The First 100 days

This is the single reason why I have voted Libertarian in Presidential elections since Bush Sr ran for re-election.

 

I'm not a huge Tea Party fan due to the religious influence but I always thought the established Republicans fought them (especially the man with the tan) because they wanted to coast and pretend to be conservatives. The sequester probably would never have gone through without the TP. Or am I missing something here?

 

The early Tea Party wasn't really a religious or socially conservative phenomenon. Rick Santelli was sorta the father of the Tea Party movement. Is he a social conservative? I have no idea. It's certainly not something he wears on his sleeve if he is.

The problem is that the movement quickly got overwhelmed by motivated conservative activists, many of whom were social conservatives. Were they also fiscal conservatives? Perhaps on a superficial level, but that didn't motivate them, and they were largely ignorant about fiscal policy. The tendency for Tea Partiers to get behind Trump is pretty indicative of how fiscal conservatism had lost its emphasis in the movement. When he was running in 2016, there was pretty much nothing conservative about his fiscal policies.

 

I thought the Tea Party movement would have been much less significant if the president from the left at the time wasn't 1/2 black and the middle name Hussien. A college roommates was in one of the misspelled Tea Party pics in Arizona back then. He denies it but it was him.

 

So are you insinuating that people who are concerned about runaway federal spending are really just using that as a cover for racist hatred of that sorry sack of **** Obama?

 

Yes, he has been saying that for years. Tea party = racists who hate Obama

 

About one-third of the populace believe any resistance to Obama was race-based cause there couldn’t be any other reason. Similar reasoning applied to Republicans who are concerned about FBI and DOJ unfairly targeting Americans - must be people under the sway of Trump the dictator.

 

This is the type of race card comment that is extremely frustrating to me. The national debt was and is out of control. It doubled under Obama. Is it so hard to believe that someone would step up and say, "ENOUGH!" The Tea Party was attacked by Republicans too! Nobody wanted to deal with it. And what do you expect anyway? That the Republicans would not work with a Liberal? Is that so shocking that race could be the only reason?

Another interesting thing is how the Left mocked the Republican Party as the Party of No. Yet Obama tried to take some credit for lowering the deficit (how poor our standards are; a slowing of the rate of growth in overspending is cause for celebration). What would that deficit have been if the Republicans were the Party of Yes?

Where would we be without the sequester?

 

This would be the time for the non-racists who were concerned with debt to speak up. Crickets....They also were fairly silent under W.

 

Grover and Rand Paul are about it.

 

Thank goodness you believe there are two non-racists. That’s progress.

How do you feel about the debt growing exponentially?

 

If the numbers in this bill have been properly analyzed and if the deficit will grow then it was a mistake and our leaders should be held accountable. But they won't. And again, the race card is really unfortunate. Republicans didn't question Obama because he was black. They questioned him because they are hypocrites. If you'd focus on that then maybe we can talk.

I know three things and two real effects: The corporate tax rate was lowered from 35% to 21%. The tax tables have been changed and millions of people now have to pay less taxes. There is an excise tax of 21% for every dollar over $1 million for employees of non-profits (I'm sure Aggy has noted this). The effects are as follows that I can speak to: Utilities will be lowering their revenue requirements in rate cases to the extent of the tax as income taxes are recovered in the rates. This is a positive development for every single person in the US who pays a utility bill. Also, the extra money on everyone's paychecks will be spent and recycled into the economy.

Now, what effect will the rest of the bill have? Hard to say. We can stipulate that non-utility corporations will have extra money because of the lower tax rates. What will they do with this extra cash? Bonuses? Increase dividends? Reinvest in the business? Stock buy-backs? Give it all to the CEO so he can send it to his bank account in Switzerland? Many have tax loss carry forwards that were calculated at the higher rate. This will work it's way through their tax returns.

What else? I don't know enough to comment.

In my opinion, the only thing that will lower the debt (and obviously annual deficits) is the Captain Obvious comment of more revenues coming in than money going out. An industrial revolution is required and not a false one such as the .com boom in the 90's. Otherwise, somebody has to say no to spending and no to tax reform that DOES NOT RESULT in enough revenues coming in to exceed the spending habits of a government that is 100% political on both sides of the aisle.

 

Deficits under Bush were in the $200-400B range. Just saw the graph in WSJ or somewhere.

 

There were several major events in the 2000's. 9/11 and the two wars. Was all that the fault of the Republicans? Who gave legal authorization for the wars? Congress or George Bush? Hillary voted yes and Bernie voted no (giving a very eloquent speech justifying his vote; it's on YouTube). Those events had a major impact on government spending.

Then you have the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (signed by Clinton who was egged on by Goldman Sach's man on campus as Treasury Secretary: Robert Rubin) and the collapse of the stock market at the tail-end of Clinton's second term. Think about Enron; their stock boomed in the 90's and the capital gains tax revenue poured into the government to the extent of their stock. Then they later collapsed. All that tax revenue was due to fraud but Clinton prospered politically because of it. There's plenty of other legislative acts but I don't have the list in front of me. Is it all the fault of the Republicans?

 

So, you're saying if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and wears ugly football uniforms it might still be a gamecock?

The Tea Party arose around "national debt" is a CRISIS. 8 years later there seems to be no national crisis. Hypocrites that elected Trump wanted to "take their country back". I didn't say that they were racists. I said I don't know of the movement would have been as strong were he not black and named Hussien. We still would have had the movement. We may not have had the whole birther movement that also outed a **** ton of racists.

 

For some reason the country can't seem to pass a budget without 60 votes in the Senate. How many Dems will join in cutting the budget?

 

Why would him being black and named Hussein make the Tea Party stronger?

Why would somebody trying to follow the law regarding the requirements to be President make someone a racist?

 

1. Good question.
2. The whole birther thing was racist. He was a Hawaiian. Ted Cruz didn't have to fight the same battles and he was actually born in Canada. What's the difference?

 

Uh, I thought Trump made an issue of Cruz being born in Canada.

 

Maybe it was because people couldn’t understand how a faculty lounge Marxist became president of the US. If Obama could fake the voters about his ideology, what else could he have faked?

 

I've noticed you struggle to back up your claims and avoid providing facts, Bubba. What's up?

 

My OPINION is based upon what I see. I see it from my friends from college and in this red state in which I have lived a half century. I mean, there were more homosexuals in my fraternity than there are Democrats. I THINK that a decent portion of the Tea Party were upset that we had Barrack Hussein Obama as the president and they wanted to "take their country back". They were not in the universe of people who were complaining about increased debt under W. Yes, I saw some grumbling about it then. They are also not in the universe of people who are complaining about debt under Trump - I've seen VERY limited complaints relating to the increase of debt under Trump. I mean $1.5 trillion for MORE nuclear weapons? Some debt hardliner ***** about that, please.

How hard is that to understand? I don't think it's that controversial or even that debatable. And, I don't think there is any source that I could find and provide that would support this opinion. It's an opinion that had little validity until recently when things happened like the GOP doesn't want to hear from the CBO before voting on legislation and Trump is continuing to add on debt. I personally don't have a problem with debt. My point is, a large % of the GOP had a problem with it for the last 8 years and now? Crickets.

 

When you say, "I personally don't have a problem with debt", do you mean that all debt is good? If not, is there an optimal level of debt? What are the advantages and disadvantages of government debt? What is your reasoning?

 

Taking our country back IN MY OPINION (and I'm not one of those who ever said anything like that; neither did I ever bother to research the birther issue or give an opinion because I don't have one; he won and was OUR President) was born because of things like Reverend Wright saying, "G*d D*mn America. Well, unfortunately for Obama (I guess) there are millions of people who believe in this quote:

"My country may not always be right; but right or wrong, it's my country."

They love America and saw too much of it being attacked. The entire history of white people has become one of nothing but evil. On top of that it's a philosophy of governance. However you define socialism, Obama is much closer to it than the Tea Party. I believe there are stark differences.

As for the debt, only the Tea Party IN MY OPINION cares about it. Nobody else does and they should all be held accountable.

 

Saying having no problem with the debt wipes out the entire idea that Obama did not save us from a depression but instead kicked the can down the road with debt that saved bad business models and failed to spur an industrial revolution that would have poured money into the governments coffers. It means that doubling the debt was a sign of Obama's economic prowess. It means that doubling the debt was a good thing; not a bad thing.

 

Maybe we should elect Dave Ramsey. Beans and rice.

 

All debt is not good. Some debt is necessary. Home mortgages are a good example.

I'm not going to throw my lollipop in the dirt over deficit spending. MY WHOLE POINT is "where did these deficit hawks go?" They were obviously disingenuous. Why? I don't know. God knows, if the GOP had done that from 2001-2009 and from 2017 to present, we'd have a lot of lollipops in the dirt.

 

lollipop... ok, I smiled on that one. You're right. The hawks used the deficit for political purposes but they don't have the stomach to cut it. They certainly are not going to raise taxes because they think raising taxes will just mean more money to spend (i.e. it won't go to debt retirement). But you're right. Where are the noisemakers? They are fat cats in their roles as royals. There's no doubt about it (IMO).

 

http://www.cnn.com/2018/02/12/polit...rooks-spending-bill-new-day-cnntv1151AMVODtop

To be fair, there were 67 genuine legislators who voted against the recent budget on that issue. 67 out of 238.

 

Nobody is willing to touch military spending and entitlements. Without curbing either of those any talk of reducing our deficit is simply window dressing.