[citation][nom]balister[/nom]Yeah, sucks when you're below the poverty line ($10k a year for a single person, $25k a year for a family of 4)
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Are you suggesting half of the workforce is under the poverty line? Seems like a lot...
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You realize that Greece's retirement age was 50 right? You realize that Portugal and Ireland have extrememly loose tax systems right (look up the Google Double Irish to see what I mean). When you a small tax base, of course you're going to have issues.
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I was referring to countries like Denmark. I have a family friend from there (super liberal) and even she was starting to see the flaws in large entitlement programs, particularly how unsustainable they are.
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Trickle down didn't work. You seem to forget what happened when taxes were raised on the ultrawealthy, they shelter their income in dividend paying stocks as dividends are taxed a a very low rate (around 15%) which means the ultrawealthy invent their money into companies which causes the economy to grow. Want proof of this, look at Clinton's presidency where he raised the taxes further (after GW Bush raised them initially which cost him a second term) thus starting one of the biggest economic growth periods for the US in decades and eventually led to budget surpluses that started to eat away at the debt of prior presidencies (going back to FDR, but mostly from what Reagan had done, prior to Reagan, the US had some debt, but it wasn't too bad, after Reagan it was OMG huge).
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Reagan was caught in a position where he had to beat the Russians by outspending them, accounting for a large amount of the debt.
Clinton had a Republican Congress that pushed to cut the budget, which they succeeded at, as well as the benefit of a HUGE economic growth in the form of the dotcom bubble.
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One has only to look back at the Clinton presidency to realize what raising taxes can do. Where programs can be paid for and debt can be lessened with budget surpluses.
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See above.
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Yet if Bush and Chenney weren't so gung ho to try and finish the job that Bush Sr and Chenney should have done over 10 years prior, when the world would have been behind us all the way, we wouldn't have had the expenditures we have from a war that was started under false pretences where intelligence showed otherwise.
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I get tired of this argument, so fine you win.
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Bush lost most of the jobs. Likewise, you need to learn history and realize that sometimes the government needs to step in and create the jobs. Look back to how FDR got Americans working again during the Great Depression; hint - it was from start various civic projects like the building of Grand Coulee, Boulder (now Hoover), and various other Dams in the west along with other infrastructure projects. Obama tried to get infrastructure repaired and brought back up to speed and it did create jobs and help the economy move (realize that the last time there was any large scale infrastructure done in the US was back during the Eisenhower presidency).
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Ummmmmm maybe you should learn that NOTHING that FDR did actually benefitted our country. He did exactly as Obama has done by "putting people to work" on infrastructure work and taxing the wealthy heavily. Our country would not have ever come out of the Depression had it not been for the war to end all wars.
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Really? Funny, the GDP has been actually growing over the past two quarters, something it hasn't been doing since around 2007. There have also been companies hiring to put people that have been out of work, like myself, back to work.
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I didn't say no companies have been hiring, but overall the job market is still rather stagnant (except for Micky D's hiring spurt, woohoo!). Check your data on GDP growth, there was a short period (I think that's in 2009) when the GDP shrank. Not to say that was Obama's fault though.
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
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Do you realize what kind of effect the gulf oil spill had, both above and below the surface? Do you realize that where people are wanting to drill will effect wild life, but the oil companies are unwilling to do side drilling to get to the oil which would lessen the effect to the protected areas while only increasing costs a small amount on the extraction of oil that is considered low to mid quality oil compared to other oil reserves? Do you realize that Oil companies charge 65% of the cost of a gallon of gas to just pull up the oil in question, not talking about refining or the like, but the actual extraction which costs much less of a percentage per gallon thus allowing them to make huge profit margins *and* them getting subsidies from the US government on top of those profit margins?
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Frankly, I don't care about the short term impact on wildlife. We can't hault our lives to save a few birds. Period. Regardless, there is actually a substantial amount of life that thrives on oil. It consumes the oil, something consumes that, and the whole chain rebounds. No biggie. Sucks for a little bit, but its not the end of the world.
Besides, even in the BP case people are discovering how little the impact actually was. The ecosystem has checks and balances in place for these things:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2066031,00.html
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I refer you back to the bloat in the debt caused by the deficits under Reagan and the surpluses created under Clinton thanks in part to Bush Sr's and Clinton's raising of taxes against the ultrawealthy and the like.[/citation]
Meh, tired. See above again haha
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