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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (708140)	4/10/2013 9:13:08 AM
From: SilentZ	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572838

>You describe deficit targets as "arbitrary," even though anyone who has witnessed your double-standard can figure out why you describe them as such. It's not a double-standard. Is all debt bad? Is all debt equal? >I pointed this out to you, only to have you pretend that I don't even know what that word means. The context in which you used the word was incorrect! Of course I'm going to point that out! >To me, it's pretty clear that deficits have become unmanageable for many reasons, the biggest one being partisan politics. And that factor, more than anything else, is the real "arbitrary" reason. You seem to assume that partisan politics exists for no reason at all. I freely admit to being partisan. But I pick the side that jibes the most (even if not that much) with my values and the things that I've seen work. >Now if you want to be part of the solution, and not part of the problem, then you might want to let go of certain ideas such as the notion that people will die if their benefits happen to be cut by a small percentage. It WILL kill some people if they suddenly have $100 less a month and can't pay their rent or have to decide between food and medicine. Elderly people DID die in squalor before Social Security. And your side called Social Security "communism." And there is more than significant contingent among conservatives that doesn't want to want to see that program even exist, let alone Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, or food stamps. And these are all things that keep people alive. How you can deny that these things keep even one person alive is beyond me. It won't kill me or you if suddenly we had $100 less a month. Heck, I wouldn't notice it at all. But, sadly, $100 a month is hell of a hit to someone who gets $900 a month and pays $350 in rent alone. And that's millions of people. And Jesus, what the hell kind of life are they even living on that $900 a month? If I were paying $350 a month, I would be literally living in a boiler room in a basement with three roommates. Yikes. >Or that anarchy will reign if government is cut by a small percentage. Total straw man. But I've asked you a few times what you would actually cut to get that "small percentage," which I believe you defined as something around five percent. You haven't done that yet. >Maybe then you can get people to accept an increase in taxes and not have to sell them in ways that only taxes people richer than themselves. >Or have them figure out just how much they'll have to pay for a government that is increasingly becoming a part of their everyday lives. Except it isn't. Taxes are the lowest they've really ever been in the modern era of this country, by far. With a few cherry-picked exceptions, government is in people's lives less and less, not more and more. And most of the ways that it's in people's lives more are not in accordance with my values (having to pee in a cup to get food stamps because they might have the "munchies" because they smoked a "doobie?" Really?). >Otherwise it'll be the same old nonsense that led us into this mess in the first place. You mean like war, tax cuts, bank deregulation, and stuff like that? That nonsense? Yeah, I'm happy to not go through that again. -Z