United States Heading towards a Depression?

My new theory is that obamanation is a masochist and enjoys being spanked by you and that is the reason he continues posting.
You should start charging him, S/M services are not cheap.

 

Ignoring for a second the fact that the rulebook is not how it works in practice, ignoring the interesting "good faith effort" to obtain photo ID or deny payment (does that mean that if a good faith effort to obtain photo id from a voter results in no ID being obtained, the government can legally reject your vote?), ignoring the fact homeless peopel rarely have any identification of any kind, but continuously receive treatment, I think the ground rules laid out in that guide were quite interesting. Specifically:

Loving it. I paid $130 the other day for a doctors visit and antibiotics for my daughter. Looks like that is the last time I'll have to pay for medical treatment for the minor scrapes, bruises, and infections common to childhood. Just have the baby sitter haul em into the clinic. You really think any illegal pays for their children's medical care, per the current rules of the program you posted?

I would accept a spanking from that woman, so long as I was permitted to suckle afterward....

 

Exactly... NONE!

See below:

 

The American people are a generous, giving people. Comes with being a Judeao-Christian nation.

Now, I don't know of anyone who is going hungry but I do know of people that are forced to ration their food because they are so cash-poor.

I partially agree. I believe that medical treatment should be a basic human right and I believe that the framers of the Constitution thought so, too. The problem is it can't get done economically here in the USA. Look at the vicious pigs greedily feeding at the trough from Obama's health care plan. It insures that the rich get fantastically rich. Yes, it will provide health care but at such gigantically overcharged rates that the government will bleed out. And that's not counting the new ways that will be found to game the system in the coming years.

No, it sounds cold.
Remember the 1970's? If you had a high school degree and no college you could get a job in a factory, building airplanes, toasters, televisions. You not only got a paycheck big enough to raise a family on, you also got a sense of community from the healthy friendships that developed.

Here in Massachusetts I used to hang out at a coffee shop where I would talk to the middle-class high school kids. Smart, good grades, no college and no idea of what kind of future they can have. What are they going to do for the rest of their lives - deliver pizza? Not everyone is cut out for sales, and few people have the inner drive to start their own business. It's nice to rant about personal responsibility but in my experience few people have it - they NEED a job with a boss that tells them what to do.

Tax the rich? Wait, before we even have that discussion I think that Washington D.C. has proven that they aren't responsible enough to spend the money we already send them! When I call my Democratically-elected representatives about funding a project and I'm told get a lobbyist or get lost, well, something is broken.

You can cite all the stats you want, but in my opinion government waste is the real culprit. Much of that has to do, admittedly, with the lawyers that run the government. We have such a litigious society that only the lawyers benefit. Look at the divorce lawyer scam - both sides get lawyers that tell them "I can get you whatever you want". A year later the former couple's cash is depleted, firmly in the pocket of both lawyers. The estranged couple is forced to come to an agreement, something they should have done in the first place. Look at the price of malpractice insurance to protect against stupid lawsuits. And I've already written about how while driving in Texas years ago I got rear-ended by an illegal alien. After we exchanged info he tried to steal my driver's license & I had to fight him on the side of the road to get it back. While HE hit ME, HE sued ME and the insurance company settled. I could not sue him because, as I was told, it's impractical to take someone here illegally to court. That's the fucked-up legal system we have.

You can ignore it because it ain't true.

Here's something liberals can actually DO, instead of spouting inexperienced bullshit: next time a begger asks you for money, offer him $5 if he will just show you a form of ID.

I tried this as an experiment a few years ago. Five beggers later I was out $25.

 

Colder than throwing donuts at the overweight? Its a bit like throwing bailout cash at over extended banks. Failure is a good thing.

Just because they have a job and a boss does not mean they can be personally irresponsible. Those are two different things. You drink on the job, you get fired, unless you have Gloria Alred to make the case that your work environment was hostile (to your drinking), in which case you sue your employer for wrongful termination, wait a few years, rinse and repeat.

We need government. City. County. State. Federal. They all serve a purpose.They will all be wasteful, the bigger they get, but they all serve a purpose. Considering that, the goal should be to have the local governments have the most control, a bit like Mitt Romney's argument for socialized health care at the state level, but not at the federal level.

Lets be honest. Communism and socialism work terrific in very small groups. In a single church, or a single community, freeloading comes with it's own brand of shame and ostracism, which you will never receive from the state or federal government. People who genuinely need help are recognized and helped.

When the State or Federal government try and redistribute money in an impersonal and impartial way, they remove the shame, and in that action, they breed government dependency. If there were a role for them to play, it would be figuring out how to fix broken communities.

While I am inclined to accept your anecdotal story as commonly true, the idea that homeless, poor, and minorities are unable or unwilling to obtain photo ids is at the very core of every argument made against photo ID mandates for voting. I personally believe it is true.

This type of argument is made by bleeding hearts who don't care about illegals voting or bleeding our safetynets (medical and financial) dry. At the moment, at least in California, our public services practice this philosophy, whether it is true or not.

 

The Mexican government has been working with the United States Department of Agriculture to increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.

USDA has an agreement with Mexico to promote American food assistance programs, including food stamps, among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.

“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance,” the USDA explains in a brief paragraph on their “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics With Nutrition Assistance” web page. “Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”


...


It is up to the states to determine if applicants or households are qualified aliens. In some circumstances, SNAP benefits can be conferred upon people who merely state, upon penalty of perjury, that they are in the country legally.

“Applicants need only attest that they are citizens of the United States, and the state must accept that attestation as conclusive,” Sessions explained in his letter. “Some states currently voluntarily participate in the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) program, which allows administrators to run a simple check to determine if non-citizen applicants are eligible for benefits. States that do not use SAVE to verify alien status may simply accept the applicant’s attestation of legal status as a substitute for verification, or, alternately, may accept submitted documents without checking their veracity.”




Source


How timely to our little discussion.

 

That is the idea that neo-cons pushing all over the world. Government is incompetent, so lets everything be run by private companies and be paid by people or government. Things are too expensive, so lets fu*k the poor and let them die. Why nobody asks if the government is incompetent, why shouldn´t we change it for competent government? There are many ways the government can provide essential services and use the profit for society benefit but God forbid that we should put any dent in elites profit. For those of us who are older, we remember the discussions about privatizing water, electricity and phone companies out the municipalities control and make it private so they can provide better service and price. Does anyone think that service or price is better today? Why should such simple businesses be in the hand or private sector and generate enormous profits for few when it is such simple business to operate? Do you really think that you need geniuses, inventors, capitalists, marketing specialists to convince people that they need water, electricity or phone?
There are some services such as hospitals or senior citizens home that effect the life and death of people, do we really want to let this decisions be taken by profit motive? When is it more profitable to let someone die instead of spending the money to save it? How about when you are 85 and in need of someone take care of you, do you really want the number of times they take you to bathroom or give you water be dependent on how much money they can save on the cost of employees to increase the profit? If these businesses can be run, paid by government and still make profit then why shouldn´t public organization run them efficiently and save the profit for the society? Where has it written in the law that everyone who works for a public organization must be stupid and everyone who works for private company is a genius? If private companies are such efficient organizations and every one is a genius then what happened with all the banks that lost billions of dollars?
Lets forgot about the BS that government is incompetent and will always be incompetent and work for a competent government that can take care of essential services which is necessary in modern civilization and let the private sector work on innovation and production of new products and services which does not put people life in danger and their work and risk taking can be justly rewarded.

 

It was deliberate. What have the few big banks gained from this? Gigantic monopolistic integration. Their competition either crumbled or were absorbed, all with the help of US tax money.

ALL HAIL WALL ST.

No-one claims private business workers and owners are geniuses. The public and private sectors are both run by people. Others could turn your argument on its head and claim people like you believe the government can do no wrong and only private businesses and corporations are evil.

The main problem with the public sector is that incompetency is not punished. Their workers operate with a much greater degree of impunity than those in the private sector. This is a fact. My mother works in a prominent position in the NHS and has told me lots of stories over the years.

By the way, why do you keep using "neo-con" as an insult towards people like ObamaNation? If you claim he is one, where's the insult? It's like calling you a commie, right?

 

You totally missed the point, I never said that government can do no wrong. I actually in my previous post mentioned that there is no difference in high ranking people in government and elites and both want to steal everything which is not nailed to the ground.
My argument was that if people claim that private businesses can run essential services and make profit, it should be possible for public organization to run those services and save the profit for the benefit of the society.
If there is a problem in public sector, then it should be dealt with and fixed but the answer is not to dismantle it and give it to private sector so they can rob the whole society with free hand. Just think of one simple element that if government run all the water, electricity and phone companies and keep the price and profit in the same level as present time, how much they can decrease the taxes which results in more money in the society that in turn helps the consumption and businesses.

 

No, you missed my point and you are completely wrong. (and what is a neo-con?). As I'd argued before there is a disconnect today between a private company's success and C-level compensation. Look at Dick Fuld - he mismanaged Lehman into the ground, bankrupted an established financial institution, and got a big fat bonus for it.

We can't keep making the arguments that private companies can be left to themselves because that doesn't work for companies too big to fail. Look at General Motors - these guys fucked up, I told you all they were fucking up, I told you months in advance they were going to demand a bailout, and yes they demanded a bailout.

At it's core, the corporate system in the USA isn't what it was in the 1990's. I can tell you from being on the inside that in some businesses C-level officers are now being rewarded for failure. Look, a small or medium-sized company has to do good because management lives and dies by company profits. But in very large companies, it's the rise of the mediocre. Skilled executives often aren't being promoted, instead it's the rise of the mediocre - people that won't rock the boat. It's reverse-Darwinism.

Many of you work for yourself or work for small companies. My history has been with huge, 10,000+ employee companies and the softening I see in C-level management sickens me.

O', "Failure is a good thing" when it really is a personal failure. But I am seeing orchestrated failures, deliberate failures, failures that make upper management millions of dollars while the stock drops and employees get laid off. Look at Lehman Bros, Kodak, GM.

Conservative extremists and liberal extremists now have something in common - their view of the world is unrealistic. Shit, the corporate world has changed!

* C-level: CEO, CFO, The Board, etc.

 

Failure is a necessary thing, always. Take the examples you cite.

Lehman, a company allowed to fail. Yay! now if only all the others who were not allowed to fail were broken up, and those fat slobs who ran them into the ground fired.

Kodak, a company in the chemically processed photography business. Its a bit like being in the covered wagon business. Buh bye. BTW, they had a chance to evolve to digital photography, and keep their stranglehold on the business but it didnt happen. Failed management died as it should have.

GM, a classic example of mismanagement rewarded with bailout dollars by means of special interests. Classic example of what we consider too big to fail, and what it breeds. Buh bye.


@Gworld:


Government is rarely evolutionary (efficient,learning, and self improving) because it doesnt need to be. Evolution, when it comes to government is called a Revolution. Therefore, by definition, government will be less competant than the private sector. The reason private sector businesses are normally so good is because, if they aren't, they die. Failure. A very necessary part of success.

Enter Democracy, governmental evolution without revolution. Leaders of non-working government disappear to be replaced by potentially better leaders.

Enter gerrymandering, Union and Corporate money, lobbyists, special interests, career politicians and an end to evolving government in exchange for entrenched interests.

Enter a culture that believes government is too complex to understand and refuses to reject failed leadership.

What you wind up with is the failure and decay you see in the California public schools.

What you wind up with government wages doubling those of the private sector for the same work.

What You wind up with a system that is guaranteed to fail if it doesnt evolve, and the longer it takes to evolve, the more that evolution is going to feel like a revolution.

 

I didn't miss your point G, I know exactly what you're saying. I've heard it so many times before from likeminded people. You may not have said the government can do no wrong but your suggestions do actually indicate this from your continuous bashing of the private sector as if it's a scourge.

But they're two completely different methods of operation. A public organisation never creates profit so where's the incentive to strive for continuous better performance? Don't say the incentive is "for doing good" 'cause then I'll know for sure you're a loon. The fact is people largely aren't altruistic and you can't force them to be. This applies to the public sector just as much as the private.

Public can never be as efficient as private for the simple reason I stated above - the public employees are given a massive sense of entitlement that does not exist in the private. I know this from first hand experience! Take the NHS, it's facing upcoming huge problems because the ageing workforce will not leave and they cannot be sacked. The best thing for a public organisation to do is to contract out the work while handling the finances in a way that means they break even.

Seriously Julian, we're not in fantasy land. What you're saying would make perfect sense if we did, but we don't. The reason the state doesn't have a monopoly over water and electricity is because we learned from several decades of its incredibly poor performance. The tax payers ALWAYS end up subsidising the prices and losses, so you actually pay more than if it were privatised. This is exactly what happened over the years of the coal industry and its unions. It's common sense that more and smaller companies can do a better job than one monolithic one.

You're putting too much faith in human nature. Just like Marx and every other lunatic since him. We're not robots.

Forget dogma and idealistic ideologies, look at performance and facts. I'm not defending privatisation because I'm some shill or because my ideology demands I should, I'm looking at history and results. The fact is what you're wanting has been tried, in many countries, and failed. Price controls murder a nation. Taxes can never be reduced while an industry is nationalised, they go hand in hand as subsidies are absolutely required in order to maintain the static prices and compensate for fluctuating demand. Evidence for this is rife if you look at England before Thatcher made her changes - not to say what she did was completely right.

 

What makes the human nature of people in private sector any better than people in the government. Every one is assuming the private company is more efficient and better but is this really true? Look at crowin examples and I can give you hundreds more. The management of big companies and leaders of the governments are both side of the same coin. No interest in the society and only interested how much they can steal and get away with it.
Lets look at how efficient the private sector is. In California after privatizing the electricity the prices went up 10 folds. In Montana the price increase was 5 folds. Obamanation probably still remembers the Enron mess and the blackouts which was its result. Even in your own country the government had to bail out the British gas with 5 billion. What a great idea, give public utilities to private sector, let them raise the price 10 folds to rob the consumers and when they fail, tax the people so you can give them money to survive.

 

now it is not... as of now European crisis begins....

 

Seriously, do I have to repeat myself again? I didn't say humans in the private sector are inherently more efficient, I said they have to be if they want to keep their jobs because unlike the public sector they do not have the large degree of impunity i.e. if they don't perform they are sacked. A great example is the porters at the public hospitals. At a local hospital in my city, one night one of the managers discovered they had a widescreen TV and a Wii in their cabin. They were slacking off big time during night shifts. When they were discovered no-one was sacked or even repremanded as they threatened to involve the unions. See what I'm saying now? They usually wouldn't get away with this a private business.

I think you're generalising all private businesses small and huge. Your theory that those at the top want to rob from society only really happens in large corporations. With companes like Enron it's not as black and white, do you know how much government corruption was involved in that?

 

You remind me of the city council in a small Swedish town. The city council wanted to decide if a site outside of the city should be used to bury nuclear waste and the whole discussion took 10 minutes and permit was granted. After that they want to decide where in the street the bicycle stalls should be installed, so people can park they bicycles. They were discussing it for two days and couldn´t make a decision. The reason was simple, nobody understood anything about nuclear waste but everyone had a bicycle or knew someone who had the bicycle.
While you are worried about some porter having a wide screen TV, the banks are robed of billions of Euros and the management in the same banks get billions in bonuses for permitting the robbery and making the business bankrupt. People are not knowledgeable about a big picture in economy and instead concentrate on petty jealousy about their neighbor or some one that they have heard about.

 

Why do I remind you of those knuckle heads? I've been to Sweden a couple of times and I can tell you I'm no fan of the United-Soviet-Kommunes-of-Sweden and its unbelievable bureaucracy. They can't even get their healthcare system right. They use taxes to subsidise treatment but you still have to pay a small administration fee, talk about inconsistency.

I'm willing to bet that the reason they were so quick to bury radioactive waste is because they were leaned on, whereas you don't get lobbyists for bike racks.

Why do you find it so difficult to understand the actual meaning behind my points? You know my porter story is just an example of public worker impunity, if you want to discuss corruption then so be it, but don't twist the pragmatics of my words; corruption and robbery were not addressed in my post.

I agree most have little knowledge about macro economics, but I'm not one of those. I studied micro and macro economics for a time at university before my second degree.

You'll get no argument from me that corporations can get away with corruption much more easily than public organisation and this is due to accountability. My post was about incompetence impunity because you started our conversation about efficiency. Don't start a conversation about one thing and then refute my words because they don't explain something else.

 

They were not leaned on, the simple fact was that city council was made up of average people with no more than high school education who could not grasp the discussion and didn´t have anything to say about it and for that simple reason when the motion was put on the agenda then they simply rubber stamped it. It is the same story that when they tell people if the banks fail, it will be an Apocalypse and the world will end, the average citizen will accept it as absolute truth. They used the same method to force Ireland to borrow the first 20 billion and then the next 80 billion to save the banks which people of Ireland have to pay now but in reality all people who loaned the money to the banks in Ireland was considering it gone and lost and they couldn´t believe their luck when government agreed to pay it back. Of course in the mean time nobody told them that some people in the know bought some of those loans at very low cost and get fully paid when government agree to pay up and made huge profits.
Of course nobody tells people in Ireland, UK, Spain, Greece,... that people in Iceland fought and told the bankers to fu*ck off and there was no Apocalypse and Iceland economy is doing very well after couple of years.
I am glad that you accept it is easier for big corporate to get away with murder which proves there must be a way to make efficient and honest public organizations that can take care of essential services. I have nothing against private companies but lets reward them for real work, initiative and risk taking instead of just awarding them a license to steal.

 

WE have those, they are called NON-PROFIT's. And "public" non-profits, with "PUBLIC" being the key word (not government).

Government does not make a profit. Government does not create, it consumes. Business makes a profit which in turn benefits society. Those profits translate into jobs and tax revenue. Business consumes services, where as Government consumes money. When a business consumes services it in turn generates money (and tax revenue) create jobs, and creates more services and products that generate jobs, money, tax revenue.

Government consumes money. That's it, that's all.

Non-profits generate a key benefit to society, but tax revenue is not one of those benefits.

Non-profits take advantage of key tax exempt status in order to help facilitate and generate revenue to help accomplish whatever goal that non-profit is seeking to reach. The "non-profit" status exempts that organization from certain tax liabilities and generates very little if NO Tax benefit. Most non-profits generate NO jobs and are strictly voluntary. To that end, again, no jobs = NO TAX REVENUE.

The benefit of most non-profits is to one key segment or niche' market and or localized community and or item of interest.

Private Business Benefits ALL OF SOCIETY ALL OF THE TIME.

Private Business buys commercial property that pays 3 times the going rate of similar residential property and in turn pays PROPERTY TAXES that provide services such as fire, police, local government, builds roads and other city services, and educates our youth who in turn become property owners, workers, business owners and in turn TAX PAYERS.

Non-profits in most cases pay NO property taxes. Most have NO property.

Both private business and non-profit businesses have a place in society. Both have great benefit to society. One produces the revenue that provides for all our services, the other picks up the slack and aids causes or other services that society or segments of society may be missing.

Government does NONE OF THIS.

Government's role in all of this should be to PROTECT, UPHOLD AND DEFEND THE CONSTITUTION OF THESE, THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - AND GET THE FUCK OUT OF THE WAY.

That's it, that is all.

Once people on the left end of the spectrum realize that, both private business and non-profit business will flourish.

You really think that government is controlling and keeping prices for basic services DOWN?

Julian, businesses succeed when they keep profit and productivity up, not the same or less. This is why your method fails. Markets forces and consumer demand dictate prices and profit levels, not government.

Your thinking is flawed.

 

I can accept the possibility of sometimes my thinking can be flawed but since I am definitively sure that you CAN NOT think and the best we can hope from you is to parrot what you have heard correctly, I will waste no time discussing with you.