finknottle

Great piece. No surprise to any one. But the single most important point IMO is glossed over at the end. It's one thing for regions to fail because of bad government philosophy - it means growth elsewhere as smart people leave. But if we institutionalize that philosophy across the country, there will be no place to go.

Bush's spending has nothing to do with Neoconservativism. Neoconservativism is a philosophical approach to foreign policy, with very little to say about economics. There is nothing incompatible between neoconservativism and fiscal discipline. The neocons were not running the budget in Bush's administration.

Yes they have. Saddle everyone who has money or plans for a career with an obligation of 50k, and use that money to run the stimulus programs (money for planned parenthood, tuition subsidies to colleges, jobs for ditch diggers and UAW members, etc) for a few years. Then repeat.

I'm not so sure of that. We have a generation today who simply doesn't appreciate inflation and what it was like in the late seventies - IMO inflation is far worse than unemployment and economic contraction. It destroys your wealth, savings, and planning, and makes impossible any kind of economic decision-making. We may be worried academically about the spectre of inflation, but believe me if it hits 10-15% again you won't hear people crying about unemployment any more. They will be drowned out by those who have jobs, but whose salaries are effectively shrinking week by week.

Can you point to any post-WWII examples where a large expansion of public spending pulled a countries economy out of stagnation and/or recession? And compare them to examples where reducing taxes and denationalizing economic interests led to the same? I can think of no examples of the former and plenty of examples of the latter. Maybe I'm missing some...

I wasn't refering to this board, which strongly trends towards conservative and liberatarian. Rather, I was speaking of online communities overall. PPP was far from hostile to Bush - it was quite friendly. You don't see the MoveOn, DailyKos, and (other than some of the Paulites) the Bush-9/11-Oil-Bildersberg-NAFTA Superhighway conspiracy types here at all. But go to your average politics forum on most non-political sites and it is quite different.

Can we cut out the middle man here? Let's just raise taxes on anybody who works. Take that revenue and spend it on a campaign discouraging people from working, and telling them how to get welfare and foodstamps instead.

Wow - what rock have you been living under for the last 8 years? It was precisely the hatefull and unfounded crap that was always being spewed out that turned me from a Bush critic to a reluctant defendent. I'm still dealing with people who tell me Bush hates hispanics, is against AIDS treatment, invaded Iraq to take their oil, etc... No garbage is too unlikely to throw at Bush.

Even counting the recent crash, your 401k returns are still ahead of your social security returns over just about every 10+ year interval you would wish to measure. (Note that SS is 'progressive.' The interest they pay you on your contributions is higher, at maybe 4%, if you are poor, and zero or negative if you are near the maximal contributions.) That assumes, of course, that you will still be able to draw out your social security payments at all in 15 years.

And those in the middle who resent gaining office with bull sh-- promises, even by politician standards, then blowing them off and getting away with it.

I actually went to the IIPC website looking for the most recent whatever, not wanting to rely on the press takes, and was surprised at how difficult it was to find anything. 99% of the available content is specialized research, and it is difficult to see what their official overall position/conclusion is unless you read the Annual Report on Climate Change. But unless I'm being numb-skulled, it appears that that is the only document you can't download unless you are an institution.

Remember, if a job is no longer worth doing, it's important that the position still be filled five years from now.

This is why the stimulus bill has to be passed this week! By 2010 all that borrowing and spending down the road may not seem like such a good idea any more.

At least your criticisms are potentially on the mark now. Her lack of visibility right now is consistent with her doing what she is supposed to, and she shouldn't be hammered for that. If you want to hammer her on something, go after the appropriateness of her nomination. The inept campaign she has run tempered by her personal skills suggest she is more likely to succeed as a Special Ambassador than as the head of a large beaucracy.

I'm not sure what you mean. I thought the only thing they had to say about that was a parenthetical debunking (that's too strong a word - new argument maybe?) of the assumption that it was a global phenomona. Whether they are correct or not, it shouldn't make any difference to the climate change debate. Did they say otherwise?

And how would this be any different from the qb's we've drafted over the years?

Remember that our courts likes to extend our rights to everybody else.

I'm pretty sure you can not do that, believe it or not. If somebody breaks into an abandoned house on your property and is injured falling through a floor, for example, you are liable.

Your 'little ice age' was a pimple on the buttock of the longest warming plateau of the Ice Ages. All you have to do is look at a graph and see that - unless we are breaking out of the 3 million year old Ice Ages cyclic pattern for some reason - the natural pattern would be a sudden return to extensive global glaciaration some time within the next thousand years at most. This proves nothing. I'm just sick of people pointing to the little ice age as some kind of supporting example without bothering to look at the charts. They are remarkably clear. The little Ice Age is about as relevant as a small three day drop on the Dow during a two year Bull run.

Everything you said is true about the people at the bottom as well. And who is the person at the bottom? Maybe its the entry level loan officer who knows there is no way an applicant will pay off their loan, but it is bank policy or maybe even an FHA requirement to approve it. They are wiping out shareholder value, and they don't care because they are getting paid. They are even more insulated from reality than the exec's. So why do you only rail against the CEO's? What about all the employees, top to bottom, who happily drew checks while the bank owners lost their money? Do you really think that the janiter ever gave a rats ass about company value?

Gee, I'd like to do some intellectually honest scientific research, but I just can't concentrate with all these controversial talk shows and demonstrations. What is your take on Copernicus. Garbage science, given the circus atmosphere? Any research worth its salt is usually performed amidst skepticism and controversy - otherwise nobody is impressed.

Because that philosophy will undermine the bailout of the Big 3. Where money meets jobs is where you will see the true committment of the Democrats.

You can not do mathematics. The numbers Obama is throwing about dwarfs these deficits you are using as a benchmark. Between TARP and this first stimulus bill (both with the Democrats in firm control), we will increased the national debt by about two trillion. That doesn't even include Obama's first budget and the growth in entitlements this year. It's an impressive pace of spending, about as much as Bush ran up his first term (with 9/11, homeland defense expenses, Iraq and Afghanistan, ...). Bush averaged increasing the debt about $500b a year over his two terms. Obama is halfway there and hasn't even budgeted for his first year in office!

Fixed it for you.

Look again at where they have sent SecStates. It is usually to (1) confer with Ambassadors in country, or (2) to give a speech to a broad group in a way that says the US is *particularly* interested. The SecState is no more negotiating with the country than is the President when he visits. Any negotiations are already a done deal, it's just theater and appearances. Here is Colin Powell's travels in his first year: --02/16/01 Travel to Mexico --02/23/01 Travel to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Gaza and West Bank, Jordan, Kuwait, Belgium --04/11/01 Travel to France and The Balkans --04/20/01 Travel to Canada --05/22/01 Travel to Mali, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda, and Hungary --06/03/01 Travel to OAS General Assembly in San Jose, Costa Rica --06/11/01 Travel to Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Poland, and Slovenia --06/26/01 Travel to the Middle East --07/17/01 Travel to Rome, Italy --07/22/01 Travel to Japan, Vietnam, Republic of Korea, People's Republic of China, and Australia --08/13/01 Travel to The Bahamas --09/10/01 Travel to OAS Special General Assembly in Lima, Peru and Colombia --10/14/01 Travel to Pakistan, India, and APEC Ministerial Meeting --11/09/01 Travel to New York for the United Nations 56th General Assembly --12/03/01 Travel to Europe and Eurasia Just how much important confering and negotiating do you think this accounts for, and how much of what Colin Powell did personally here do you think reflects the priorities of our diplomatic efforts? The guy didn't go to Russia at all, and went to Mali before China! No, because *that's not the job of the Sec of State!* The job is to ensure the smooth running of the US diplomatic machine, not to run around doing free-lance negotiation. And that means that the bulk of the job is managerial - tending to the embassies, bureaus, and task forces; looking out after them, setting their directions and policies; playing peace-maker among the Ambassadors; and representing the Department to the President. Travelling and meeting foreign counterparts is a pretty unimportant part of the job. Ok, so to you the mantra of change means we do it differently. Fine. So why do you assume that the SecState has to be the uber-Ambassador you have in mind? Why not the VP, or the House Speaker? And if you make it the SecState, then who is actually going to run the Department of State? Honestly, this whole depate is about as silly as if people were complaining because the DCI isn't spending all his time at the stations in Islamabad, Kabul, or Bagdad.