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Forums - General - Someone thinks America will collapse soon...

Mr Khan on 30 July 2011
badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:

Not really. In 2006, every single Democratic senator voted against raising the debt ceiling. Some of them, including Obama, even gave some pretty impassioned speeches as to why it was the wrong thing to do.

And there never was a Clinton surplus.

All politics on that end. In 2006, before the election, the Dems were still the double-minority, and had absolutely no incentive to vote to raise the debt ceiling or make it look like raising the ceiling was a good idea at the time.

Which is the problem we're seeing with the Republicans right now. They're still acting like a double minority party, and not a responsible partner of governance which is what you have to be when you have divided government

Which is kind of my point. It's not only Republicans who play politics with the raising of the debt ceiling, and contrary to what so many people keep saying, nothing about the present situation is unprecedented (except for the fact that we are dealing with trillions instead of billions now, of course) as the Democrats tried to put the screws to Eisenhower in almost the exact same way.

I suspect we could argue at great length over just who is behaving more irresponsibly here, but Harry Reid knew exactly what the next Congress would look like when he declined in November to take up the raising of the debt ceiling - which at the time was supposed to be reached in April. But he decided he wanted Republicans to own it, too, so he put it off, probably banking on the idea that these crazy freshmen didn't really believe what they were saying. Clearly, at least some of them do.

A fair assertion. My guess is that he understood that the democrats raising the ceiling would be interpreted negatively and used as fodder by the Tea Partiers in its time, and that he wanted to put that burden on them to force them to make some sort of decision that would inevitably be taken badly, assuming that they couldn't not make the unthinktable decision, which they may very well make



Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.

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NJ5 on 30 July 2011

It seems politicians CAN speak the truth:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SenRe/start/14756/stop/16376



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

Kasz216 on 31 July 2011
NJ5 said:
It seems politicians CAN speak the truth:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SenRe/start/14756/stop/16376

Oh Coburns been saying that for like..... a few months now.



Kasz216 on 31 July 2011
Akvod said:
badgenome said:
Mr Khan said:
badgenome said:

Not really. In 2006, every single Democratic senator voted against raising the debt ceiling. Some of them, including Obama, even gave some pretty impassioned speeches as to why it was the wrong thing to do.

And there never was a Clinton surplus.

All politics on that end. In 2006, before the election, the Dems were still the double-minority, and had absolutely no incentive to vote to raise the debt ceiling or make it look like raising the ceiling was a good idea at the time.

Which is the problem we're seeing with the Republicans right now. They're still acting like a double minority party, and not a responsible partner of governance which is what you have to be when you have divided government

Which is kind of my point. It's not only Republicans who play politics with the raising of the debt ceiling, and contrary to what so many people keep saying, nothing about the present situation is unprecedented (except for the fact that we are dealing with trillions instead of billions now, of course) as the Democrats tried to put the screws to Eisenhower in almost the exact same way.

I suspect we could argue at great length over just who is behaving more irresponsibly here, but Harry Reid knew exactly what the next Congress would look like when he declined in November to take up the raising of the debt ceiling - which at the time was supposed to be reached in April. But he decided he wanted Republicans to own it, too, so he put it off, probably banking on the idea that these crazy freshmen didn't really believe what they were saying. Clearly, at least some of them do.


The Democrats never dragged out a debt ceiling debate until 2 days before the treasury runs out of money.

This is madness. The damage is already done, whether we raise the debt ceiling or not. If our legislative branch is going to put the world economy at risk until (?) the last minute, who knows if they're going to do it again in the future.


Except, the damage has nothing to do with the debt ceiling.  We were going to be downgraded  credit wise anyway.



Marks on 31 July 2011

Time for the US to implement some austerity measures. A collapse is inevitable if they keep wasting so much money.



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badgenome on 31 July 2011
Akvod said:


The Democrats never dragged out a debt ceiling debate until 2 days before the treasury runs out of money.

This is madness. The damage is already done, whether we raise the debt ceiling or not. If our legislative branch is going to put the world economy at risk until (?) the last minute, who knows if they're going to do it again in the future.

Firstly, the treasury cannot run out of money unless it chooses to. And if having billions of dollars flowing in every single day is "running out of money", then I only wish I could run out of money. Second, I would argue that the Democrats are doing exactly that, just as much as the Republicans. After all, it's the Republican House which has produced two bills, both of which were immediately killed by the Senate without even taking them up for debate. Maybe there are good reasons not to "rush" a balanced budget amendment through like this, but the second bill was pronounced dead on arrival even before Boehner had to tack on a BBA, and that despite the fact that it was remarkably similar to Reid's own bill - aside from the fact that Boehner's bill has, you know, actual cuts (to the extent we are even talking about cuts, since these are all actually only reductions in the growth of spending) instead of bullshit accounting tricks. Reid couldn't even muster a substantive reason as to why, unless you count "EWWWW IT SMELLS LIEK TEH T PARTY!!111" as substantive (which you might).

If you really think the damage done by these dickheads squabbling over the debt ceiling is worse than that done by the debt itself... I really don't know what to say to that. That's pretty out there.



NJ5 on 31 July 2011
Kasz216 said:
NJ5 said:
It seems politicians CAN speak the truth:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SenRe/start/14756/stop/16376

Oh Coburns been saying that for like..... a few months now.

I see! Why does the media not regularly say the same things? I haven't seen many (any?) articles calling the spending "cuts" what they really are.



My Mario Kart Wii friend code: 2707-1866-0957

WiseOwl on 31 July 2011

I think the USA will default to.



Akvod on 31 July 2011
badgenome said:
Akvod said:


The Democrats never dragged out a debt ceiling debate until 2 days before the treasury runs out of money.

This is madness. The damage is already done, whether we raise the debt ceiling or not. If our legislative branch is going to put the world economy at risk until (?) the last minute, who knows if they're going to do it again in the future.

Firstly, the treasury cannot run out of money unless it chooses to. And if having billions of dollars flowing in every single day is "running out of money", then I only wish I could run out of money. Second, I would argue that the Democrats are doing exactly that, just as much as the Republicans. After all, it's the Republican House which has produced two bills, both of which were immediately killed by the Senate without even taking them up for debate. Maybe there are good reasons not to "rush" a balanced budget amendment through like this, but the second bill was pronounced dead on arrival even before Boehner had to tack on a BBA, and that despite the fact that it was remarkably similar to Reid's own bill - aside from the fact that Boehner's bill has, you know, actual cuts (to the extent we are even talking about cuts, since these are all actually only reductions in the growth of spending) instead of bullshit accounting tricks. Reid couldn't even muster a substantive reason as to why, unless you count "EWWWW IT SMELLS LIEK TEH T PARTY!!111" as substantive (which you might).

If you really think the damage done by these dickheads squabbling over the debt ceiling is worse than that done by the debt itself... I really don't know what to say to that. That's pretty out there.

The treasury is running out of money... that's a fact. Unless you're proposing that the platinum coin idea is a viable one. Still doesn't change the fact that we're trying to avoid having to resort to extreme measure to pay our obligations.

A balanced budget adment is completely out of the question. It's not a matter of "rushing" it. It's simply radical.

The squabling is ultimately due to the Republicans. The President initially wanted to just have a debt ceiling raise, no strings attached. Just like all the other times. The Republicans are the ones that actually tied this to the deficit. Not the Democrats. The Republicans wanted to use this as an opportunity to enact spending cuts.



Kasz216 on 31 July 2011
NJ5 said:
Kasz216 said:
NJ5 said:
It seems politicians CAN speak the truth:

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/SenRe/start/14756/stop/16376

Oh Coburns been saying that for like..... a few months now.

I see! Why does the media not regularly say the same things? I haven't seen many (any?) articles calling the spending "cuts" what they really are.

I'd guess because the "news" is the deal, not so much the specifics behind it so to speak.

Got me, the closest they tend to get is why the deals were stalled.

Essentially Republicans didn't want to raise the debt ceiling past the obama presidency without actual "cuts" specified.

While the Democrats wanted to put it past the deadline with the vague promise of "cuts" so it wouldn't be an election issue and presumibly the "hard" cuts can be put off if Obama wins which would also likely mean house and senate gains...

or be forced to be done under the republican president ensuring he's a 1 term president.

 

I think the fact that most of the cuts (and indeed i believe ALL of them in the current plans) aren't really cuts is generally only brought up by senators like Coburn when interviewed on CNBC and presumibly fox news... but I don't watch fox news.


CNBC tends to deal a bit more with the reality of the situation because instead of being a news station... they're a buisness news station.


Paul Ryan puts it in a funnier way.

http://www.breitbart.tv/rep-paul-ryan-destroys-reid-bill-in-blistering-speech-lets-cover-the-moon-with-yogurt/

 

Paul Ryan was the guy everyone hated for his spending cuts idea a while back... to the point where democrats made a commercial where he literally threw an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff.

I think his plan was for about 5 trillion... which is only 1 trillion more then what is said is possibly the bare minium needed to avoid a downgrade.

People who think the debt ceiling issue really had anything to do with this are fooling themselves.

If the debt ceiling would of been passed and this never been an argument, we STILL would be downgraded.

The only difference is the democrats would of just ignored the situation.