Yes, should be in the billboard thread, but what I believe | Forums

[donna577]

In over 200yrs we built up a debt, Obama has doubled that in only a couple.

To grotesquely paraphrase Winston Churchill "Never has so few, sold out so many, in such a short time"

At least I am young enough to learn how to speak Chinese.

[Yooperbacker]

That is cute.

[deep.sharks]

The Presidents of America are all the same

[WernherVonTrapp]

Funny, but true.
That's been circulating on cellphones for quite some time here in the NE. I swear Obama is going to bankrupt this country.

[paulhager]

Obama may prove to be the best thing that ever happened to our Republic (I’m speaking now to those of us who are American) because he tried to boil the frog too quickly. He was also inept in the process. As a consequence, Obama generated a massive counterreaction. People, who heretofore would have never gotten political, formed a loose, decentralized movement calling for a return to constitutional government. Although at first blush it would appear to be anti-Obama and anti-Democrat, it is just as much a threat to the Republican establishment. I’m referring, of course, to the Tea Party.

What’s most remarkable about the Tea Party movement to me is that it is strongly “libertarian” or classically liberal. Sure, there are conservatives in it – they’re clearly the majority – but even they tend to have a libertarian orientation to some degree. It’s that libertarianism that is such a threat to the political establishment. The Democratic Party has long been the party of “Big Government” but the Republican Party has differed only in claiming that it could tame Big Government and make it run efficiently. Of course, the GOP could do no such thing – it just gave us the slow boil, growing government just as deliberately as the Democrats but at a more relaxed and acceptable pace.

Since humans developed civilization a few thousands years after the last glaciation, the overwhelming majority of people have lived under various despots, dictators, oligarchs, theocrats, or some combination thereof. Self governance isn’t a new idea – it dates back at least twenty-five-hundred years – but it has been rarely tried and always fails. Given that history, I tend to be rather pessimistic about the future. Until the Tea Party movement got going, I figured that Obama would make the slide into oligarchy irreversible. Now, the possibility that enough people will rediscover the founding principles of the US to reapply them to governance gives me a scintilla of hope. So I celebrate Obama’s narcissism, ignorance, and ideology. He turned up the heat – soon he will have to leave the kitchen.

[realoldephart]

[Blowtanks]

[nohunt1]

Let's give credit where credit is due... George Bush (the Younger) managed to take a budget surplus left by the Clinton Admin. into the largest budget deficit at the time when he left office, while at the same time giving his buddies (campaign contributors, all of them)the largest corporate tax breaks in history. And when all the $$ holders realized that their portfolios, largely made up of mortgage "securities", were not worth the paper they were printed on, they all rushed to George to get them out of the hole, starting with Morgan Chase, whose top ranking director was now Bush's Sec. of the Treasury. Thus was born the infamous bail-outs that grew the Nat'l debt to historic levels....

Mr. Obama has tried to juggle the balls in mid-air, unfortunately the winds have proven to be too strong....

At the same time, corporate geniuses found out that they could buy all this really neat Chinese-made stuff and sell it at a great profit in the States, so they closed down their plants, sent people home, and watched as their profits balloon like never before.

So this is where we're at now...

[paulhager]

Originally posted by nohunt1:
Let's give credit where credit is due... George Bush (the Younger) managed to take a budget surplus left by the Clinton Admin. into the largest budget deficit at the time when he left office, while at the same time giving his buddies (campaign contributors, all of them)the largest corporate tax breaks in history. And when all the $$ holders realized that their portfolios, largely made up of mortgage "securities", were not worth the paper they were printed on, they all rushed to George to get them out of the hole, starting with Morgan Chase, whose top ranking director was now Bush's Sec. of the Treasury. Thus was born the infamous bail-outs that grew the Nat'l debt to historic levels....

Here's what I said in my post above:

The Democratic Party has long been the party of “Big Government” but the Republican Party has differed only in claiming that it could tame Big Government and make it run efficiently. Of course, the GOP could do no such thing – it just gave us the slow boil, growing government just as deliberately as the Democrats but at a more relaxed and acceptable pace.

See, I gave appropriate "credit". But, as I said in my post, the real credit goes to Obama who is so irresponsible that it is finally producing a backlash. If your argument is that Bush was a fiscally irresponsible President, that doesn’t excuse the disaster that is Obama. Obama made everything worse. That’s why his approval is tanking and why Obama loses to “generic Republican” in opinion polls.

Incidentally, the so-called "surplus" came from Social Security. Almost no one seems to know that and it is very significant. That surplus had actually been engineered back in the 1980's when the GOP controlled the Senate under Reagan. The surplus was a demographic hiccup, if you will, that could have been used to transition to a fiscally responsible system. It wasn't, of course.

Here's the other thing about the SS surplus. One of the few fiscally responsible things Baby Bush tried to do was to take a liberal Democrat plan to convert 1/6 of Social Security into a system of private accounts - basically 1/6 of the Chilean system which totally phased out pay-as-you-go SS. (Chile, incidentally, has the best economy in South America and has shrugged off the effects of the global recession.) The Democrats who proposed this were the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and ex-Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska in 1998 – when the surplus existed. Candidate Bush made the plan his own. (I vividly recall Bush announcing the plan in a press conference with Moynihan and Kerrey standing in the background.) There was a minor event known as 9/11 that completely derailed the Bush domestic agenda. He resurrected the idea but that was after he’d spent most of his political capital on the war. The idea went nowhere.

Incidentally, your statement about the “surplus” is somewhat ironic for me. The US pay-as-you-go, Ponzi scheme Social Security system was one of the issues I ran on in 1996 and 1998 as the Libertarian Party candidate for US Representative in the Indiana 8th District. In a 1998 TV debate, the question came up about what to do with the surplus, and I got to devote my 90 seconds to it. The following is from one of my campaign press releases, dated 25 July 1998:

Libertarian 8th District candidate Paul Hager reports, “I’m only 83% crazy now, and feeling better every day.” Hager explains, “When I ran in 1996, I was described as crazy for saying that Social Security should be privatized. Now that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and some other liberal Democrats are talking about 1/6 privatization, that means that I’m only 5/6 crazy. Things are looking up.”

As you can see, I’m very well acquainted with this issue.

The entitlement programs are going to fiscally destroy this country as they’re already doing to the Europeans. Bush was to be commended for taking up the Moynihan-Kerry plan.

One other thing, with respect to President Clinton. A few days ago, he said of the latest Obama “plan” that raising taxes in the midst of a recession was a bad idea. Yet Obama is intent on doing precisely that. A lot of people these days are comparing Obama to Carter. There is a much better comparison: Herbert Hoover. Hoover and the GOP dealt with a minor recession (minor compared with the near-depression that the Harding-Coolidge administration inherited from Wilson and solved by reducing government spending and lowering taxes) by raising tariffs, massively increasing spending on public works (the Hoover Dam was begun under Hoover’s administration), and enacting a big increase in the income tax rates (from 25% to 61%). Does any of this sound familiar? Obama wants to increase capital gains taxes – these are a double tax. Raising capital gains would have the macro-economic effect of stifling investment. It’s idiocy. It’s so stupid that it has to be pure ideology. When Clinton actually points out that raising taxes at this time is a bad idea, and he does so while Obama is standing on the same stage a few feet away, people should take notice.

Mr. Obama has tried to juggle the balls in mid-air, unfortunately the winds have proven to be too strong....

This doesn't wash. Canada got its fiscal house in order and is doing well. So did Germany. They've had to deal with the same global macro-economic problems - worse problems in fact because their economies are affected by the insanity going on in the US. The Germans, of course, are having to bail out the so-called PIGS, which is a problem the Canadians don’t face.

At the same time, corporate geniuses found out that they could buy all this really neat Chinese-made stuff and sell it at a great profit in the States, so they closed down their plants, sent people home, and watched as their profits balloon like never before.

So this is where we're at now...

The US is becoming a regulatory nightmare. The regulations are a hidden tax on everything made in this country and that’s a big part of the problem. It existed under both Republicans and Democrats but Obama has made everything much worse. That was the point I made above – Obama is a blessing in disguise for waking people up to the slide toward oligarchy happening under BOTH the Democrats and Republicans. Surely you’ve been watching as the EPA is becoming a law unto itself under this President. How about the NLRB’s actions now that it is controlled by Obama appointees? Businesses adapt. If they don’t, they die. If the regulatory and tax structure in the US favors moving business overseas (look what’s happening to Boeing’s attempt to open a NEW factory in North Carolina), then that’s what will happen. Too bad government bureaucracies don’t die like corporate ones (think Solyndra). The only way to kill government bureaucracies appears to be to kill the entire country – rather like killing a parasite by killing the host.

More and more Obama supporters are having buyer’s remorse. That’s a very good sign and just another indication that Obama went too far, too fast and lacks the intelligence, guile, and charisma to pull it off. But, maybe I’m giving the American electorate too little credit. Lincoln said it best: “You can full all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t full all of the people all of the time.” Some of the people will support Obama to the bitter end. The majority are going to boot him and his Democrat supporters out of office. After that, we’ll see what the future holds.

[Wolferz]

Let's all go to Yale and maybe get tapped into Skull and Bones. Be a part of the "in" crowd.

Ah, the age of greed.
What will be Obama' campaign slogan now?
It's Complicated"