A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

[dxmnkd316]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

That was The Plan: you stop collecting tax revenue from the top down and let the country go bankrupt. The GOP basically performed a leveraged buyout on the country, funding the tax holiday they gave their donors with debt that would then cripple government services later. Bush's wars were the immediate cause of the 2006 collapse but the root cause was Republican tax policy that goes back to the 70s. They understood that even in the unlikely event the voters figured it out, they'd still have their money. A very nice crime.

I'm on my phone now and had to leave for lunch, but I disagree with the wars causing the collapse. I'll post a better reply when I get back to my desk.

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

You always throw this out, and can never defend it. How exactly has Obama thrown the fiscal ruin up a notch compared to where it was when he took office?

I always point to the numbers, then I always get a bunch of evasion. The yearly deficit numbers and total debt numbers are easily acquired via google. Obama's share of the debt far outweighs anyone else, even if you give him somewhat of a break the first year or two. But, all I get back is, as with most things, somehow it's all Bush's fault. As if Obama tries to restrain spending at every turn, which of course is ludicrous.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

So how much is Bush's fault and how much is Obama's fault? Did that responsibility immediately switch upon taking the oath of office? Do you have a different date? Or do you have some sort of model that assigns blame based upon time passed since the inauguration?

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

The annual numbers did start coming down when we got a Republican House to help reign in the free-wheeling spending when the Dems controlled everything. Obama's lucky for the Republican House, or the numbers the last few years would be noticeably worse.

 

[Rover]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

I always point to the numbers, then I always get a bunch of evasion. The yearly deficit numbers and total debt numbers are easily acquired via google. Obama's share of the debt far outweighs anyone else, even if you give him somewhat of a break the first year or two. But, all I get back is, as with most things, somehow it's all Bush's fault. As if Obama tries to restrain spending at every turn, which of course is ludicrous.

Ummmmm....yeah Bob, the unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts, and financial crisis isn't something you can solve overnight. Bush II's disasterous reign will take generations to overcome, forget about its effect only on Obama.

And you voted for him. Go figure.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

That was The Plan: you stop collecting tax revenue from the top down and let the country go bankrupt. The GOP basically performed a leveraged buyout on the country, funding the tax holiday they gave their donors with debt that would then cripple government services later. Bush's wars were the immediate cause of the 2006 collapse but the root cause was Republican tax policy that goes back to the 70s. They understood that even in the unlikely event the voters figured it out, they'd still have their money. A very nice crime.

As promised:

Not sure I agree with the highlighted.

I think the housing sector was a massive bubble that was burst by the spike in oil prices (the extent to which the two wars contributed to the oil spike can be debated) as well as other commodities.

See: http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/images/charts/Oil/Inflation_Adj_Oil_Prices_Chart_small.jpg

We had a massive increase in oil and gasoline prices that put a fairly sizable squeeze on the nation's spending power. You saw a fairly substantial shift from discretionary spending to non-discretionary spending. People weren't willing to spend extra money because of the uncertainty. Once the housing market started to get shaky, everything went to sh*t.

But this wasn't something that happened overnight, like you said. This was the rapid increase in the value of homes that gave people this false sense of wealth. The ones who owned their homes would take out HELOCs to finance their lifestyles and the people who were looking to buy wanted to keep up with the Joneses so they had to take out ARMs to afford the new (overpriced) house, the new car, braces for their kids, etc. This was worsened by the introduction of new loans that would be horrifying to anyone with any financial sense 10-15 years earlier. The 5-year balloons, NINJA loans, interest-only... Then came the subprime bundling we have all become too familiar with.

The problem is, we had eight years of regulatory decay in the commodity, housing, and banking industries. Unfortunately for everyone, the lapse in regulations, the stupid decisions made by consumers, the predatory behavior of the consumer banks, the extreme risk taking by the investment banks, the housing bubble, the decrease in discretionary spending, and the oil market all came home to roost within a year of each other in a self-"supporting" death spiral. Each worsened the effect of the others.

Once the credit crunch came through, you basically decapitated the economy's engine: Housing. This also caused employers to break out the chainsaws and start hacking off large chunks of their workforce because there was no liquidity in the rapidly contracting markets. Again, worsening the housing crash.

Getting back to my original point, that I don't think the wars caused this, for a moment. I could see an argument that we as a nation were too focused on the boogeymen overseas to see what was happening in our financial sectors. A fair point and one I probably didn't give enough credit at first glance.

So as I see it, it's a big circle jerk but if I had to put it into timeline view:

House Price bubble -> Consumer banks come up become predatory -> Consumers make incredibly stupid decisions -> Investment bankers make historically risky moves -> Oil "needle" pops housing bubble -> mortgage-backed securities become toxic -> Investment banks get f*kked -> Credit crunch -> Employers panic -> We're all f*ked.

tldr = 8+ years of deregulation and stupid decisions by the consumer bukaked the economy

 

[Kepler]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

tldr = 8+ years of deregulation and stupid decisions by the consumer bukaked the economy

I'll allow it.

 

[dxmnkd316]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Also, I don't think it was the GOP that screwed the pooch since the 70s. Politicians are far too stupid to pull off that kind of long con. I don't think they can see beyond the next set of polls. No, this was their financial backers that Keyser Sozed us. They basically set policy behind the scenes by dangling the donation carrot in front of the GOP while they wrote the legislation.

 

[Kepler]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Politicians are far too stupid to pull off that kind of long con.

Politicians don't set policy. They're horses, but the jockey tells them where to go.

Also, remember that pols aren't all stupid. For every Inhofe there's a DeLay. Criminality and intelligence are not related, so one would expect about the same percentage of pols to be intelligent as the rest of the public: 2.5% super smart, 2.5% moron, 95% +/- 2 SDs. Life is a 40-person homeroom class: one kid has all the answers, one kid's eating crayons, the other 38 are livin' the dream.

 

[cF[Authentic]]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Ummmmm....yeah Bob, the unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts, and financial crisis isn't something you can solve overnight. Bush II's disasterous reign will take generations to overcome, forget about its effect only on Obama.

I can't wait for 2054 when you're still whining about Bush and the budget and how it's all his fault for any and all presidents who spend out of their minds

 

[Critical Thinker]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

Ummmmm....yeah Bob, the unfunded wars, unfunded tax cuts, and financial crisis isn't something you can solve overnight. Bush II's disasterous reign will take generations to overcome, forget about its effect only on Obama.

How the hell do you fund a tax cut?

 

[Priceless]

How the hell do you fund a tax cut?

Raise taxes or fees somewhere else, or choose a pet project in the budget and cut spending accordingly. Bush II did neither.

 

[Kepler]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

How the hell do you fund a tax cut?

Tax cuts cut revenue, so you counter them with revenue increases elsewhere. For example, part of Reagan's 1980 tax changes was taxing federal education loans as income. He used that revenue to (very slightly) defray the cost in revenue of giving his cronies a big tax cut.

The way Republicans typically pay for their tax cuts is increasing the debt burden, because this has the feature of shifting the money from the direct recipient of the tax cut, the wealthy, to the people hurt by diminished services driven by debt, the middle class and poor. It's all part of the shell game where the GOP gradually moves money from earners to investors. That's what their donors pay them to do -- it's their whole point.

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

How the hell do you fund a tax cut?

Please let us know when the Thinker part kicks in. Thanks.

 

[Rover]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

How the hell do you fund a tax cut?

Cutting spending for one. Or raising revenues elsewhere (tariffs, fees, selling govt assets etc). Not advocating any particular approach, but tax cuts for GOP campaign contributors = big deficits as they invest the money overseas thus giving this country little benefit.

I can't wait for 2054 when you're still whining about Bush and the budget and how it's all his fault for any and all presidents who spend out of their minds

I for one wouldn't be surprised if 45 years after he left office Bush II is still known as the worst President in living memory.

But, to be fair, I promise to only bring up GWB for as long as knuckledraggers brought up Carter. Since Mittens was basing his campaign in 2012 on trying to recreate the 1980 election, I figure we have until at least 2044 depending on whether you dinosaurs try to make 2016 into a "repeat of 1980".

 

[Bob Gray]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

How the hell do you fund a tax cut?

It's their way of thinking and the lingual gymnastics they use to make it sound better. The money is the government's not ours. It's like when the federal government talks about a spending cut, but spending keeps growing, the cut is in the rate of growth. Or someone proposes to cut spending on a given item by 1 or 2 percent, and everyone dons sack cloth and bemoans the draconian cuts.

 

[ScoobyDoo]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

It's their way of thinking.

And the Republican way of thinking is to slash taxes for the rich and spend the money anyway. But, yeah, us *******s are the gymnasts.

 

[Rover]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

It's their way of thinking and the lingual gymnastics they use to make it sound better. The money is the government's not ours. It's like when the federal government talks about a spending cut, but spending keeps growing, the cut is in the rate of growth. Or someone proposes to cut spending on a given item by 1 or 2 percent, and everyone dons sack cloth and bemoans the draconian cuts.

So who owns the debt Bob, the govt or us. Or do you want to live in a bizarro world where its the people's money but the govt's debt? And we can pay it down by selling unicorns to the Zorbodians on a planet far way.

 

[Kepler]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

The money is the government's not ours.

As opposed to the way of thinking that if you cut my taxes by $5 and Romney's by $5M, but we each have to live without the services that money would have paid for, that's "fair."

The government is us. It's not like it's an alien force. When money goes to the government it still belongs to us, it's in public hands, being used to pay for stuff we as a public voted for.

The thing that cracks me up (and worries me) about the hard core right is how after 30 years of indoctrination they now hate government on sheer reflex, without thinking about it at all. It's just "gubmint bad, bidness good". At least our government is democratic, whereas business is plutocratic. It's as if the right has some deep animosity towards democracy and wants to see it destroyed.

I understand why the criminals hate the cops -- they impede their freedom of action. But I don't get why some citizens fall for it.

Government and business are two strong forces which, if unregulated, will run over us. The trick is to match the forces and oppose them, so they both provide appropriate services but neither takes over. The idea that all government is bad is lazy and wrong, and all it leads to is domination by the rich and powerful.

 

[jerphisch]

Re: A Discussion of US Immigration Policy

I always point to the numbers, then I always get a bunch of evasion. The yearly deficit numbers and total debt numbers are easily acquired via google. Obama's share of the debt far outweighs anyone else, even if you give him somewhat of a break the first year or two. But, all I get back is, as with most things, somehow it's all Bush's fault. As if Obama tries to restrain spending at every turn, which of course is ludicrous.

Below are the annual change in debt for Bush and Obama, removes all accounting gimmicks used to calculate the deficit. First off, Obama's share of the debt doesn't far outweigh, or even outweigh at all Bush's share. It will by the time his term is up, but not by far, that's 6.1B Bush and 4.8B Obama to date. The deficit is like steering the titanic, you aren't going to swerve around the ice berg at the last second, it takes time to change course. Since you insist on using the numbers, who would you was steering towards the iceberg and who away from it? Is Obama a small government spending reducing savior? Of course not. But do you know why you always get back that it's Bush's fault? Because it is. Why was the deficit rising so fast under Bush? Tax cuts, wars, and unfunded mandates. Did those go away when Obama took office? No, so the deficit they caused didn't go away either. The one major piece of legislation that has been implemented under Obama was funded, so let's give a little credit that he did try to restrain as far as impact on the defecit. The deficit under Obama would actually look even better had the R's been willing to budge an inch and meet the D's just a fraction of the way, but the no tax increase crowd wouldn't budge and hurt us all. But please, use the numbers and paint a different picture for us. Don't just say look at the numbers, provide some analysis with them that paints a different picture.

Clinton	2001	$133.3M
Bush	2002	$420.8M
Bush	2003	$555.M
Bush	2004	$595.8M
Bush	2005	$553.7M
Bush	2006	$574.3M
Bush	2007	$500.7M
Bush	2008	$1017.1M
Bush	2009	$1885.1M
Obama	2010	$1651.8M
Obama	2011	$1228.7M
Obama	2012	$1275.9M
Obama	2013	$671.9M