So CR til Jan...Debt Ceiling til Feb...Budget Conference finally gets going after 20 blocked attempts by GOP... Nothing given up. Senate votes 81-18... Teabags in the House + Cruz are complete morons. Thanks for wasting our damn time and money. I sure did love the IRS being furloughed during tax season the last 3 weeks...Fucking idiots.
Govt funded for 3 months Debt ceiling raised for 4 months time. Budget conference to make a compromise budget b/w house and senate...
Yes... and the sad thing is that jackass ingrate Ted Cruz is being looked at as a hero in his district so no chance he gets kicked to the curb. I'm no fan of the Dems but they absolutely beat the GOP into bloody pulp over this. If the GOP pulls this again they will be writing their own eulogy.
What world do you live in? This was an artificial crisis manufactured by the right wing tea baggers in the Senate and the House. Was it about Obamacare? The debt? Or just an attempt to blackmail the President to advance their agenda? Or all of the above? Why is Obamacare so bad other than it being legislation passed by Democrats? The Tea Party has put out so much misinformation about it they should be ashamed. For 75% of Americans, Obamacare will have NO impact on health care. But it does provide an inexpensive mechanism for those who have no health insurance to purchase it. Have you ever had to face the prospect of no health insurance for you, or worse yet, your children. How selfish can you and the GOP nuts be? How about we let the law go into effect and see how it works? And when the GOP 1) figures out how it can win a national election, 2)Take over the Senate, or 3) plays politics the way it has been played for 235 years, then they can change or repeal Obamacare. When they have the votes and the Presidency and can make a case that it did not work, and come up with an alternative so that the richest country on earth does not have people going broke because they have no basic health insurance, then the GOP can consider repealing it. And how dare these lunatics keep bringing the entire world on the brink of economic disaster to............what? A default causes a catastrophe that makes the deficit appear to be a minor problem. If the debt were a problem, why is the market thriving? Why don't the credit rating companies downgrade the US when there is no debt crisis? Why was corporate America dead set against the default? Does the GOP and the tea baggers think we the public are that stupid. There is only a threat of economic collapse and a credit downgrade when the wingnuts threaten to push the US into a default. So don't go throwing this "everybody" is to blame crap at me. The economy is coming back. I work too hard for my money. I earned my pension and 401k money. I am putting two kids through college. My kids are on the cusp of getting jobs after college because companies are hiring. And all of that, every single penny of that - my livelihood, my investments, my retirement, my children's future - is threatened every year or two because the GOP right wing decides to play these very dangerous games. The Democrats and the President played no role in this fake crisis other than to help end it. I hope and pray the polls are right and the public sees this for what it was - a bunch of extremists continuing to blackmail the public, the country, and the world all for some misguided ideology and an extreme reluctance to accept reality and the consequences of elections. The only good to come of this is that the GOP is on a respirator. The popularity of the party is at historic lows. The demographics of this country are changing rapidly and the changes favor the Dems. They are on the wrong side of almost every issue that is important to young people and the growing minority population of this country. The GOP is never ever going to win a major national election again unless there are significant changes in its ideology and they manage to isolate and distance themselves from the Tea Party. Good riddance. Let's just hope the Tea Party and other conservatives are run out of office before they have the opportunity to ruin this country. Because they have shown they care more about "winning" and pushing their extreme agenda than doing what is best for this country.
I heard they reached an agreement to open the government. I'm glad to see the Democrats caved in and closed the NSA, disbanded the secret courts and ended the war in Afghanistan. What's a few points in GDP, higher borrowing costs, lower tax revenue and a big dip in consumer confidence if we can restore our personal freedom? Keep fighting the good fight Conservatives.
How can you be pissed at big government when it's closed? Now that the government is open we can be pissed at the Democrats for the expensive, crappy service it's providing to the undeserving unwashed bankers, uh masses.
Damn right I'm angry. The difference is I and the rest of this country have every right to be angry. These nuts brought the world economy on the brink of collapse and are making this country appear unstable. They were willing to endure self inflicted wounds that were far more worse than whatever it it was they were hoping to accomplish - defund or limit Obomacare, reduce the deficit, or something else. They cost the economy $25 billion with the shutdown for nothing but will cut programs for the poor or refuse to fund disaster relief that cost far less but actually accomplish something. They are very very dangerous and crazy.
While I agree it's interesting that during the shut down and threat of default world wide markets went up like crazy. I suspect now that the threat is off the table we will see markets retreat. It's pretty clear the markets didn't take the possibility of default seriously and they viewed the shutdown would ensure very lose monetary policy by the FR for a very long time. This shutdown while damaging to the lower middle class has had a positive economic impact on the investor class around the world. While you have a right to be angry, I hope the fact that you personally gained from this shutdown will offset some of that anger. I know when my 401K reports come in for the quarter I can thank the tea party for a great quarter. I might go to Tiffany and buy the wife a trinket. I might even get TC engraved on it.
The thing that is craziest about the Tea Party is that they've had the upper hand on deficit reduction negotiations for two plus years now and all we've gotten out of that is the dysfunctional sequester. Our overall position would be better now if they'd let the Grand Bargain go through and people would have more respect for the US government, but that's not their priority. Their priority is making the government look bad at all costs and to hell with the consequences.
Reaganomics was pretty much about increasing deficit spending during a period of slow economic growth. Cut taxes and increase spending. That's pretty much what Obama did to get us out of a recession. The Republicans today would never agree to go back to the Reagan era tax code. It would raise taxes on cap gains substantially. Reagan couldn't get elected by today's Republican party.
While there are some issues I think Obama and his admin are not progressive enough on, there are others where I think he can be fairly criticized from his right. The point is that a healthy as the English would say loyal opposition is a good thing, and we do not have that now. I live in an unincorporated area north of NYC, but the nearest village has five Dems on the five person board of trustees, including the mayor. While I may agree with them as often as not, at times one can't help missing their smugness and even disregard for the views of the voters. I also voted for the GOP in the last County Exec race, and will likely do so again this year. In short there are benefits even to the party one tends to favor if the other one is vibrant and presents effective challenges and alternatives. We do not have that in DC today. Take the ACA. Other than repealing it, what is the position of the GOP? What alternative do they have? Why was it formerly acceptable as a GOP idea to have the individual mandate, but now that it is in the ACA they hate it? What would be better to replace it? In this most recent period I am most troubled by the way the GOP goes from an attack on the ACA to expressions of concern about the federal debt in justifying their posturing about the government shutdown and debt ceiling. They are hardly the same thing, and arguably to at least some extent the ACA will save money overall and lower the debt. But even if the ACA was neutral in respect of the federal debt, the two concerns are not related. The only thing that makes them related is the hard right's hatred of Obama, which is quite simply irrational. It should be no surprise that their policies and political strategy is also irrational and incoherent.
Everyone wants something for nothing. Our founding fathers warned us that our system of government would be in trouble once people realized they could vote to use the government as an unlimited source of free stuff for themselves. Even if the government writes the checks, someone has to produce the goods and provide the services that we consume. As we continue to run up the tab not only do we ultimately have to pay the bill but the annual interest takes up a greater percentage of our production. Once we reach the tipping point there is no going back. Right now we are in a position to make good decisions and spread the burden of entitlement reform and other needed changes across a large population that includes the baby boomers. Once they retire, not only will the burden be greater but there will be a much smaller group of people left to share the pain.
As to Reaganomics I believe what David Stockman believes which is that in 1981 you had wicked inflation and a tax system that was indexed in a way that people were beng driven up into higher brackets by inflation without gaining any buying power in the process. The old tax system was punitive because people were being driven upwards into diminishing returns by the extraordinary inflation of the era. It made sense to flatten the tax brackets out and in the process provide a lot of middle income tax relief to the people who were being squeezed for more of their income without getting any more buying power in the process. The problem of course was that the high inflation of the times was beginning to flatten out already and the Fed worked very hard to rein it in after the inflationary shocks that accurately pricing oil and other imports had created. Once the inflationary pressure lessened the flatter tax brackets meant that more and more assets accumulated at the top of the spectrum and we began the run up to the 1% problem today. Reagan recognized part of the problem and actually had two tax hikes, mainly on the upper middle class and above in his late first and mid-second term. Reaganomics would have been fine if it flattened out the brackets of the bottom 95% of taxpayers to prevent bracket creep and then established several reasonable and widely spaced tiers above them that prevented assets from accumulating at the very top of the spectrum. Have the bracketed income tiers stagger slightly from $10K to $250K adjusted for inflation, then have a $251K-$500K bracket, a $501K to $1M bracket and then a bracket for everybody above $1M a year. The situation going into 1981 was kind of ridiculous at the top levels. Nobody should be paying 70% of their income in taxes, period. Nobody making $20K a year should be paying 50% counting Federal, State, Local, Social Security and Medicare. I was paying more than 50% of my income in overall taxes in 1980 at the age of 19 working a decent entry level job. That was ridiculous. My salary was $14K and I paid more than 43% overall on that but the OT I put in all year pushed me up substantially and by the end of the year I was losing a lot more to taxes than I was taking home because LBKL's accountants were trying to keep up with my bracket creep.
