Obama's Downgrade

This is the perfect example why Government shouldn't get involved with private

Bailing out a business is probably the dumbest idea everrrrrrrrr

sustaining a war + throwing money at the economy = disaster

raising the debt ceiling is just a band-aid for the government

Deep cuts in government services (slashes staff/programs/services)
does help with lowering the cost of gvt but it does not help the economy because now there is more people out of work

Seriously government should just regulate so people don't break laws and that should be the end of it.

If the people running the economy decides to run it to the ground no one will be able to stop it.

I love how people talk out their *** like they know anything.

I'd take Romney ahead of Huntsman. Huntsman's too much of a "Say whatever to get elected" polititian.

I think they just regurgitated something they heard last night on fox news.

So no schools then? They're not police so guess not....

No libraries? No roads? who needs roads to be a law abiding citizen... not me!

Hell who needs the fire department, unless of coarse the fire is breaking the law?

Actually someone needs to resurrect Reagan. And fast!

No army either, dont need any defense..

Aww. Now I guess we're confusing reality with forum rants. Sorry, gents, won't happen again. Honest... til the next blame post.

To me, the problem is that we've fostered a culture where everyone is an expert, and yet won't listen to experts.

We don't trust biologists to talk about biology, climatologists to talk about climate, astrophysicists to talk about astrophysics, or economists to talk about economics. We dismiss statistics as lies. We view all expert information as biased. We've jettisoned everyone with any informed opinion as a member of the "elite," and the elite are not to be trusted.

We've become so conceited, we think the average person has enough expertise and knowledge to find simple solutions for every problem, despite the fact most of us are impossibly under-educated and arrogantly proud of that fact. And we won't look to anyone other than ourselves for answers, because we believe we occupy a special, pseudo-religious Mr. Rogers style "we're special" place in the world, where none of the experiences or history of other countries could possibly have any bearing on our own.

We trust blowhard cable news pundits with even less education than ourselves to filter our information and spin it into manufactured outrage, selling us hopelessly myopic ideologies based on over-simplified talking points. All so we'll then feel compelled to storm off in righteous indignation and regurgitate it all into pointless forum threads, while deluding ourselves into thinking we're having a genuine independent thought.

The market is tanking because nobody has any idea what the hell is going on anymore. The debt ceiling negotiation showed that both parties have their heads so far up their *** they're more interested in making the other side lose than accomplishing anything of logical value. Nobody knows if we'll be able to cut spending or raise taxes any time soon. Will the Tea Party just default us out of principle in a few months? Nobody knows! S&P downrated us? Great. What does that mean? Does it mean anything? Nobody knows! And when nobody knows, people bolt, and take the market down with them.

Because the electorate is so wrapped up in screaming bitchfests as political blood-sport, egged on by braindead opinio-tainment journalism, and so convinced they have all the answers, they won't listen to any expert opinion that doesn't parrot their own version of reality while convincing them to stick through more Sleeptrain mattress commercials out of sheer team loyalty alone. It's politics as a religion, and just like we saw in the dark ages, the fearful need for simple villains and simple answers in times of deep uncertainty can lead human beings to very dangerous conclusions.

I'm &*#$ing tired of it.

I said getting involved with Private

aka big businesses like Ford.

I didn't say the government shouldn't provide services

try again


edit:


Anyways we are where we are

Time to deal with it and deal with what happens next

/slowclap

Jaerik for supreme ruler, anyone?

Well said. I feel like we're quickly deteriorating into something I don't wish to be a part of. Whatever awfulness is happening in the world right now, it's likely because of/thanks to people that you just described.

Only if we name the position "Chief Mugwump".

Edit: apparently a mugwump was an actual political activist group. Well I'll be damned... nvm then.

Y'know, Iro, as rare as common sense is nowadays its becoming an important qualification.

As a culture it's a problem for sure, but the advent of the internet has made it possible for what once were exclusive clubs to have self taught outliers who know more, or deduce more than the so called experts. For sure, it's not the majority of people, but it does allow for marginal independent thought to grow.

What gets me about the whole recovery from the recession process is that nobody knew what was going on. Almost universally in the viewpoints that I've read is that the economic crisis happened because a whole mess of people who were legitimately considered "experts" in their respective fields had little to no idea what was going on until much too late. People were gambling on sums of billions and billions of dollars without a clue of what was going on, either because they were too stupid or too corrupt to care is still open to debate.

And S&P and Moodies didn't know what was going on either (they were in some instances actually played into signing CoDs full of crap) and people implicitly trust their ratings. And the ratings agencies end up having the flunkies who can't make it big on wall street instead of the brightest minds in economics. Am I supposed to trust experts when they have no idea what the tinkering they're doing is causing? It's a tough question.

You touched on fear towards the end, but fear to the Sheeple of America is alive a well today! No offense NurseryNazuna. Well put Jaerik

What would you have us do, Jaerik? We can't very well let them continue onward and run our country into the ground, but we can't actually DO anything without walking the thin line between terrorist and revolutionary.

You don't vote for people who would walk on either side of the crazy line.

you know the constitution calls for us to take action and restore order if the government is leading us astray

I don't think the constitution suggests that we tear down the government when a few crazy people make it into office. I think the founding fathers would suggest we vote better next election.

hard to vote better when the elections become voting between two(or more) evils, with picking whichever one that sound like theyll just screw us over the least

I've run out of rate-ups for today, but that is deserving of one.

One of the many reasons voting does no good, is politicians tell you what you want to hear to get your vote, one after another. So okay we learned politician A won't actually do anything they promised, so this next election we don't vote for him.. Now we vote for politician B, same thing.

'Voting better' doesn't really mean anything, unless it's voting for a new system entirely.

That's what primaries are for, to weed out the craziest of the crazy.

If you're looking for a perfect candidate you're not going to find one. But there are people who obviously shouldn't be steering the ship. If you pull the people who are leading you off course out of the helm, maybe the ship will slowly drift back on course.

That's the one thing you can count on in these matters. It's easy to hide financial problems and the watch dogs can't catch everything. Most people didn't see the mortgage problem coming, most people didn't see Enron coming, and most people didn't see lehman brothers coming that said if the news stations and politicians didn't say "We're gonna default" over and over for the last month then this probably wouldn't have happened at all.

Hopefully it turns out to be a good thing and they address the issue instead repeatedly putting off fixing it. Medicare spends more than it takes in because the population charts are skewed towards the end and they've put off discussing how to fund it for longer than I can recall. The problem is that one party only wants spending cuts and the other only wants tax increases and they're all idiots if they think they can fix it by simply doing one or the other.

This country is not going to default on it's obligations it's got a little machine that prints money. The problem is inflation and that's the destroyer of nations.

A damn good article that I agree almost entirely with right now.