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New York, 5:19 PM
Mon Nov 30
40 posts in the last 24 hours
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07/21/09
25 years in a job, sure screams failure to me.
07/21/09
07/20/09
Incidentally, I went to the FAQ area of Recover.gov to see if my question was listed. It was not. My question is: "How much of the stimulus package has been spent so far?" I'm hearing about a quarter of it after almost half a year. Disgraceful
07/20/09
07/20/09
You may be correct about the other networks covering this issue. I currently only get about two hours of news a day. I could be missing the spending criticism.
07/21/09
Regardless, yes, it's different when Obama spends and Bush spends. Not all spending is the same. Obama's spending is on programs that are designed to get the economy moving again. Bush's spending was on programs designed to grind the economy to a halt. Seriously. (It worked, too.) Two totally different things. You don't get a whole lot of return on investment on a bomb dropped in the middle of a desert in a little country halfway around the world that poses no threat to us. Yet this reckless spending was just fine with the Republicans, and Fox News.
It remains to be seen if Obama's spending is going to work, but how many people do you hear talking about us being on the edge of a new great depression anymore? And only a growing economy can ever get rid of the deficit - if he'd let things languish the way they were, as Herbert Hoover did, then we'd have had trillion dollar deficits for 20 years.
07/21/09
"Obama's spending is on programs that are designed to get the economy moving again." This is patently untrue. Obama had an $800 billion dollar stimulus package passed in February. He has spent $200 billion of that money. A great deal of that cash was on loans to states to pay off their debts. That is not spending to stimulate the economy. My proof? The economy continues to languish as the $600 billion remainder is only being allowed to trickle out. You're right about not getting a return on the bomb being dropped. You get stimulus, though, when you have to pay people to make a replacement bomb. Those people then go out and buy clock radios and eat in restaurants with their wages. That's stimulus. It's not a particularly palatable example, but if we are being accurate that is exactly what dropping bombs does. In fact, the only kind of government spending policy that does not create any kind of stimulus is one that requires the cash to sit in a huge escrow account for future programs.
If we were actually brought back from the verge of the Great Depression and that could be attributed to a government action, then we owe it to the last important bi-partisan bill passed: The TARP - signed into law by George W. Bush after receiving a great deal of support from a Democratic Congress.
07/21/09
But that has nothing to do with the argument you and Fox News are making. Predictions, especially in economics are opinions, which is fine. You have your opinion. Fox News, which deals exclusively in opinions (although it didn't really express much of an adverse opinion about fighting a completely unnecessary to benefit one corporation on the taxpayer die) is, here--and just about every time O'Reilly opens his mouth--calling the kettle black.
I don't think you're missing the spending criticism on other networks, I think you're tuning it out because it doesn't fit with your preconceived ideas. You tend to do that a lot.
07/21/09
Seriously, I used to get to watch a lot more news. What I said about the coverage is my genuine perspective. Incidentally, I watch more hours of CNBC than Fox and CNN combined. The comparison between the federal governments spending and my personal finances is entirely apt. If the federal government continues to deficit spend, the currency will devalue and they will eventually not be able to borrow from their creditors. The Chinese do not have to buy our debt anymore than Citibank has to offer me more credit.
What is irrelevant in terms of the economy is whether or not the war was necessary. The money side of this thing doesn't know whether we went into a war for good reasons or fabricated ones. It only knows what it costs. I'm not really interested in switching every conversation about the economy to a statement about the war. It serves no purpose.
07/21/09
But I'll say it again: your opinion about what will happen as a result of today's economic policies is opinion and, as you're not an economist, an uninformed one. Same with O'Reilly, who never met a minute of airtime he couldn't fill with his bias. For him to bemoan the state of today's media is, simply a joke.
And thus we arrive where we started from.
07/20/09
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07/20/09
(looks through change drawer...)
07/20/09