Best economic growth in six years - Is the recovery finally here? - Page 3

Sorry but try again and if you continue on this path, be prepared to go to the ignore corner. You clearly asked if I wanted to put a positive spin on it.

I don't want to deal with spin and willingness to deal with spin does not make one partisan, quite the opposite.


Bet you can't find the quotes that would support that claim. Stop arguing with the voices in your head. Right answers don't need SPIN.

In public relations, spin is a form of propaganda, achieved through providing an interpretation of an event or campaign to persuade public opinion in favor or against a certain organization or public figure. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, "spin" often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics.

You are now calling people who refuse to engage in a form a propaganda partisan. That is literally like declaring down to be up. It is beyond irrational and thus if you can't come to terms with that, then off to ignore you go because I have no desire to discuss propaganda.


Wrong. I won't entertain the idea that change makes a bad idea worth trying. If Bush said I could get skinny eating twinkies and Obama said he would bring change and thus promised I could get skinny eating cookies, they both would still be bad ideas. They would be bad from day one and wouldn't need time or spin to prove this to be so. A year later when the result is so bad that no one can deny it, being unwilling to put a positive 'SPIN' on it doesn't make one partisan but does prove one is avoiding delusion.

The U.S. suffers from excessive debt and excessive demand that was created by that debt. Creating a whole bunch of new debt because "we have to do SOMETHING" won't change that.

Until you realize that attitude has nothing to do with fixing what is wrong, then you will continue to suffer from the delusions that currently blind you. They've blinded your whole generation though so why stop now. Quality time versus quantity time. Debt = wealth. Spending = investment with no questions asked and no thoughts occurring. If you do question the outcome then you have bad INTENTIONS and thus are a bad person.

I'm sort of over all that and if you can't get over it be prepared to be consigned to the dustbin of history a little early.

How long will you last this time?


Here's what I asked :
What I actually asked is what if it had a positive spin not for you to put a poisitive spin on it! It was a hypothetical. What if Obama was doing the right thing? Just for you to entertain the idea for a moment. Would you be ok with it if that was true?

Of course though it stuck in your craw so much you wouldn't even entertain the idea even for a moment. This shows how closed your mind is. Nobody knows everything and no one is right all the time. So the only conclusion a person can draw from this is that you wouldn't be ok with that hypothetical idea no matter what. I was just asking what if you were wrong ( and surely trumptman you don't want us to buy into the idea that you're never wrong? ).

By comparison I've never said Bush was wrong about everything. He did do some good things. I just think overall he was a lousy leader. That wouldn't imply that I'd just say he's automatically wrong about everything and if we had found WMD in Iraq I would have admitted he was right. And you know if we had he'd of been right.

Life isn't black and white ( us against them ). There's all manner of shades of grey.

Now do you get the difference?

My mind isn't closed. Perhaps yours is rusty though because words have meaning. Spin is spin. You presumed that I didn't want to engage in spin because it is Obama when my answer made it very clearly I don't want to engage in spin PERIOD.

Why would anyone want to deal with spin instead of reality?

That is the statement to which you assigned partisan intent. Long winded justifications aside, there is no basis for it.

To see where you stand on cooperation with the whole. And it's not spin. I never said " This is what's going to happen ". Spin always involves an alteration of reality. As you pointed out it's not the reality one way or the the other yet. Hypotheticals never are an event that's actually happened ( reality ). They are a way of testing out ideas. A way of saying if the situation turns out to be " A " how would you feel? I think we already know your answer if it's " B ".

Like I've said your lack of a response other than " I won't " is an answer in itself. Now we know both.

Exactly and you prove my point. This is merely the intent game. You want to assign ill intent and talk about partisan, you aren't assigning it for real grievances, justified or not against real policies, you are assigning it to unwillingness to discuss imaginary grievances or celebrations.

That is quite the hoot there Jimmac. You are quite the package.

Hey, hypothetically, you know just as spin, why don't we discuss the murder of the president because he's raping your daughter. I mean it isn't real, but I need to know your intentions there and of course if you aren't willing to engage in my strange little fantasy it is only because you are a partisan hack.

Right?

Also would you be willing to wait a year to judge his actions on that hypothetical rape? It might turn out okay, you never know. He clearly felt the need to do SOMETHING there. Your daughter might end up pregnant but really she might have a turnaround in feelings about the whole thing if just given enough time. She might come to love the child, the man, who knows right?

You've just got to stand back and not judge and be willing to let come what may while giving it all time to work out.

That is unless you are a partisan hack who just prejudges such actions as bad from the get go.

Who are you REALLY to know they are bad and that they will turn out bad?

Bad reasoning is bad reasoning and all the above shows why all the lame justifications about Obama DO NOT change the reality of his actions and why no one is wrong for judging them on day one and are profoundly more than justified on judging them a year later when the have turned out just as bad as predicted. No one need engage in or discuss some dream utopian hypothetical to avoid reality.

That's the truth.. RUTH.

The bad plans haven't had bad results because Republicans said no. The plans went forward anyway and guess what as bad plans, they had bad results.

Stop the intent game.

In which trumptman whines about the intent game':

On the surface, subsidies look like they are helping. In fact, it is a government sponsored (to be paid for by YOU by the way) misallocation of capital. Recessions and depressions are the market's way of telling us that something is out of balance and must now be allowed to rebalance. Government cannot control markets, it can only delay the inevitable pain of a crash and in our case, this recession that looks and feels like a depression must bottom out before the world's economies can return to health. IMO, part of what's going on is the system is contracting to reflect the Baby Boom tsunami moving into retirement. It's literally all downhill from here on out for the next 20 to 30 years as the generations that follow are too few to support the retirees.

On the wild speculation front, who knows... if fusion power is perfected in the next ten or fifteen years, or if Japan or Korea's advances in robotics bear fruit perhaps we'll all be spoonfed by an army of nurse-bots in our twilight.

It's ok trumptman. You've made it abundantly clear where you stand on partisanship.
I think it's kind of funny that I asked a simple yes or no question that didn't require you to say Obama's plan is right, good, or will work. I wasn't saying that either. I just asked a hypothetical question about a hypothetical situation that you couldn't answer. Something from you that didn't require any change of postion or anything from you other than how would you react if this happened. But instead it took you 3 times and several paragraphs and you still didn't answer the question.

It's really ok trumptman. I know where you stand now.

I still feel tired of the fact few people want to do the very thing that could literally get the US economy going again: massively overhaul the income tax system based on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code.

Look at the income tax system causing these problems:

1) We have thousands of lobbyists in Washington, DC wanting to "tweak" the IRC to favor or punish even the smallest constituencies. As such, it ends up creating a tax code so complex and long (around 67,500 pages of the IRC plus additional rulings) that even the IRS admits it can't figure out much of the code!
2) As a result, compliance costs for the IRC is somewhere between US$350 and US$500 BILLION per year, increasing every year from now on.
3) The withholding process reduces your paycheck by around 20%, and you'll be lucky to get the majority of that withholding back from your income tax refund for middle class and higher taxpayers.
4) Because we impose taxes on savings account interest, dividend payments and capital gains, small wonder why Americans have probably the lowest savings and investment rate in the industrialized world.
5) We have a HUGE problem with tax evasion. Why do you think some economists estimate something like US$2 TRILLION in assets are invested in the illegal cash-only underground economy? Or American citizens and businesses using tax loopholes (legal or not!) to funnel American-owned liquid assets estimated at US$13 TRILLION to offshore financial centers located beyond US borders? (Care to explain all those "banks" located on various the Bahamas, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Netherlands Antilles, and other Caribbean nations?)
6) The second-highest corporate income tax rate in the world, the payroll tax, and taxes on dividend payments and capital gains drive American companies to outsource both blue-collar and white-collar jobs as a means to lower income tax burden. Small wonder why the unemployment rate is much higher than it should be.

In short, sheer economic stupidity. It's time to seriously look at phasing out the current Internal Revenue Code and replace it with either flat tax plan Steve Forbes developed or the even more radical FairTax replacement for the income tax. Such a change would create what amounts to the world's largest "private bailout" as most of that US$15 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets return to the US financial system and we could get probably US$10 TRILLION more in new foreign investments as they now realize the USA becomes the world's largest legal tax haven--a tax haven with REAL productive output. And all that worthless commercial real estate goes from worthless to almost priceless literally overnight as everybody wants to put as much blue-collar and white-collar jobs in the USA as possible.

So what are we waiting for, Godot?

Obama pushed the Dow below 10,000 today.

Yes, Obama did. Not the policies of the last several decades. Not the greed of the CEOs running the companies. Not the 24 hour news networks who sensationalize everything. Obama personally did it.

Give
it
a
fucking
rest.

^ Really? Bush was blamed for everything from 9/11 to tsunamis to the recent recession to ...


Turn about is all of a sudden not fair play?

Remember when that Chinese jet crashed into the Navy P3? That was Bush's fault.

Actually, yeah...he did. The policies of the last several decades have almost nothing to do with what's hitting the market right now. "Greedy" CEOs have nothing to do with it. 24 hour news networks have nothing to do with it.

No, BR...businesses and investors are SCARED. Obama is running around spending trillions, vilifying Wall Street, the rich, doctors, health insurance companies, oil companies...pretty much anyone that doesn't have a government or union job. They are afraid of rising taxes, coming inflation and more. We have a government that is run by a party that is anti-business and anti-private sector. Good Lord... Dennis Kucinich just came out and said that the private sector has failed to create jobs, so now "we" have to do it. Tax and spend. Borrow! Borrow! Borrow!

This is why the market is in bad shape.

Wait! Wait! I know. The Bush backlash got Obama the amateur elected and so now it's not Obama's fault that he so bad it's Bushes! FUCKING BUSH! I'm moving to Canada!

Bush can only be blamed for 9/11 if you apply the same standards you apply to Obama and the attempted Christmas plane bombing. To blame Bush for a tsunami is retarded.

Apply the same standards you apply to Obama and the Democrats to your own party and then you can start whining about fair play. Until you do, cram it.

Ah of course. Ignore all the events that led up to crisis and just blame Obama's way of handling the crisis. Ignore the fact that without the events leading up to the crisis, said crisis may not have happened. That makes perfect sense...IN BIZARRO WORLD!

Wall St deserves it. Goldman Sachs arranged the AIG default, and then arranged the AIG bailout where they got billions - they they got their friends in government to make them a bank, where they borrow money for 0% and loan it back to us for more than that (more billions).

Then they give themselves bonuses with our money, and complain when we try to fix any of the problems that they caused.

They were given the cash, given a line of credit at or near 0%, and it's there fault they used the basically endless supply of cash to turn a profit?

Who gave them "our money"? I certainly would never have done that, and if I heard of someone giving them cash without assuring they would use it responsibly, that person would be the one at fault.

Bush did first. Obama continued doing so. Bash Bush if you are going to bash Obama on this one.

So... the previous post you made ... you're admitting you were mistaken? Or, do you you just go around accusing the wrong people?

In that case, you should rethink this accusation since you've shown you lash out blindly at the wrong people.

No, again, I'm just making you live up to the standards with which you hold others. If you are to hold Obama's feet to the fire over the bailout business, you better do the same for Bush. Otherwise, you are a raging hypocrite.

Instead of doing the logically consistent thing here, though, you instead have to twist and twist and twist. I'm so tired of all the twisting.

um... where did I blame Obama?

You DO go around making mistaken accusations, you know.

I blame Obama for failing in his priorities. He should be focusing on jobs 100%.

Obama voted for it and endorsed it. GS already paid back the money they got directly. What would be funny is if the MBS increased in assessed value and AIG got their warrants back (with interest). Then AIG would increase in value and the US could sell it's stock at a profit. But for that to happen housing prices need to recover

I'm not ignoring anything. I'm simply saying that "greedy CEOs" and 24 hours news networks had nothing to do with the problem. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns didn't go under because their execs made too much money. AIG didn't run into trouble because of FNC and MSNBC.

I'd love to hear what "events" you think caused the crisis.




It's just not that simple. The big banks and investment firms share a good portion of the blame, to be sure. Many were leveraged to hard in worthless mortgage paper. This was all well and good until the housing market collapsed. However, the government had a large part in that bubble and subsequent burst. So, a little from column A, a little from column B.

As for AIG: How did Goldman "arrange" their default. I would say they helped cause it, but they didn't arrange it. Here is a quick read on the topic.


Here again, that's not so simple. First, the bonuses you reference were mostly contractual obligations. AIG and others were legally obligated to pay these bonuses. Secondly, when the government invested our money, it didn't place restrictions on what they could or should do with it. It was only later that they tried to tap into populist anger over the bailout. Last...many of the banks and institutions were forced to take millions if not billions, even if they didn't want it. Many have already paid back the TARP money.

What I would be more concerned about is what the Obama admin is doing with the money that has been paid back. Hint: They're getting ready to spend it before it even arrives.

You're not seriously suggesting there were no Republicans against the bailouts are you? This forum was filled with folks who spoke out against them. What the hell do you think started the tea party movement?

Ignorance?

No, that's what drives people to attack the Tea Party movement.

No it's the fact that it's not really viable and they know it.

Viable or not, it's allowed. That's the point.

jazzy. I don't recall anyone saying " It's not allowed ". That's not the same thing as " Silly " or just plain old " won't work ".

Many things that were once considered silly or declared irrelevant are now mainstream.

And maybe some stuff that is currently mainstream is actually silly and irrelevant.

Zing!

Of course.

Yeah. Like uh.......Comet pills!

jazzy this won't be one of them.

Thus has jimmac declared. So let it be done.

Dip #2 is here.


U.S. New-Home Sales Drop 11.2%


Jittery Shoppers Dim Stores' Hopes

Sad thing is, I think that the Republicans want the economy to stay in recession.

I for one would love to see a big rebound so I can stop worrying about my employment.