OK, they’ve got their agreement. Over the cliff it is! Senate bill passes the House; lots of ridiculous pork; massive tax hikes.
I’m inclined to think it’s as good as it could have gotten. The GOP will take blame in ’14 for violating anti-tax pledges, but MSM has made the mistake of hyping how Republicans would sacrifice the economy if they didn’t raise taxes. Now the GOP can reasonably say, we couldn’t stop it. So here’s Obama’s economy. You want something different, vote us in.
It still may not work. Recently saw a poll saying a majority of Americans blame Bush for the state of the economy today. It may be that we can make it to ’16 with everything still being the Republicans’ fault. Or maybe ’20 or ’24. It worked for FDR.
Your comment about FDR reminds me of a conversation I had with my brother-in-law at New Year’s. He state emphatically that FDR’s policies got us out of the Depression, and then added that “we learned what to do from that” and Obama is following the same blueprint! I asked if he really believed all that, or did he just get taught Howard Zinn in school and never give it a thought since. He of course started the Standard Line about Tea Partyers, etc. etc. etc.
This is a guy with extensive background in finance. He is in charge of much of the budget for the state’s fleet of vehicles. He thinks the deficits and massive spending don’t matter; they’ll get us out of the recessions.
This is profoundly depressing. People have swallowed the Progressive/postmodern liberal line and Obama’s lies without a moment’s discomfort. The bill for all this is going to be massive misery, but it will be paid by my children and their children, not me. I do not see any way to change this.
Pennsylvania has been downsizing the state’s vehicle fleet. So, I guess, he’s doing something right in spite of his politics.
I’m too depressed to comment. Almost everybody seems to be getting on the Obama bandwagon; even my husband doesn’t see anything wrong with making the rich pay “just a little bit more.”
Is there something wrong with my brain? It seems to me that if we penalize the rich (the big investors in commerce), everybody is going to lose the benefits of that commerce. To me, the “rich” are very useful to the rest of us. But my husband and daughter say, “Oh nonsense; they are not going to stop investing.” And I say, “Maybe not stop investing, but they will have less to invest, and they will take fewer risks.” But to them that seems a weak argument. I don’t know–maybe it is a weak argument, else why do I hear no conservative politicians or pundits make that case?
Hm. I’m not rich, but I already have stopped investing, and according to an earlier article posted here, I’m far from alone.
I don’t know about conservative or RINO pols, but I’m seeing this as: Obama won. The Senate stayed Democrat. We now have the “fiscal cliff” deal to raise taxes on the top 77%, Obamacare kicking in, &c.; let’s see how it works out. If it works, the right was wrong and we can shrug and say “let’s bring on lots more of it.” If it doesn’t, let the Democratic WH and Senate take the blame for their policies. I’m just relieved I haven’t heard GOP endorsements of them.
The problem with that, academie, is that the price is just too big. It won’t just be failed policies, it will be failed USA.
In a fiscal sense, I see the ongoing fight against Obamanomics as existential. If he keeps getting what he wants, this country will be thoroughly trashed. The Great Depresssion will look like a birthday party in comparison; FDR was never $23 trillion in hock, and growing at about $2 billion AN HOUR.
And MetaLark: what rich people do when it gets too expensive to invest in America is invest elsewhere. Kiss goodbye the jobs their investments would have created. This is a long-known feature of economics: the price of doing something is often invisible, and so many people simply do not notice it. They see evil rich people being taxed and are happy (envy is ugly), but they don’t grasp that the guy across the street lost his job and went on welfare (a double hit to the taxpayers) because of it.
Yes, I think we’re looking at a disaster of Great Depression proportions — worse, actually, since we didn’t enter the Depression with crushing debt. Oh, yes, you said that, never mind.
Question is: how long before the public identify the suffering with the policies and the men who caused it? If Romney had won, he’d be taking the blame. THen in Dec I thought, Damn, GOP lost and the One _still_ found a way to blame them for the upcoming recession. So they gave him what he wanted. If he can convince the public that they’re to blame after _that_, we’re just plain fucked. (I’d give better than even odds that we are.)
Agree with everybody. Still I do not want to participate in destruction of America. Even in discussion on “Stop adoption from America” in russian forums we managed to prove to some small number of “Patriots”, that it was evil law. So the fight has to continue for the soul of every person on individual level.
The doctrine of “relativism” has cut the ground out from under even individual persuasion.
Today, I talked with the nurse taking blood at my oncologist’s office. She is outraged by the level of spending, the amount of debt and what she herself said is the coming disaster. I pointed out that after four years of $1 trillion+ deficit spending and continuing unemployment, the country just voted for more of the same, re-electing Obama and giving Democrats more seats in both houses of Congress.
And she confidently told me that the Republicans aren’t any better, there being “good and bad in both parties.”
This line of reasoning leads nowhere, of course. When you can’t hold a group accountable for four+ years of miserable performance (I always starting counting at 2008, since that’s when the Pelosi/Reid nightmare began) because “the other party also has good and bad guys, just the same,” then there is nowhere to go.
I thought about pointing out that maybe NOT electing the people making the bad policy choices would be a start, but I was just too damned tired.