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[Heron TSG]

Well, churches are allowed to rent themselves out as halls, and government events are allowed to rent halls. (In the US). The government is NOT allowed to hold religious events there (or anywhere), obviously.

Heck, even my theatre group had rented out a couple of churches though. And we put on some questionable stuff.

One my fellow local Occupiers is the pastor of a church, so we meet there for the General Assemblies. They can make pretty good meeting halls in towns where there are few other large buildings.

EDIT: However, if other locations are available I think they should be used. The subliminal messages are a bit biased, I'd think.

[Truean]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/broke-sick-lonely-stanford-heads-122429951.html

"The Free Market without regulations."

And they're all saying the government should've done more before this. My my, didn't they say smaller government is better? Except of course when it's your own personal ass on the line.... Good luck getting your life savings back if you invested with this guy.Regulations = good.

There's a difference between regulation and fraud prevention.

Not really. Especially those regulations to prevent fraud. Disclosure forms and corporate 10 K and 10 Q forms: regulations to prevent corporate fraud. Most of the regs he violated SEC. The only way you can enforce fraud prevention measures is through regulations. Anything other than that and it's all clean up duty.

Regulations are how the executive branch enforces things.

Well, churches are allowed to rent themselves out as halls, and government events are allowed to rent halls. (In the US). The government is NOT allowed to hold religious events there (or anywhere), obviously.

Heck, even my theatre group had rented out a couple of churches though. And we put on some questionable stuff.

One my fellow local Occupiers is the pastor of a church, so we meet there for the General Assemblies. They can make pretty good meeting halls in towns where there are few other large buildings.

EDIT: However, if other locations are available I think they should be used. The subliminal messages are a bit biased, I'd think.

Problem being you're engaging the services of a religion. You can try, somewhat successfully even, to divide a religious group's "religious services" from their "secular aspects" but even then it gets dicey. You're still undeniably in a church, which has its own psychological impacts, especially on ballot issues effecting the congregation. More on point, you could very successfully say that engaging the services of the church would divert resources away from actual or potential businesses. Space rental becomes a less feasible market to break into when the church is in and subsidized by members. A business has nothing but fees to get revenue to cover costs. Churches on the other hand....

____________________________________________

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/09/20/5145120-chart-national-debt-by-president#.TxkLvBSw1FM.facebook

In other news it turns out its the Republicans who like spending.... Only Clinton, a Democrat has demonstrated any fiscal responsibility in recent history. It's funny how his budget surplus is so quickly explained away as "when you're in debt way more than the surplus, it's not s surplus." Who made the deficit? So he has to both generate a surplus and fix the prior presidents' mistakes for it to count? .... nice.

[GSD]

Just like to point out that that if you're just looking to compare republicans and democrats, that chart's misleading (although I'm in no way defending massive government spending).
There are 3 republicans depicted and only 2 democrats, one of whom's only been in charge for 3 years. Grand total that's 20 years of Republicans represented to 11 of Democrats, so yeah, budget increases are going to be weighted towards Republicans.
(Correct me if my numbers are wrong.)

[Leafsnail]

George Bush still racked up a heck of a lot more debt than Clinton or Obama even if you take that into account though (ie if you go by a debt/ year figure).

[GSD]

Absolutely. My objection is to making generalizations about 'all republicans' based on a misleading graph.

[Pnx]

Absolutely. My objection is to making generalizations about 'all republicans' based on a misleading graph.

Here's a more unbiased graph of the debt levels.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

As you can see the debt kicks off in WWI with Wilson, it's generally felt that Wilson poorly managed demobilising the country, and the post-war debt. This was actually around the time when the democrats and the republicans began to switch places, something I've never really fully understood.

It begins to drop with Coolridge who cut back on the government, opposed labour unions (something that was popular at the time due to people being worried that allowing unions would cause a communist uprising, oh the irony), and even cut taxes. Hoover then got saddled with the great depression, and passed that torch onto Roosevelt, who was well known for the huge amounts of spending he did to fight the depression, but honestly, the debt didn't start to really pile up until the war started. From then on after the war the various presidents steadily brought the debt down, until Nixon came along.

Nixon got involved in Vietnam, and disallowed cashing in the dollar for gold, which removed it from a gold standard, and basically opened the floodgates for inflation.
Some say this was inevitable and a good thing, I'm not so sure.

Nixon also stopped bringing down the debt, which was something that continued with Ford and Carter, until we get Reagan, who spent like crazy. Then G.H. Bush carried on that legacy.

Clinton then started to bring the debt down, before the next Bush started bringing it back up.

Then the recession hit. yay


Something that puzzles me is why when republicans are supposed to be in favour of smaller government, they wind up incurring more debt than democrats.

[Tellemurius]

During the Cold War era it was shoved to the side and they had dramatic military budget changes.

Why can't Clinton come back, challenge the 22 amendment, hes voted in anyways and congress seems to be getting away with it anyways

[GSD]

Well, one argument might be that size of government isn't directly proportional to overall government spending. A huge chunk of Bush's spending was on foreign wars, not to increasing the size of government.
Not justifying, just addressing the puzzle.

[Pnx]

This bipartisan system is all kinds of messed up.

[GSD]

Would your prefer more than or fewer than 2 parties, or just prefer that all the parties agreed with eachother more?

[Vector]

Not parties, people.  As many as appropriate.  I'm with George Washington on this one.

[zchris13]

Not parties, people.  As many as appropriate.  I'm with George Washington on this one.

George Washington was the man. had wooden teeth and didnt afraid of anything.

[scriver]

Not parties, people.  As many as appropriate.  I'm with George Washington on this one.

And what did he think?

[Luke_Prowler]

Not parties, people.  As many as appropriate.  I'm with George Washington on this one.

And what did he think?

He was really against the two party system

[kaijyuu]

As were most the founding fathers, but the two party system is the inevitable consequence of how we set stuff up.

I seem to recall some proposed laws abolishing parties but I haven't a clue how they'd plan to enforce that.