If you don't believe the USA is in deep financial trouble, you will after watching this video by the head of the GAO on YouTube (GAO: "USA is living beyond its means"). This should be required viewing for every member of the legislative and executive branch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjZBOCAgR64

Phoenixguy-

If the elected officials in Washington would have listen to you advice and view that video maybe things would have been different.

Walker points out this is just a debt we are passing on to the next generation and how right he is.

For Obama to stand up and say there is no pork or earmarks in this stimulus bill...he must be snorting cocaine again!


Check out his double talk here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCVJNzfMSnc&feature=related

Ok, so this is after 8 years where you man Bush took budget surpluses and turned them into an extra $4-6 TRILLION DOLLARS of debt - and doubled government spending from 2001-2008.

So Bush busting the bank on wasteful tax cuts and war is ok, but Obama and team trying to keep the country from falling into a true depression is suddenly bad?

Bush and the Republicans in congress did it and almost everyone universally agrees it was bad. Democrats are currently doing it at an ever increasing levels using the argument "well, Bush did it so now it is our turn to do it". If it was bad when Bush did it, it is bad when Obama does it.

What it really boils down to, is if you have been living beyond your means, you must adjust your lifestyle until you are living within your means. There is no possible solution whereby you can preserve a lifestyle of living beyond your means by borrowing your way out of the situation. Consumers have gotten that message the hard was and adjusted their lifestyles accordingly. Now government needs to get the message. It looks as if government will only get the message the hard way as well.

Sancho,

I understand, but the point is, what is the alternative? The credit markets are not working. There is a near panic across the country. Would I prefer to not have them do it? Of course, but the alternative is the Hoover approach - sit back and hope the markets correct themselves.

I would prefer to see much smaller chunks of stimulus, and focused more on shit we 1)need and 2) will actually create jobs. So I would prefer a smaller package of public works - actually, I would prefer them just to say "we're doing $400Billion in spending and doling it out to the states to determine what to do with it. Infrastructure only - power lines, bridge repairs, water mains, sewers, new pipelines." I think spending money on tax credits - helping someone buy a house, what a fucking crock. Creating a new bubble isn't going to be that great, just a costly short term fix.

But, you can't sit back and do nothing. And no, two wrongs don't make a right, but I have little patience with conservatives who are bitching about balancing the budget and cutting spending after the 8 years we've just had. I don't think Democrats could piss away nearly as much money as Republicans did, and on something as truly meaningless as a bad war and tax cuts for the rich.

What about the Democratic controlled Congress the last two years. The were going to change everything when they took control in 2006 and everything got worse. Now Obama campaigned he was going to change everything and now he and his appointees don't have a clue what to do except blame Bush.

Please tell me why the Democratic Congress has no blame for what has happened in the last two years!

"Please tell me why the Democratic Congress has no blame for what has happened in the last two years!" Republican obstruction,
The Dems had just a one point majority in the senate and the Republicans did then what they do now, they stop everything from going through and blame the Dems for it. The Dems can be pretty clueless but the Republicans are flat out evil

I think I mostly agree with your assessment. Government should be building roads, bridges and stuff like that. It is a smart use for out of work construction workers. I could care less about 'green' energy but the energy independence argument can carry some weight with me for spending on energy infrastructure. But just dumping massive shitloads of cash willy nilly on failed state governments, failed city governments, everyone else and their brothers who got us into these problems in the first place is a recipe for financial disaster.

You guys may be surprised to know I am generally giving Obama high marks on 'most' things since he has taken office. He has surprised me to some extent. However this so called stimulus package thing is bad news. Very bad. It's going to end poorly.

Lets see. According to the progressive web site here http://www.nationalpriorities.org/costofwar_home , the Iraq War has cost us almost $600 Billion to date. A staggering expense. But of course these days $600 Billion is mere chump change the government can apparently pull out of it's ass at will. I suppose it helps to put 820 Billion into perspective though.

I'm starting to take these gold bugs out there seriously for once. I think I smell runaway inflation, if not hyper-inflation coming somewhere down the road.

I'm all for the $15,000 tax credit for buying a house though mainly because I will be buying a house soon anyway.;-) Thanks all you guys for chipping in. I could have done it without your help but hey, looks like I will pay very little for taxes this year. $15k may not seem like much to most of you but that's like 20 RT plane tickets to Asia for me on the tax payers dime. That is stimulus I can believe in. To bad all the sex work jobs have been effectively outsourced primarily due to over regulation of the US sex work industry, so that money will not be staying in the US economy.

I guess the Republican Congress of 6 years under Clinton stopped everything good that happened in the 90's.

Don't you understand that there is a balance of powers. Presidents get to much much credit when thing are good and to much blame when things are bad! How did a Congress that was much less popular than Bush gain bigger majorities?

The Democrats have control both Houses of Congress the last two years and they could have put the brakes on this economic downfall if the had the courage to do it!

Beachman,

There is one simple point that you simply cannot understand. Just because a lot of people think that Bush is a retard does not mean that people think that democrats are smart. Democrats are can be downright stupid too.

As far as the stimulus package, it is truly destined to fail. That said, this is not a democrat republican thing in my view. If Bush were in office for four more years, I think that the stimulus package would look eerily similar, and it would still fail.

Tell me something, Beachman. Why don't you have the courage to stand up to popular opinion and tell everyone you travel the world to pay for sex? Everyone knows prostitution takes place when it's illegal and quite acceptable in places where it's perfectly legal. Surely YOU have the wherewithall to lead a popular movement to make prostitution acceptable?

That was, of course, a rhetorical question. You won't do that for the same reason that congress won't legalize prostitution or marjiuana despite all the evidence as to its harmlessness. Too many people have a built-in opposition to new ideas; including those that put a damper on wild speculation in industry.

As for Bush getting the blame; remember the sign that president Truman had on his desk.

Freedom now legalize Prostitution

Someone get 1000 t-shirts printed up immediately and get back to me.......

CFK

Wombat88-

The States, not Congress have the right to legalize prostitution like Nevada.

As far as having the courage to tell people I travel the World to pay for sex where prostitution is legal....it is none of their business.

I fail to get your analogy comparing legalizing prostitution with why the Democratic Congress of the last two years failed to put up any resistance as the liberals put to all the fail policies of the Bush Administration concerning the economy. Especially since the Constitution clearly states: A PRIMARY AVENUE FOR EXERCISING CONGRESS'S POWER OF THE purse is the authorization and appropriation of federal spending to carry out government activities. While the power over appropriations is granted to Congress by the U.S. Constitution, the authorization-appropriation process is derived from House and Senate rules.


http://budget.senate.gov/democratic/crsbackground/overviewcongressbudget.html

Screechman-

You keep referring to the Democrat-controlled Congress of the past 2 years, but in doing so you demonstrate your ignorance of the workings of Congress. Yes, the Dems controlled the House, by a relatively small margin, but by enough that they could often get bills passed. The Senate, though, is/was a totally different picture. No one "controls" the Senate unless they have a margin sufficient to invoke cloture on a regular basis. The Dems did not have that margin over the past 2 years. They did not "control" the Senate. Most major legislative initiatives of the Dems in the Senate were blocked by a minority of 41+ Republicans there. In essence, the rules of the Senate give considerable power to large minorities (over 40 members). So, for all practical purposes, Republicans in the Senate had veto power over all legislation for the prior two years, and they used that power extensively to block actions by Dems. And, of course, if the Senate is unable to take action on legislation, it dies even though the House might have passed something. The Republicans used the rules to stalemate action in the Senate, thereby giving the Republican party, because of the power of the presidency, ultimate control of the legislative process.

Wana Dick

You think the Democrats plan to spend all this money is really going to fix the economy not to say the debt being shoved off to the next generation.

History proves massive spending won't fix the problem. The New Deal was a failure after all the money spent unemployment was still near 20% in 1938....only War War 2 fix the economy.


The Japanese spent massive money in the 1990's that is now call the lost decade because spending money didn't help.


Now the Democrats who control everything want to rush this bill and not even allow anyone read the full text of the bill before they have the vote.


So according to you the Democrats over the last 8 years while Bush was President.....could have use the same tactics you accuse the Republicans of using. So the Democrats didn't have the courage to stop all the massive wrongs that Bush is blamed for solely. They could have stalemated all the bad Bush policies but they were fucking cowards! That is exactly why there is supposed to be a balance of powers and the Democrats are just as responsible for this mess as Bush!


Now they have absolute control and Obama is already blaming Bush for regardless of what Obama and the Democratic Congress does.

The 50 percent plus American workers who pay no taxes don't care how much money is spent because they only will benefit while others pay their bills.

As long as their sugar daddy Obama promises to take from the taxpayers to support those who don't pay taxes they will drink the Kool-Aid.

"History proves massive spending won't fix the problem. The New Deal was a failure after all the money spent unemployment was still near 20% in 1938....only War War 2 fix the economy. "

And World War 2 solved the problem by requiring the government to spend even more money.

FDR's failings in regards to the Depression was in being too conservative in spending $$ to get people working again. The war removed any constraints, and it was the enormous spending during the war that jump started the economy.

The snippet that unemployment in 1938 was 20% ignores the reality that a few years previous, the New Deal got unemployment back to 10%, but a second plunge due to Supreme Court fiddling with New Deal programs cut the legs out from under the economy.

Lastly, Beachman suddenly becoming a fiscal conservative is a joke, given his support for all that Bush spending.

There goes Beechman and the fucking Kool-Aid. What's with these FOX morons and Kool-Aid?

And that "absolute control" bullshit. If the guy had a brain, he'd be worth arguing with, but it's the same old bullshit, post after post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8IV0vm3vUA

More surreal every month..........

As you know, the government is unfortunately at it again, this time with the biggest spending and money printing blitz in US history. In his April 3rd Interest Rate Observer, James Grant reports that the combined Federal Reserve and US Government response to this economic crisis, defined as the change in the Fed’s balance sheet plus the US Government’s fiscal deficit as a % of GDP, is some 30% of GDP. To put that number into perspective, that’s 10 times the postwar recession average of 2.9% and 3.5 times the previous record of 8.3% seen in you guessed it, the Great Depression. The next, even bigger crisis awaits, with this one looking like the mother of all crises.

Check out this article that I saw in USA TODAY's iPhone application.

IRS: 1,470 millionaires paid no income tax in '09
http://usat.ly/q5zENm

A lot of tax cheats out there...I wonder how bad we would be off if they all paid their fare share???