Posts Made By: David Cotterell

Inspired by the "What, Me Worry?" thread....

The current US debt is pretty close to $17 000 000 000 000. (I asked Siri for all numbers in this post....)

[COLOR="Green"]Assume that some sort of bipartisan cooperation (!) can be achieved to eliminate this debt in some finite number of years. Say 17 years for round numbers' sake. Debt gone by the end of 2034. This presidential administration plus nearly 5 more. These administrations will be a mix of R and D, in all liklihood. A trillion dollars a year skimmed from the US economy every year and applied directly to the debt.

And, at the same time, running balanced budgets each of the 17 years so that the debt snake does not continue to consume its own tail... (In 2016 spending exceeded revenue by 0.6 Trillion...)

so we are really searching for 1.6 Trillion per year.[/COLOR]

From whence cometh the 1.6 trillion? What specific programs/entitlements/entities or what have you can be eliminated to come up with this level of $?

To what degree does the average taxpayer have to become part of the solution in order to contribute? Should there be any tax increases for this? Corporate taxes?

What entitlements can be cut? Social Security? Medicare? Obamacare-or-whatever-replaces-it? Welfare? Food Stamps? Police, Fire? Public libraries? Infrastructure maintenance? Parks? Education? (I know I am mixing up Fed, State and Municipal things here but cuts at all levels would obviously seem to be necessary...)

How about the military? (2017 budget: $523.9 billion 0r about 0.5 trillion....) Can some significant trimming be done there?

And, perhaps the biggest question of all, what happens to the day-to-day lifestyle and quality of life of the citizenry when massive cuts are put in place?

The above is all terribly rhetorical but needs to be discussed... In any sane,practical sense, the items in green, above, are very likely too aggressive. A 51 year plan would maybe be a better idea - only have to look for more like 0.5 to 0.7 trillion a year.... (and no more deficit budgets!!) Just imagine 51 years of bi-partisan cooperation on this......

Your thoughts?

Dave

Trump failed to properly address the Charlottesville events. He weasled out a 'Both Sides Are Bad" comment. That's it. His total failure to name the hate groups specifically and tell them they are [COLOR="Red"]not true Americans or Patriots[/COLOR] is a glaring example of his fear of offending a portion of his support base. Disgusting lack of true leadership.

Both sides Bad? What a bunch of smarmy waffling. The Fascists arrived with clubs, weapons, helmets, jackboots, flak vests, heavy leather gloves - everything needed to beat the shit out of the counter protesters that would inevitably come to resist them. If the Nazis didn't feel empowered to rally yesterday the counter-protesters would have stayed home reading Thoreau and Pirsig and playing their Arcade Fire albums. There would have been just another peaceful Saturday in a small southern city. No one injured, no three deaths.

Thank the fates that Virginia Governer McAuliffe spoke the words that Trump should have spoken. Clear, forceful, succinct, specific and accurate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-D8wEFa3r0

And, lurking just about a month away, on September 16, is a planned rally by the same Nazi/Fascist/KKK/WhitePower groups at the National Capitol which they are ominously calling "The Mother Of All Rallies." What is to be done? Who will lead?

Dave

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/aug/27/should-the-rich-be-taxed-more-a-new-paper-shows-unequivocally-yes?utm_source=fark&utm_medium=website&utm_content=link&ICID=ref_fark

Highlights:

"The trend has been particularly strong in the US, where labour’s share of income has fallen from a recent peak of 57% at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency to 53% by 2015. The Gini coefficient – a measure of inequality – has been steadily rising since 1970 and is now at levels normally seen in developing rather than advanced economies."

"In terms of income, the poorest 99% of the US population paid nine times as much income tax as the richest 1%, both when John F Kennedy was president in the early 1960s and when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 race for the White House. By 2014, they paid 21 times as much.

Similarly, the bottom 99.9% in the US paid 28 times as much tax as the elite 0.1% in the early 1960s and the early 1980s, but by 2014 they were paying 76 times as much."

"As the authors note, since 1980, economic policy making has been dominated by the idea that deregulation, less generous welfare and tax cuts will stimulate higher investment, higher productivity, higher growth and higher living standards for all. None of this has occurred and, what’s more, the social mobility in the decades after the second world war has been thrown into reverse. The great American dream – the notion that anybody can strike it rich – is dead."

Dave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4

Dave

Wealth distribution inequality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZsmyfpoILw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dY4WlxO6i0 (NSFW language)

We need a new paradigm...

Dave

Libs like me get beat up every time we go on here about the gun problem in the USA. Things such as taking a hard look at the second amendment - even re-writing it somehow, making it more difficult to get guns, banning certain kinds of weapons, background checks, cooling off periods etc. etc.... get blown away ( ) as being patently impossible, unconstitutional, Un-American and how could I even consider suggesting it.....and so on and so forth.

The very clear messages I get from just about every 'right minded' person here include: 1) that the 2nd permits you to have guns, so you are going to have guns. 2) that you need guns to defend property and loved ones from criminal attack. 3) that the citizens who own guns can use them to rise up against any future government tyranny. 4) no rule changes can possibly be made that criminals or deranged nutjobs will follow anyway...

It almost appears that you guys don't want to do anything at all about this problem.... Nothing. Clearly your position is that any step taken to reduce gun deaths will erode a freedom or infringe a right. And you currently seem to be giving much more weight to these freedoms and rights than to the lives of those who will be lost in the next 'mass shooting' (however that is defined). And there will be several large ones over the next while and hundreds of smaller ones (again, definition problems but let's ignore that for now....)....

So, I'm directly asking you guys here who are on the right, conservative, libertarian, strict original constitutionalist or any combination thereof, what specific steps should be taken to reduce the number of gun deaths in the USA?

Thanks for listening.

Dave

Armistice Day or Remembrance Day in some countries is today. It marks the end of World War 1 at 11am on November 11, 1918. The people at that time though this was "the war to end all wars"... How terribly wrong that label has turned out to be...

We pause to remember those who fell in all the conflicts from then on which, sadly, seem to be continuing......

"In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields."

-Lt. Colonel John McRae. Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1872-1918

Below is the best essay I've seen in a long time which details the fallacy of trickle down.. The TLR is that the current tax cuts make the rich richer. Period. End of.

The. Rich. Don't. Care. About. Us.

http://www.stonekettle.com/2017/12/lemonade.html

They don't create a thousand new jobs as soon as someone gives them a zillion dollars. They. Keep. The. Money. They put the money offshore.. They buy property, boats, homes in exotic locations like the French riviera, Paris, Kuala Lumpur.... They send their kids to expensive private schools at the same time as they lobby to gut the public education system (Hi, Betsy DeVos...)....They fight like hell to move jobs offshore so as to be able to pay far less than 'American Level' wages.

Merry Christmas.

Dave

If a company makes a profit by manufacturing a product or performing a service, there are taxes on that profit, whether they make bicycles, provide limousines or manufacture life-saving drugs. And with regard to the drug companies their after-tax profits are astonishingly immense so these taxes aren't exactly killing them.
Perhaps, rather than taxing the drug companies in the particular case of H1N1 vaccine, we could ask them to provide the drug at their cost, no profit (and therefore no tax payable), as a goodwill gesture for the common good.
The drug companies would jump right on that, yes?

The store owner was being purposely provocative in my opinion. When called on his gaffe he makes up some lame 'didn't know' story. Simple common sense in any country on this planet is that you don't fly a foreign flag above the home country's flag.

He actually wouldn't have caused any fuss at all if he had flown the Mexican flag by itself. The solo flag simply states one's pride of origin. I fly a Canadian flag on my car at Star Parties in the USA and no one ever says anything more than, "Oh, there's a Canadian guy here...."

Bravo to the Veteran and, if the store owner has any brains at all he won't press the theft charges.

Dave