ICYMI: Purple states, razing homes and the UAW heads south
Response to this feature last week was pretty good, so I’m trying it again today: a rundown of articles, essays, graphs, etc. from this week that are interesting but haven’t made it to my blog until now.
- Polls from so-called battleground states suggest President Obama’s re-election chances are worse than the national surveys would indicate.
- All the talk about spending cuts in the debt-ceiling debate ignores the fact that neither side is talking about anything more than slowing the growth rate of spending. And here’s a useful graph comparing the two plans by Speaker John Boehner and the one by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
- An astonishing chart showing the price of the average U.S. house in ounces of gold. It’s enough to make one consider selling gold and buying real estate — so long as you do it before banks reduce a lot of the housing stock by tearing down unwanted, foreclosed homes.
- Someone else argues the higher tax rates of yesteryear won’t solve Washington’s budget deficits unless we also return to ye olde spending levels. This example uses figures from the 1950s, versus my earlier suggestion about taking the example of the Clinton-Gingrich-Lott era.
- Talk about the UAW organizing workers at Volkswagen’s new factory in Chattanooga may mean that a potential Audi plant, for which Georgia might have competed, will end up in Mexico instead.
- Georgia’s newest Public Service Commissioner is making the rounds — Savannah, Albany, France — on the dime of taxpayers and campaign contributors, with the latter group contributing not only to his election but his personal business.
- Finally, a thought-provoking piece from the always-worth-reading Walter Russell Mead about the dark side of human progress, as revealed in Norway. (It’s fairly long by online standards, and I don’t agree with every word, but it’s worth your time.)
– By Kyle Wingfield
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70 comments Add your comment
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 28th, 2011
7:58 pm
gm: emplyees…their is nothing they can do…the south is control by the rednecks…to stupid to have a union…
————–
If you’re going to call working people “stupid”, you might want to pay a bit more attention to your spelling and grammar.
Grapedrankisha
July 28th, 2011
8:10 pm
You beat me to it, gm sounds like a cretin. And obviously a union member.
Linda
July 28th, 2011
8:17 pm
Obama has demanded a clean debt ceiling bill from day one. There is still criticism that the House voted against it.
The American people spoke loudly & clearly last November in elections all over the country. The most important election was in the House in DC, which inaugurated 87 new Republicans, most of whom were endorsed by the Tea Party. They have fresh faces, have not yet been corrupted by the lobbyists & the “established” Republicans & understand their mission in DC. What the Tea Party Republicans understand & what the “established” Republicans AND Democrats do not understand is the American people are fed up with business as usual & kicking the can. ALL their jobs are on the line, come 11/12.
$2 T in spending cuts are peanuts, but it’s a beginning in the right direction. There will be more.
Say what you will about the Tea Party, but the Tea Party just saved American taxpayers $2 T!!!
Warm Springs, Georgia
July 28th, 2011
8:23 pm
The only thing to fear, is fear itself.
Moderate Line
July 28th, 2011
9:55 pm
Linda
July 28th, 2011
7:45 pm
Has anyone else noticed that the $2 T in spending cuts that both the Republicans in the House & the Democrats in the Senate have come up with to cut over 10 years is about half of what the economic stimulus bill of almost $1 T cost? It’s taken weeks to come up with cuts of $2 T & only took a moment to spend $1 T, less than 3 weeks after Obama was inaugurated.
Has anyone noticed that Obama wanted to increase the debt ceiling by $2.4 T without any spending cuts attached to it? He wanted a clean debt ceiling bill to keep spending (paying for already spent bills) until after the 11/12 election. That means out national debt is projected to be $16.9 T in about 15 months.
Is anyone else alarmed?
++++
28% of the stimulus bill was tax cuts not spending.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/feb/10/jonstewart/stewart-claims-stimulus-bill-one-third-tax-cuts/
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 28th, 2011
10:09 pm
Our President Bush’s tax cuts worked. Revenues went up and unemployment stayed between 4-6%.
How did your Idiot Messiah’s tax cuts do?
Linda
July 28th, 2011
10:29 pm
Moderate@9:55, I know what I said TODAY & when I said it. No reason to paste & repeat.
The economic stimulus bill was a dud. It was nothing more than a celebration of Obama’s win by redistributing our tax money to blue states & to blue districts in red states. Whatever “tax cuts” were in the bill de-stimulated the economy & were a complete waste.
Read your site, especially the last 3 or 4 paragraphs. Nice try.
Maybe you should refrain from quoting Jon Stewart in the future.
Linda
July 28th, 2011
10:34 pm
Lil Barry, I’ve been happily married for over 35 yrs. but I told my husband tonight that you are one of my sweethearts. That you are! He’s read some of your posts that support me & he, too, thinks you are deserving of my devotion. Keep up the good work, my dear. You are awesome!
Jefferson
July 28th, 2011
11:37 pm
Well now you see how small the cuts that can pass are, the only way to get out of debt is to raise revenue. The cuts just ain’t there, and after these last weeks of back and forth, they won’t be there. If the GOP has the same deal like in 2000 where they have all three branches, they will too spend more money, they have since 1980, who thinks they won’t.
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 29th, 2011
6:12 am
Thanks Linda, you and your husband are obviously very bright people (based on your thoughts and opinions expressed here, not because you often agree with me.) Your well-researched posts are what I aspire to–I’m not nearly as energetic I guess!
real American
July 29th, 2011
9:53 am
Lil’ Barry Bailout
Two idiots finding common ground: I rather have a communist member living next to me then you and linda, at least the communist have love for his leader you and the idiot linda have hate for the President of the United states, you are the worst kind of American.
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 29th, 2011
11:12 am
Q1 economic growth revised down to 0.4%…Q2 growth lower than expected.
Your boy’s a failure. Unfortunately, he’s taking America down with him. So I guess that means Obozo is, by his way of thinking, a huge success.
independent thinker
July 29th, 2011
11:43 am
Mr. Boner”s plan is dead on arrival – so much for all the Republican grandstanding and chest beating including Kyle’s.
Logical Dude
July 29th, 2011
12:04 pm
Kyle says: All the talk about spending cuts in the debt-ceiling debate ignores the fact that neither side is talking about anything more than slowing the growth rate of spending.
You are right on the mark with this one. We won’t get out of this mess until we actually spend less than we take in. How will that happen? Well, after the 4 or 5 Trillion cut (to be decided this year – for the next 10 years), and then another 1 – 2 trillion each year cut from the deficit for the next 10 years. And when I say “cut form the deficit” that means cut spending AND increase revenues.
ChristieS
July 29th, 2011
12:25 pm
commonsense, you said: “I’m pretty sure in the last 100 or so years regulations/agencies have been passed/created that guarantee rights and working conditions for employees… just look at OSHA, minimum wages, equal opportunity, etc. Unions are not much needed anymore.”
The only problem with your logic is that one party here in America has been systematically trying to get rid of these workplace protections since the moment they were enacted. I’ll tell you what. I’ll support doing away with unions when you get the Republican Party to forever disavow any attempt to dismantle these protections that UNIONS fought to get enacted. Deal?
ChristieS
July 29th, 2011
12:32 pm
Lil’ Barry Bailout
July 28th, 2011
6:24 pm
Why did the national debt go up if we had “surpluses”?
We had an increasing national debt because the Congress went along with Alan Greenspan and decided that the surplus couldn’t be applied to the debt. Greenspan said it would be “bad” for our country to not have any debt. The theory being that being in debt shows our creditworthiness. ::shrug::
I like old Alan. Some of his decisions I absolutely agreed with; this one, however, I didn’t. I thought we should have paid down the debt. But then again, I don’t believe our country should be subject to an individual FICO score or under the guns of the credit rating agencies, either.
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 29th, 2011
12:39 pm
Incorrect. Try actually answering the question.
The correct answer is that there never were any surpluses. Clinton used the Social Security surplus as if they were tax revenues to make it appear there was a surplus. Now we have nothing in the SS “trust fund” but worthless IOUs.
ChristieS
July 29th, 2011
1:48 pm
Incorrect, yourself L’il Barry. You can look at this website http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/ . They used the CBO’s report on the matter. The significant paragraph is
“Clinton’s large budget surpluses also owe much to the Social Security tax on payrolls. Social Security taxes now bring in more than the cost of current benefits, and the “Social Security surplus” makes the total deficit or surplus figures look better than they would if Social Security wasn’t counted. But even if we remove Social Security from the equation, there was a surplus of $1.9 billion in fiscal 1999 and $86.4 billion in fiscal 2000. So any way you count it, the federal budget was balanced and the deficit was erased, if only for a while.”
The surpluses were real. Where people get hung up is on the difference between the public debt and the budget deficit.
The then-current surpluses were enough to get rid of the then-current deficits and leave quite a bit of money left over. But even if we had applied 100% of the excess surpluses to the overall debt, they would not have paid it off completely. We could have paid a significant chunk of it off, though.
The budget (then current) was balanced and we had excess funds that should have been applied to the overall debt. As people are fond of saying, that’s generally what fiscally responsible families do. They pay off their credit cards when they have the money.
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 29th, 2011
6:08 pm
So what happened to these mysterious funds that were a result of your imagined “surpluses”? The federal government doesn’t have a piggy bank. Real surpluses have nowhere to go but to paying down the debt.
The debt went up every your of Clinton’s administration.
There were no real surpluses.
Lil' Barry Bailout
July 29th, 2011
6:14 pm
And here’s the relevant part of your link that puts the lie to your claim:
“The debt the government owes to the public decreased for a while under Clinton, but the debt was by no means erased.”
The total debt is the debt owed to the public PLUS the debt owed to the trust funds when the government pilfers them to increase spending. The debt went up every year under Clinton.
No surpluses.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm