Jonah Goldberg nails it. http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2012/11/05/presidential-election-romney-obama-voting/1684277/
well, i've said we're screwed either way. its just a matter of when we're going to take the lumps and how hard.
Goldberg is a far-right racist chickenhawk who was busted for lying in print that his books have been nominated for Pulitzers Prizes.
I tend to agree. I sat and looked at my ballot and didn't want to vote for either Obama or Romney. We know Obama will continue to make certain the economy is permanently destroyed and Romney offers no viable plan to undue what has been done.
In some ways, my take is the opposite of all that. For many reasons that I've said in a bunch of other threads, I would like to see Obama win. That said, my taxes will probably be lower with Romney.
mobes23, How much spending by the government is enough? At 25%, economic growth sucks and the middle class is rapidly losing ground. It would be nice to see them prioritize their spending and then explain why they need to spend more. EDIT - that's 25% of GDP by the Feds, not counting state taxation/spending.
Quoting from your link: The difference between entrants and nominated finalists Anyone whose work has been submitted is called an "entrant". The jury selects a small group of "nominated finalists" and announces them together with the winner for each category. However, journalists who were only submitted, but not nominated as finalists still claim to be Pulitzer nominees in their promotional material. For example, msnbc.com's Bill Dedman pointed out in 2012 that financial journalist Betty Liu was described as "Pulitzer Prize-Nominated" in her Bloomberg Television advertising and the jacket of her book, while National Review writer Jonah Goldberg made similar claims of "Pulitzer nomination" to promote his books. Dedman wrote, "To call that submission a Pulitzer 'nomination' is like saying that Adam Sandler is an Oscar nominee if Columbia Pictures enters That's My Boy in the Academy Awards. Many readers would realize that the Oscars don't work that way — the studios don't pick the nominees. It's just a way of slipping 'Academy Awards' into a bio. The Pulitzers also don't work that way, but fewer people know that."
What have you had considered for the Pulitzer, MARIS61? LOL Seems to me he didn't do anything out of the ordinary among journalists and others.
The idea of the tax and spend liberal has been pretty well established by the right. In my mind, the don't tax and spend conservative is worse. Bush spent a lot and conservatives didn't seem to bat an eye. You think spending will go down with Romney, but I don't believe it will and I think that's where we differ. Admittedly, Romney has moved around some and I have a hard time knowing exactly how he will go about spending.
I agree with you, mobes, that the "don't tax and spend" guy sucks. I'm on the record for saying that if the American people (as stated by their elected representatives and leaders) wanted to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers overseas (for good or bad reasons), then it should be coming out of their skin and/or pocketbooks. If we rang up an extra 100B a year in "war costs", then we should be setting up the "war sales tax" or whatever. If you want Medicare/Medicaid to stay as it is, then septuple the payroll tax to pay for the 800+B in expenditures that you didn't budget for and aren't creating. Maybe then we'd get popular support for things like entitlement cuts and fewer troops sent off to war. Two things that Romney's already said are that he wants to get 12M people to work (paying taxes) and pushing to repeal PPACA. Just those two things seem to be bringing the budget back closer to where I want it to be.
On the spending side, I think PPACA is worth it. Yes, it might be expensive, but I would absolutely hate for it to get repealed. In fact, that is one of the main reasons that Obama has my vote. Romney would just take us back to the old, flawed system. With Obama, I think there is a good shot that some of the problems with it get worked out and we end up with a better health care system.
It has nothing to do with making care more affordable. It just redistributes the costs. If it was something like subsidizing more doctors to go to med school, or building more hospitals, or making rules that standardize costs for certain procedures, then you might have a point...but an MRI still costs $3k. A heart attack still costs $150k. That's not "affordable" at all.
You're ignoring that trifle about 60 million Americans who can't afford insurance, now becoming insured.
It could be semantics, but I think it makes health care much more available. I have a close relative who was diagnosed with MS when she was in her 30s -- under the old system she is virtually insurable for the rest of her life. We have a good neighbor friend who went back to college in her late 20's and went without health insurance for 4 years. I have a friend who is a fireman in West Seattle -- a crazy high percentage of his calls are low income people who dial 911 with some trumped up reason for transport to the emergency room (the easiest way under the old system to get access to healthcare.) If you don't have health insurance, you might be able to game your way through the old system, but that's not nearly as good as having access to health care with no barriers. I work at at biotech that's focused on cancer therapies and it kills me the number of times that people put off going to the doctor until the cancer has progressed. Granted, some of that is people just not wanting to go to the doctor, but if you take away the insurance/payment barrier, the chances of patients promptly seeking health care would go up.
Both tax & spend and borrow & spend are something of strawmen here. I asked about spending, and just spending. My concern is that our elected officials would spend whatever the hell they want (they actually do), and then stick us with the bill. Instead of 25% of GDP, how about a more (historically) reasonable figure in the 15%-20% range? Why is $3.6T in spending more necessary than spending $3T? THEN the corollary would be why should we pay an extra .6T because govt. wants to spend it?
