Obama's Downgrade

I could get behind that. It would mean blaming everyone for multiple generations, no exceptions. That sounds about right, given the magnitude of the problem.

We have reached the last cycle of most world dominant societies. People have said this over the last quarter of a century. A nation can only be world power for 250-300 years before something happens that said nation can't recover from. The problem is that time frame is just about when the nation as a whole feels bullet proof enough to completely ignore fallacies in its market.

It happened to Greece, it happened to Rome, it happened to Assyria, Persia, France, and Britain. Cue America's turn

Except that it's 1000x greater effort in the WRONG direction. Bush already screwed us over once. It would have actually been better not to do anything at all than to do what he did. Just because someone is more prone to action than another does make them any better at achieving solutions.

You have three types of people:
1) Those that were too stupid to ever understand this over the last 50 years
2) Those who chose to be blissfully ignorant of the signs over the last 50 years
3 ) Those who warned but were laughed at

Obama supported the Gang of Six proposal, and it was rejected by the House. Obama supported the Senate's first and second bills, which were rejected by the House. Obama proposed a Grand Bargain of 4.2 trillion in deficit reduction, including from Medicare and Social Security, comprised of $3.175T in spending cuts and $825B in tax hikes, which was rejected by the House.

There were a lot of proposals by "the other side," and they were immediately voted down by the House. One was voted down before it even passed!

Saying "the other side" had no proposal is completely disingenuous. The problem was, every proposal by the President or the Senate contained some form of tax increases, whether directly or through eliminating loopholes, and the House made clear that they were completely unwilling to compromise on that point.

I'm not taking Obama or the Democrats' side here. I'm agreeing with the S&P, who pointed to a completely dysfunctional legislative process as a huge part of the problem.

Nobody is at the helm. The Republicans passed a proposal that was doomed even from their very first vote. A bipartisan panel's proposal was rejected by both. Congress and Obama walked away from each other. Reid and Boehner voted down one another's bill within hours of their passage. It was a complete disaster on every front, and playing political poker with our debtors' money is shockingly irresponsible. And wishing desperately for "the buck to stop" exclusively with one's political enemies doesn't help, because it's impossible for one side to "win" this one anymore.

Get it out of your head, Bush didn't screw you.

Congress, the house, banks, large corporations, OPEC and 70% of your fellow US citizens screwed you

Add this to the list.
Nanking Massacre

Japan does not have a very nice history.

Yep.. its all about the fact that all nationalities are capable of atrocities at any time for any reason.. which evidently is beyond the comprehension by some jaded souls.

Not many countries have very nice histories.

You didn't hear? America is the only country capable of humanitarian atrocities...

Reread the posts quoted and nobody said Japan was "better", just said the atomic bombs were not on the same tier.

Also this isn't the topic :O

exactly, can we please get back on topic. I was having fun laughing at the tea partier.

You act as though we're saints...The Trail of Tears, slavery, rape during the Civil War, (you should read this...) 'The Spoils of World War II: The American Military’s Role in the Stealing of Europe’s Treasures' by Kenneth D Alford. This list can go on and on if need be.

Where the hell did the Japan thing come from?

They placing all the blame on Obama as well?

The government should go a step further than making contraceptives freely available and go into a program of voluntary sterilization and mandatory sterilization for the worst offenders. I've seen two generations of people living on the system and a third who is bellying up to the table.

I don't care who's fault it is. My ethical and ideological sensibility lies in a more conservative stance, but I am reasonable enough to understand that both sides are trying to *** me.

What I want to know is if anyone can account for the trillions of dollars that we did borrow? I know that we put a portion of the original investment into fanniemae/sachs etc etc. I know a portion of the second "national mortgage" went into the domestic auto companies. What happened to the rest of it? As a taxpayer and a voter for over a decade, I don't feel I can easily look up where this money went (and I feel i should be able to). We hear every day how the modern american over-extended their "financial reach" and caused this dilemma, yet.... the government did the same thing AFTER the fact?

Regardless of whether I liked Obama from the start I said I was going to support him because he was now my president. I felt that the BP problem was handled in a painfully poor manner (had it been Bush it would have been 10x the drama of his "3-day's of ignoring Katrina"). I feel he worked hard to worm policies and his health agenda far enough into the system that we won't be able to work them out for years, if ever. That's really where I draw the line with "problems" I have with him. The thing that concerns me about the whole debt crisis has less to do with what Obama has done, and more about what he WILL DO. I've gotten the distinct impression that Obama speaks very well, and then does very little to back it up. I haven't seen anything from him to give me "hope", nor do I feel he is the "political messiah" the democratic party was hoping he'd be.

All that being said: If I'm wrong. If at the end of his two terms (i'll give you the benefit of the doubt that he'll get two..... detroit's last mayor did somehow) he has caused the beginning of economic prosperity I would kiss him. I just think he's young enough (and a politician enough) to be more concerned with his future than our future. I'm not enough of a tin-foil hat to think that both parties are high-fiving and orchestrating politics like it were professional wrestling, but I do think that most politicians who get on a national level have reached a point where they have a massive personal agenda and put the voters in the back seat. If he fixes things great, but I for one think we're going to see more and more unemployment for the next 10 years and one day we're going to look back on this era at our new government funded systems the way we look at medicare/social security/welfare now.


Then again that's my opinion.

Referring to Hague Convention of 1907, it can be argued that the US violated:
Section 2, Chapter 1, articles: 23, 25, 26, 27.

This should be the relevant protocol at the time of WWII, with the addition of the Geneva Protocol; if someone else can verify that it would be appreciated.
I also see your link, and raise you by another:
US War Crimes

1 it was a joke
2 it is because the world's view of America has a lot to do with its international commerce, which ha taken a nosedive over the recent decade (embargoes, exchange rates, import taxes etc)

It's actually pretty easy to get detailed info about what part of the budget goes to what, and which parts of the debt were spent on what.

You can even drill down and make custom charts and graphs to answer any question for almost any year.

The problem is, numbers are boring. What sells cable news ratings are preconceived narratives of ideological purity based around simplistic political notions that get people to stay tuned out of self-righteous tribal loyalty. And so most Americans, whether on the right or the left, are wildly incorrect in how they think the money is actually spent. The right vastly over-estimates the amount of money spent on domestic and foreign welfare/aid programs while under-estimating the cost of the military, and the left vastly under-estimates the cost of the military while under-estimating the cost of entitlement programs.

The USA vs. Japan stuff is informative and all, but can we focus mainly on the economic troubles in this thread? I haven't followed any of it up until recently (my fault for being dumb and trusting the government to fix whatever they broke) but now I'm trying to catch up on information and the actual on-topic economy discussion in here is helping a great deal. Thanks.

This seems like a fair tradeoff

I mean the "stimulus era" spending. We borrowed trillions and I don't recall anything coming of the money after bailing out the auto companies. I remember them saying it was "allocated" but for what?

/feels bad

There's a whole site tracking exactly where the stimulus money went/is going.

Taking the government at exactly its word on those numbers would be a mistake, but I would imagine it's accurate to within +/- 15% at the very least.

Incidentally, no stimulus money went to bail out the auto industries. That was the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) signed under Bush, of which around $80B was loaned. (And has all been paid back, at a net profit to the taxpayer.)

The numbers speak for themselves. Obama is growing the debt by more than twice the rate of Bush. 4 billion dollars a day in new debt isn't disputable. Government spending that has increased 25% more than it was in 2008 isn't disputable. The outrage comes from people such as myself seeing this trend and concluding that its unsustainable. Today there is one party calling to reign it in and one party ignoring the unsustainable reality.

If your argument is don't trust those evil republicans, you may be right but you aren't living in reality.

If your argument is we don't have a debt problem, you aren't living in reality.

I've never argued we don't have a debt problem. Neither does Obama. "We have a huge debt problem" has been the primary talking point of just about every speech he's given for the past year.

I just think it's frustrating as hell to claim the problem is entirely the fault of Democrats, point to one ludicrous and doomed proposal to fix it from the Republican side, and then morally wash your hands of the whole situation. Which you keep trying to do.

Obama initially scoffed at the Gang of six proposal when it was originally proposed months ago. Also it was a page and a half manefesto, not anything that was of any substance legislative wise, by their own admissions in order to turn it into legislation they would not have made the deadline.

Obama's did have the notion of a grand bargain, but it never even had so much as a pie chart, let alone support in the senate or house. With a week to go he was the only one of the three still calling for tax hikes.

Read what you quoted

So, basically everyone who is leaning to the right has totally forgotten basic Keynesian Economics. Bravo!

If The New Deal, and post WWII expansion has taught us anything it's that withholding money at the micro-economic level will be the death of us. That is precisely what has been done by the Republican party.

The guy doesn't acknowledge we have a debt problem! Every other speech he makes talks about how we need to spend spend spend, or invest invest invest. His acknowledge of the debt is only as lip service. It is nothing more than a campaign tool to him.

How hard are you going to try to disconnect his use of "investment" and spending? They are one in the same.