I don't know if a multi-party setup is any better than a two-party one. It just means you can't get agreement on anything without parties forming coalitions. And the leader of it all thinks he's got some sort of magical mandate to do whatever the heck he likes... even though with a multi-party system he's often got a minority of the populace behind him. *cough*StephenHarper*cough*

If you are of legal voting age, residing in the United States, who are you voting for today?

I voted for Democrats. I voted Green on one ticket, California State Treasurer, just because I am pissed off at Bill Lockyer, the Dem in the race, for running ads castigating fellow Democrats, as if that could help him get Republican or Independent votes.

Hell yeah...Mission accomplished, finally. I'm not the most bloodless sort of guy anyways, but still a little weird to feel nothing but happiness that someone's dead.

But

I'm cool with that. Screw him. He deserved to die.

I know there will be repercussions, our troops did get the mission accomplished. Our troops didn't give up and lots of people died for this goon to die, so I am happy! I feel natural about it, maybe it's wrong, but we needed to show the world that if you do such a diabolical thing as 9/11 on American soil, then we are coming after your ass! WTG to the special forces that finished this!

So...

Didn't that Weiner sex scandal illustrate just how messed up the priorities of both major political parties and the news media are?

The media prioritizes viewership, regardless of how vapid the stories reported are. Politicians prioritize public opinion, so they care about how the news media portrays them. I think both stances are ridiculous, but I don't think these qualities are reserved to the US and I don't see any good way of changing things. That sort of change would require a larger social change first, as the media and the politicians are both ultimately catering (or pretending to cater) to what people want to see.

It's a rare day; I actually agree with you on that.

I think it was messed up that he was forced to resign, not by his constituents but by Obama and the Dems. And they said they'd take his committee seats away. I wondered if they were glad to get rid of someone who was such a vocal liberal.
But at the same time, the incident seems like self-sabotage and like he was trying to end his career.

So congratulations to New York state for passing a bill legalizing same-sex marriages!

Been messed up for a long time.

So I just signed a petition to recall Governor Snyder. I hope that authoritarian bastard gets dragged out of office, and death to his affront to both democracy and representation!

That is not ... true for Canada.

Health care is guaranteed to everyone, regardless of who what and why we are. You will not be denied, nor will you be pushed back of the line because you smoke or drink. That is downright illegal. The system takes care of everyone, no matter what you have or will do.

We all receive the same level of care. No one gets better care than any one else. It is the law. We all pay our taxes towards socialized health care. Weather I paid a paltry sum next to my neighbour who makes 10x the amount that I do, means nothing. He won't get faster better care then I, he will wait in line like us all.

Most cases you may have heard are things like: Sally wants to get a blemish removed, but the surgeons are busy placing a heart in 6year old Jhonny and are scheduled for other life saving procedures. The order which is determined by who needs it more. Sally is pissed and cries that its unfair and all of a sudden, socialized care is no good.

Also on the same note, when deciding who gets what and when, they do not decide who gets what and who or what kind of life they lived. That is irrelevant to saving lives.

How do I know this? My aunt was an alcoholic. She laid dying in the hospital because she destroyed her liver. She needed a new one. There were other patients on the list that needed a liver too. But she was in most serious condition. She may not have even survived much longer after that and they knew she would probably drink again anyways. But she was assessed as the person who needed it the most at that time, so she was first on the list. They do not judge, they do what will save.

Luckily, she ended up not wanting it. She just wanted to die and let someone else go on living.

I am not saying there isnt flaws. Doctors feel they are protected by our government since the government pays them..with our taxes. They slack off, and have to be reminded. It is our responsibility in a way to keep doctors, social workers, what have you, in check. I am certain that they dont preform as well as US doctors because they dont have a 30k paycheck or more per single patient they see.

In all honesty, I believe the US should adopt this practice. If everyone pays in, everyone can receive. Then again, I understand the rich not wanting to pay for the poor, since the USA is pretty much everyone for themselves. I dont understand this new law of so called socialized healthcare for the US. I read and reread it and it just doesn't make any sense.

I am going to be a US citizen in a matter of months, I am slightly afraid. No one helps and the government doesn't seem to care unless you have something huge to give in return. (Remember this is my opinion, from looking at it from a Canadians point of view. We are well taken care of, most of our stuff is "free", as in paid by our taxes. I mean not to anger or offend anyone)

Now, I don't think it's really "everyone for themselves." That's just a presence which overtakes the real identity of America. The Tea Party is all for themselves, and the wealthiest of the wealthy are all for themselves. I certainly agree with that.

I think the problem is people don't really recognize socialism in the US. But they still LOVE it. Medicare and social security, you touch these, you will die politically. And yet, they are as socialist as the US has come on anything. I don't think most people recognize that; it's just not something they typically think about, and then you add on top of it Republican lies about what socialism is, treating it like it was fascism, when it's clearly not. Hell, universal coverage of health care and other factors would -reduce- costs, once you add everything up, to the people even with the higher taxes (basically: you raise taxes for coverage, but cut costs of all this other stuff).

Now as for the health care debate, I have no idea what it is anymore. And frankly, while some good things certainly did come of it, I'm very dissatisfied with how the whole bleeding thing was handled. I don't think Obama fought hard enough, I think he gave way too much to the Republicans which was utterly pointless as they won't vote for it anyway (case and point: the current debt ceiling debate), and how the Democrats fooled themselves in their excitement into thinking they had a super-majority (they didn't - the only super-majority was that there wasn't Republicans; it was really a mix of Democrats, independents, and conservative Democrats (who I think ruined everything)). It was a clusterfuck. The public option was socialized medicine, but that was dropped to win votes (that didn't really get won over anyway).

I was going to end with my opinions of the Republican Party and the Tea Party, but... eh.

I wouldn't say the ideology is everyone for himself, either. What Libertarians and many Conservatives actually want is simply more control over the choices they have to make in life. They want to be able to spend the money they earned in a manner they feel is appropriate. There are many Libertarians and Conservatives who are very generous and give to charities that help out people who struggle in one way or another; they simply don't want the government forcing them to give to such a system, because they want the power of autonomy and the ability to assess and decide where their money would do the most good.

Do you mean citizens shouldn't pay taxes? Or they pay too much tax?
Read a funny editorial last week on that topic - http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/new...0,4540452.story

"and many Conservatives"

And yet, those many don't have a lick of control over their own party, lest they're Tea Partiers or way-right leaning. The Republican Party is purging moderatism in favor of some kind of ultra-right purity. Just look at the debt ceiling "debate;" Boehner hasn't any control over his own party, and has to bend so far backwards he's grabbing his own ankles, lest he be ousted like a witch in medieval England.

It varies from person to person. Some feel taxes should be lower, but that there should be some government in place and that it is fair to pay some taxes to keep it running. Some feel that there should be no government, thus, no taxes. I lean towards a preference for minarchy, which means a small, minimalist government with low taxes and all services that aren't absolutely essential at the government level privatized. Sometimes I do wonder if we would be better without government, but I'm not completely committed to that stance.



I think the debt ceiling debate is a poor example of what you claim. I haven't looked closely into the topic, but my understanding is that the Democrats want to raise the debt limit, while the Republicans want to cut spending and try to get to work paying off the debt right away, instead. If we have come to the point where we will soon be unable to pay back our debts if we don't get on it now, how is it a wise move to borrow even more, which will then increase the amount we owe and the amount of interest accruing? Our government chronically overspends and now it's getting to the point where it'll bite them in the ass. This is the perfect time for the government to finally take up fiscal responsibility and "live within it's means", so to speak. Not only that, but there is no alternative. The money to pay back America's debt isn't going to magically appear out of nowhere if we simply keep borrowing more. Money is a limited resource. The only way to get more is to spend less than you earn.

Now, I do think Conservatives are backwards on other issues. It is the Conservatives that are opposed to treating gay people like human beings, for example. I'm frankly disgusted that, in our socially and morally advanced society, gay people still don't have the right to marry and are still sometimes treated like they're less than human. This is just one example of a major break of Libertarians from Republicans. Conservatives often think they should be able to dictate social norms and make anything that falls outside of that illegal, while Libertarians think that people should be able to live their lives however they choose, so long as they're not hurting anyone else.

No. The Republicans, especially the Tea Party, either don't know what the hell the debt ceiling is, or do know but want power so badly they're willing to play games with it. My example is perfect. Fuck, we gave them a bill with massive cuts, no taxes, everything that was within their established, unmoving, uncompromised guidelines, and what happened? They STILL walked away from the table! And now, Boehner doesn't even have the votes for a bill he proposed, even after struggling to get support for it. They're "spending cuts" would ruin us because they're so massive. There is a point of necessity where you cannot cut and still be stable enough to earn income, and they are going well beyond that point in their adamant refusal to raise taxes. They have not compromised in this stupid argument, and it's only now, under Obama, that it's even an issue; not the hundred-plus times the debt ceiling was raised before.

You MUST raise revenue at some point, lest you cannot support yourself. If you live in poverty, even in poverty, there are essentials that must be paid for. Food, water, electricity, heat (depending where you live). This idea that you can simply cut your way out of it is ridiculous and so utterly naive; what, are you going to stop eating? Stop drinking? Going to allow yourself to freeze when its 10° F outside? No. And that's what they're thinking of doing. You want to fix the spending issue? Get our troops asses back into the US instead of Iraq and Afghanistan, bring those god damn factory jobs back that have been sent out to China, let those hell-damned Bush tax cuts expire from all incomes, close tax loopholes.

And if you're in poverty, guess what, cutting spending is not "the only way;" you get a second job, a third job, like some people in those lowest brackets actually try to do. Increase revenue. But since we have a party who will not budge, who will not compromise, who will stand like the bloody fucking wall of Berlin, we can't get shit done.

Just for the record, money for you and I is a finite resource. Individuals aren't allowed to print more. Governments not only can, but it's a function of sovereignty.

Beyond that, you seem to lack a basic understanding of what money is these days. Money is not a representation of a finite resource, some strange abstract of value that one can less than arbitrarily attach to one good or another. It appears that way once the whole concept gets to the individual because the vast and complicated currency exchanges in the world strive to resolve value out of currency based on the value of the country of origin, based on the relationships with other currencies, based on historical and future confidences, etc.

What's money's actual value? Nothing. A dollar isn't a handful of coins or a piece of watermarked cloth paper. We actually don't have enough real currency to express all of the dollars figuratively out there in the wild held by people. If everyone in the world "called their markers" on USD we'd have to go into further debt to open up the mints and print more hard currency. I don't know the numbers, but that debt alone could be substantial - and ultimately, pointless.

Money isn't a thing you have in your pocket really, it's an abstract of what money does. That's why we can trade currencies, because we're not trading the paper, we're trading in the things that the paper and coins do. What is the value of everything bought, traded, sold, and manufactured in a country? In the absence of currency these things still have value, right? What currency does is allow discrete divisions of investment in these things, promotes banking institutions and reservations like savings and credit, and all the other wonderful stuff we consider part of normal everyday life.

Applied the arbitrary and completely "consensus agreement" of the fiction that money has any value is sustained - oh, and then nations create armies and treaties with other people with armies to keep everyone in line with the notion that it's all got value. Having people devalue your currency has more to do with their lack of confidence in government than debt, or having a lack of confidence in your nation's population.

Our debt ceiling, in a way, is extraordinary on the face of it. We've essentially established an arbitrary limit to our own confidence in government in the decades past, and now Republicans and the Tea Party are resolved to demonstrate such an extreme lack of grace in governance that even if we were to resolve the debt ceiling tomorrow I suspect our currency will be lower in value for quite some time simply because the bastards are in office sustaining more internal threat to our currency. They're the poison well lurking on the otherwise nice property that obviously needs some upkeep.

Anyways, back to the point: Except for inflationary concerns, the government could "print" (except most money isn't printed) an infinite amount of money and create an infinite amount of debt, assuming everyone else in the world had an infinite amount of confidence that they'd get paid eventually. It might have been made famous by an infamous politician, but it's absolutely true that "deficits don't matter," because they don't except as a function of revenue and confidence in the currency.

Business and student loans demonstrate the principle: Whatever you borrow to go through school or to start a company is only as relevant as the value you earn based on that debt afterward. It's also the demonstration of why everyone calling for austerity measures is absolutely wrong, because austerity measures are great if you don't already have bills you can't avoid, but we're in the position of essentially turned our full time employment into a part time position with the Bush Tax Cuts, have enormous student loans we're paying, and possibly we're in the position of still not having the correct alignment of education to get a better job anyways. In the same position our correct plan of attack on the debt would be to get our old job back or something similar, maybe take on a part time job on top of that, and take on another loan to make sure we were a great hire next week and everyone in the town wanted to work with us. Sure, on paper we'll look tragic for a while, but whatever that number value is on our debt is meaningless except as it regards our income.

Stripping income is possibly the worst thing we could be doing. Reducing expenses without a plan to increase them in critical areas designed to create employment is the next worse, and yet here we are.

@Nekowolf: I looked into it and it looks like the Republicans are willing to compromise to some extent. While it is not set in stone, this article predicts that the Republican plan will include an increase to the debt ceiling. It is being smeared for being short term, but the Democrat plan, which would only last through 2012 or 2013, is also short-term. It is just enough to get Obama through this term and then they will be back at the the debt ceiling arguments. Any plan of this nature will be short term until the government actually takes up fiscal responsibility. I have heard of the Republican plan to add a balanced budget amendment and I think it sounds like a pretty good idea. The version mentioned here, with an 18% GNP cap is maybe a little extreme, but a simple provision that says the government must not spend more than it can earn would eventually solve our debt problems and would make our government that much more responsible and trustworthy.

@Mistermook: You handwaved inflationary concerns, but that is exactly why the government cannot just print more money. History has repeatedly shown that governments that try to solve budget crunches by printing more money go through massive inflation.

I am aware that money is no longer backed by the gold standard, but that does not mean that money is valueless. Money is worth what people think it is worth; in that way, it works something like supply and demand. If there is a large supply of money available, people will have more money to spend and businesses will charge more because they can increase their prices without hurting their customers when their customers have more money. This decreases the value of money. There may be a short period where there is temporarily more money available and it is still valued at its previous value, but that will change quickly. The only way to create more value is to be productive. If the US discovered/utilized some valuable natural resource it has, that would increase the country's worth. If employment went up, that would increase the country's worth. Printing paper does not increase the country's worth. Money is not a zero-sum game, but its creation does require that someone, somewhere gain something of value.

Well I certainly haven't seen it. I've seen them walk away from the debt talks. I've seen them make radical, impassible, legislation. Furthermore, this is from a few days ago. I'm serious, this debate, you really need to keep up stuff day-to-day. It's insane. I'm not so sure that the Reid plan is even on the table anymore, at least not in that way. I believe they're still working on it. And the Boehner plan has been altered a bit as well since then. And the Senate (Reid) is saying "we won't pass the Boehner bill. It does not have the votes." So it may well be completely pointless to even work on. But the Republicans are so unmoving that we can't come to an agreement. I mean, the Democrats are saying, don't touch Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, but we'll be willing to listen to cuts elsewhere. But we want taxes. The Republicans hear taxes and go "LA LA LA LA LA LA, I'M NOT LISTENING!" and try to shove through what they want. We gave them a bill that was within what they wanted, and they still walked away from it.

And just to prove a point:
Savings don't count, because it's still not a cut. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

I'm sorry, but they are NOT going to compromise, at least, not the Tea Party. They are so adamant, they will not allow even the closing of tax loopholes. Not raising taxes, now, but closing loopholes. And no, a balanced budget idea is atrocious! Governments go in and out of debt like all the time! What if something happens? What if we get another 9/11? Another Katrina? Another BP spill? Well, then we'd have to cut a ton of shit just to take care of those, because now, we can't borrow or anything due to a stupid legislative amendment, because it'd be "more than we earn." What a stupid idea. If you're in poverty, you're not going to limit yourself by what you earn; there may well be thing you may have to go beyond your income for, out of necessity. It will suck, hard, but you simply cannot shrug necessities. But that's what such an amendment would do.

Either you would make an exception, in which case, would need to make massive cuts in culmination, because you would have already gone beyond your limit. Or you don't an exception, and make massive cuts right then and there, which would be like me shoving a spear into your heart and you going into shock from it. Or you don't bother paying for those and hope for the Rapture to come and it won't ever be a problem again (can't have a problem without people).

EDIT: Let me make this very clear, for the sake of it. I think the Republican Party -would- maybe negotiate on this. Except... they will not turn against the Tea Party, they will not piss off that side of themselves, and it is the Tea Party who are making a firm standing, pulling the rest of the party with them. Basically, the Tea Party is calling the shots, and the Republicans, out of fear, are doing what they're told.

Like when we printed money in dizzying amounts to win World War II? Or the Civil War? How about when we incurred massive debt to pay for the Louisiana Purchase?

I handwaved inflation because it's a red herring that people with a little bit of history and little macroeconomic background tend to latch upon as some sort of holy grail of certitude on The Way Things Work. Inflation isn't good, but it's not the end of the world. The end of the world in economic turns is when no one has any faith in your currency - which can occur with (massive) inflation, but again, faith in a currency has less to do with debt or inflation or... anything really, besides the really hardcore stuff like "Will this government be here next year? Will its citizens still buy things?"

Germany had their crippling inflation because people had no confidence in government that lost a devastating war. Yugoslavia had their economic crisis because its rulers were dicks skimming off the top of their economy conflating internal issues that were eventually made clear with genocide and mass graves. Sure, we could have those sorts of problems too - but if we start to then I recommend leaving the US entirely. The problem won't be purely economic, it will be because the US has fundamental, radical flaws in its structure that will lead us to a less than economic, more literal disaster than anyone will be happy with.


It works on an infinitely more complicated social and psychological level than normal supply and demand. Don't amuse yourself that it's anything less than black magic in some respects. Money might the craziest invention people ever thought of, and the most useful - even more than fire and the wheel.


That's absolutely not the only way to create more value, or else the US would have fallen into tragic economic circumstances somewhere in the mid sixties. You can create money by spending money. It's well recognized as an economic reality, even if libertarians I've talked with generally must have missed that question on their macroeconomics tests.

Currency velocity (the average frequency with which a unit of money is spent in a specific period of time) in the US has plummeted recently, for instance, thanks to banks freezing their lending practices. We could insist on banks loaning money of course, by writing laws demanding it (which wouldn't be socialist, but it would be lead to terrible business practices) or nationalizing them (which would be socialist, and also probably be bad business); or we could simply "print" more money and have the government spend it on things.

The money virtually locked in the virtual vaults of the world's electronic banking systems would still stay there, adding absolutely nothing to the economy, and yet by increasing "loans" in the form of subsidies and grants we'd almost certainly get the lending effect in our economy. Which, strangely enough, would encourage banks to lend money to things for them to spend money on, because lending institutions like to chase money rather than create it (or else they'd be different sorts of organizations.)

Would we produce anything by creating that new money? Not necessarily directly. The economic stimulus of the Bush Tax Cuts, which were in response to the incipient recession caused by the 9/11 attack really, more or less amounted to simply making everyone feel better about having more money, and having more money people spent more money. They cut taxes to do so, but they could have simply handed people the same amount of money on top of their normal tax rates and they'd probably have amounted to the exact same amount of stimulus. Similarly, rather than TARP bailout funds the government could have simply ignored debt or taxes for the recipient businesses and those would likely have had a similar effect.

Money is complicated because it's very very much tied into the people that use it. It's an abstract of all sorts of things in our lives, from our family homes to our children to our livers to (yes) our happiness. Happy people spend more money - I'm not sure anyone knows exactly why.

A lot of the abstract principles we went over back in college about the weird things with money supply and macroeconomics regarded stringing out finances as strings with flags and weights on it representing expenses, allocations from demand, and time. Money isn't a thing at all in some respects, it's a movement. It's your time and place, and how you feel as relative to how everyone else feels and thinks of you. Thinking about macroeconomics like it's anything at all like microeconomics is a vast, shudderingly limiting oversimplification.


You know how you know when you've really reached your limit in debt? It's when people won't lend you anymore money, and in the case of a nation it's when people won't accept your currency any longer. Declaring that we've reached the limit on our debt is akin to declaring that we can't, or won't, pay back the bills. Honestly? I think it's unpatriotic, in the sense that it's a bet against America and the American people's ability to create value. In some ways I've got a love-hate relationship with the stuff, because the more I understand about macroeconomics the more it sometimes appears to be a religion. It requires faith, or else it disappears like smoke.


By your own words then, you accept that as long as people believe it has value still, creating money creates value?

I just heard that McConnell refuses to negotiate with Reid, and is fucking filibustering Reid's proposal.

Fine, I'll say what I withheld earlier. I think Republicans are god damn terrorists. I do. I really fucking do. They terrorize by threatening unions, by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, things people rely on out of necessity. They terrorize by playing games with US debt, they terrorize by refusing to negotiate, they terrorize through filibusters that no longer need you to stand for hours and hours on end and have been made even harder to break. They terrorize by playing politics with the Supreme Court.

They are terrorists from the inside, terrorists who want an authoritarian, Christian, darwinist, America, sucking the cock of corporations for a literal money-shot with only two thoughts in mind: extreme "conservative" agenda and elections.

/rant

Nowhere in there did you provide the point at which, under our current system, that additional debt would get paid back. That is the problem. Under our current system, our debt is not getting paid back. We're living in Lala land, acting like wanting expensive government programs means we should get them even if we can't afford them. Yes, we should have ways of borrowing money in cases of emergency, but we should be responsible enough to set out a clear plan to pay back that debt in better times. Our politicians don't care about anything more long-term than their terms in office, though, so they don't care about our long-term debt or the sustainability of popular programs. Our politicians are responsible for sustaining our government and they are failing at their jobs.



Inflation may not be particularly crippling to government, but it is to people, particularly the poor. Wages typically do not keep up with inflation, but maybe catch up months or years down the line. Those working two to three minimum wage jobs are unlikely to get raises to cover the higher cost of living, so their paychecks just get stretched even thinner. College students typically do not get increased scholarships and grants to keep up with the raising cost of tuition (as I can personally attest to), so they have to take up more loans. Government may be able to shrug off inflation, but it shouldn't because it has a duty to its citizens to not screw them over.



I absolutely agree that spending money can create money. I've talked about it in political debates on this site before and it was what I meant to imply with that statement. What I meant by productivity is largely the functioning of business. When people do business, usually both parties come out the better for it, thus creating wealth. I wasn't speaking simply of material goods. But what I was getting at is that there is no mutual exchange when the government prints more money. At best that means that it is a zero-sum situation and, at worst, it actually loses wealth.



Banks still make loans to big businesses and those are the loans that carry the most economic weight. Big businesses are what create jobs. Jobs have a much stronger and more lasting impact on the economy than individual loans. The money that banks hold doesn't just sit there or, at least, not all of it does. A bank that let its money just sit would not be very successful because the banks that lent that money out to businesses would have a distinct advantage. Plus, there is no benefit to a bank if it does not attempt to make a profit, and it cannot attempt to make a profit without making loans and investments.



While I understand that money does not follow perfectly simply rules, I think you are being too quick to dismiss some logical ways that it acts. Tax cuts stimulate the economy because the government does not, in many cases, create wealth, while individuals and businesses do. One of the most expensive government programs we have is Social Security. Social Security does not create wealth; it redistributes it. If that wealth instead were kept in the hands of individuals to be saved or used as they saw fit, particularly those individuals responsible for creating jobs, we would likely have a much stronger economy because there would be that much more money out there being used to create more wealth. I'm not going to argue about whether we should actually abolish Social Security or not, but I'm just pointing out that more money in the hands of individuals means more wealth is generated.



I didn't say that creating money creates value. Creating value creates value. What I meant by the statement that you quoted is simply a reiteration of the concept of mutual gain or, at least, one person breaking even while another gains. I was basically repeating my point about productivity, while trying to clarify.