Unemployment rising

BrooksMustGo · 10-10-2004, 09:10 PM

A pretty well thought out response. Appreciate the time you took to formulate it, so I\'ll try to respond to all of it by paragraph.

the bottom line is a tax and spend liberal like John Kerry will balloon up the deficit (and debt) higher than it is now.

I don\'t get the \"tax and spend\" moniker. The alternative seems to be \"borrow and spend\" and I don\'t see how prolonged debt financed by other nations is a good economic policy. This seems to be a bedrock conservative principle to me and one of the reasons that Bush claims to be a conservative in the first place. The guy signs off on any and all spending that hits his desk. At least Reagan and Bush 1 tried to keep spending down. Bush 2 doesn\'t seem concerned by that. Even if you take the 20% increase in military/homeland security spending, it doesn\'t account for the other 16% increase that is higher than any discretionary spending during the Clinton era. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=139.html. I\'m using factcheck since Cheney seems to think it\'s an acceptable source and to avoid the whole \"liberal bias\" argument which I think is a waste of time to discuss.

His \"plans\" will increase spending to ultra high levels and there is no way that just raising taxes on the upper 1% of taxpayers will foot the bill.

I basically agree with this. However, I don\'t see a Kerry landslide with huge coat-tails. The congress will remain under GOP control and Kerry won\'t get the health care thing through which is his big ticket item. So while Bush has shown that he signs everything for the past 4 years, it seems reasonable to say that 2 parties will slow down the spending.

Wealthy people aren\'t stupid people and everytime their taxes have been raised, they find ways to avoid it. Kerry knows this. Now use your head. You don\'t really think the wealthy folks in this country are just gonna pay higher taxes without looking for loopholes, do you? And while $200,000 sounds rich, it\'s not when you\'re shelling out paychecks from it which some small businesses do

Yes tax dodges are legendary and among the wealthy more easily done. It may be reality, but that doesn\'t make it right. If I didn\'t pay my taxes, I\'d be audited. It seems to me that the law and order crowd would favor the idea that \"everybody pays\". It\'s a crime not to and should be prosecuted. Wasn\'t it Leona Helmsley who said (as she went to jail) \"Taxes are for little people.\"

As for the small business angle. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=118.html
http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@DocID=265.html The Bush talking point is that Kerry\'s tax rollback will injure 900,000 \"small businesses\", even though factcheck seems to think the number is closer to 500,000. From there you\'re talking about Subchapter S corporations. Most of these are just individuals who have some sort of \"business\" income. Like say Lynn Cheney\'s speaking fees--no employees. Or say you rented out your yacht once in a while--no employees. It\'s a loose definition of business and Bush is blowing the job creation angle way out of proportion.

In case you haven\'t noticed we haven\'t been attacked since 9/11. Now I know you Democrats are hoping for it so you can say, \"See, we told you so. It\'s all Bush\'s fault.\"

Nope, don\'t want that at all. I had friends at the Pentagon who, thank God, made it out OK. I have no desire to see that happen ever again.
Maybe Bush is the reason we haven\'t been attacked, and maybe he isn\'t. It\'s an argument from silence. But the Bush people have been making regular claims that we are going to get hit again (especially if Kerry is elected). It seems like the Bush people don\'t think we can prevent another act of domestic terrorism.
This argument seems congruent to an argument from the other side claiming that September 11 is Bush\'s fault since he happened to be in office. He did get the briefing while he was on vacation that bin Laden was determined to attack in the US. So I\'m not sure this argument is a winner. As you say, facts are facts.

Personal income, according to the Dept of Labor is at an all-time high. Kerry says family income is lower. Perhaps he and you can explain how incomes are higher, unemployment is lower (lower than when Clinton ran for reelection in 1996)

Real income levels are at least debatable, choose the facts you want for it. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=120.html As for employment, The Clinton/Bush numbers are partly explained by the number of new workers needing a job, so we\'d need to create 137k a month just to keep up. But even aside from that Bush has claimed over and over and over that his tax cuts would create somewhere between 200-350k per month and has never happened. Another tricky little part of the Bush record.

yet Kerry has the gall to say tax cuts are the reason for any economic woes we\'ve experienced. That nonsense alone disqualifies him of being credible or truthful.

And Bush says that tax cuts are the only solution for any economic problem we face, when that seems to have surprisingly little to do with it. Wouldn\'t that also bring Bush\'s credibility into question? If anything the federal reserve policy of dropping interest rates to historic lows seem to have done far more to keep the housing bubble inflating and far more to do with new homeowners than Bush tax cuts.
But even so, who cuts taxes in a time of war? Honestly, who does that?

Kerry is a tax and spend liberal, operative word liberal.

Interestingly enough, Kerry was an early supporter of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings amendment which would have required mandatory balanced budgets and cut overspending. I don\'t know how old you are, but you might not remember that there was a strong movement toward more fiscal discipline--when real conservatives still roamed the earth. http://people.howstuffworks.com/election-issue4.htm Reagan pretty much ended the movement by inititating the borrow and spend right wing. If anything, Kerry seems most inclined to follow the model of Clinton and adopt a pay as you go sort of policy by balancing the budget and paying down the debt. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4687592/

In one breath he says he\'ll get rid of corporate welfare then says he\'ll create tax cuts for corporations to hire more people. Brilliant! Simply brilliant! Corporations go overseas because of the high cost of labor as well as the excessive regulations imposed on them here at home. Somehow I just don\'t believe any of those regulations will be relaxed during a Kerry administration. The problem with you Democrats is you love jobs but you hate the companies that offer them.

I lived in Houston for a while and was there during September 2001. When the airlines were grounded, the CEO of Continental, Gordon Bethune, made a big stink about going on TV and crying for federal money so the airline could keep all its employees. Congress promptly comes through with the bailout. Continental promptly fires thousands of employees and gives bonuses to the executives with the federal money. That makes me feel great about paying taxes. As for \"excessive regulations\", I\'m reminded of Enron, Reliant and that crowd. As it turns out market forces didn\'t cause California\'s cost for electicity to increase 3000% per kilowatt hour. Enron, Reliant and the guys decided to do some old fashioned price gouging. Bush and Cheney absolutely refused to even look into the problem. They were busy blaming \"failed energy policy\" and letting the guys at Enron and Reliant write the administration\'s energy policy. I don\'t hate the corporate types, but sometimes they make it awfully hard to like them. I will agree with you that the goal of Bush\'s crowd is to do all possible to push down the cost of labor.

Because WMD (or the possibility of them) were the only things keeping Iran from coming across the border into Iraq. Saddam knowingly bluffed their existence because to not do so would ensure an invasion from Iran and nobody, not us, not the French, not the Germans, nobody would have stood in the way.

I have no problem agreeing with the report in this regard. So if Iraq was bluffing to maintain the balance of power in the region, why do we need to invade him? Hussein was a rotten little man who did awful things to his people. Why invade him and not the dozens of other rotten little men who do awful things to their people? And if the bluff was keeping Iran at bay, why destabilize the reason and practically invite Iran to go on into Iraq? I agree, nobody was going to ride to Iraq\'s rescue if Iran came over the border, but why take down the only secular government in the entire middle east?

Talk doesn\'t convince people who only respect power.

Power is going to have to be the same sort of power that we saw in Gulf I, overwhelming and multinational. I think Governor Bush makes much more sense than President Bush. \"And finally, whether or not there was an exit strategy. I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don\'t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we\'ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place.\" http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000a.html It looks like we are in the middle of a monstrous nation building project, i.e. the creation of Jeffersonian democracies in the middle east. So here we are for the foreseeable future. (John McCain says we could easily be in Iraq for the next 20+ years). So with 140,000 people on the ground in Iraq, we are now living out the dangers that Governor Bush verbalized; we\'re nation building, we\'re overextended, we have no exit strategy and we\'re trying to be all things to all people in the world. I\'m not sure that having US forces all over the globe makes us safer.

Kerry the one world government, give all power to the UN candidate may just be what the doctor ordered for most liberals.

This is too ridiculous for words. You\'re better than this. That\'s right up there with saying something from the other side like, \"Bush wants to give all power to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.\" Kerry wants other nations to help foot the bill and provide the manpower to get the job done. Now that we\'re in a \"nation building\" project, we have to fix it or leave a big power vacuum in the region.

Now is Kerry further to left than I am? Yep. But Bush only seems to be one of the social conservatives and I don\'t vote social issues. If he had a leg to stand on in his use of the military or the budget, then I wouldn\'t be so quick to dismiss him, but he really doesn\'t have anything to run on but fear. And fear isn\'t a good enough reason to make a guy president.

:kerry:

10-10-2004, 09:10 PM	#5
BrooksMustGo 1000 Posts + Join Date: Sep 2003 Posts: 1,762	Unemployment rising A pretty well thought out response. Appreciate the time you took to formulate it, so I\'ll try to respond to all of it by paragraph. the bottom line is a tax and spend liberal like John Kerry will balloon up the deficit (and debt) higher than it is now. I don\'t get the \"tax and spend\" moniker. The alternative seems to be \"borrow and spend\" and I don\'t see how prolonged debt financed by other nations is a good economic policy. This seems to be a bedrock conservative principle to me and one of the reasons that Bush claims to be a conservative in the first place. The guy signs off on any and all spending that hits his desk. At least Reagan and Bush 1 tried to keep spending down. Bush 2 doesn\'t seem concerned by that. Even if you take the 20% increase in military/homeland security spending, it doesn\'t account for the other 16% increase that is higher than any discretionary spending during the Clinton era. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=139.html. I\'m using factcheck since Cheney seems to think it\'s an acceptable source and to avoid the whole \"liberal bias\" argument which I think is a waste of time to discuss. His \"plans\" will increase spending to ultra high levels and there is no way that just raising taxes on the upper 1% of taxpayers will foot the bill. I basically agree with this. However, I don\'t see a Kerry landslide with huge coat-tails. The congress will remain under GOP control and Kerry won\'t get the health care thing through which is his big ticket item. So while Bush has shown that he signs everything for the past 4 years, it seems reasonable to say that 2 parties will slow down the spending. Wealthy people aren\'t stupid people and everytime their taxes have been raised, they find ways to avoid it. Kerry knows this. Now use your head. You don\'t really think the wealthy folks in this country are just gonna pay higher taxes without looking for loopholes, do you? And while $200,000 sounds rich, it\'s not when you\'re shelling out paychecks from it which some small businesses do Yes tax dodges are legendary and among the wealthy more easily done. It may be reality, but that doesn\'t make it right. If I didn\'t pay my taxes, I\'d be audited. It seems to me that the law and order crowd would favor the idea that \"everybody pays\". It\'s a crime not to and should be prosecuted. Wasn\'t it Leona Helmsley who said (as she went to jail) \"Taxes are for little people.\" As for the small business angle. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=118.html http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@DocID=265.html The Bush talking point is that Kerry\'s tax rollback will injure 900,000 \"small businesses\", even though factcheck seems to think the number is closer to 500,000. From there you\'re talking about Subchapter S corporations. Most of these are just individuals who have some sort of \"business\" income. Like say Lynn Cheney\'s speaking fees--no employees. Or say you rented out your yacht once in a while--no employees. It\'s a loose definition of business and Bush is blowing the job creation angle way out of proportion. In case you haven\'t noticed we haven\'t been attacked since 9/11. Now I know you Democrats are hoping for it so you can say, \"See, we told you so. It\'s all Bush\'s fault.\" Nope, don\'t want that at all. I had friends at the Pentagon who, thank God, made it out OK. I have no desire to see that happen ever again. Maybe Bush is the reason we haven\'t been attacked, and maybe he isn\'t. It\'s an argument from silence. But the Bush people have been making regular claims that we are going to get hit again (especially if Kerry is elected). It seems like the Bush people don\'t think we can prevent another act of domestic terrorism. This argument seems congruent to an argument from the other side claiming that September 11 is Bush\'s fault since he happened to be in office. He did get the briefing while he was on vacation that bin Laden was determined to attack in the US. So I\'m not sure this argument is a winner. As you say, facts are facts. Personal income, according to the Dept of Labor is at an all-time high. Kerry says family income is lower. Perhaps he and you can explain how incomes are higher, unemployment is lower (lower than when Clinton ran for reelection in 1996) Real income levels are at least debatable, choose the facts you want for it. http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx@docID=120.html As for employment, The Clinton/Bush numbers are partly explained by the number of new workers needing a job, so we\'d need to create 137k a month just to keep up. But even aside from that Bush has claimed over and over and over that his tax cuts would create somewhere between 200-350k per month and has never happened. Another tricky little part of the Bush record. yet Kerry has the gall to say tax cuts are the reason for any economic woes we\'ve experienced. That nonsense alone disqualifies him of being credible or truthful. And Bush says that tax cuts are the only solution for any economic problem we face, when that seems to have surprisingly little to do with it. Wouldn\'t that also bring Bush\'s credibility into question? If anything the federal reserve policy of dropping interest rates to historic lows seem to have done far more to keep the housing bubble inflating and far more to do with new homeowners than Bush tax cuts. But even so, who cuts taxes in a time of war? Honestly, who does that? Kerry is a tax and spend liberal, operative word liberal. Interestingly enough, Kerry was an early supporter of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings amendment which would have required mandatory balanced budgets and cut overspending. I don\'t know how old you are, but you might not remember that there was a strong movement toward more fiscal discipline--when real conservatives still roamed the earth. http://people.howstuffworks.com/election-issue4.htm Reagan pretty much ended the movement by inititating the borrow and spend right wing. If anything, Kerry seems most inclined to follow the model of Clinton and adopt a pay as you go sort of policy by balancing the budget and paying down the debt. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4687592/ In one breath he says he\'ll get rid of corporate welfare then says he\'ll create tax cuts for corporations to hire more people. Brilliant! Simply brilliant! Corporations go overseas because of the high cost of labor as well as the excessive regulations imposed on them here at home. Somehow I just don\'t believe any of those regulations will be relaxed during a Kerry administration. The problem with you Democrats is you love jobs but you hate the companies that offer them. I lived in Houston for a while and was there during September 2001. When the airlines were grounded, the CEO of Continental, Gordon Bethune, made a big stink about going on TV and crying for federal money so the airline could keep all its employees. Congress promptly comes through with the bailout. Continental promptly fires thousands of employees and gives bonuses to the executives with the federal money. That makes me feel great about paying taxes. As for \"excessive regulations\", I\'m reminded of Enron, Reliant and that crowd. As it turns out market forces didn\'t cause California\'s cost for electicity to increase 3000% per kilowatt hour. Enron, Reliant and the guys decided to do some old fashioned price gouging. Bush and Cheney absolutely refused to even look into the problem. They were busy blaming \"failed energy policy\" and letting the guys at Enron and Reliant write the administration\'s energy policy. I don\'t hate the corporate types, but sometimes they make it awfully hard to like them. I will agree with you that the goal of Bush\'s crowd is to do all possible to push down the cost of labor. Because WMD (or the possibility of them) were the only things keeping Iran from coming across the border into Iraq. Saddam knowingly bluffed their existence because to not do so would ensure an invasion from Iran and nobody, not us, not the French, not the Germans, nobody would have stood in the way. I have no problem agreeing with the report in this regard. So if Iraq was bluffing to maintain the balance of power in the region, why do we need to invade him? Hussein was a rotten little man who did awful things to his people. Why invade him and not the dozens of other rotten little men who do awful things to their people? And if the bluff was keeping Iran at bay, why destabilize the reason and practically invite Iran to go on into Iraq? I agree, nobody was going to ride to Iraq\'s rescue if Iran came over the border, but why take down the only secular government in the entire middle east? Talk doesn\'t convince people who only respect power. Power is going to have to be the same sort of power that we saw in Gulf I, overwhelming and multinational. I think Governor Bush makes much more sense than President Bush. \"And finally, whether or not there was an exit strategy. I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don\'t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we\'ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place.\" http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2000a.html It looks like we are in the middle of a monstrous nation building project, i.e. the creation of Jeffersonian democracies in the middle east. So here we are for the foreseeable future. (John McCain says we could easily be in Iraq for the next 20+ years). So with 140,000 people on the ground in Iraq, we are now living out the dangers that Governor Bush verbalized; we\'re nation building, we\'re overextended, we have no exit strategy and we\'re trying to be all things to all people in the world. I\'m not sure that having US forces all over the globe makes us safer. Kerry the one world government, give all power to the UN candidate may just be what the doctor ordered for most liberals. This is too ridiculous for words. You\'re better than this. That\'s right up there with saying something from the other side like, \"Bush wants to give all power to Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.\" Kerry wants other nations to help foot the bill and provide the manpower to get the job done. Now that we\'re in a \"nation building\" project, we have to fix it or leave a big power vacuum in the region. Now is Kerry further to left than I am? Yep. But Bush only seems to be one of the social conservatives and I don\'t vote social issues. If he had a leg to stand on in his use of the military or the budget, then I wouldn\'t be so quick to dismiss him, but he really doesn\'t have anything to run on but fear. And fear isn\'t a good enough reason to make a guy president. :kerry:
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