Friday, October 24, 2014

The H-Word Creature offers us some low-hanging fruit





Talk about a quintessential will-haunt-you-for-years utterance.



Thanks, H.

H/T: Weasel Zippers

22 comments:

  1. A lot of folks believe this which is backed by research:

    "After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of American capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved it from the abyss."

    Read more at http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/epic-failure-of-republican-trickle-down-economics

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  2. Or, as Bobby Reich puts it in today's facebook post:

    Wherever you are, are you hearing candidates talk about (1) raising the minimum wage (supported by 78% of the electorate), (2) raising taxes on the rich to finance better schools for all (supported by 63%), (3) putting people back to work by repairing our roads, bridges, water, and public transportation systems (58% support), (4) making childcare more affordable (71% support), (5) raising taxes on companies with high ratios of CEO pay to average workers, and lowering them on companies with low ratios (61% support), (6) resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act and limiting the size of big Wall Street banks (72% support), or (7) requiring big companies to provide paid family and medical leave (74% support)?

    If you’re not hearing candidates support these popular proposals, why not?

    Like him as a friend here at https://www.facebook.com/RBReich?fref=nf

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  3. Let's start with Hillary's actual comment. Where the f--- does she think jobs come from? You can't deny this is one of the stupidest statements by a prominent public figure in some time.

    Now, let's look at a few of the assertions in your linked C&L post. It's from 2011. How have things been going since then?

    Say, on the job-growth-and-quality-of-those-jobs front?

    http://www.npr.org/2014/08/01/337094697/as-labor-market-advances-millions-stuck-in-part-time-jobs

    Income inequality?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/income-inequality-obama-bush_n_1419008.html

    http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/10/1200756/-Income-Inequality-has-grown-much-faster-Under-Obama-than-George-W-Bush


    http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/01/21/as-obama-hammers-income-inequality-gap-grows-under-his-presidency/

    With regard to the W-era tax cuts being a cause of debt increase, tax cuts are never a cause of that. Spending was never cut during the W era; occasionally the rate of increase was scaled back in various areas of the budget. Plus, remember that we had to fight those wars.

    Which gets to an important point. W was no conservative. He expanded Medicare to include prescription drugs, he further expanded federal control of education, and subsidies for play-like "energy companies" got going on his watch.

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  4. Here's a whole page of charts from the Heritage Foundation - each American's share of the public debt, debt limit increases (most under Obama; another reason why squishes like Boehner are useless; this must stop), all tax revenue going toward entitlements and interest by 2030, etc.

    http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/entitlements-historical-tax-levels

    Plus, don't forget the Freedom-Hater-care was still in its infancy at the time of the C&L post. You've seen the LITD posts about increases in premiums and narrower networks - not to mention the fact that its popularity has been consistently underwater, and now a record percentage of post-Americans hate it.

    Re: tax cuts and economic growth: the Dutch policies (tax rate cuts, spending cuts, anti-inflation monetary policy, deregulation) ushered in a boom:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2011/05/05/reaganomics-vs-obamanomics-facts-and-figures/

    During this seven-year recovery, the economy grew by almost one-third, the equivalent of adding the entire economy of West Germany, the third-largest in the world at the time, to the U.S. economy. In 1984 alone real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years. Nearly 20 million new jobs were created during the recovery, increasing U.S. civilian employment by almost 20%. Unemployment fell to 5.3% by 1989.

    The shocking rise in inflation during the Nixon and Carter years was reversed. Astoundingly, inflation from 1980 was reduced by more than half by 1982, to 6.2%. It was cut in half again for 1983, to 3.2%, never to be heard from again until recently. The contractionary, tight-money policies needed to kill this inflation inexorably created the steep recession of 1981 to 1982, which is why Reagan did not suffer politically catastrophic blame for that recession.

    Real per-capita disposable income increased by 18% from 1982 to 1989, meaning the American standard of living increased by almost 20% in just seven years. The poverty rate declined every year from 1984 to 1989, dropping by one-sixth from its peak. The stock market more than tripled in value from 1980 to 1990, a larger increase than in any previous decade.

    In The End of Prosperity, supply side guru Art Laffer and Wall Street Journal chief financial writer Steve Moore point out that this Reagan recovery grew into a 25-year boom, with just slight interruptions by shallow, short recessions in 1990 and 2001.

    And as for the economic good times of the 60s, let us remember the role of the tax cuts of JKF, who, while a deeply flawed human being (he was a Kennedy, after all), was a supply-sider and an ardent anti-Communist.

    http://www.aei-ideas.org/2013/11/sorry-keynesians-jfk-was-a-supply-side-tax-cutter/

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  5. I see Mr. Perr is still spouting his pro-tyranny-and-decline hooey at Daily Kos. Latest post is on why it's so important to keep subsidized FHer-care in place. Talk about deranged.

    There are other ways to make sure those 25 million have insurance. They are based on the normal-people, economic-freedom premise.

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  6. Seattle is proving to be a laboratory for what happens when you raise the minimum wage:

    http://shiftwa.org/seattles-top-chef-15-minimum-wage-the-most-serious-threat-to-business/

    http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304202204579252413945322426

    Han Kim, a partner in the 171-room Holiday Inn Express franchise in SeaTac, as well as two other SeaTac hotels, estimates that for all three, the city's wage hike to $15 hourly will result in about $400,000 in additional labor expenses.
    "We are running pretty thin as it is so we cannot eliminate positions," he says. Increasing the price of a room is too risky, he adds. "I cannot go around changing prices without my competition [also] changing them. . . . We'll have to make less money I guess."

    http://townhall.com/columnists/hectorbarreto/2014/06/12/lets-hope-minimum-wage-hike-fever-doesnt-spread-to-dc-n1850269

    The example of SeaTac, Washington, is especially troubling. At the beginning of the year, a $15 minimum wage went into effect for certain types of businesses in this Seattle suburb. Already, local businesses and their employees are paying the price. The Seattle Times reported that one hotel near the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport – a major hub for local employment, not just worldwide travel – had to shut down their restaurant, laying off every one of its 15 employees. They also fired members of the hotel staff and are toying with the idea of raising their prices. Other businesses have slapped on an additional “living-wage surcharge” for parking spaces.
    Local employees are feeling the wage hike’s impacts on a very personal level as businesses try to recoup losses. “I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday and vacation,” one hotel cleaner told Northwest Asian Weekly. The hotel she worked for also used to provide her meals on the job – now those are gone too. She summed up her thoughts on the minimum wage increase simply but powerfully, “It sounds good, but it’s not good.”
    And the fever is apparently spreading. Nearby Seattle approved its own minimum wage increase to $15 at the beginning of June. Before the city ordinance was even passed, local businesses saw the writing on the wall. Northwest Caster and Equipment, a family business with a long history in Seattle, packed up shop and moved out of town entirely. The owner told a local news outlet, “It just seems like increasingly the city’s become a more difficult place to do business.” Other stores and restaurants are being forced to scale back or put off expansion, with one restaurant owner calling the Seattle business climate “paralyzed by the uncertainty.”

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  7. But you know LITD. Our first choice is to argue these things on the level of principle, and the minimum wage is tyranny. Government has no right to tell a private organization how to conduct its affairs (i.e., what to pay people).

    And re: how it polls: That is exactly why blogs like this (and talk radio, and mags like National Review and the Weekly Standard, and organizations like Americans for Prosperity and Tea Party Patriots) are crucial to restoring this country to its status as the USA. Far too many of post-America's people have been turned into cattle.

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  8. "Making child care affordable": What the hell is "affordable"? I hear this term all the time from Freedom.-Haters. "Affordable housing," "affordably health care." Talk about a subjective word. What is affordable to any given person is an intersection of his or her income and budget, and no one else has any business being involved in the decisions leading to that intersection.

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  9. Not to mention the fact that the push for ever-more day care is a scheme by the Freedom-Haters to destroy the American family. Just like homosexual "marriage."

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  11. "Requiring big companies to provide paid family and medical leave" - once again, raw tyranny. Where does government get off "requiring" companies to have any policies one way or another?

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  12. I am laying on the ground riddled with holes from your machine gunning. Let me clean up and address your responses at some future time.

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  13. Probably should not have even linked Bobby Reich's facebook post, because, I too, am not a fan of the minimum wage but the Tan Man Crist keeps harping on it because that is what the people want. Generally the voters vote for issues their candidate supports. That is the only point of Reich's post, what the polls say the people want. That said, I am conceding that the Pubs will win more than they lose in little over a week, but if they don't give the majority of the electorate what they want, their victories will be short-lived. Not necessarily what I want but what someone says the polls say what the people want. I do think people are wary of corporations and they think there is economic inequality. Whether that is really true or not, and I know the economically prosperous work hard, but so do many many others here amongst us. Is this backpedalling? And your dismissal of my first link because it is 3 years old means nothing because it speaks of history. One does not have to look far to find critiques of trickle down which is in no way any sort of truth set in granite.

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  14. The linkage of the Reich post elicited the vast preponderance of your rage on the page. Maybe I should remove the comment.

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  15. I actually can't wait for the smackin' your're quite rightly going to give the Dems this election which brings up memories of the smackin' the voters gave the Pubs back in '06 when I first began blogging at your former site, Bent Notes. You were wounded bad in those elections. And so it will go thus, on and on, which is a good thing, they're all nuts and fail to deliver as promised. Thus my call for no leaders, which is going a bit far but might be the wave of the future though we certainly can and do thrust them out of power, hopefully with increasing regularity. All your evil premptors are powerless, tried to regain it under Romney, yet still powerless, though they crawl out of the cracks whenever they think they see daylight. I love it!!!!!

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  16. Great article on what Obama thinks he has up his sleeve which he has saved for after the inevitable bashing:
    http://nypost.com/2014/10/26/obamas-plans-for-a-secret-radical-agenda-after-the-elections/

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  17. "And so it will go on thus": Indeed, the struggle for freedom and civilizational preservation never ends.

    "People are wary of corporations": Another front on which we conservatives have our work cut out for us. Full-headed Freedom-Haters put up sound-bite Facebook posts about corporations being bad, and all their lo-do friends swallow it, without passing to think about what a corporation is and what it exists to do.

    The MEC's post-election plans for a radical agenda: Of course. That's who he is. That's why we understand him to be one of America's enemies

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  18. Another reason I linked Reich was to show that, instead of haunting her, a majority might just cheer her. That's when you scream Post America!

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  19. The FL race is a dead heat between red money and blue money. Both candidates are nerds with connections. Looking forward to it though. Republican v phony Dem.

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  20. Sometimes I get the impression where you're coming from is along the lines of "It's true I don't align with everything I link to or excerpt here. I just think you rigid righties need your noses tweaked fairly regularly to keep you from being so full of yourselves."

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