GOP--Sore Losers

[tzor]

You forget. This is Tzor. Regurgitating weird foaming propaganda without even realizing how crazy it is is, well, kinda his thing.

That's not true, I regurgigate it because it is crazy, who wants to talk about the stuff that is actually true.

[Username17]

I thought the document was a "cirtificate of live birth." Can you use that to get a US Passport? Because I needed a birth certificate for mine, and it's just a matter of fairness for me.

A certificate of live birth is a birth certificate. Note how it has birth and certificate in the title. This has gone round and round, but there's absolutely nothing whatever to this particular attack on Obama. Snopes Weighs In.



-Username17

[tzor]

Edit: No, I'm not making that up. There's a guy, about my age, who is infuriated at the idea of public health care. Or taxing the upper levels of the wealth strata to support nationwide programs of any sort. And he has been known to ask "What happened to 'survival of the fittest'?" when he gets on a rant about welfare.

Well I could give you a lot of reasons why I am in general not supportive of "public health care." (Or the current system in general; I'd rather pay more and live longer. We need to be honest about the costs and benefits of a good healt care system; not trying to hide the costs by either shifting it to companies (current system) or into the federal budget (Obama's plan)) I could also argue why "taxing the rich" won't work. (There are simply not enough rich to fund any significant national program.)

Speaking of taxes, I saw a similiar problem with my local church. Expenses generally exceed revenue. It was determined that if every family only contributed $8 per week expenses would be paid (this only shows how god damned cheep the average Catholic is). Our K of C had a fund raiser that raised $10,000 for the church, probably enough to cover the deficit for a month or two. That was several months of hard work. The little of the many is greater than the much of the few.

[tzor]

I thought the document was a "cirtificate of live birth." Can you use that to get a US Passport? Because I needed a birth certificate for mine, and it's just a matter of fairness for me.

A certificate of live birth is a birth certificate. Note how it has birth and certificate in the title. This has gone round and round, but there's absolutely nothing whatever to this particular attack on Obama. Snopes Weighs In.

Still, you can't use that for a passport.

A certified birth certificate has a registrar's raised, embossed, impressed or multicolored seal, registrar’s signature, and the date the certificate was filed with the registrar's office, which must be within 1 year of your birth. Please note, some short (abstract) versions of birth certificates may not be acceptable for passport purposes.

No signature.

[Maxus]

Actually, taxing the rich can work.

I mean...Okay, let's say a progressive tax scale is being used. Base line in 10%. Rich people pay 20% (define 'rich' as a million or more a year).

Now, thing is...If I take 20% of the income from a guy who's making ten, or twenty, or a hundred million a year...He's not going to be in the poor house. Hell, at those level, I could take 30% and he wouldn't be reduced to eating rats and wearing cardboard shoes. And the amount of tax money I could score off a rich man without in any way impoverishing him is often greater than that of many, many people below the 'rich' line.

Anyway, a lot of rich people keep large chunks of currency inactive. I'm not sure what it's there for. The best theory I've heard is that it's some way of keeping score.

Which would be cool and all, if that money couldn't be more profitably used to help people and improve things. Which it is always can.

There may be more poor people than rich people, but rich people have a disproportionate amount of money and can therefore shoulder a bigger burden than their population would indicate. And when they start talking about how great they are, they can mean it.

[Username17]

Oh bloody hell, is tzor arguing against progressive taxation again? I'd pretend to be surprised, but that's old hat from the guy who assured us that the US economy was totally fine and the doom saying over the subprime mortgage collapse was totally overblown. Tzor's concept of how large scale finances work is incredibly bad, and is actually frighteningly bad because he supposedly works in the finance industry in some capacity where people actually listen to the stuff he says.

But it's not really surprising that Tzor is divorced from reality. He's a self identified conservative, and conservatives do not interact with reality in a functional or sane manner. Also, he's a catholic, and the Catholic church is evil.

He can blithely state that he is in favor of condemning a man to a literal eternity of torture in fire for having had the temerity to save the life of a nine year old rape victim. This is not a hypothetical, this is historical fact. So the fact that he's opposing progressive taxation despite the fact that it benefits humanity and has a proven track record of success is not weird or inconsistent with his world view. He doesn't give a rat's ass about benefiting humanity and he specifically rejects fact based argument.

-Username17

[tzor]

No Frank, I'm not. I'm arguing that those who want to pay for things by imposing a "rich" tax (typically on those making $250K and over) often forget that the amount of money they need doesn't cover the money that the rich have.

I don't oppose a progressive tax, although I don't like them with large bumps because if you make enough to cross the border you get penalized. Personally I prefer a "flat tax with offset" everyone gets a flat X tax free and then pay x% on all monies after that fixed amount. For the rich, that flat amount is pocket change; for the poor, it's everything, and the middle class it's significant. But that's not something you hear discussed.

Back to "tax the rich:" Here is something I wrote up for Gather. I'll just quote the part I quoted from here. If you want to see my entire article, I can always use the web visits.

It's a common misperception that, in the interest of fairness, the "rich" should be taxed to pay for the government programs politicians favor, for whatever reason. However, looking beyond the simplistic slogan of "taxing the rich," the question is just how much money can be generated this way?

Looking at the situation from one perspective, we can get a clue from the September 2008 Forbes' list of the 400 Richest Americans. The top five were: Bill Gates (Microsoft), $57 billion; Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway, $50 billion; Lawrence Ellison (Oracle), $27.0 billion; Jim Walton (Wal-Mart), $23.4 billion; and S. Robson Walton (Wal-Mart), $23.3 billion -- a total of $180.7 billion. Their portfolios have no doubt lost value as the market crashed, so assuming their combined holdings are now worth only fifty percent of their previous value, they would still have a total net worth of around $90 billion.

Based on the administration's proposed $3.5 trillion 2009 budget, if the government took the entire $90 billion net worth of these five richest Americans, it would run the government for only about ten days. If the total $1.57 trillion net worth of the Forbes 400 Richest Americans were confiscated, it would run the government for only about 164 days. So, for those who seem to believe that taxing the "rich" can pay for everything they want, what happens when the richest Americans have nothing left? Whose taxes will be increased next? Obviously, the middle class, notwithstanding Obama's repeated promises to reduce them.

Please note: I "work" in the financial news reporting agency. I'm like the people who report the sports games, I don't know how to make home runs from an inside fast ball, I just report the results.

Please note: I don't think I have made an official statement here. I do know that on Gather I invoked the principle of double effect faster than you can say that word which the Knights who say "Ni" cannot hear.

Speaking of conservatives, especially when considering the MSM and on liberal blogging sites like Gather, how many times have you seen a judge for Miss America throw out sexual insults to a liberal, or how many MSM news hosts throw out sexual insults at liberals? How many liberal governors have their children constantly ridiculed and insulted and how many liberal governors have to suffer with 18 ethics complaints of a frivolous nature (even the governor of Illinois didn't get that many).

So, Frank, seeing you are a "godless heathen" I'll let that slide.
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Yes I know "godless heathen" is an oxymoron. (Heathen generally implies pagan.)

[Crissa]

I might point out, tzor, that the top 1% control 50% of the country's income.

The much of the few actually does outweigh the little of the many.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

Please note: I "work" in the financial news reporting agency. I'm like the people who report the sports games, I don't know how to make home runs from an inside fast ball, I just report the results.

You know, I was going to be nice and not mention that.

But actually if I recall I was "predicting" the financial crisis (an easy thing to do at the time since by then it was already well underway). And you declared that not only was it not that bad, but there was NO and would be NO financial crisis. And that as an expert who gathered and collated financial information you should know. Then you went into hiding for several months as the shit really hit the fan on that claim.

Have you considered contacting your employers and recommending "some guy on the internet" as being a better information gathering AND analysis service than what they currently have going?

[Crissa]

Yes, you can use Cert. of Live Birth (the legal document, not the cert from the hospital) - well, the one they print out, with the raised seal and signature on the back - to get a passport.

-Crissa

PS: I can only name two current MSM news anchors who haven't made sexist remarks of Liberal targets, tzor. Admittedly, they also did not make sexual jokes about Palin, either. Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper.

[tzor]

I might point out, tzor, that the top 1% control 50% of the country's income.

I'm going to call you on the word "control" here, (A CEO controlls the income of all those who work beneath him or her) but excuse me while I quote wiki (emphasis mine)

The aggregate income measures the combined income earned by all persons in a particular income group. In 2007, all households in the United States earned roughly $7.896 trillion. One half, 49.98%, of all income in the US was earned by households with an income over $100,000, the top twenty percent. Over one quarter, 28.5%, of all income was earned by the top 8%, those households earning more than $150,000 a year. The top 3.65%, with incomes over $200,000, earned 17.5%. Households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $75,000, 18.2% of households, earned 16.5% of all income. Households with annual incomes from $50,000 to $95,000, 28.1% of households, earned 28.8% of all income. The bottom 10.3% earned 1.06% of all income.

[Crissa]

That only counts dollars.

It doesn't count other compensation... You know like getting stocks instead of dollars on a check. Or company cars, or apartments, travel, food, etc.

-Crissa

[Murtak]

Any special reason for not quoting these bits?

For information on the income of individuals, see Personal income in the United States.

To measure the income of a household, the pre-tax money receipts of all residents over the age of 18 over a single year are combined.

However, the size of a household, which is commonly not considered, creates significant distortions which offset gains or decreases in household income and makes direct comparisons between quintiles impossible.

As you can see here personal income and household income are not exactly the same.

Not that it matters, because even your own numbers show one-fifth of the population earning half of the income. And that number will go way up once you deduct the actual cost of living (which is essentially untaxable) from those incomes.

[Username17]

Double effect doesn't mean donkey shit. You're still torturing someone for eternity for the high crime of saving the life of a 9 year old girl who had been raped and was dying. You don't just get to say "Double Effect" and have the fact that you are child torturing monster magically go away, you seriously don't get to do that.

We have laws, we have a discipline, we have a doctrine of the faith, this is not just theory. And you can't start backpedaling just because the real-life situation carries a certain human weight.

Your "moral" system does not value the weight of humanity. That makes it unrecognizable as morality. The pope is a child torturing monster, and you have always been his humble servant.

-Username17

[Psychic Robot]

Lol @ the Gawker thing. The said part is, I'm pretty sure that people like Frank take that at face value. I advise you check out The Huffington Post before you actually put any weight into the idea that Republicans are somehow retarded.

(Oh, and don't confuse "having a college education" with "being shoved into a predominantly left-wing atmosphere that stifles intellectualism.")

[mean_liar]

I think that the GOP's latest floundering is clearly a result of leadership - someone else brought that up already.

To add to the discussion, I think that crisis of leadership is the result of being torn between populism and any sort of conservative dogma. Yes, back in the day conservatives were still anti-black nuts but at least they stood for something discernible. These days the rabid, consistently-voting wing has been fed fear for so long that they've totally demonized compromise. At this point the majority of the people that vote Republican just hate the other side and articulation of that hate has never been a strong component of the rabble-rousing.

It exists, of course, but it's generally not very good or very deep analysis. Most right-wing foundations were formed as media arms rather than policy analyzers and its straining at the seams now. Those media arms are compromised - as Frank noted - and successive generations have left university with strong left-leaning views and the ability to think deeply about these things.

The pablum that they're feeding the base isn't gaining anyone new and hastens the alienation.

Ultimately, they're floundering because they'll say anything that's outlandish and gets people to flock to TV for the newest outrage. It's not even about pushing a position, its about the spectacle they can create. The politicians are just getting dragged along with the riptide.

The seminal moment for me was during the stimulus bill discussion and someone with the GOP made the comment that it was easy for Rush to "throw rocks", but that they had real work to do and a real crisis to worry about. Within a week he was on Rush's show apologizing, because the base that gets him his seats was up in arms about him being a traitor.

Another thought is that all the redistricting has pocketed the Ds and Rs into their little enclaves and its been the Ds that have come out ahead, mostly because they were worse at it and had to reach out to the middle to stay competitive. They had to survive by adaptation rather than appeasement.

[Crissa]

Yep, because the media is so in Obama's pocket.

Oh, wait, no it's not.

-Crissa

[Psychic Robot]

Were you perhaps tuned out during the election?

[Crissa]

Were you perhaps tuned out during the election?

I'm a bit confused, wasn't the election nine months ago? What does that have to do with now?

Even so, I doubt there's scientific evidence providing support for your position.

-Crissa

[Ganbare Gincun]

Were you perhaps tuned out during the election?

The media certainly was not in "Obama's Pocket" during the election, and they sure as shit aren't in his pocket now. The American news media is controlled by people that benefit from what the Republican agenda has to "offer" to America and they haven't provided any decent news coverage of American politics since before 1990 (and even then the quality was already in decline). Combine this with the fact that older Americans are the primary demographic in their rapidly shrinking portfolio of consumers, and you can see why Big Media and the GOP are partners in crime.

[cthulhu]

The only problem with tax the rich initatives is that the income is much more variable than taxes on the middle classes.

So it has its ups and its down, but those ups and downs can lead to massive changes in revenue year on year.

Which if the money is used to fund fixed cost initatives can cause politically akward situations.

Note that isn't the same as economically bad.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Were you perhaps tuned out during the election?

The media certainly was not in "Obama's Pocket" during the election, and they sure as shit aren't in his pocket now. The American news media is controlled by people that benefit from what the Republican agenda has to "offer" to America and they haven't provided any decent news coverage of American politics since before 1990 (and even then the quality was already in decline). Combine this with the fact that older Americans are the primary demographic in their rapidly shrinking portfolio of consumers, and you can see why Big Media and the GOP are partners in crime.

I think the media definitely has biases, but they're not clear-cut partisan ones. The most ideological bias the media probably has is a two-party establishment bias. Ever notice how every third-party candidate who gains traction (at least since John Anderson in 1980) is portrayed as borderline insane? Insurgent primary candidates within the major parties get the same treatment.

The media also likes sensationalism and building up the story of the moment. The classic example of this was how the "liberal media" arguably ran Jimmy Carter out of office with their overkill on the Iran hostage crisis. It was the lead story on the news every night no matter what happened ("It's Day 312 of the Iranian hostage crisis, and nothing happened. In other news...."). In fact, Nightline started out as America Held Hostage, a half-hour of news and speculation about the hostage crisis, even if there was nothing to talk about. It was the closest to Michael Jackson overkill the old media ever produced (well, except maybe for Apollo 11, which deserved it), though at least this was an event where people's lives were potentially at stake.

They also have an "exciting election" bias. Thus, they played McCain's Palin-fueled convention bounce to the hilt and manufactured the "lipstick on a pig" mini-scandal practically out of whole cloth.

And finally, they like to convince themselves they're living up to their "Fourth Estate" heritage by occasionally attacking the powerful, especially if they don't poll well. That explains the anti-Republican, pro-Obama attitude that dominated last year's election when they weren't trying to make things exciting. Of course, now they have to grab onto any slightly negative news or poll data about the Obama administration to prove that they aren't having "a slobbering love affair" with him (so that attack was well played by the conservatives).

[Psychic Robot]

The media certainly was not in "Obama's Pocket" during the election, and they sure as shit aren't in his pocket now. The American news media is controlled by people that benefit from what the Republican agenda has to "offer" to America and they haven't provided any decent news coverage of American politics since before 1990 (and even then the quality was already in decline). Combine this with the fact that older Americans are the primary demographic in their rapidly shrinking portfolio of consumers, and you can see why Big Media and the GOP are partners in crime.

Haha, oh, wow. So be it, then.

Anyway, I see this "skub war" as being part of the backlash of the Bush years. During that time period, Democrats freely attacked GWB over the most pointless and mundane things--I've seen "he doesn't carry his own wallet!" as a criticism--and much of the opposition toward his policies came because he is a Republican. In turn, Republicans are giving back to Democrats what they've dealt with for eight years. It might not be the most mature of things to do, but one can't argue that it is undeserved.

Furthermore, the skub war has always existed, so don't delude yourself that the virtuous Democrats are trying to change Amerikkka while the evil Republicans are impeding their progress and stomping on the little guy.

[Koumei]

and much of the opposition toward his policies came because he is a Republican.

I'm pretty sure most of it actually came because he is a fucking moron. Alternatively, a very evil man. It's kind of hard to tell.

Now, the fact that he is also a Republican just adds to the stereotype, and that's not the fault of the Democrats, that's the fault of Bush for being like that, and the Republicans for voting him in. It's like how it's not my fault that you're an ass, it just strengthens the image of what the typical psionics-and/or-warforged fanboy is like.

And no, I'm not insulting you because of anything to do with this thread, as a substitute for having a good point. I'm insulting you because you're an ass.

[Crissa]

I'd like, you know, some actual evidence of this Bush Derangement Syndrome, or the McCain Derangement Syndrome you're postulating here.

'Cause I know of no evidence for it.

-Crissa