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State of the Union Responses
01-24-2012, 09:37 PM
Sounds like the forum's gonna have a lot to say to this so I'm starting it in advance:
Most striking thing so far is he basically said "college should be for everyone"
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01-24-2012, 10:11 PM
Got a video for us who ain't in the States?
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State of the Union Responses
01-24-2012, 11:52 PM
He's such a joke its sad.
This is the same guy who, when asked on 60 minutes why no one has gone to jail for financial crimes, said, "Some of the least ethical behavior on Wall Street wasn't illegal." Now he's going to appoint a commission to go after them? Whatever.
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01-25-2012, 12:06 AM
None of what he said in this speech actually means anything. It's just gonna go back to status-quo business as usual tomorrow.
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01-25-2012, 12:18 AM
What was that the third time in American history a non-caucasian has given the State of the Union speech?
Barack Obama has balls bigger than 99.99% of American dudes.
Aloha!
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01-25-2012, 12:21 AM
Quote: (01-25-2012 12:18 AM)Kona Wrote:
What was that the third time in American history a non-caucasian has given the State of the Union speech?
Barack Obama has balls bigger than 99.99% of American dudes.
Aloha!
I doubt this considering he doesnt even wear the pants in his own family.
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01-25-2012, 12:22 AM
Know your enemy and know yourself, find naught in fear for 100 battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, find level of loss and victory. Know thy enemy but not yourself, wallow in defeat every time.
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01-25-2012, 01:58 AM
"Yesterday, I held a fiscal summit where I pledged to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office." - Obama's first state of the union address.
Oh and this gem: "My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs."
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01-25-2012, 02:28 AM
Sorry man, but that is absolutely false. This president has spent more than George Washington until G.W. Bush COMBINED in less than 4 years.
Blaming Bush Tax cuts is pretty unsubstantiated and a lot of evidence points to even worse tax revenue as a result.
You can't point to GM as a success when I'm pretty sure they aren't profitable and that money hasn't been repaid.
Solyndra was a 500 BILLION dollar fuckup and it's not the gov't place to be a venture capitalist.
I love you speakeasy but I can't get behind any of those reasons as being valid.
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01-25-2012, 02:31 AM
House Republicans are destroying the fiscal position? Pdog, how is that possible when they're trying to reduce Gov't spending?
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01-25-2012, 02:57 AM
Pdog, Gov't has never held it's spending back when revenue has increased. Cutting severely is the only way this will improve matters imo.
If you want to generate revenue, how about deregulating some of the ridiculous laws that are putting a 1.5 trillion dollar a year burden on businesses?
Or giving amnesty to businesses who have their money overseas if they bring it back and put it to work?
Or LOWERING taxes so that more money is flowing through the economy and allowing more people to work thus more people paying taxes?
All I'm hearing from Obama is "raise taxes, spend more, more regulations".
I don't know what speakeasy has been looking at during this 1st term but it almost seems to me that he HATES this country and wants to systematically destroy it. I haven't seen a single thing he's done besides begrudgingly give the order to kill Osama Bin Laden that's worth a compliment.
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01-25-2012, 03:02 AM
Oops speakeasy, my bad on the typo putting billion, still man 500 million? And that's not the only company, it looks like there are almost dozens of these emerging.
New Debt, that's my whole reason for pointing out the "line by line, eliminate wastful spending" and this obamacare thing is going to make medicare and medicaid look like a dream. This guy didn't deliver on anything.
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01-25-2012, 11:04 AM
Didn't watch it because I never do, but I skimmed through the transcript this morning and noted two alarming things
1 - The bitching about mortgage brokers packaging and selling loans to minorities who were incredibly poor credit risks. This was a government created policy, not a private sector one. Even the innovation of securitizing mortgages and trading them, while a private sector innovation, was only possible because of the willingness of Fannie and Freddie to act as lenders of last resort. It's 2012, and we're still not willing to admit that the Clinton-Bush dream of expanding minority home ownership is the root cause of the subprime debacle?
2 - "College should be for everyone". This ridiculous, HBD-denialist view is why education policy in America is FUCKED
RE the taxation debate in here yeah raise the top marginal tax rate. There's little evidence that it impacts economic growth and the government is spiraling into a debt crisis. Solution: cut spending and raise taxes. That's a policy Republicans used to be known for back when they were the sharp pencils party of businessmen opposed to waste and imprudence, but now opposing taxes (except payroll taxes, apparently!) is a religion for the GOP.
this comment is particularly economically illiterate:
Quote:fisto Wrote:
Or LOWERING taxes so that more money is flowing through the economy and allowing more people to work thus more people paying taxes?
What do you suppose the government does with tax revenue? Puts it all in Scrooge's Duckburg vault so he can go swimming in all that sweet cash?
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01-25-2012, 11:14 AM
Does it really matter who's in the office? If its a republican the same shit will happen. Democrats will just cockblock everything just as GOP is doing now. Once insider trading is banned for house/senate members than maybe we can get shit done.
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01-25-2012, 11:24 AM
Yes it matters who's in office, but it doesn't matter to the dramatic degree radicals wish. If a Republican was in office I somehow doubt that ICE would've announced a new policy of not deporting illegal aliens unless they are serious criminals, because he would catch hell from his own base for doing so. We also wouldn't have gotten "health reform".
So those are two examples of how a Democratic administration substantively differs from a Republican one.
Most of the stuff that does matter isn't really well known, because it takes place through the bureaucratic workings of the Executive Branch. Journalists, who are mainly just vainglorious gossipers, find this sort of investigative reporting boring and hard. They prefer palling around with glamorous politicians who make them feel like important people.
Congress not so long ago decided to destroy the American patent system by harmonizing it to global standards--replacing the first-to-invent principle with first-to-file, giving a huge advantage to large corporations with big legal departments. This was reported on, but only barely, because innovation and industrial policy requires a sophisticated understanding of business and economics. Journalists don't have this, the only training they have is how to write and how to appear "balanced".
Now while that's an example of something that's important and probably would've happened under a Republican President too, it just goes to show how important things go on without people really noticing because of how criminally incompetent and vain journalists are. There's also the whole "corporate media" and "liberal media" angle of looking at it, but oftentimes it just comes down to what shit people journalists are.
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01-25-2012, 11:39 AM
HBD is a catch-all in order to encompass more than scientific racism. For instance, the neurological differences between men and women which significantly explain why more women don't pursue careers in science and engineering--another educational "crisis" rooted in HBD denialism and PC bullcrap.
It's perfectly possible to reconcile the individual heritability of intelligence while denying that the differences in intelligence between racial groups are genetic in origin. I happen to agree with the hereditarians that the gap is primarily genetic in origin, but scientists like James Flynn who support the environmental position are perfectly respectable. And crucially, James Flynn does not deny that intelligence has a significant genetic component despite his refusal to accept that the racial gaps in intelligence are genetic. In fact, he has made policy statements in his native New Zealand disparaging the fact that highly educated women are not having children at replacement levels. The response from the New Zealand government was that "education" would solve this, whereas Flynn's entire career says this isn't true.
We can continue to sweep the racial issue under the rug and still admit that sometimes stupid is as stupid does. Everyone knows that some children are dumb and some children are bright, and our education policy needs to take that into account. All children should be educated to the limit of their potential, regardless of who their parents are or how much money they have. But that's not the same thing as claiming all children should go to college. Not everyone is college material, and there is nothing wrong with that. In the past this was widely understood in America, and the structure of our educational system and our economy was geared so that people of ordinary and indeed below average intelligence could still acquire useful vocational training and work in good, blue-collar jobs.
The current idea is believing that college magically makes people smart, based on absolutely no evidence at all, and browbeating teachers into fudging the numbers so kids with mediocre intellects look like they're college material. You don't get people to achieve by raising a bar they're already not meeting and demanding they must meet this bar or else.
Smearing things by association with Nazism is intellectually lazy. In addition to Nazi Germany, 27 other countries had eugenics policies. Sweden and the province of Alberta continued these into the 1970s. These policies were primitive and unfair, but they're not exactly the gas chambers. The Nazis also built the Autobahns, but somehow no one thinks the interstate highway system is a one-way road to Auschwitz. Using the same dishonest debating tactics we could claim that a belief in blank slate human equality is a one way ticket to Pol Pot's killing fields, but somehow I don't see Malcolm Gladwell being touted as the new Pol Pot.