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[mainiac]

Actually the economy is worse with Obama's stimulus than it would have been without his stimulus, according to his own estimates. So no, it probably could have been better.

Once again, a lie.  The economy is worse after the stimulus then the economy was projected to get before the stimulus.  Entirely different.  To put it more directly:
"It's worse then we expected."  Furthermore, it had already gotten worse then those projections before the stimulus really started.  The stimulus didn't even pass until unemployment was at %8.2 and unemployment was already at %7.8 and quickly rising before Obama was even in office.  That's not even to mention that unemployment had already jumped 2% in just a few months before the election even took place.  But no, apparently Obama used black magic to travel back in time with Barney Frank and prevent G.W.B. from creating utopia in order to enact his socialist central planning schemes of extending unemployment benefits and repairing some roads.

Nikov, 100% pure unadulterated lies, all the time.

[counting]

About "double tax" and remove foreign tax credit, its NO WHERE plausible to become a policy. First, there is treaties there to prevent such thing, and against so many accounting rules. Second, it will create the opposite effect, since it's the "foreign gain/income" that will be affected, not their "operation cost". It will essentially driving all the international mega corporation out of U.S. boarder. Only leaves those sell goods domestically remains. It's effectively cut-off your businesses from the world.

[PTTG??]

Not until the last republican is strangled with the entrails of the last democrat will the United States prosper.

[mainiac]

Not until the last republican is strangled with the entrails of the last democrat will the United States prosper.

Yes, damn those democrats and their bending over backwards to find common ground among the meager portion of the population that gets off its' ass and votes.  Why don't they just get the stuff that a tiny slice of the voting population supports done already?!?!?

[RedKing]

Yeah, I don't buy the whole equivalency thing. It's become a lazy way for people to complain about politics. Don't get me wrong, the Democrats have plenty of things to hate about them (the lack of balls and utter inability to play politics, for starters) but they are not "equally the problem".

Sorry. They're just not. And I say that as someone who's never been a Democrat and never will be.

[mainiac]

The really hard part about being a realistic socialist in the US is that you spend a lot of time arguing for policies that you don't want simply because they will prevent policies that you absolutely hate.

[PTTG??]

Yeah, I don't buy the whole equivalency thing. It's become a lazy way for people to complain about politics. Don't get me wrong, the Democrats have plenty of things to hate about them (the lack of balls and utter inability to play politics, for starters) but they are not "equally the problem".

Sorry. They're just not. And I say that as someone who's never been a Democrat and never will be.

Fair enough.

The really hard part about being a realistic socialist in the US is that you spend a lot of time arguing for policies that you don't want simply because they will prevent policies that you absolutely hate.

Then let's agree to put all our energies to bringing about the alternative voting system.

[Eagleon]

Re: Outsourcing, brain drain, etc. It's always bugged me a little seeing people complain about China, et. al., gaining a real scientific community. Like there's some latent resentment that anyone else but us could improve things. I'm not saying it's here in this thread - it's a fine line between being resentful about our own R&D decreasing and wishing everyone else would let us be the heroes - but if we want improved technology, better science, and cooler toys, the one thing we do need is more people. You can spend more to get more up to a point, but it drops off when the idea pool thins.

I hate to say it, but the only reason this started happening in the first place was a growing and pervasive anti-intellectual bent after the cold war. Blaming taxes, a president, a lack of spending, political maneuvering, foreign competition, it's avoiding the issue. It's a cultural blindspot - we love technology, we hate what it takes to improve it over the long haul, namely hard scientific research and education. I think we have a weird fear that somehow spending in this area is a 'waste' if it doesn't make immediate and obvious progress, or if someone else is spending on the 'same thing', but that's not how science or education works.

I don't have anything constructive to say on the matter. Cultural warfare? Maybe we'll get some kind of reverse-backlash from a scientific golden age in China, leading to growth in our own sector. We might have to wait a while for that. Secession! That always works. I don't know.

[Impending Doom]

Actually the economy is worse with Obama's stimulus than it would have been without his stimulus, according to his own estimates. So no, it probably could have been better.

Once again, a lie.  The economy is worse after the stimulus then the economy was projected to get before the stimulus.  Entirely different.  To put it more directly:
"It's worse then we expected."  Furthermore, it had already gotten worse then those projections before the stimulus really started.  The stimulus didn't even pass until unemployment was at %8.2 and unemployment was already at %7.8 and quickly rising before Obama was even in office.  That's not even to mention that unemployment had already jumped 2% in just a few months before the election even took place.  But no, apparently Obama used black magic to travel back in time with Barney Frank and prevent G.W.B. from creating utopia in order to enact his socialist central planning schemes of extending unemployment benefits and repairing some roads.

Nikov, 100% pure unadulterated lies, all the time.

Nikov is wrong because the economy isn't worse than it would have been without the stimulus, it's worse than we thought it would have been without the stimulus.

Oooo-kay...

[RedKing]

Actually the economy is worse with Obama's stimulus than it would have been without his stimulus, according to his own estimates. So no, it probably could have been better.

Once again, a lie.  The economy is worse after the stimulus then the economy was projected to get before the stimulus.  Entirely different.  To put it more directly:
"It's worse then we expected."  Furthermore, it had already gotten worse then those projections before the stimulus really started.  The stimulus didn't even pass until unemployment was at %8.2 and unemployment was already at %7.8 and quickly rising before Obama was even in office.  That's not even to mention that unemployment had already jumped 2% in just a few months before the election even took place.  But no, apparently Obama used black magic to travel back in time with Barney Frank and prevent G.W.B. from creating utopia in order to enact his socialist central planning schemes of extending unemployment benefits and repairing some roads.

Nikov, 100% pure unadulterated lies, all the time.

Nikov is wrong because the economy isn't worse than it would have been without the stimulus, it's worse than we thought it would have been without the stimulus.

Oooo-kay...

Let me give you an analogy to make it easier to understand. Patient comes in wounded, losing blood. The doctor estimates he's losing a pint every 20 minutes and uses bandages and a clotting factor to slow the bleeding. Trouble is, patient was bleeding internally as well so the actual rate was more like a pint every 5 minutes. Thanks to the doctor's intervention, the blood loss is slowed to a pint every 10 minutes. Still bad, and now worse than the initial estimate, but it was not the intervention that caused the higher-than-expected blood loss.

Nikov would be the guy sueing the doctor for malpractice and saying the patient would have been better off without medical care.

[Aqizzar]

Not until the last republican is strangled with the entrails of the last democrat will the United States prosper.

Yes, damn those democrats and their bending over backwards to find common ground among the meager portion of the population that gets off its' ass and votes.  Why don't they just get the stuff that a tiny slice of the voting population supports done already?!?!?

I'm probably being too snide even for me, but I have heard actual reporters from the Wall Street Journal say this, and it's more or less empirical in a way.  Consider: if you ask business people and politicians what the number one reason for why the American economy is still in a slump after almost three years, their answers will eventually come back around to "uncertainty".  Uncertainly about what, you'll ask, and they might rattle off some vague notions of wondering about the future of the tax structure and interest rates.  But the reality of the situation is, there's about a trillion dollars in fungible cash sitting in banks not being loaned, and somewhere in that ballpark worth of capital investment money floating around America not being spent, all with federal interest rates at essentially zero, and the economy is going nowhere.  And I think at some point, it does come back to the personal attitudes of the rather small number of people in the country who actually have the resources to make major economic decisions.

They're sitting on cash because they're "uncertain" about the business climate, and because they're enraptured by low-risk high-payoff fields like finance and healthcare have become, so they're sort of waiting for everyone else to move so they know it's "safe" to invest again.  But you think about the people who have that kind of money.  Think about how they view politics.  The simple fact is that most American businessmen, large and small, tend to be Republicans.  This isn't a value judgment, it's just a fact.  For every Warren Buffet there's a dozen David Koch's, and the world of small business and individual entrepreneurs is largely Republican, as anyone with a wealthy relative can attest.  And, whether their criticisms are factually grounded (and plenty are) or not, you'll be hard pressed to find one who likes Barack Obama.

So yeah, what I'm wandering my way to, and people much smarter than I have wandered their way to the same point, is that the economy will continue to suck as long as a high profile Democrat is President, no matter the actual economic conditions, because business owners and investors large and small will continue to be "uncertain".

[Impending Doom]

Let me give you an analogy to make it easier to understand. Patient comes in wounded, losing blood. The doctor estimates he's losing a pint every 20 minutes and uses bandages and a clotting factor to slow the bleeding. Trouble is, patient was bleeding internally as well so the actual rate was more like a pint every 5 minutes. Thanks to the doctor's intervention, the blood loss is slowed to a pint every 10 minutes. Still bad, and now worse than the initial estimate, but it was not the intervention that caused the higher-than-expected blood loss.

Nikov would be the guy sueing the doctor for malpractice and saying the patient would have been better off without medical care.

So it's worse now than we thought it would be before the stimulus, because there were other problems at work that we didn't know about at the time?

[KaelGotDwarves]

Namely the fact that Republicans AND Democrats are more worried about the politics of beating the other "team" than actually helping their country.

Mostly Republicans, judging by how close they were to letting the country default unless the Dems compromised.

[RedKing]

Let me give you an analogy to make it easier to understand. Patient comes in wounded, losing blood. The doctor estimates he's losing a pint every 20 minutes and uses bandages and a clotting factor to slow the bleeding. Trouble is, patient was bleeding internally as well so the actual rate was more like a pint every 5 minutes. Thanks to the doctor's intervention, the blood loss is slowed to a pint every 10 minutes. Still bad, and now worse than the initial estimate, but it was not the intervention that caused the higher-than-expected blood loss.

Nikov would be the guy sueing the doctor for malpractice and saying the patient would have been better off without medical care.

So it's worse now than we thought it would be before the stimulus, because there were other problems at work that we didn't know about at the time?

Precisely. Or that some of the problems we knew about were far more serious than we realized at the time. Like the lack of lending by banks. We ponied up more money to the banks, so they could "grease the wheels of the economic engine", and instead they're sitting on it and hoarding it. Couldn't have really predicted that, especially when the rhetoric coming from banks was that they'd just love to give out loans but didn't have the capital outlays. Like almost everyone in the financial industry, they were lying through their teeth in a successful ploy to get more money.

[Phmcw]

Let me give you an analogy to make it easier to understand. Patient comes in wounded, losing blood. The doctor estimates he's losing a pint every 20 minutes and uses bandages and a clotting factor to slow the bleeding. Trouble is, patient was bleeding internally as well so the actual rate was more like a pint every 5 minutes. Thanks to the doctor's intervention, the blood loss is slowed to a pint every 10 minutes. Still bad, and now worse than the initial estimate, but it was not the intervention that caused the higher-than-expected blood loss.

Nikov would be the guy sueing the doctor for malpractice and saying the patient would have been better off without medical care.

So it's worse now than we thought it would be before the stimulus, because there were other problems at work that we didn't know about at the time?

Dude, your congress just shot your economy in the guts : You have a strong money, and a strong, united country. Therefore, your debt rating is EXCELLENT. And now, you've shown to the world that, because your politician are crazy, you could actually completely default without warning.
In an economy based on trust, how do you think this will impact your country?

That's just one example.