Journal mcgrew's Journal: . CRASH!!! 12
Leila called yesterday. "Hi dad, did you see the stock market crashed again? Boy is Mom gonna be PISSED!" Apparently Evil-X's retirement is in a 401k. Boy, those rich folks sure know how to screw us middle (and in her case low) class people, don't they?
Huh? Unemployment is 10%. We never got OUT of the recession.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about a general slowdown in economic activity. For other uses, see Recession (disambiguation).
In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction, a general slowdown in economic activity.[1][2] During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way. Production, as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, investment spending, capacity utilization, household incomes, business profits, and inflation all fall during recessions, while bankruptcies and the unemployment rate rise.
Recessions generally occur when there is a widespread drop in spending often following an adverse supply shock or the bursting of an economic bubble. Governments usually respond to recessions by adopting expansionary macroeconomic policies, such as increasing money supply, increasing government spending and decreasing taxation.
Well, I guess the definition of recession has changed since Will Rogers said way back in the 1930s when my dad was a kid: "A recession is when your neighbor's out of work. A depression is when you're out of work."
The recession ended a couple of years ago for the rich, but nothing has changed for the rest of us. Going by Will Rogers' definition, it's been going on for the rest of us for three years now, right before Bush left office. For some, We're in a deep depression. The recession ended for the rich when Bush and Obama threw a shipload of money they collected from the poor and middle class at the rich. Now the goddamned (they're gonna rot in hell) teabaggers want to steal the money that we've been paying into Social Security and Medicare all our lives to balance the budget they squandered on two wars, making the rich richer, tax cuts for the rich, and bailouts that made the rich richer.
Stock market crash? BRING IT ON! The lower stocks and commodities, go, the cheaper gasoline is. Fuck those God damned rich sons of Satan. The "end of the recession" didn't help anybody I know; nobody got any raises, exept the rich. The Bush tax cuts for the rich that were supposed to create more jobs left Bush as the only President in history to leave office with America having fewer jobs than when he took office. Listen up, you stupid teabaggers, you want he budget balanced? I'll tell you how to do it. First, bring the cannon fodder home. Then, disband the TSA and the DHS (with the exception of FEMA, which works well when "Good Job Brownie" isn't in charge). It's all money wasted on security theater.
Legalize, tax, and regulate the sale of psychoactive drugs. Like the end of alcohol prohibition it will lower the crime rate (which is already lower than it used to be), and less government expense for law enforcement, courts, and prisons. Taxes on it would raise revenue. Regulation would reduce the number of overdoses and other medical complications from impurities and fakes (bath salts selling as crack cocaine when the bath salts are even worse than crack). No good has come from the war on drugs; it has resulted in the US having the world's highest per capita incarceration rate. Doesn't that fact make you embarrassed to be an American? What's wrong with you people?
The only drugs that should be prescription only are antibiotics, and that's because unlike heroin, your misuse of antibiotics affects everyone because it breeds "superbugs" like MSRA.
Disband the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, and Firearms; its purpose ended in 1933.
Stop welfare for the rich; farm subsidies, grants to oil companies, stupid loopholes that allow corporations to get away without paying any taxes at all.
Then, not only repeal the Bush tax cuts, double the tax on anybody making more than a quarter of a million dollars a year and slash their deductions. In fact, get rid of all deductions entirely. I don't get any, why should you? Get rid of the Capital Gains Tax and tax capital gains as regular income. Why should someone collecting $75K gambling on the stock market pay half of what a roofer working his ass of in the blistering heat earning the same amount pays?
If lowering taxes on the rich results in a stock market crash, which the Bush tax cuts obviously did, then raising them ought to fix it. And yes, I know that correlation does not imply causation, but it strongly suggests it.
The Koch brothers, the Murdochs, and their ilk are NOT patriots; they're selfish, greedy traitors to their country. Fuck 'em. Can't afford another two hundred million dollar summer "cottage" and those five hundred dollar lunches any more? Well, boo fucking hoo. Stupid teabaggers. The original tea party's motto was "no taxation without representation". The new tea party's motto is simply "no taxation". I say I have no representation; the rich buy the candidates. Why should I pay taxes? I have no representation whatever!
Their other goal is removal of regulations. But, you know, most Federal regulations make sense and aren't strong enough! There should be a regulation outlawing the use of antibiotics on farm animals. If that had been a regulation all along, and FDA regs were stronger, Cargill would have had huge fines, maybe even been put out of business. But it's OK to kill people, as long as you're a corporation and killing people raises your profits. Note that the poisoned turkey salmonella was antibiotic resistant? Are these people brainless, or just evil?
I wish Rority would take these damned teabaggers to 1965 Sauget (before the Clean Air Act) and make them stand in front of the Monsanto and Cerro Copper plants for half an hour. Too bad he's not real.
A true libertarian says "I should be able to do whatever I want as long as I don't hurt anybody else." An LPer says "I should be able to do whatever I want." Alester Crowley, who claimed to be the Beast of the Revelation, said "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law". Ron Paul would be proud of him.
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oops
The political facade is just that (Score:1)
What you're essencially asking for is for pirates to give up piracy. It really is that basic. As long as we submit, we will be allowed to live. The bureaucrat's pen may be mightier than the sword, but the sword is always there, just in case of any resistance
Thanks in large part to bickering politicians (Score:3)
Leaving the debt limit extension to the last minute shook confidence all around the world. To anyone living anywhere that isn't a total shithole already, a US debt default would be something between a "big problem" and a "REALLY fucking big problem."
Again if the Republicans weren't assholes big enough to make Goatse's look like a cat's butt in comparison, they would've passed that debt extension as soon as possible, and hashed out the other stuff later. And of course the spineless Democrats couldn't call their bluff and point out that the debt extension was not a bargaining chip. Seems like it takes a supermajority of Democrats for them to do any more than slow the Republicans down slightly, and even then they don't get anything through unless the Republicans have had their way with it first.
Re: (Score:2)
Wealth and income are two different things.
If I have $10,000,000 in the bank, make $1,000,000 a year and the income tax rate is 40%, then when all is said and done I'll have $10,600,000 in the bank.
That isn't on the way to being "poor", by any stretch of the imagination.
And it isn't "government GIVE us weed" it is "the market SELL us weed, and the government tax it". Just like cigarettes and booze.
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I think the GP AC is one of the learning-disabled tea folks that come here once in a while. Face it, anyone making less than a quarte million per year who is complaining that the rich pay too much tax isn't very smart.
The original tea party: "no taxation without representation"
New tea party: "No taxation"
Can't Mod Journals (Score:2)
I agree with everything you have said, shame I cannot moderate journals up.
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Thanks. I have fifteen points today myself, probably use 'em when I get home tonight.
Fourteen to go! (Score:2)
Me too!
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I've had mod points continuously since May 2nd. I've been keeping an eye on it.
The couple of times I used 'em all, I watched the little countdown on top after hitting "Moderate" and saw...
Moderated "Insightful"...3 mod points left
Moderated "Informative"...2 mod points left
Moderated "Funny"... 1 mod points left
Moderated "Overrated"...0 mod points left
And in the upper right corner of the screen...
"You have 15 mod points! Use 'em or lose 'em"
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Same here, although I went a few weeks without mod points after heavily posting comments.
What about health care? (Score:3)
You missed one thing the government should do (must, really). Universal health care. if the US doesn't bring it's per capita health care costs in line with the rest of the developed world, the debt is going to get worse. Reforming health care properly (and not just implementing Romneycare across the board) would do so much good that only minimal tax hikes would be required.
But anyway, it's nice after surfing the hyper-right and economically illiterate /. boards to come here and read your journals. I would probably have quit /. in disgust a long time ago without them. Keep it up, McGrew.
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Thanks! That's one hell of a compliment!
It doesn't look like we'll have health care matching the civilized world's any time soon, though, after Obama's giveaway to the insurance companies and the right's insistance that government has no place in anything. Health and malpractice insurance are the two things that make our dysfunctional system so expensive.