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and?
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
That ball just keeps bouncin'.....
and?
We've got other problems. NSA spying on US Citizens, the debt, wiretapping journalists, intimidating journalists, the longest period of unemployment of over 7% in our nations history, Obamacare in a shambles, immigration reform in shambles, IRS targeting citizens based on ideology, the ' executive order kill list', killing a US citizen with no trial, no federal budget passed since 2009, less than half of adults have full time jobs, 11 states have more people on government assistance than jobs, a terrorist attack on US soil just 3 months ago. Actually, it's hard to keep track it moves so fast. Benghazi, fast and furious, recess appointments overturned by the courts. Newtown, Sandy relief not getting to victims, gun control reform dead...security leaks, first Bradley Manning, then Snowden. 17 missile launch officers relieved due to security violations....
what's the problem? other than the Repugs, HUGE PROMOTERS of running up the national debt ("deficits don't matter" -- head) when they are in office, beating Barry with the national debt, most of which the Repugs ac ulated?
diseased St Ronnie switched the govt from "tax and spend" to "borrow and spend"
dubya's wars and tax cuts have been the biggest contributors to the debt.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 07-20-2013 at 10:25 AM.
Well, we have to end apartheid for one. And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger. We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women. We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern and less materialism in young people.
I have to return some videotapes.
Free abortions and free birth control for every woman in America too.
LOL...
Is the place still in business where you rented them from?
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooossssssssssssssssss sssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh.
You never fail to disappoint.
deficit/debt hawks are full of bull , and probably hired by the billionaires to harp on the debt. When the 1% is pushing hard for something, we know, without any doubt, it's to their benefit and the detriment of the 99%
Here's a much bigger problem:
A Permanent Slump?
But what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal? What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?
You might imagine that speculations along these lines are the province of a radical fringe. And they are indeed radical; but fringe, not so much. A number of economists have been flirting with such thoughts for a while. And now they’ve moved into the mainstream. In fact, the case for “secular stagnation” — a persistent state in which a depressed economy is the norm, with episodes of full employment few and far between — was made forcefully recently at the most ultrarespectable of venues, the I.M.F.’s big annual research conference. And the person making that case was none other than Larry Summers. Yes, that Larry Summers.
And if Mr. Summers is right, everything respectable people have been saying about economic policy is wrong, and will keep being wrong for a long time.
Mr. Summers began with a point that should be obvious but is often missed: The financial crisis that started the Great Recession is now far behind us. Indeed, by most measures it ended more than four years ago. Yet our economy remains depressed.
He then made a related point: Before the crisis we had a huge housing and debt bubble. Yet even with this huge bubble boosting spending, the overall economy was only so-so — the job market was O.K. but not great, and the boom was never powerful enough to produce significant inflationary pressure.
Mr. Summers went on to draw a remarkable moral: We have, he suggested, an economy whose normal condition is one of inadequate demand — of at least mild depression — and which only gets anywhere close to full employment when it is being buoyed by bubbles.
the evidence suggests that we have become an economy whose normal state is one of mild depression, whose brief episodes of prosperity occur only thanks to bubbles and unsustainable borrowing.
More broadly, if our economy has a persistent tendency toward depression, we’re going to be living under the looking-glass rules of depression economics — in which virtue is vice and prudence is folly, in which attempts to save more (including attempts to reduce budget deficits) make everyone worse off — for a long time.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/11/18...ent-slump.html
Government Investment Hits Lowest Level Since World War II
Gross capital investment from the public sector, or government spending on infrastructure, scientific research, education, and other long-term priorities, hasfallen below any level since World War II, according to an analysis by the Financial Times. It now amounts to 3.6 percent of GDP, compared to an average of 5 percent after the war.
The biggest decline has been in infrastructure spending, which has fallen off a cliff since 2010, when the midterm elections swept in a wave of conservative Tea Party Republicans who have repeatedly demanded spending cuts and even pushed the country to the edge of multiple crises to get their way. Those Republicans have blocked President Obama’s attempts to invest in the country’s crumbling infrastructure, which will need about $450 billion a yearfor the next decade to get it up to snuff.
The FT notes that federal funding for research and development hasn’t fallen as dramatically, but sequestration is having a big impact and will get worse as it continues. It has had a devastating toll on research this year, with half of the country’s scientists saying they have laid people off and some even closing up their projects. Federal investment had already fallen by about 20 percent, and next year sequestration’s cuts will get even deeper.
Various budget proposals would make the situation worse, with Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget being the most extreme and forcing investment below 1.5 percent of GDP within a decade. But most other budgets would force investment to decline as well:
Yet the continuing drive toward austerity and severe budget cuts comes at a time when the deficit has fallen dramatically. It is now half of what it was in 2009 and has fallen below $1 trillion for the first time in five years. Much of that has been from spending cuts — 72 percent of the $2.4 trillion in deficit reduction since 2011. There is plenty of other evidence that the U.S. doesn’t have a spending problem and in fact the economy would be better off with far more investment.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...vestment-fall/
Fake budget "wonk" Ryan and similar assholes say the debt is burden passed to future generations. His 10 year budget would actually increase the debt while cutting taxes on 1% and corps (who pay him to spin his LIES)
But now is a fantastic time, extremely low interest rates, for govt to borrow in invest in infrastructure. A crumbing, decrep infrastructure is a huge burden to future generations, when THEIR debt/investment costs to fix the infrastructure will be much larger than ours.
Big Majorities Favor Progressive Tax-And-Spend Policies
In a stunning change of public at udes, Republicans have lost majority support for their signature, if not only, economic policy issue: tax cuts.
The results from a host of polls this year indicate that Democrats can win big in future elections if they focus on progressive tax-and-spend policies that create jobs, protect Social Security and Medicare and require rich Americans and big corporations to shoulder more of the burden of supporting government.
Likewise, if the public views Democrats as nothing more than “Republican lite” on economics, offering a weak brew of deference to Wall Street and discredited Chicago School theories, these same polls suggest Democrats will throw away an opportunity to shift national economic policies away from Reaganism.
Asked what budget priorities they want Congress to focus on, 68 percent of voters chose strengthening the economy and creating jobs while just 28 percent want deficit reduction and lowering the national debt (the Tea Party platform).
Those figures come from a Hart Research Associates telephone poll of 1,009 registered voters conducted in late October for Americans for Tax Fairness, a coalition of 325 progressive, labor and similar organizations.
While the poll was conducted for progressives, it is consistent with other polls sampling public at udes about the economy, taxes and federal spending.
Indeed, the latest poll shows that even a quarter of Tea Party Republicans favor some progressive tax and spend policies.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/big-majo...es-polls-show/
One of St Ronnie's worst ups was his VRWC strategy of switching America from tax-and-spend (cut taxes on the 1% and corps) to borrow-and-spend, he, Bushes pere and fils, ALL ran up America's debt as fiscal conservatives.
unending, all azimuths, right-wing fraud
Astroturf “Fix the Debt” Caught Ghostwriting for College Students
Our friend Jon Romano, press secretary for the inside-the-beltway PR campaign “Fix the Debt” and its pet youth group, The Can Kicks Back, have been caught writing op-eds for college students and placing the identical op-eds in papers across the country.
This is the latest slip-up in Fix the Debt’s efforts to portray itself as representing America’s youth. Previously, they were caught paying dancers to participate in a pro-austerity flash mob and paying Change.org to gather online pe ion signers for them.
The newspapers involved in the scam were not amused.
Gainesville Sun to Fix the Debt: “Lay Off the Astroturf and Outright Plagiarism”
The identical op-eds were discovered by Florida’s Gainesville Sun. The paper’s scathing editorial on the topic makes for an entertaining read.
If you liked University of Florida student Brandon Scott’s column last Sunday about the national debt, you also should enjoy columns by Dartmouth College student Thomas Wang and University of Wisconsin student Jennifer Pavelec on the issue.
After all, they’re the same columns.
The identical columns ran last weekend in newspapers in New Hampshire and Wisconsin. They each included the same first-person passage describing the student’s work with the Campaign to Fix the Debt and its “millennial arm,” The Can Kicks Back.
After I was told last week about the column appearing under the byline of different writers in other publications, it was removed from The Sun’s website. Staff with the Campaign to Fix the Debt, who sent out the columns, said they were templates that were supposed to be personalized or otherwise reworded.
The campaign’s vice president of communications, John Romano, said Scott -— an intern with the group — was not at fault.
“This was an inadvertent mistake and the campaign takes full responsibility for it,” he said.
Ooopsie.
“The Sun‘s policy is not to publish astroturf pieces written by advocacy groups and only signed by supporters,” writes the editorial page editor. “Advocacy groups and others should lay off the astroturf and outright plagiarism unless they want to discredit themselves and their causes.”
The paper promptly pulled the op-ed, as has Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the New Hampshire Foster’s Daily Democrat.
Fix the Debt “Chapters” Are State-Based PR Firms on Retainer
The papers who pulled the phony opinion pieces are to be applauded for standing up to this type of crass manipulation.
With polling consistently showing that 90 percent of Americans want to preserve and strengthen Social Security, Fix the Debt has its work cut out for it pretending to represent the grassroots.
The truth is Fix the Debt is the latest effort by Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson (who pledged a cool billion of his Blackstone Group fortune to the cause), to convince America that our deficit (which has been on a steep decline since peaking in 2009) is so out of control that it justified extreme budget cuts, including to Social Security and Medicare. Peterson gave $5 million to get Fix the Debt off the ground. Fix the Debt’s members are a raft of Wall Street firms, like JP Morgan Chase who pitched in $500,000 and GE who contributed $1 million, and its “grassroots” are a series of politically-tied state-based PR firms on retainer who are required to line up a list of politicians and lobbyists, call them a “chapter,” and work to make sure they get regular interviews in the local press. Here in Wisconsin, Fix the Debt’s flack is Mark Graul, a Republican apparatchik best known for his false, racially-charged TV ad campaign against Judge Louis Butler in his 2008 race for Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Fix the Debt fails to tell students that its leaders, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, have a new budget plan that not only throws Grannie under the bus with cuts to Social Security and Medicare (which mean their kids and their grandkids will be working harder to support them in their old age), but also attacks college students by calling for higher interest rates on student loans and changing the law to allow those interest rates to kick in even before the student graduates from college (PDF, p. 30). Fix the Debt cries crocodile tears over the “generational inequities” of the federal budget, but fails to note that states spend billions on education.
While the nation hurtles to new budget deal deadlines in December and January that put Social Security and Medicare in danger, Fix the Debt is looking for a new press secretary to aid its effort to achieve a “Grand Bargain,” along the lines of Simpson-Bowles — budget cuts so steep they would cost America some four million jobs says the Economic Policy Ins ute. We can anticipate that the group will use some of its $40 million budget to ramp up its spin campaign on TV, in print ads, and radio.
Fortunately, more people are starting to catch on. The editorial board of theGeorgetown Voice, the student newspaper of Georgetown University, urged student groups to do their homework before inviting groups to campus:
Given the lack of transparency in the structure and goals of Fix the Debt and, by proxy, The Can Kicks Back, it is of special importance that Georgetown student leadership take a closer and more critical look at the external groups they promote in the future. Had [student groups] done some research and looked past the glossy, misappropriated rhetoric and symbolism of the group they invited to the Hilltop, they would have found that Fix the Debt’s agenda is undoubtedly anti-student and anti-poor, despite its claims to “promote generational equity.”
Next time you see an op-ed from Fix the Debt or The Can Kicks Back (and there are many penned by Romano and his crew), give the editorial page editor a jingle and tell them that they have been hoodwinked by a reclusive billionaire named Pete Peterson and his Wall Street friends.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/20096...llege-students
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