the Book of Obama

[CUDA]

Obama 1 2:25
My Government will supply all my needs according to its riches and glory in the new Messiah.

787 billion spent
410 billion more proposed by year end

Nuf Said

[flip]

Obama is pushing bigger government that's for sure. Every speech he's made since becoming president has a long tirade of how we need more government. Worse is that he's pushing for strong centralized federal government over states governing themselves. Again I see no conspiracy because these things are being said and done publicly and without secrecy.

[Foil]

Sarcasm noted, but I generally agree with the perspective. The liberal push for big government spending isn't the answer (and in fact can be very problematic).

That said, what should we do about the economy?

I've heard some conservatives say essentially, \"nothing, let it work itself out\", but I don't think that's wise, either. I think this stimulus bill is hugely excessive; however, there are places where government intervention could spur activity (which is exactly what is needed).

[SilverFJ]

Blame Canada.

[Will Robinson]

Watching his speech last night I kept think after he would say something about 'both parties must make sacrifices'...and \"I'm going to go through the next spending bill line by line and trim out the pork\"and I thought, wow, you know that sounds good...If he hadn't just given the democrats free reign over spending a trillion dollars on their favorite projects last week!!

Frikken amazing that the media just swallows this mans crap! Not one comment on one of the most completely duplicitous, shameless, in your face lies ever allowed to stand unchallenged!
It's like Jeffrey Dahmer thinking he deserves credit for having at least invited his victims to dinner...right before he killed them and cooked them!!

[CUDA]

well if they had chosen to give the people the money instead of Porking it out to their pet projects. if you take the $$$ they have already spent, it would mean that each person in the country would have gotten $3400.00 in their pocket and then take the $$$ they are proposing to spend. it would mean each person would get an additional $1700.00 in their pockets. for a Total of $5100.00 for every Man, Woman, and child in this country. considering I have myself, my wife, and 3 underage kids at home, if the government had chosen to give back the money that I had earned and they had taxed me on. that would put a total of $25,500.00 in my pocket. I'm PRETTY SURE I could stimulate some economy with that kind of money. but according the the Government we sheeple are too stupid to think for our selves and spend money that would best benefit our families thats why they need to do it for us.

"I'm going to go through the next spending bill line by line and trim out the pork"...

Will, he promised that before he was elected. and what happens with the first bill he signed???? NOT ONE LINE ITEM is crossed out, infact!! he doesnt allow ANYONE enough time to read it EXCEPT for the top Democrats that wrote it, Pelosi, Reid and a few others

[Spidey]

That said, what should we do about the economy?

Was addressed here… viewtopic.php?t=15011 But the topic starter let the thread die.

And no, stimulating activity is not “what is needed” the lack of activity is a symptom of a more insidious problem.

But what the heck, the government is much better at dealing with symptoms than actual problems…

[Bet51987]

Sarcasm noted, but I generally agree with the perspective. The liberal push for big government spending isn't the answer (and in fact can be very problematic).

That said, what should we do about the economy?

The exact opposite of what the Republicans have done in the last few years...since it didn't work.

Bee

[CUDA]

Flunked History in School did you Bee
either that or you have no concept of reality and have bought hook line and sinker the left Dogma.

FYI Bee

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008 ... risis.html

The Real Deal


So who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of \"layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role.\" Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.


Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.


Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.


Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.


The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.


Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.


Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.


Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.


The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.


An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.


Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) the crisis is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.

[VonVulcan]

That's a very good summation Cuda.

[Bet51987]

Flunked History in School did you Bee
either that or you have no concept of reality and have bought hook line and sinker the left Dogma.

FYI Bee

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008 ... risis.html

I didn't flunk History.

...Bush's early personnel choices and overarching antipathy toward regulation created a climate that, if it did not trigger the turmoil, almost certainly aggravated it.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/20/ ... php?page=1

Republicans had eight years to do something but did nothing and doing nothing didn't work very well. I want to go with Obama.

Bee

[CUDA]

blah blah blah

unfortunately that is contrary to the facts of the cause of our current recession

edit: Oh and By the way the Republican's only had control of the Congress and Senate for 6 years, So how then do you explain the Democrat's do nothing ineptitude of the last 2 years?

[AlphaDoG]

Republicans had eight years to do something but did nothing and doing nothing didn't work very well. I want to go with Obama.

Bee, just so you know, neither party is acting in your best interest. Consider the fact that you, and your children, and quite possibly your children's children will be paying for JUST this one spending bill. I for one am going off the grid.

[dissent]

Flunked History in School did you Bee
either that or you have no concept of reality and have bought hook line and sinker the left Dogma.

FYI Bee

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008 ... risis.html
...

yeah.

My new sig -

"Politics, someone once said, may not be the world’s oldest profession, but the results are the same."

[VonVulcan]

Republicans had eight years to do something but did nothing and doing nothing didn't work very well. I want to go with Obama.

Bee, just so you know, neither party is acting in your best interest. Consider the fact that you, and your children, and quite possibly your children's children will be paying for JUST this one spending bill. I for one am going off the grid.

I think I'll join ya.

[flip]

That said, what should we do about the economy?

Well first I wouldn't try to fix it all at once. Cuda's suggestion of dispersing stimulus money back to the American people so THEY can get out of debt and then require all banks to refinance mortgages in foreclosure to terms that the people can actually afford. Anything sounds better than what seems to be happening. What I gather from Obama is this. Lets keep things the way they are and put the Givernment in charge of it to safeguard against this happening again.

Also to gain the confidence of the American people again, I'd make indictments against all the jackasses who had their hands in the destruction of our economy. Out of it all that's what gets me the most. It was obviously fraudulent, yet no one has even mentioned punishing these fools. Instead we give them more money so they can keep the status quo. Throwing money at the problem and not dealing with what caused it is a losing battle.

[Bet51987]

Ok I concede. I don't have the time to research the blame game and whatever the Democrats did I didn't see the Republicans trying to undo but I do believe what AlphaDog said. Me, my children and their children, will be paying for the mistakes and the apathy that followed.

However, what makes me different than most members and downright racists in this forum is that I'm not praying for Obama to fail. I want him to succeed.

Bettina

[VonVulcan]

OMG, now your throwing the race card.

[Spidey]

Ahhh, but history bares out that it is just way too easy to blame one single group of people for times of trouble.

And I don’t even want to go into the ramifications of doing so…

[CUDA]

However, what makes me different than most members and downright racists in this forum is that I'm not praying for Obama to fail. I want him to succeed.

Bettina

Oh PULEESE
so now your bringing in the racist card
and I didnt think you Prayed at all


EDIT: VV you posted before I could finish

[Will Robinson]

Ok I concede. I don't have the time to research the blame game and whatever the Democrats did I didn't see the Republicans trying to undo but I do believe what AlphaDog said. Me, my children and their children, will be paying for the mistakes and the apathy that followed.

However, what makes me different than most members and downright racists in this forum is that I'm not praying for Obama to fail. I want him to succeed.

Bettina

One of the big failures that pushed our economy over the edge was invented and brought to bear by democrats, Clinton era. Barney Frank and company used Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to underwrite mortgages that shouldn't have ever been written because the people they loaned the money to couldn't pay the bills...but they could vote democrat.
Bush and other republicans did try to stop it, did call for regulations to control it and the democrats stood in the way saying everything was fine.
but you and other pro-democrats keep repeating the mantra you just offered in your previous post claiming it was the republicans that did it so anything anti-republican is an improvement.

Well, Obama was elected on that kind of willful ignorance and he and his democrats are, in only the first 30 days of his reign, starting in on spending the second trillion dollars and so far only a small fraction of it is really going toward stimulating the economy, the rest is going to redecorate their new church you joined and have invested so much blind faith in. The church of the easily led.

[Sergeant Thorne]

However, what makes me different than most members and downright racists in this forum is that I'm not praying for Obama to fail. I want him to succeed.

Downright racists? I wasn't aware that we had any racists in here.

The only reason that I hope Obama fails is that I am almost certain that if he succeeds America fails. My personal animosity toward the man is limited to the degree that I perceive he is being disingenuous or deceptive, which he has been. I'm not the kind of person that hopes someone fails just so I can be right. You may not realize it but I've kept an open mind on the whole issue.

[Plague]

Obama does seem to have a knack for making elegant promises which basic common sense finds absurd. He voted for the Bush \"stimulus\" package, spends another $800B in his own \"stimulus\" package, on top spending increasing spending in other areas and trying to cut taxes at the same time. Then he has the nerve to bring up fiscal responsibility. I nearly laughed out loud at work the other day when I read that he wants to cut the budget in half by the end of his first term.

The government cannot actively stimulate the economy. The real economy is not driven by consumer spending. The Federal Reserve has created money and credit out of thin air to create a boom, but because the credit was not backed by real capital and savings, the market needs to correct itself. We need to quit worrying about retail slumps and get back to saving money.

However, despite the \"change\" in Washington, our monetary and foreign policy have not changed. We still spend what we don't have, and to cover it we borrow or counterfeit the money. I think that Obama, along with the worshippers in congress and around the nation, just might spend enough to finally topple our empire, end our fiat currency, and best of all, end the Federal Reserve system.

One can only hope...

[Grendel]

Welcome Amero...

[woodchip]

Well the new 4 trillion dollar budget (almost double what Bush had when he was voted in) is now being readied for Barack \"Chavez\" Obama to sign. Lets see if he will send it back because of the 9000 items of pork it contains. I mean, he did promise to cut pork but so far all the pork he has cut was probably on his breakfast plate.

[CUDA]

this country is going to be in some DEEP SH!T financially. people piss and moan about Bush raising the National debt from 6 to 10 trillion in 8 years. a Total increase of 4 Trillion Dollars. well Obama and his Socialist croanies have done that and much more, they have already raised the national debt by almost 1 Trillion dollars with 400 Billion more on the floor of congress as we speak and they are proposing a budget of 4+TRILLION more dollars and all this in his first 100 days I cant wait to see what happens over his remaining 4 years

[CUDA]

Just an observation. with the exception of Bee the lack of the left leaning members of this forum chiming in on this subject speaks volumes

[Foil]

Meh, it wasn't much different four years ago when I joined. There were people typing just as furiously about how bad Bush was going to screw things up.

[Sergeant Thorne]

Maybe they weren't given an answer for some of the stuff that is discussed on here.

The exact opposite of what the Republicans have done in the last few years...since it didn't work.

This is a real gem.

[Will Robinson]

Meh, it wasn't much different four years ago when I joined. There were people typing just as furiously about how bad Bush was going to screw things up.

And the people were right! So don't stop listening to them now....

[Krom]

Meh, it wasn't much different four years ago when I joined. There were people typing just as furiously about how bad Bush was going to screw things up.

And the people were right! So don't stop listening to them now....

Yep, don't you just hate being right all the time?

[VonVulcan]

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1039849853

They have some good points.

[VonVulcan]

This was taken from The Wall Street Journal.

---------------------------------

The 2% Illusion
Take everything they earn, and it still won't be enough.

President Obama has laid out the most ambitious and expensive domestic agenda since LBJ, and now all he has to do is figure out how to pay for it. On Tuesday, he left the impression that we need merely end \"tax breaks for the wealthiest 2% of Americans,\" and he promised that households earning less than $250,000 won't see their taxes increased by \"one single dime.\"
[Review & Outlook] AP

This is going to be some trick. Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can't possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama's new spending ambitions.

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and \"the wealthiest 2%.\" Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That's about 7% of all returns; the data aren't broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% -- about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 -- paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already \"progressive\" with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He'd also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won't come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.
But let's not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let's go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That's less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable \"dime\" of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

Fast forward to this year (and 2010) when the Wall Street meltdown and recession are going to mean far few taxpayers earning more than $500,000. Profits are plunging, businesses are cutting or eliminating dividends, hedge funds are rolling up, and, most of all, capital nationwide is on strike. Raising taxes now will thus yield far less revenue than it would have in 2006.

Mr. Obama is of course counting on an economic recovery. And he's also assuming along with the new liberal economic consensus that taxes don't matter to growth or job creation. The truth, though, is that they do. Small- and medium-sized businesses are the nation's primary employers, and lower individual tax rates have induced thousands of them to shift from filing under the corporate tax system to the individual system, often as limited liability companies or Subchapter S corporations. The Tax Foundation calculates that merely restoring the higher, Clinton-era tax rates on the top two brackets would hit 45% to 55% of small-business income, depending on how inclusively \"small business\" is defined. These owners will find a way to declare less taxable income.

The bottom line is that Mr. Obama is selling the country on a 2% illusion. Unwinding the U.S. commitment in Iraq and allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire can't possibly pay for his agenda. Taxes on the not-so-rich will need to rise as well.

On that point, by the way, it's unclear why Mr. Obama thinks his climate-change scheme won't hit all Americans with higher taxes. Selling the right to emit greenhouse gases amounts to a steep new tax on most types of energy and, therefore, on all Americans who use energy. There's a reason that Charlie Rangel's Ways and Means panel, which writes tax law, is holding hearings this week on cap-and-trade regulation.

Mr. Obama is very good at portraying his agenda as nothing more than center-left pragmatism. But pragmatists don't ignore the data. And the reality is that the only way to pay for Mr. Obama's ambitions is to reach ever deeper into the pockets of the American middle class.

[Spidey]

Bear with me here for a minute, if getting more money from the people who account for 62% of income taxes won’t be enough, how is even taxing the remaining 38% going to do much good?

Plain and simple…business is going to bear the brunt of this…guaranteed, it starts with cap and trade, then the carbon tax. And the sky is the limit after that, and please try to remember when businesses face higher costs…people lose jobs, prices for goods go up, so you end up paying for it anyway. (the dirty little secret, of taxing the rich)

3.5 trillion dollar budget…I’m sorry, but that is just obscene! (over 12% of GDP)

[AlphaDoG]

(the dirty little secret, of taxing the rich)

It's dirty, it's not secret.

[CUDA]

wow some perspective on the Presidents new budget

If you took 4 Trillion 1 dollar bill and weighed them, they would have the equivalent weight of 103 Nimitz class aircraft carriers

at $4.5 billion each you could build 890 Nimitz class carriers with 4 Trillion dollars

and if you laid 4 trillion dollar bills end to end they would stretch from the Earth to the Sun AND BACK 4 times

4 trillion second = 148,592 years

“That’s one out of every four dollars produced in the U.S. It’s 25 percent of the GDP,”

[snoopy]

Here's my 2 cents on Obama:

1. I really would like to see him succeeded. For the good of the country.


2. I really hate the idea of taxes going way up. I really hate the idea of the government going deeper into debt. I'm quite against the big government thing... it feels too much like Robin Hood, and really takes away incentive to be successful & become rich, because huge chunks of it will get taken away from me.

If I was in that richest 10% bracket that's gonna have to \"anti up\" to support all of this crap, I'd move away & change citizenship.

[Spidey]

And go where?