Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

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_Bond James Bond
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Bond James Bond »

Brackite wrote:
moksha wrote:I agree with you on this troubling point about Santorum. I also find the conservative proposal to implant electrodes to dampen human brain activity in order to make more responsive voters and consumers to be troubling.

Getting back to Honorentheo's original post, Santorum knows that the true measure of morality is to be found in maximizing profits and reducing taxes. That is why the godless touting of global warning must be opposed, since it is fraught with the potential of decreasing profits and raising taxes.


Dear Moksha,

Is Rick Santorum really a fiscal Conservative?


Rick Santorum voted to raise the debt ceiling five times.

Rick Santorum voted for ‘The Bridge to Nowhere.’

Rick Santorum voted for Medicare Part D.

Rick Santorum voted for the war in Iraq.

(Rick Santorum now wants to go bomb Iran.)


Rick Santorum is Not really a fiscal Conservative.

Rick Santorum is a Pro-war, big government, social conservative who doesn't believe in science.


Greatness!
Whatever appears to be against the Book of Mormon is going to be overturned at some time in the future. So we can be pretty open minded.-charity 3/7/07

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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Bond James Bond »

Kevin G loves graphs so I thought he might save this to his files for the next time he talks to Droop:

Image
Whatever appears to be against the Book of Mormon is going to be overturned at some time in the future. So we can be pretty open minded.-charity 3/7/07

MASH quotes
I peeked in the back [of the Bible] Frank, the Devil did it.
I avoid church religiously.
This isn't one of my sermons, I expect you to listen.
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

Buffalo wrote:
Droopy wrote:This is pure ideological twaddle, for a number of reasons. First, if any of these faux moralists were really interested in a "fair" rate of taxation, they would all be clamoring for a single, low, fair, flat tax on income at its source, and taxed only once. That, however, would throw cold water on the entire government-is-the-fountain-of-all-blessings mentality of the Left and of its project of total centralization of human life in the state.


You can tell that Droopy slept through math class. A flat tax is the opposite of fair. Think about it.


A number of people have. Unfortunately, you have not been among them.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

This is why you'll never have credibility Loran. Anywhere. The 2009 fiscal year began October 1, 2008, nearly four months before Obama took office. This means Heritage, your primary source for all that is under the sun, doesn't know what it is talking about when it tried to blame Obama for Bush's massive deficit.

Here is the corrected graph posted by CATO Institute after Heritage tried to blame Obama for Bush's last year. You've seen it before and I know you'll never let it sink into that thick skull of yours, but I'm reposting for the benefit of those who aren't afraid of the facts.

Image


This is utterly irrelevant, as anyone who was either intellectually honest or was really interested in doing serious homework on an issue and wasn't just on a soapbox gatekeeping for his agenda would understand. The topic of the thread is not that someone at Heritage made a mistake in attributing some of the post Bush debt to Obama. The point is that, under Obama, the national debt soared, in just a little over two years, from $10.626 trillion, to over $15.3 trillion and heading rapidly toward $16 trillion This means that, in just a little over two years, Obama increased the national debt by almost 3.5 trillion in 735 days, dwarfing anything Clinton or Bush ever attempted.

When Bush took office, he inherited a $5.8 trillion deficit. When this free spending "moderate" Republican left, the deficit had doubled, to some $10.6 trillion. This represented approximately an increase in the national debt of $607 billion a year. Enter Lord Obama. During his tenure, the national debt has risen by an average of $1.723 trillion a year.

If Obama cannot be blamed (though he hardly would have objected) to Bush's spending through 2009, Obama must take full credit of all of his own and his party's own spending initiatives since he took office post Bush's original spending (Obama did, in fact, sign Bush's $410 billion omnibus spending plan). That would mean looking at actual and projected spending through fiscal years 2010 and 2011.

During Bush's 8 fiscal years in office, Bush oversaw $3.3 trillion in deficit spending. In his first two fiscal years, Obama ran up some nearly $3 trillion in deficits. Almost 4 years into his presidency, a national debt that took Clinton and Bush nearly two decades to create has taken Obama only one term to dwarf.

But this is only the beginning. Obamacare, if and when it is fully functional, which is set to send government spending even farther into the stratosphere (and contains a plethora of tax increases).

Likewise, the National debt for fiscal year 2009 was $11.9 trillion, which means the national debt literally doubled under George Bush in just eight years and it also means you do not know what you are talking about, yet again.


Sure I know what I'm talking about, its just that you're too intellectually disoriented to follow a clear argument and stay on the subject. The subject is not Bush, because I have never defended Bush's economic record here or anywhere else. The subject is the Obama administrations runaway spending that has taken the country into effective bankruptcy, a massive downgrading of its creditworthiness, substantial general price inflation, and a bleak future for our children and grandchildren, who will, in the decades to come, be paying much of their taxes just to service the debt.

I'm not arguing Clinton vs. Bush vs. Obama. I'm arguing Obama vs. the nation and its people. Bill Clinton would be far preferable to the crusading left-wing ideological purist now in office.

Loran wants people to believe Obama suddenly spent an extra $5 trillion, but for the life of him, he cannot explain to us where he spent that money and/or how. What legislation did he pass that caused a $5 trillion jump in the debt? This is where he'll go silent or write up another thirty pages of rhetoric to derail from the question. I've asked idiots like Loran for months to explain to us what Obama has done to explode the deficit and the debt, as they insist he has done. They can't say. All they know is that it must be true because he's in office while the debt keeps skyrocketing.


Assuming the Kevin really isn't as manhole cover dense as this makes him appear, the above challenge is a trick. The President doesn't pass legislation and spend money, the Congress does. Congressional spending has roughly doubled under Obama, that's the reality. The Obama administration borrowed (created out of thin air) some $5 trillion since Obama took office. This did not happen under Bush. It did not happen under Clinton. It did not happen under Reagan. It occurred during the Obama presidency. The federal government, under Obama, is now borrowing 45 cents of every dollar it spends. Congress is appropriating and spending that money, not Obama, but Obama has initiated and supported the concepts and ideas for much of that spending, and he had a two year period in which the opposition party could do virtually nothing to stop him.

The real question is federal spending since Bush took office with Obama and his cabinet in control of the executive branch of government. Where was it all spent? Hard to say. Here's about 20% of it:

http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/a ... k-at-tarp/

Then there's the utterly failed $600 billion bailout of foreign banks with American taxpayer funds. Let's look at a running total, both committed and actually spent in various programs during Obama's first term:

$9 trillion earmarked for direct investments in various financial institutions, including the purchasing of corporate debt and toxic mortgage backed securities. So far, the government has spent $1.6 trillion

$1.7 trillion insuring financial institution debt and proping up poor performing bank, Fannie, and Freddie assets. $330 billion so far.

$1.4 trillion spent lending phantom money to banks and guaranteeing money market funds. $528 billion spent thus far.

The federal government has committed $3 trillion and spent $4 billion thus far in making the Fed the buyer of last resort in the commercial paper market.

$1.6 trillion earmarked and $178 billion spent for buying Home Loan Bank securities.

$1.5 trillion earmarked and $641 billion spent for the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) program.

$900 billion earmarked and $5 billion spent for the public-private investment fund.

up to $700 billion (up to $900 billion) for TARP, of which about $540 billion has been paid out. The recipients include some of the biggest financial and corporates interests in the nation, including GM, which took the funds at the price of becoming a creature of the state and preserving its rapacious union contracts, which are not sustainable and will eventually collapse the company anyway when the next bubble bursts. At least 43 of the banks assisted in the original TARP program were foreign banks.

$700 billion of which $645 billion has been paid out to bail out the economic two of the heavy hitters in the sub-prime meltdown, Freddie and Fannie, which should have been abolished and its lackeys sent packing, along with the politicians that created them in the first place.

Almost 15% of Americans are now using food stamps, up 12% from just a year ago and 34% from just two years ago. That represents a great deal of extra spending for the Depression era levels of unemployment our Keynesian/corporatist/Alinskyite President and his DSA cronies in Congress and the Senate have created.

I'm sure Kevin can add to the list, detailed homeworker that he is. Keep in mind to that, just because all of the earmarked money has not been spent, doesn't mean it does not have an effect on the economy. When the government borrows funds from the Fed beyond what it takes in in taxes and creates money out of thin air, that money goes off the Fed's books and appears on the federal government's books. It can then be appropriated and spent. Even, however, that which is not spent immediately is still on the books. The fact that it's phantom money doesn't matter. Once its been created and either put it the federal treasury or pumped into the economy via the central banks, it then acts like real money, with all the economic effects involved. Each penny of such money is a further inflationary pressure on general prices across the economy, and each penny is in direct or indicator competition with capital resources in the private sector.

Its all a scam, its all a sham, and its never worked at any time in historical experience, no matter how many times its been tried. But then, it isn't supposed to work. That's not the point. The point is, ultimately, to collapse the free market, capitalist economic structure of the United States and provoke an economic/social crises of such magnitude that a majority of people will cry out for government to "do something" and restore order and make the trains run on time. Obama, and others like him, will be standing at the front of the line for the job.

But who has the time to constantly correct an overgrown child who keeps trying to find meaning and identity in this life by presenting himself as an authority on everything he clearly knows nothing about.


Red Ronald McGraham simply isn't educated, well read, or intellectually honest enough to really have any kind of substantive debate with. As he lives in his own alternative space-time continuum of alternative facts and alternative modes of processing information other than logical argumentation, no real discourse is possible. What is clear, however, is that Kevin represents the real, honest base of the Democratic party and the American Left. He's a Kool-Aid guzzling drone who acts like a soldier bee but is still a drone nonetheless.

What anyone who's ever engaged Kevin, either on political issues or on the Book of Abraham subject, well knows, is that Kevin has virtually no intellectual integrity whatsoever. He'll say anything to score debating points but, upon close inspection, he's unaware of what actually constitutes critical thinking and is insensate to basic rules of intellectual decency.

Graham's leftism, like his anti-Mormonism, is all just an act anyway. All of it is of a piece and all of it is an outgrowth of his apostasy from the Church and the bad conscience that follows him day in and day out like Odin's hounds.

One day, we'll doubtless know the truth.
Last edited by Guest on Thu Feb 23, 2012 8:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Buffalo »

Droopy wrote:
Buffalo wrote:
You can tell that Droopy slept through math class. A flat tax is the opposite of fair. Think about it.


A number of people have. Unfortunately, you have not been among them.


If and when you finally move out of your parents' house, you may discover that 100% of your income is no longer discretionary, yours to do with whatever you please. You may, in fact, discover, that the bare minimum cost of supporting life does not, in fact, scale with income. Ergo, a flat tax disproportionately affects the poor.
Parley P. Pratt wrote:We must lie to support brother Joseph, it is our duty to do so.

B.R. McConkie, © Intellectual Reserve wrote:There are those who say that revealed religion and organic evolution can be harmonized. This is both false and devilish.
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

But the point here is that tax cuts lead to deficits, and thus, our current deficit problem.


The very fact that Graham can make a statement such as this, while branding numerous other people as "stupid" and "dumb" is about as breathtaking as it gets, folks. His pretense to an understanding of basic economics would have me rolling on the floor were in not for the fact that my jaw is in the way.

Tax cuts do not lead to deficits. Deficit spending (government spending beyond its means) leads to deficits. Without hurling the terms "'stupid" and "dumb" around at this point (thought the temptation is well nigh overwhelming), This kind of argument bespeaks both an intellectual temperament and background that is inherently hostile to serious thinking.

National debt first skyrocketed under Reagan and it has been going out of control ever since.


No, it was going up before Reagan, but the vast majority of the increases under the Democratically dominated House and Senate during the majority of those years was to fund the welfare state, entitlement programs (which rose dramatically under Reagan), and discretionary spending. About a quarter of the federal budget, by the mid-eighties, was dedicated to the rebuilding and modernizing of a dangerously underfunded military and to winning the Cold War, something that people like Red Kevin probably rue, but which intellectually and morally normal human beings -including large numbers in the former East Block- applaud.

You have to have income to cover your expenditures.


Yet he supports and defends a President who has overseen the creation of over $5 trillion in phantom money above what that government actually has in tax revenues.

Government spending has been steadily increasing for decades because the country is growing.


A serious thinker would be open to the historical plausibility, and historical evidence, that government spending has been growing for decades because government has been growing. Logical thought is a harsh mistress, but her demands are rewarding for those willing to embrace the arduous task of thinking.

Government spending took of first, during WWI and then during the Great Depression. Another massive upsurge occurred during WWII, and the next during the "war" on poverty. When Nixon said, "We're all Keynesians now," he served notice to the nation on the general orientation of the federal government at that time. When Newsweek, near the beginning of Obama's term, said, "We're all socialists now," they were echoing the general received wisdom and trends within the federal government and the mainstream media. The progressive project has spanned much of the last century, beginning with TR and Wilson and moving through FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, who has simply been the most aggressive and intense in his desire to finish that project. Reagan was the one brief exception to this general rule among both parties.

You can't just cut income and then act surprised when there is a deficit.


When a business, a family, or a household sees a cut in income, they cut their expenses. If the state cut its spending as tax revenues dried up, there could not possibly be a deficit. Connect the dots Kevin, it isn't really all that much of a grand intellectual production.

This is what Reagan did and he got away with it. His predecessors have followed suit, rewarding their wealthy constinuents who put them in office in the first place.


This is vulgar class warfare rhetoric worthy of the worst political and intellectual thugs in American political life. This sounds like something you'd here at an SEIU rally with an open bar.

Just look at the numbers. Only 9% of Romney's donations come from small donors. The bulk of it comes from a handful of billionaires who know he is going to keep rewarding them with more tax cuts.


Let's take a look at Obama's 2008 profile to top contributors:

University of California $1,648,685
Goldman Sachs $1,013,091
Harvard University $878,164
Microsoft Corp $852,167
Google Inc $814,540
JPMorgan Chase & Co $808,799
Citigroup Inc $736,771
Time Warner $624,618
Sidley Austin LLP $600,298
Stanford University $595,716
National Amusements Inc $563,798
WilmerHale LLP $550,668
Columbia University $547,852
Skadden, Arps et al $543,539
UBS AG $532,674
IBM Corp $532,372
General Electric $529,855
US Government $513,308
Morgan Stanley $512,232
[in real life issue, removed] $503,295

Notice anything?

To even think about increases on those beloved "job creators" is anathema.


Why would one want to raise income taxes on the job and opportunity creating investment and entrepreneurial classes, especially since that class is now paying the vast majority of all income taxes paid to the bottom half who pay no income taxes at all but are increasingly receiving government benefits (including long term unemployment payments, subsidized housing mortgages, and greatly expanded foods stamp benefits) at their expense?

Before too long, we will be in a situation where the "takers" will well outnumber the "makers" and no serious constituency for limited, constitutional government will any longer exist.

But then, that's the point, isn't it?

Even Reagan knew that he had to increase taxes to compensate for the massive deficits he created, and he increased taxes no less than six times.


Reagan was tricked into the big one, TEFRA, by the Democrats (that little bit of political history is well known) but why Reagan raised taxes here and there is interesting. Any CFR on your claim that the reason, in all such cases, was to deal with deficits (only a fraction of which he created. The vast majority was the servicing of the welfare state and discretionary/pork spending).

But the current wave of Republicans scare the s*** out of me. It is as if they don't give a damn what economists say. They're only interested in what corporate funded astro-turf movements, blogs and "think tanks" suggest. It is why attacking education and demonizing it as "liberal-controlled" is so important to them. It is their justification for remaining ignorant.


I've got those terms "stupid" and "dumb" and "inane" right here, waiting to be deployed like a verbal MLRS launcher, but I'll resist the temptation. Sounds like Howard Dean or Dennis Kucinich on one of their red meat populist class envy rants. No, its me and others like me who are not credible.

Kevin is to credibility what Lady Ga Ga is to musical appreciation.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

But we know this doesn't pan out the way they predict. More and more corporations are outsourcing overseas, and thanks to the technological boom, more and more jobs are becoming obsolete as everything is becoming automated with computers. Hell, even grocery stores are moving to "self-checkout" technology, allowing customers to scan their own food and pay for it themselves. This is just one of an endless list of examples, where technology has caused a huge decrease in employment. Relying on robots to build cars is another.


Among another central economic mistake made in this statement, the "automation and technological advancement creates unemployment" meme is one of the most persistent, pernicious, and fatuous economic fallacies of Western intellectual history. See Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson for its disarmingly easy demolition.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

Kevin Graham wrote:As a business owner in Brazil, I can state with absolute confidence that a tax break would not encourage me to hire more English teachers for our school. Not one.

What would make me hire more teachers?

An increase in students, obviously.

That is where stimulus comes into play. By putting more money into the pockets of the general public, people are more likely to pay for extra services like English lessons. In fact, we pretty much know that when the lower classes have money, they spend it.

Consumer spending is the lifeline of any economy.



This represents gross economic illiteracy, if not at its worst, than at its most brazenly opaque to known facts, sound theory, and historical evidence. None of this is even remotely defensible as economic theory or practice, and was thoroughly debunked long before either I or Kevin were born.

Basic econ 101:

1. Consumer spending does not drive the economy, productive economic activity does.

2. All "stimulus" money represents money taken out of the productive economy and recirculated back into it. There is no net economic growth in such a system. All this represents is a shifting of money from somewhere in the private economy to somewhere else by politicians and bureaucrats to the benefit of someone at the expense of someone else. There is no economic growth obtained in this manner (although there very well may be job creation).
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
_Droopy
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

And notice the switcheroo he pulled on the issue of taxes. He avoids the arguments and goes back to the Limbaugh-scripted derailment about how the wealthy pay the bulk of the taxes, which has nothing to do with the point I made.


Limbaugh scripting my posts? I wish I knew the guy that well. But even if so, I wouldn't let him script my posts. I like my own prose and delivery better.

The fact is the Bush Tax cuts have crippled the economy. You cannot have expenditures without income and Loran has already admitted that his hope is that the government becomes absolutely starved of funding.


This is either a smiling ear to ear lie, willfully entered into in the hope it will be swallowed whole, or a manifestation of the terrible educational deficit that Kevin Graham brings to any subject while he prances, postures, and struts as "smart." Which should we opt for? I'd hope for the latter.

Again, tax cuts do not, and logically cannot create deficits. In the first place, Kevin's implicit assumption here, that government is the engine of economic growth and prosperity and that any loss in funding could, in some sense, cripple the economy, is something only a true blue believer like Francis Fox Piven, Robert B. Reich, or Ramsey Clark could digest without serious gastrointestinal distress.

The second implied assumption, that all the money the federal government spends at any given time is sacred, untouchable, and totally defensible as money spent is beyond the pall of intellectual respectability, except for an unreconstructed Marxist or utopian socialist bearer of the sacred flame.

Deficit spending causes federal deficits. If this simple, virtually self evident truth is just too much for the leftist mind to process, then I fear serious dicourse of opposing views is, yet again, impossible.

He has a phobia of government like those in his camp.


Typical leftist. Put all principled opposition to his ideology down as a sign of mental illness or neurosis. Graham would have just loved those Soviet psychiatric hospitals. Oh, for the good old days...

He is an extremist with no proper home in today's political landscape.


Blah...

He rejects education for fear-mongering rhetoric which he pulls from discredited websites like WND and American Thinker.


Blah blah...

The government cannot just "stop spending" to compensate for the dramatic decrease in income it has suffered at the hands of Republicans, and only the extremely ignorant folks on the far right, who know nothing about basic economics, live in this fantasy world.


Rama...

They have no solutions. None.


Lama...

Their only proposal is to starve government and let the corporations run amok unregulated.


Ding and dong.

Kevin's problem appears to be that, not only does he have virtually no understanding of conservatism/libertarianism at all, but he doesn't even really understand the leftist ideology he had so abruptly adopted. Kevin's one of the only people I've ever seen who is actually capable of knocking down strawmen with his own strawmen. Its a war of the strawmen between Kevin's own ears.

Odd.
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
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Re: Santorum - Droopy in a Sweater Vest?

Post by _Droopy »

If and when you finally move out of your parents' house, you may discover that 100% of your income is no longer discretionary, yours to do with whatever you please. You may, in fact, discover, that the bare minimum cost of supporting life does not, in fact, scale with income. Ergo, a flat tax disproportionately affects the poor.


All the flat tax proposals of which I'm aware take the regressivity of a flat tax at lower income levels into consideration. The best of these is the Forbes version, in which Americans making up to $36,000 a year are exempt from federal tax. This is well into the middle class and takes care of that problem.

Once that problem is addressed, the flat tax is, by definition, fair, as it taxes everybody at a single rate according to earnings. That's the very definition of "fair."
Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson


I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

- Thomas Sowell
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