I don't believe you, and neither does a majority of the public: http://washingtonexaminer.com/eric-...ort-for-voter-id/article/2504969#.UC1bpt1lQlC Showing an ID is such a trivial requirement in today's society that your cries of "poll tax" and "voter suppression" just don't hold water.
Maybe if you imagine that we inhabit some Ayn Rand fantasy universe where individual achievement is the sum total of everything, and entrepreneurs simply wring profits from the very ground through sheer force of will and merit, those words sound "disparaging." Back here in reality, they sound like a reminder to certain segments to get a grip and stop trying to undermine the system that supports, sustains and enriches everyone. Unconvincing bluster. I'd probably be insecure and overcompensating as well, if I'd spent so many months trying to put a brave face on a party in disarray fielding a dustbin-bound candidacy.
The total absence of any evidence that there is an actual problem with in-person voter fraud affecting the fairness of our elections is such that claims of "genuine concern for fair elections" just do not hold water.
For one very simple reason, I was not wrong. Why I am I not surprised to see you yet again playing fast and loose with the facts? The “Evil Voter ID Plot” is more than just voter ID, it is excess the elimination or restricting early voting in predominantly Democratic districts and maintaining early voting in Republican districts. It is complicating the voter registration process and imposing draconian fines for the least violation and it is a unified effort across the land by Republican legislatures. And your assertion that it is bipartisan is yet another lie, yet again spreading misinformation. If you could prove that 1000 corpses or illegal aliens or felons were voting illegally, you might have a case. But you cannot. You cannot even prove a handful has voted illegally, and for that you are willing to disenfranchise millions of legitimate voters. Further I am not making excuses for President Obama, none are needed. You are the guy along with those in your party who feel the need to misrepresent information for political gain. President Obama and the Democrats have no such need nor the will power to do so.
How about this: When 1,099 felons vote in race won by 312 ballotsOver a thousand felons voted in one election. An election that gave Democrats a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. But for those felons, Obamacare would likely have never passed. Furthermore, how could we possibly know how much fraud there is when we don't even check ID's? Imagine we had a requirement that you must be 21 to purchase alcohol but we never asked anyone for an ID when they actually made the purchase. Could we reasonably claim that no one under 21 was buying alcohol if we weren't even checking? Sure, we might catch the occasional kid showing up drunk at school or something, but the vast majority of underage drinking would go undetected just as I'm sure the vast majority of voter fraud goes undetected at present.
To mods whom it may concern: feel free to break this tangent off into an appropriate separate thread. To Billy's proposed mechanism: You appear to be laboring under a serious, fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on there. The spike of money in excess reserves is not held in Treasury bonds. It is simply cash sitting in reserve accounts at the Federal Reserve, collecting interest (I made this explicit a bit earlier in this thread, when I linked a graph of the growth in money supply with excess reserves discounted). What happened is that the Fed bought securities (treasury bills, mortgage-backed securities, etc.) from the banks, and credited their reserve accounts at the Fed in payment. That glut of excess reserves represents a reduction in the bonds and other securities held by the banks. Instead, the Fed now has those, and the banks have a pile of excess reserves sitting in accounts at the Fed. The Fed also started paying interest on excess reserves, which allows them to control the incentive of the banks to lend it out. Basically, quantitative easing is a process wherein the Fed reduces the exposure of banks to the bond market (and other security markets) and gives them cash instead. The bonds and mortgage backed securities are transferred over to the Fed, and the banks get cash reserves instead. So you are asserting that Europe is going to "run out of money" and so exit the bond market, and that the Fed is going to drive up interest rates in 2014. Both of those assertions need some support. I've previously pointed out to you that the Fed has not signalled any intention to do such - they've only said that they have not yet decided what to do beyond a certain point, and that they will examine conditions as they develop in making their decision. Your assertion about Europe dropping out of the bond market is extraordinary and requires major substantiation. Again, the bonds are not in the banks' vaults. They are in the Fed. All of that surge in fiat money from quantitative easing represents reductions in the bond assets held by banks. The banks have a bunch of excess reserves instead, which pay interest at a separate rate determined directly by the Fed. The value of those excess reserves is not tied to the bond market. Severing the banks' exposure to the bond (and mortgage-backed security) markets is the entire point of quantitative easing, and the huge sums of fiat money that resulted represent exactly reductions in the banks' exposure to such. Well, no. For that money to get into circulation, the banks will have to either lend it out or purchase assets with it. It does not consist of treasury bonds that they can dump onto the open market - it is cash sitting in a deposit account. If bond yields go up, they may wish to use their excess reserves to purchase bonds, but that effect will rapidly diminish bond yields. The basic point is that the banks have no reason to lend or invest their excess reserves unless they think they can do better than the interest the Fed is already paying them on it - and the Fed can boost that interest rate if they worry about too much credit creation occuring too quickly. Moreover, the Fed has various other tools to drain off or lock up excess reserves if they worry about excessive credit creation (including new ones such as the Term Deposit Facility). Apart from all of that, banks selling bond holdings does not put money into circulation: it puts money into bank vaults. The banks have to lend that money out or buy assets with it for it to get into circulation, and they have zero incentive to expend their money on loans or assets that they do not expect to outperform the interest rate the Fed will pay them on excess reserves. The whole point of funnelling monetary stimulus through banks in the first place is that banks don't want to circulate the money unless they get productive assets in exchange - which is to say that the inflationary effect of the monetary stimulus is minimized: the money only goes into circulation in proportion to growth. I'm not having any trouble following the statements you are making, but you are not giving substantive answers to my questions. You're just repeating what is essentially the definition of inflation. You aren't presenting a meaningful theory relating the various quantities in question. For example, where do you stand on the quantity theory of money? The real bills doctrine? What is your overall view on the state of monetarism as a field of study, and where do you fall in relation to the major schools?
I note that your link there stops short of asserting that those votes actually affected the outcome. And that it's only even possible that there was an effect because that particular election was astoundingly close. I also note that the voter ID laws you guys are pushing wouldn't do anything to address those felonious voters. Felons who are ineligible to vote can still perfectly well get an ID. That was an issue of the registrar of voters failing to properly vet the rolls of registered voters - something that they should have done anyway, totally regardless of voter ID laws. So your position is that in-person voter fraud is actually huge problem, but we just don't have any evidence of it because there are no voter ID laws?
The right to vote? No. The right to pack lethal weapons? Yes. Setting aside the pathetic melodrama for a moment, let us consider that voting is a right. And we'll set aside that convicted felons in Minnesota can vote after sentence completion; the source article makes a broad assertion that these felons could not vote without saying why. So here's the deal: Why punish responsible voters by disenfranchising millions in order to address an ill-defined problem? Consider shootings in Aurora, Colorado and Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Or maybe last year in Tuscon. Should we outlaw semiautomatic firearms? Or would such a proposition meet the usual gun-control opposition that says you can't punish responsible gun owners because some people are criminals? Republicans backing this disenfranchisement scheme should drop their responsible-gun-owner lament in the gun control discussion. Or is it that killing people is just that more important to conservatives than voting?
Until mid August 2008 banks deposited essentially only their "required reserves" (10% of demand deposits as I recall) but then the FED was allowed to paying interest of 0.25% on "excess of reserve requirement deposits" by banks, (usually just called: "excessive reserves"), which rapidly grew to about 3/4 of a trillion dollars as this graph shows: Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! but that is only a small part of the FED & Treasury´s newly created fiat money. Banks (and others) still can earn at least five times more interest by buying bonds. I did not want to get into confusing and unimportant details as to where the newly made fiat money was being held. Point is that only about 5% of it has been added to the circulating money so currently it has had no significant inflation effect. It will cause inflation when it is losing value (purchasing power) as then the owners of it will want to invest it in real assets, not paper promises (bonds, excess deposits, etc.) which they think will hold its purchasing power. (minerals, oil, farmland, lumber, etc.) As these things are in limited supply, more money chasing after them is how you get into serious inflation problems.
No, I have already provided you the latest data back in post 324 of this thread showing that essentially all of the new money created in recent years is sitting in excess reserves. You agreed with that statement at the time and subsequently, so I'm baffled as to why you've changed your tune now. Anyway, your statement there is wrong: the newly minted money is almost entirely just sitting in excess reserves. No they can't. This quantitative easing stuff was undertaken after interest rates had been driven to near-zero, remember? Where are the bonds that pay more than 0.25% APY? The fact that banks can't get better returns is exactly why the money is all sitting in excess reserves, and the Fed started paying interest exactly to insure that their bond purchases wouldn't just get recycled back into the banks (that would have negated the whole point of QE). ??? That is the entire crux of the subject here. And the other 95% is sitting in excess reserves, where the banks are waiting to find good credit-worthy borrowers to loan it out to. Unfortunately, it seems difficult for them to find borrowers who are more attractive than the risk-free 0.25% they get from the Fed. That all depends on exactly what yields that can get on bonds. Your whole premise was that a rise in bond yields would kick off hyperinflation - but a rise in bond yields will incentivize the banks to roll their excess reserves into the bond market, while also boosting the yields on their excess reserves. The entire point of QE was to remove the exposure to the bond and securities markets from the banks and into the Fed - which they did, to the tune of trillions of dollars. And, again, the Fed has various tools available to hold down the depletion of excess reserves if it fears excessive credit creation. Likewise, a rush into commodities would quickly drive up commodity prices to the point where they are no longer an attractive investment. Upshot is that your proposed trigger - a rise in interest rates - won't cause a panic among banks holding excess reserves, because those excess reserves are sitting in the Fed and not in the bond market. The bond market risk has been largely transferred to the Fed, for exactly this reason. The Fed is not a profit-taking regular bank, but a policy institution, and will simply eat the losses on its bond holdings. That is, again, the whole idea behind QE to begin with. Moreover, there's the question of the magnitude of the monetary expansion relative to the value of the assets out there. The total financial assets out there in just the USA number in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. While the 1-2 Trillion bucks in new money sounds like a lot at first glance, it is actually not that huge compared to the pool of assets that it can chase. So I think it is unreasonable to expect hyperinflation given the basic scale of the quantities involved. Hyperinflation is really a political event, not an economic one.
Check out this bozo. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Yes, stupid people who are capable of actually believing that Obama is a socialist (which generally leaves out anyone who achieved more than an eighth grade education) are going to insist on believing this idiotic talking point. None of these people were going to vote for President Obama anyway. Also: http://irregulartimes.com/index.php...t-his-business-with-a-lot-of-government-help/
true that first time I went to vote in the primaries I forgot my ID. person running the poll was someone from my neighborhood. they had known me for 15 years through the local swim team. I was turned away. if that's happening I doubt we have any real concerns.
What is your point about felons voting? How is their voting pattern different than pregnant women, snorklers, scrap metal collectors, or the people that starch collars down at the dry cleaners? Suppose 2500 ant farm aficionados voted that day. Might they not be the ones that swung the vote? What was your point again? That felons believe everyone should take responsibility and buy health insurance policies? You've lost me.
Your article just once again demonstrates your party’s heavy reliance on deception. Only 9 states permanently disenfranchise felons. And Minnesota isn’t one of them. The only way those felons could have voted illegally in Minnesota is if they voted from a jail cell or voted while on parole or probation. http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=286 So once again we find you referencing a partisan rag propagating yet another Republican myth. You have offered party sponsored myth as evidence of wrong doing. The facts are that no one was convicted and the facts are that nothing in any of the Republican voter suppression laws would have prevented convicted felons from voting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Examiner#Political_views
One of the many hypocrisies of right-wingers is their complaint that lefties are elitists. What they are actually referring to is that exclusive club of 8th grade graduates who left them in the dust. The hypocrisy is that they seem to think they have inherited the divine right of kings, to preside over the decision of who gets to vote and who should not, based entirely on whatever demographic they feel most comfortably includes them. We hear this same crap every two years. For all the crises they fabricate, they haven't been able to come up with even an interesting innovation on this same garbage claim. It's times like this I almost think the persecutions of the colonial era ought to be reinvented, to punish stupid hateful incompetent Torryism. I wouldn't mind personally devising a test specifically designed to remove their voting rights in a lawful version of the way they want to take away the rights of the downtrodden. So much for democracy, apple pie, and all the hollow jingoism of the right wing. They might as well be representing the return of the American form of government to some British tyrant in a powdered wig.
So once again we have you making wild accusations due to an incomplete understanding of the facts. In Minnisotta felons are banned from voting not just until their release from prison, but until they've completed their probation. Probation can continue for many years after being released from prison. In fact, many felons are on probation (and therefore in eligible to vote) despite never having been to prison at all. And here's an update on the guy who turned down a photo op by VP Biden because he disagreed with President Obama's "You didn't build that" comment. His business was flooded with people coming in to support his discision to such an extent that he ran out of dough and had to close his shop by about 1 PM! . http://www.roanoke.com/news/breaking/wb/312876
Where is your evidence of wrong doing? You have none. Additionally, as perviously pointed out by others and myself, there is nothing in any of the Republican voter suppresion laws that would prevent felons from voting. One would think that if you were so concerned with felon voting you guys would have adddressed it in even just one of your voter suppression laws but you have not. If you Republicans speak for the majority of Americans as you have claimed repeatedly, then why do you guys need to rely voter suppression at the ballot box? You are supposed to speak for the majority.
Hundreds of felons are known to have committed another felony by illegally voting in Minnisotta in 2008. That is wrong doing in my book. Your description of such a basic and common sense measure (showing an ID when voting) as "voter suppression" does nothing more than identify you as a member of the looney left. People have fought and died for the right to vote, and yet you seem to think that a requirement to show an ID is too steep an obsticle to overcome? I'm sorry, if showing an ID is too much to ask, perhaps you don't deserve to vote.
