The Debt Ceiling: This is getting ridiculous

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Xelor, Sep 7, 2017.

  1. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Well, it seems that you and your companion "bullshit" didn't bother to factor in the AMO, nor weather in the Sahel, nor the Caribbean sea level pressures , nor the 200mb zonal winds.

    Did you want a grade on that paper?

    Consider that dust in the tropical north Atlantic varies inversely proportional to the number of Atlantic hurricanes.
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2017
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  3. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    No, it doesn't. Nothing "seems" like that, at all. More bullshit.

    About the debt ceiling - you were attempting to make some connection with the thread topic, one hopes - you are definitely in favor of restoring the formerly solid financing of government operations that Reagan et al trashed, right?
     
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  5. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    How about you grade the current and official Republican Congress and Administration proposal(s) to defund the ongoing, decades long project of research into all those factors - every single one - you mentioned?

    The Republican Congress and Administration proposals to destroy the accumulated data?
    The Republican Administration reassignments and political litmus testing of the researchers directly involved?
    The Republican administrations - several of them, State as well as Federal - to regulate and censor the communications of these researchers and research operations with the media and other public information sources?

    These are being justified on - among others - "debt ceiling" and other budgetary grounds. You oppose all that, right? You give those efforts low marks?
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2017
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  7. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Trump disagrees; the lack of tax cuts causes hurricanes.

    "With Irma and Harvey devastation, Tax Cuts and Tax Reform is needed more than ever before. Go Congress, go!"
     
  8. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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  9. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    Your graph does not register the interval during which the Reagan tax cuts and deregulations were in effect (established, maintained, and defended by the Republican Party) which was the relevant factor. More bullshit, in other words.

    (The dishonesty of using "% of Gross GDP" we pass over in silence, along with the dishonesty of deferring the costs of the Asian wars launched by W&Co, figuring in the unfunded supposed liabilities of Social Security and other Republican accounting maneuvers, ignoring the filibuster control of the Senate, ignoring the alliance of Blue Dog Dems with Republicans, cutting the graph off at 2012, and so forth)
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2017
  10. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    But, then again, you could be wrong.
    You do know when reagan was president?
     
  11. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    I could be wrong, but you haven't addressed any of my posting.
    Your graphs, for example, don't show that or anything like it. Your graphs are bullshit.

     
  12. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Well, I can tell your chart is kind of screwy. Two, what's your point? Three, gross debt as a percent of GDP is a meaningless metric. The gross debt includes "debt" the government owes to itself.
     
  13. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    it's self is a tad misleading
    ss is a separate entity who invests the surplus of the trust fund in federal securities.
     
  14. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    It's more than a tad misleading.
     
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    It's been working like this: Reagan and the new crop of Republicans wanted to get rid of Social Security, but not get blamed. They also wanted to remove the burden of supporting the government via taxation from the wealthy.

    He, and they, set about it thus: he levered on Congress to impose higher SS taxes on the working class than were necessary to cover SS payouts, supposedly to handle the baby boom. (The alternative prospect would have been taxing rich people more, possibly even expanding SS taxation into rich people's incomes.)

    The extra he set up to go into a "trust fund", supposedly to finance the future SS payments that would be owed to the baby boomers when they retired. But rather than purchase hard assets with the money, he and his heirs loaned it to the US Government - sold bonds to the Federal government itself. He and his heirs then used that to offset - on the government's books - the loss of revenue from tax cuts he granted to rich people.

    Very large tax breaks, for very rich people.

    These bonds, and the interest due on them, were originally set up to be paid off from general revenue when due (to cover the boomers in retirement) - if an honest deal, by restoring taxation of the people who had been granted the thirty years of tax breaks they had "financed".

    The deal was not honest. Faced with meeting that obligation now, and in no sense surprisingly, the Republicans (primarily) who engineered this have reneged on the taxation of the rich now at hand, and instead are claiming the debt owed makes cuts in government programs that benefit the working class necessary - including the very Social Security program the extra working class taxation was supposed to have covered. (No more retiring at 65 for the people who had paid in all that extra money, for example).

    The last few years of debt ceiling blather is a tactic in that defaulting.

    There's a certain beauty in the long con, when it works smoothly. Having the working class finance the tax breaks of the rich twice - once directly out of pocket, then by giving up benefits due - is admirably bold in itself. When the justification for the second financing is the debt created by the first one, we have something approaching elegance.
     

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