What grounds would be offered for such an impeachment action?

Because he's a MuslimSocialistFascist who wants to kill your grandma, that wasn't even born in this country, and besides he got a blowjob in the Oval Office and killed Vince Foster. Oh, wait, I'm confusing my Democratic Presidents hounded by dipshit Republicans sore over losing an election.

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BR, DG,

Who, that may make it into an office with the ability to seek impeachment, is calling for Pres. Obama to be impeached and removed from office?

Any of the number of Republican members of Congress who have supported the "birther" movement. Isn't that the logical outcome of questioning the circumstances of Obama's birth and citizenship?

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/07/28/birther_enablers

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I don't see this talk of impeachment. Any Republican who calls for impeachment will be a very lonely and outcast voice even in the current environment. I am quite certain that the vast majority of Republicans in office realise there are absolutely no grounds for impeachment and I will eat my hat if they actively pursue such measures.

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Obama isn't anywhere close to being corrupt as the Blago admin. But he was mucking around in the swamp of Chicago politics. If some special prosecutor can't find something there, they aren't trying hard enough.

Funny, you'd think they'd have found it before now...

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I don't see this talk of impeachment. Any Republican who calls for impeachment will be a very lonely and outcast voice even in the current environment. I am quite certain that the vast majority of Republicans in office realise there are absolutely no grounds for impeachment and I will eat my hat if they actively pursue such measures.

There were no grounds for Clinton's impeachment either. Didn't stop the Party of Spoiled Tantrum-Throwing Children from trying to rail him out of office, and that was when they were significantly more sane than they are now.

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You must be joking. Very well, if I must...

Stop outsourcing - an increase in labor costs will lead to increased consumer costs

stop paying CEOs such ridiculous amounts - define the upper limit of reasonable pay, and how you would put this into law, and how it would affect jobs.

untie CEO pay to stock performance - same question

Hell tax bonuses above x amount at a significantly higher rate - same question

stop Board and executive collusion - this doesn't mean anything

actually enforce safety standards - assuming they aren't being enforced now, you are talking about increased costs of compliance as well as increased tax burden to pay for additional enforcers. This causes the real price of consumer goods to rise

enforce disclosure laws so the market has better information - same

tax the ever lovin' fuck out of cash and semi-liquid investments (beyond a reasonable working capital) etc. - increased tax burden leads to increased costs which leads to increase prices.

What you've done is gone through a bunch of populist talking points and assumed that they will create jobs based on...well I can't see how anyone would look at that list of items and see job creation.

OK, pretty good start. But you analysis fails to take into account that a company faces elasticity of price, and that they can substitute their CEO expenditures with other expenditures - ones that encourage job creation, wealth creation, and capital expenditures. You logic might sometimes apply assuming equal tax increases across the board, but this is NOT what I am calling for.

And I was joking - somewhat. I wanted to see what your thinking was because I had a feeling your thought processes did not go too deep, or take into account rational incentives.

Realistically, price increases will not necessarily stick, especially in a recession. In fact, very often price increases will lower profitability. The more likely outcome is a spurring of actual investment, especially if you toss tax breaks in for the activity you want to encourage. rather than sinking more cash in a CEO's salary. Especially if you sever the connection between the board and the CEO. (which does mean something - very much so. It is the mechanism that the executives use to decouple the shareholder's incentives from their own personal incentives, thus their inflated pay is approved by the board who are supposed to represent the sharholders).

The goal is to give them incentive to change behavior. So if a company chooses to up prices and pay their CEO out the ass, other companies will not. And they will soon beat out the obdurate company.

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BR, DG,

Who, that may make it into an office with the ability to seek impeachment, is calling for Pres. Obama to be impeached and removed from office?

Michelle Bachmann, Tom Tancredo, John Kyl, any number of Tea Bagger Fruit Loops who might be elected. Look 'em up. They are either actively or coyly calling for Obama's impeachment, right now. Do you need more or is this enough to convince you?

Let's not forget that the real Republican leaders are calling for it. Limbaugh, and O'Reilly especially of late in regards to the AZ immigration fight.

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OK, pretty good start. But you analysis fails to take into account that a company faces elasticity of price, and that they can substitute their CEO expenditures with other expenditures - ones that encourage job creation, wealth creation, and capital expenditures. You logic might sometimes apply assuming equal tax increases across the board, but this is NOT what I am calling for.

And I was joking - somewhat. I wanted to see what your thinking was because I had a feeling your thought processes did not go too deep, or take into account rational incentives.

Realistically, price increases will not necessarily stick, especially in a recession. In fact, very often price increases will lower profitability. The more likely outcome is a spurring of actual investment, especially if you toss tax breaks in for the activity you want to encourage. rather than sinking more cash in a CEO's salary. Especially if you sever the connection between the board and the CEO. (which does mean something - very much so. It is the mechanism that the executives use to decouple the shareholder's incentives from their own personal incentives, thus their inflated pay is approved by the board who are supposed to represent the sharholders).

The goal is to give them incentive to change behavior. So if a company chooses to up prices and pay their CEO out the ass, other companies will not. And they will soon beat out the obdurate company.

I think you are vastly over rating the contribution re-purposing a CEO's salary can make to the additional available cash available for investment/price reduction/etc.

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The goal is to give them incentive to change behavior. So if a company chooses to up prices and pay their CEO out the ass, other companies will not. And they will soon beat out the obdurate company.

Attempting to socially engineer the market like that is a losing strategy. The unintended consequences would be painful.

Aside from that, there is the fact that the outlandish bonuses that everyone believes are the root of all evil are being paid by investment banks. These banks are not big time employers of the middle class, nor are they a part of the manufacturing base you want so badly. Reducing the pay of a bank CEO will do approximately fuck all to encourage anyone to open a factory.

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Attempting to socially engineer the market like that is a losing strategy. The unintended consequences would be painful.

Aside from that, there is the fact that the outlandish bonuses that everyone believes are the root of all evil are being paid by investment banks. These banks are not big time employers of the middle class, nor are they a part of the manufacturing base you want so badly. Reducing the pay of a bank CEO will do approximately fuck all to encourage anyone to open a factory.

AND

I think you are vastly over rating the contribution re-purposing a CEO's salary can make to the additional available cash available for investment/price reduction/etc.

Well that is not the only solution I called for. And I do not think it needs to be limited to CEOs - all executive pay should be taxed (at the corporate level) when it is excessive. Add that to all the other things I proposed, and baby, you've got a stew goin'. The real direction here should be to recouple executive incentives with more than just stock price. This is VERY important. I am not just talking out my ass here. Many, many people think this is a much needed change.

Besides, what the hell is outlandish executive pay accomplishing in our economy? What value is it adding? In an era when it is perfectly justifiable to fire tens of thousands of workers because they are not part of the value added process why are executives not part of this scrutiny.

Also, again - you make an assertion without anything to back it up. What are the unintended consequences? Why can you see them, but no one else can? Why can we not adjust the system as time goes on to mitigate unintended consequences? And what solutions does your model offer?

Finally, I really want to point out here, I really am not advocating the destruction of industry. Far from it. My take is that there is a balance that needs to be struck here. Corps are ascendant, and they are strip mining this country and its people. It is an awful thing to see, and it really is going to change our country for the worse unless something is done here. We need to step up, and the gov't needs to step up. But inevitably things will swing too far in the other direction, and we will have to fight it from the other side. And so we will swing back and forth passing over where we want to be for a few years then out into some extreme again.

Or we can let this all slide and watch the whole thing fall apart.

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It's this that makes me firmly believe that far too many Americans are outright stupid. The George W. Bush administration and Republican domination wasn't that long ago... have people really forgotten what happened to this country under Republican rule? Yes, the Democrats are not perfect but they've shown a willingness to actually get things done that are good for the country as well as the corporations that own them, whereas the Republicans were strictly out for benefiting their corporations first and themselves second. It just doesn't make any fucking sense at all that people would already be willing to put the same Republicans back in power.

Look around a bit more, both on the internet in person—especially where those hated rightwingers hang out—and try and find more than a handful of people that have any praise for how Bush and the republican congress conducted itself, especially on the economic front. Support for them in the middle and on the right started eroding somewhere around 2004. This idea that everyone right of center just loved Bush is one of the biggest fallacies regularly regurgitated by the left. Very few want to return to that—even though more and more would find it preferable to the clueless and corrupt idiots currently running things. Why do you think establishment Republicans are getting tossed in the primaries?

An ever-growing number of people are wanting something different than what either party has served up since 2000.

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Support for them in the middle and on the right started eroding somewhere around 2004. This idea that everyone right of center just loved Bush is one of the biggest fallacies regularly regurgitated by the left. Very few want to return to that—even though more and more would find it preferable to the clueless and corrupt idiots currently running things.

The center and the right lost support for Bush in 2004? Is that before or after he won re-election? Karl Rove liked to tout the factoid that Bush got more votes in 2004 than any Presidential candidate in history. And now no one will apparently cotton to supporting him. The Bush years among Republicans seem to be like the reverse of Woodstock -- there were far more who voted for him than will attest to that now.

The idea that there was no one on the right who was really supportive of Bush is just more right wing blame-ducking. Truly it is as JFK said -- success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan. Just fucking own up to that disaster of an overprivileged cokeheaded moron, and maybe you'll earn an iota more respect for your intellectual honesty than what you get right now. Very few people on the right had a fucking negative thing to say about Bush until the stench of his failure became too much for even the hiveminded serial liars of the right wing to ignore.

And there are plenty of Republicans in the Senate and Congress continually pushing for a return to Bush's policies. They're just not dumb enough to name Bush when they're touting his tired bullshit policies.

The failure of Bush the Lesser and his party's wholesale descent into corrupt madness should be hung like a bloodsoaked albatross around the Republicans' necks for generations, and they fucking well deserve it.

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Gee, that wasn't a biased screed.

Stupid facts and their liberal bias.

Seriously though, what exactly do you take exception too. As I read it, it really seems to be a timeline of stuff that happened showing where the right has lost their shit. Yes the adjectives are a bit too saucy and leading, but its hard to dispute the facts, damming as they are. I mean this is what the right has done. This is whirlwind we all will now reap.

Did it misreport the timeline? Does it misrepresent the 9-12 project, or the Tea Baggers? Did you read it? Copy and paste it here and we can talk about it. As it stands your objections hold little weight, but that of irrational rhetoric. It highlights the refusal to accept that the crazies may just mean what they say, and they have control of your whole fucking party.

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Stupid facts and their liberal bias.

Seriously though, what exactly do you take exception too. As I read it, it really seems to be a timeline of stuff that happened showing where the right has lost their shit. Yes the adjectives are a bit too saucy and leading, but its hard to dispute the facts, damming as they are. I mean this is what the right has done. This is whirlwind we all will now reap.

Did it misreport the timeline? Does it misrepresent the 9-12 project, or the Tea Baggers? Did you read it? Copy and paste it here and we can talk about it. As it stands your objections hold little weight, but that of irrational rhetoric. It highlights the refusal to accept that the crazies may just mean what they say, and they have control of your whole fucking party.

Believe it or not, I am not a Republican, never have been, never will be ;) Indeed, as a green card holder I can't even vote, so I just sit on the sidelines and weep somewhat. I did indeed read the whole of it. I think my objection is a general one, and one that has been repeated on this board before - that of painting the 'Tea Party' with a broad brush. There are certainly crazies, and they are the noisy ones, but I think that many normal people are tarnished by association in these sorts of rants. And I still do not think that the whole of the 'Tea Party' is the artificial construct that the author of this piece asserts. It is far too fragmented for that, notwithstanding the bankrolling by guys like Dick Armey. People still have to show up to protests, and they aren't going to do it because some shady advocacy group chucked in some money to whoever.

Anyway, maybe I am just a little naive about this whole political process in the US. It is so full of anger and hatred on both sides, and it really puts me off. And I really cannot get onside with the portrayal of one side (the right, in this case) or the other in such monolithic terms. This is what I find biased. And maybe that is an over-reaction. But every time I read pieces like this, that is how it reads to me.

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