"Is there any way to pay for these programs without bankrupting America?"
Since every dollar paid by any of them goes to an American, it is impossible for them to bankrupt us. My left pocket and my right pocket cannot bankrupt both by moving bills from one to the other. Middle class entitlements are *transfers*, not net sunk costs.
If we don't want to pay them then we just don't receive them; if we do pay them then we also receive them. Either leaves us with the same net worth - whatever our own efforts can produce.
If we want to continue them, it is easy to fund them rationally instead of irrationally. There is no reason for a retirement age of 65 when people live to be 85. There is no reason for COLAs faster than CPI, adding real economic growth on top, as we do now. There is nothing magical or sacred about the breakpoints in the security security formula, and any and all of them could be gradually adjusted any way we like.
On medicare, only the government could possibly think the way to control the cost of something is to provide giant trillion dollar a year subsidies to it out of general tax revenue. Everywhere in the universe, subsidizing something makes its costs go up, not down. It does nothing to expand supply, it is pure demand thrown at the sector, and it predictably results in galloping prices.
To change that is easy, you means test and restrict everything above the means test limit to a catastrophic health care policy instead of paying for every aged person's every swab and tongue depressor. The only reason we do it the dumb way it is done now is to grab as many votes as possible by telling everyone the rich taxpayers will pay for their medicine. Of course the middle class pays for its own medicine, all we are dickering about is how many middlemen and how ridiculous a price.
"why spend more borrowed money on cap-and-trade"
Um, cap and trade is a tax increase, not a spending item. Sure we shouldn't raise taxes in the middle of a recession; the proposal is stupid top to bottom. But not because of debt. This kind of exasperating non sequitur drives me to distraction.
"How does giving billions of dollars to ACORN stimulate the economy?"
It doesn't, it rewards political supporters. All of the dem priorities are political not economic. Would that republican priorities were economic; instead they are ideological-purity driven and populist nonsense. The only grown up left in the room since Bush left is Bernanke, so naturally all the brat kids throw food at him.
"why has only a fraction of the stimulus money been spent 6 months later?"
Because bridges have lead times. All the actually required actions fast enough to matter were put in place by Bush or the Fed, or happen automatically as men owe less in taxes and receive more in relief and transfers, whenever the economy turns down.
"how exactly does that work?"
Bush has saved capitalism and the financial system, and it will lead to economic recovery this year. All of the slander and sniping directed at him is unjust and politically suicidal. It is mere populist doom mongering in a rear view mirror.
"Why won’t member of Congress read the bills before they vote on them?"
Because they are too complex and have to be in detailed legal language in this nation of lawyers and sniping partisan hacks. They have professional staffs for it. Another meaningless populist smear.
"when they ask their congressman to read the bills"
Because they show themselves rubes with no comprehension of what law is. They might as readily ask why presidential candidates don't receipt entire law libraries on the stump. It is a professional task that requires trained lawyers, dividing up the work to complete all of it.
"Was the cash-for-clunkers program meant to save the earth or the economy?"
Neither, it was meant to curry a little public favor and provide some desparately needed respite for the flat-on-its-back auto sector. The return on investment involved is pretty puny - I got about 3% running typical numbers on it - but it isn't an outright loss.
"How did Van Jones, a self-proclaimed communist become a special advisor to the president?"
Who can possibly care? But the answer is, obviously, to give an ear to his watermelon green-red ideology, since it is shared by plenty of those who voted for the president. Asking presidents not to listen to those who vote for them is more than a bit silly.
"why was this group allowed to write any portion of this bill?"
All bills are typically written by the industries directly concerned in them, coordinated and edited by professional staffers on the hill. The industries have the actual subject matter expertise. Only in a few of the "harder" and more technocrat bureaucracies is there anything approaching the same level of subject knowledge anywhere in government, and only in the executive branch. Meaning places like the pentagon, the Fed, the government labs. There is nothing remotely new in a particle of that, again it is just rubes being surprised at how the world actually works and always has worked.
"do they have any idea what these 1000 page plus bills"
Of course. Their staffers present them with position papers and options, explain the trade offs and which constituencies want what, and the pols then have to hash out detailed deals with each other to get a majority for anything. You might as readily ask why the president doesn't know at all times where all his colonels are and what they are doing. The staff exists to put principles in the know and condense decisions to managable terms. It is the same in every complex business, every CEO has to act the same way.
"impose on the American people?"
Freely elected representatives listening quite attentively to feedback from their constituents are not "imposing" anything. The rhetoric here is ridiculous. I hear people on FR routinely speak of "tyranny" and "totalitarian" this and that, and it is all utter rot and makes those engaging in it look like hysterical nuts.
"If the ‘public option’ health care plan is so good"
It is of course a path to single payer which the left very much wants, both for political base-building reasons and also because they honestly think that a monopoly can control costs but the present half-way house of private provision and blank-check public fundng cannot. I'd rather reduce that funding, but their motives in all of it are perfectly clear.
"why do they spend so much time talking"
Because they have this silly notion that they might be reasonably informed about all of the issues, and think they have heard from and tried to balance hundreds of different concerns in the matter, which is their job. If anyone thinks that 400 constituents would all tell them the same thing they haven't a clue what politics is. They might even all agree on a negative, but it doesn't mean there is anything that would satisfy half of them.
Should pols listen to voters? Sure, and they do. But pretending being a grass roots voter magically confers virtue and expertise on any man off the street is the same mushy nonsense that talks of wise latinas and thinks it sufficient qualification for a life appointment to a high court. The average voter doesn't know diddly squat about the technical issues in health care. Some know more than the pols - doctors e.g. - but that is not what Beck is pretending here.
"every campaign stop, baby kiss and speech you give is scripted?"
Go ahead, stay home. You vote because it is in your interests, not theirs. They don't need to beg you to vote, it isn't a favor.
"Why would you want to overwhelm the system?"
Referenceless non sequitur.
"Is using the economic crises to rush legislation through congress what Rahm Emanuel meant when he talked about not letting a crises go to waste?"
Certainly, he also meant get through needed reforms when the pain of bad institutions or laws is fresh in people's minds. To take a simple example, now is the right time to insist on exchange clearing for derivatives in financial markets. Emanuel may have the wrong policy objectives, but his appreciation for how things get enacted is purely pragmatic, and correct as a description of when and how change happens. If you don't want any changes, use that information accordingly, but don't pretend the remark is anything but an intelligent piece of tactical advice.
"What are the czars paid? What is the budget for their staffs/offices?"
Who cares? What matters is whether they are qualified and do their jobs well. If their policies stink, would you be happy to put up with crap policies that don't work because those implementing them took only a dollar a year? If their policies are brilliant and help millions of people and save hundreds of billions of dollars, are you going to pout and cry about it if they earn a living doing it?
This class war crap isn't any more attractive when right-populists engage in it, than when the socialist left did.
There are a half dozen reasonable arguments lurking in that mass of snide, but Beck either hasn't found them or can't stick to them. I've no doubt he thinks he is being oh so witty and clever in all of it. But all he makes me think is that urbane argument is as dead as William Buckley.
I’m not an economist, so help me out here, please.
If our National debt is over 11 Trillion and growing by the second, aren’t we already banckrupt? It seems to me that all that remains is to sign the papers and surrender to our debtors.
“Since every dollar paid by any of them goes to an American, it is impossible for them to bankrupt us. My left pocket and my right pocket cannot bankrupt both by moving bills from one to the other. Middle class entitlements are *transfers*, not net sunk costs.”
They why do we pay so much interest to the Chinese? Its because we aren’t taking from the right pocket and giving to the left. We are BORROWING and PRINTING money we don’t have.
You can't be serious. Your analogy has so many flaws. Since most of what they buy with the money given out of the right pocket goes to overseas companies there is one loss. But, your biggest flaw is the fact that since the govt. is involved in the transfer it's not an even exchange. There is always a "watering down" of the value once govt. touches a dollar. Also, you somehow choose to miss the most obvious reason this "transfer" is going to sink us: In ten years there won't be enough people paying in to the right pocket to support the amount of money needed to take out of the left pocket.
Who cares? What matters is whether they are qualified and do their jobs well. If their policies stink, would you be happy to put up with crap policies that don't work because those implementing them took only a dollar a year? If their policies are brilliant and help millions of people and save hundreds of billions of dollars, are you going to pout and cry about it if they earn a living doing it?
No. It's about Constitutionality and accountability. Apparently you don't seem to care about that.
We can't go bankrupt paying SS benefits to recipients who are using that money to buy foreign made goods, or medical expenses that end up going to foreign manufacturers? The money goes from one pocket to another, but it doesn't stay there.
Iceland went bankrupt "paying themselves", and we can too if the taxes necessary to fund the system cripple our ability to invest in our own infrastructure and industries.
If yours is the mentality of leadership we have to contend with, then this country is in worse trouble than I thought.
Whew!
God help us from those who think their idiotic, embicilic ideas make them the smartest ones in the room!!!
OMG!!!
Certainly throwing money at a problem is going to raise prices. Doh!
Certainly staffers have to do a ton of the work. However, to assume the globalist oligarchy is not essentially writing the bills is, imho, utter ignorance. On the other hand, while they write laws and install judges in locked goose-step with them . . . they don't really consider laws all that necessary to obey.
The following is interesting. A lot of your points seem grounded in sensible reality to a point. The paragraph below sounds like you haven't a clue.
2. Who said the pols are listening to constituents AT ALL? There was a thread hereon somewhere recently wherein a pol had the guts or audacity to admit that Congress hasn't paid attention to THE PEOPLE essentially at all for a very long time. Anything otherwise is a smoke screen charade.
3. Not imposing anything? What rock have you been living under? The global oligarchy has been deepening and broadening it's degree and overtness of control for a very long time and you don't think things are IMPOSED? I didn't realize they were still doing lobotomies. Sheesh. I'll post some evidence to the contrary at the end of this post, in their own words. One might have to be more than sleep walking to apprehend the truth of the words, however.
4. You think no tyranny is involved and deepening, worsening? What planet are you from? I gather you've read none of the quotes from the oligarchs themselves:
1919
A book entitled The New World Order by Samuel Zane Batten is published by the American Baptist Publication Society. In this book, Batten declares: "The old order passes from view, the new world rises upon our vision....We have vindicated the right of social control.....There must be developed a national spirit of service....Society must break the stranglehold of capitalism....The natural resources of the nation must be socialized....The state must socialize every group....Men must learn to have a world patriotism. World patriotism must be a faith....
1919
A book entitled The New World Order by Samuel Zane Batten is published by the American Baptist Publication Society. In this book, Batten declares: "The old order passes from view, the new world rises upon our vision....We have vindicated the right of social control.....There must be developed a national spirit of service....Society must break the stranglehold of capitalism....The natural resources of the nation must be socialized....The state must socialize every group....Men must learn to have a world patriotism. World patriotism must be a faith....
1928
A book entitled The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution by socialist H. G. Wells is published.
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He declares that "..The political world of the Open Conspiracy must weaken, efface, incorporate and supersede existing governments....The Open Conspiracy is the natural inheritor of socialist and communist enthusiasms, it may be in control of Moscow before it is in control of New York...."
1931
Historian Arnold Toynbee delivers a speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen in which he explains:
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"We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands,
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because to impugn the sovereignty of the local nation states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or publicist can perhaps not quite be burned at the stake but certainly be ostracized or discredited." --International Affairs (journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, i.e. the British version of the Council on Foreign Relations) Nov 1931, "The Trend of International Affairs Wince the War"
1940
A book entitled, The New World Order by H.G. Wells, in which Wells claims:
"It is the system of nationalist individualism that has to go....We are living in the end of the sovereign states....In the great struggle to evoke a Westernized World Socialism, contemporary governments may vanish....Countless people...will hate the new world order....and will die protesting against it."
1949
Towards World Understanding, vol. V, is published by UNESCO, and in this volume one reads:
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"As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only rather precarious results....
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For the moment, it is sufficient to note that it is most frequently in the family that the children are infected with nationalism by hearing what is national extolled and what is foreign disparaged....The activity of the school cannot bring about the desired result unless, repudiating every form of nationalism..."
1951 - July 31: The Chicago Tribune publishes an article, "OWI (office of war information) Propaganda machine Linked to Rhodes (Rhodes scholars) Men," stating: "Those who absorbed the Elmer Davis(Rhodes scholar and head of OWI), Office of War Information training have pushed the British concept of policing the world with American soldiers and economic aid and have fought for a world federation under which the United States would surrender its sovereignty."
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[You should recall that Billdo Klintoon was a Rhodes ‘Scholar.’
1959 - The West in Crisis by James Warburg is published, in which he proclaims that: "...a world order without world law is an anachronism....A world which fails to establish the rule of law over the nation-states cannot long continue to exist. We are living in a perilous period of transition from the era of the fully sovereign nation-state to the era of world government." James Warburg is a CFR member and founder of United World Federalists. He is also the son of Paul Warburg, an architect of the Federal Reserve.
1962 - March 10 State Department Study Memorandum No. 7, "A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, " written by CFR member Lincoln Bloomfield, in which he states: "A world effectively controlled by the United Nations is one in which "world government" would come about through the establishment of supranational institutions, characterized by mandatory universal membership and some ability to employ physical force....(But) if the communist dynamic was greatly abated, the West might lose whatever incentive it has for world government" [EDITOR, I THINK] It looks as if now the "communist menace" has been replaced by the "terrorist menace". And of course they can switch back to the communist menace or any other kind of menace whenever they want to.
1967 - March 26: Pope Paul VI writes Populorum Progressio and states: "Who can fail to see the need and importance of thus gradually coming to the establishment of a world authority capable of taking effective action on the juridical and political planes? Delegates to international organizations, public officials, gentlemen of the press, teachers and educators--all of you must realize that you have your part to play in the construction of a new world order.
1968 - The Subtle and Leisurely Penetration, a reference report from the George Mason School of Correspondence, is published by Education Information, Inc., of Sacramento, CA. It mentions that the thirty-two Americans to be Rhodes Scholars this year have been selected, and then states: "The stated objectives of Cecil John Rhodes and his friend, Sir Andrew Carnegie, included the reduction of the United States to a colony of the New World Order."
1970 - Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era by Zbigniew Brzezinski is published. He is a CFR member who will become the first director of the Trilateral Commission and President Carter's national security advisor. In this book he states: "Marxism represents a further vital and creative stage in the maturing of man's universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external, active man over the inner, passive man and a victory of reason over belief.....Human beings become increasingly manipulable and malleable...
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1990 - Mikhail Gorbachev quoted in Washington Post Feb 25 1990 "...A new world order is taking shape so fast that governments are well as private citizens find it difficult just to absorb the gallop of events....."
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President Bush (SR) quotes on new world order and United nations:
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"Time and again in this century, the political map of the world was transformed. And in each instance, a new world order came about through the advent of a new tyrant or the outbreak of a bloody global war, or its end." Feb 28, 1990---this quote is six months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August.
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"Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective--a new world order--can emerge...... We are now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders." --Sep 11 1990
1993 - April 21: General Colin Powell receives the United Nations Association-USA's Global Leadership Award, and he remarks: "The United Nations will spearhead our efforts to manage the new conflicts (that afflict our world)....Yes the principles of the United Nations Charter are worth our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."
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1993 - July 18: CFR member and Trilateralist Henry Kissinger writes in The Los Angeles Times concerning NAFTA: "What Congress will have before it is not a conventional trade agreement but the architecture of a new international system....a first step toward a new world order."
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1994 - the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor March 19**95 quotes Vladimir Zhirinovsky on Nov 9 at a press conference at the U.N. said, "There has long been a hidden agenda to merge America and Russia under the New World Order."
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1996 - May 11 Journalist Joan Veon interviews David C. Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World (19**95) and former Ford Foundation project specialist in Manila. In this interview, Korten claims that: "the World Trade Organization is creating a world government in which one organization which is totally unelected, wholly secretive....with the power to virtually override any local or national laws if those in any way inconvenience global corporations....It was a terrible shock (to those of us who supported Bill Clinton) when Clinton came in and GATT and NAFTA became the centerpieces of his policy....And in a sense, there was almost a seamless transition from President Bush to President Clinton in that regard....Our democracy has been rendered meaningless by big money. The truth is there are politicians (who) are owned lock, stock and barrel by the big money interests....Our elections create, to some extent, a facade of choice."
1996 - October 23: On "The Charlie Rose Show" on the Public Broadcasting System, Mikhail Gorbachev states: "We are part of the Cosmos. Cosmos is my God. Nature is my God....The future society will be a totally new civilization which will synthesize the experience of Socialism and Capitalism...."
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1972 - Oct, page 28 "There should be no surprise for longtime readers of the Bulletin....that those plans include the conversion of the United States into a socialist nation....and the merger of that enslaved segment of mankind with other Communist nations into a New World Order. That goal, under that very name -- originally written in bastardized Latin as novus ordo seclorum -- has been envisioned by a Master Conspiracy for the past two hundred years as the ultimate product of all its crimes against humanity, and of all its subversive onslaughts against western civilization."
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AND THAT'S JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG OF PROOFS AVAILABLE.
That's just the tip of the iceberg of the TYRANNY involved.
Ignorance has never really been bliss. It's far from it in this era.
How old are you Jason? I am in my mid 50's I've been paying into Social Security and Medicare all my life. the means test should be when you retire you get everything back that you paid in along with the employers payments too. A reasonable 3% interest per year should be a meager means of intreast. When you start taling means test you sound like some ahole from Democrat side of the isle.