Budget talks: This is getting nasty

While it allegedly encourages home ownership, it rewards the paying of interest. And anything that encourages you to pay interest (i.e. taking out a 30-year loan instead of a 15-year) is the devil in my book.

 

I go where I'm wanted. After the GOP pissed away all respect for prudent spending (until now, in
a situation which is largely powered by GOP moderates trying to placate the wingnutters) and
respect for the privacy rights of the individual, they pretty much lost me.

Meanwhile, good luck on the fringes. The Tea Party crowd will never, ever achieve national office. Live with it.

 

This, but they've gotten in bed with that crowd too long to let them leave without at least buying breakfast.

The mortgage deduction is the biggest tax break the middle class enjoys. There is nothing else in the galaxy that will prevent them from taking on more of the tax burden if this is eliminated.

 

What part of Social Security or Medicare is "overbloated"? Administration costs are low and the income and heath insurance serve as the primary means of support for millions. With the demise of defined contribution pension plans how many have IRA's of over 200K, which at a four per cent withdrawl rate is 8K a year of income? Social Security is all that most future retirees will have.

 

But Congress will have their pensions, so who the hell cares what the rest of America will have? They'll try to convince you that they feel your pain, but believe it if you believe in the Tooth Fairy.

 

President Obama lost me with his "Don't call my bluff" statement. If someone is bluffing, shouldn't you call the bluff, espercially when they tell you they are bluffing. Or am I confused by what the President was saying?

 

America needs to raise income taxes on wealthy people. Probably considerably. Really rich people need to live on less. So do we all. The government needs our taxes to help pay for a huge generation of people who aren't dying anytime soon and still control a decent chunk of the buying power in our economy. It's not a hard thing to understand, and if the Fairness Doctrine existed for the radio, it would have happened years ago. Talk radio - and the Fox Network that grew because of relentless, free publicity on talk radio - has created such a dubious, dangerous fiction that we're literally on the brink of defaulting on our debt. It's <i>the</i> media story post-Watergate. Everything else pales compared to it.

 

This was discussed earlier on the thread. I copied and pasted manually, because I wasn't sure how else to do it in this context:

Quote from: old_tony on July 14, 2011, 11:08:33 PM
<<How stupid does one have to be to say "Don't call my bluff!"?

If you don't want them to call it, then don't announce it's a bluff. No wonder they have to hide his college records. What an idiot.>>


Here was my reply, using the online dictionary's list of idioms as a reference:


<<Not to get into a semantics argument, but "calling someone's bluff" means you are challenging said person to prove he's not bluffing. It won't necessarily mean the challenged person IS bluffing. So when you tell somebody not to "call my bluff," you aren't admitting you're bluffing, you are telling them not to question your sincerity.

I have no problem with the use of that expression and it's used in that context quite often.

Let me ask you this: If I tell you a story of a poker game and I tell you an opponent "called my bluff" on a hand, only it turns out I wasn't bluffing and won the hand, did I contradict myself?

Maybe you meant to say "What an idiom" instead of "What an idiot.">>

 

So are you trying to say the Democrats, and the President, are all about "prudent spending" and respect for the privacy rights of the individual? Or did you forget the blue font? Who kept the Patriot Act in place? Who wasted over a trillion dollars ($1.1 trillion when interest is figured) on a failed stimulus plan? Who took over the health care in this country with the biggest, most expensive (and unconstitutional) entitlement program in history? If you think the Dems give one shit about you, or that they are fiscally responsible, you are in fairy tale world.

 

Carlton, how is it unconstitutional?

 

Actually, CB, you can't prove that it failed. Things might be very much worse if we hadn't done it. Which I can't prove. So, while it's a talking point, stimulus is in fact a rhetorical push.

 

So what rate should "wealthy" people pay? What's your definition of wealthy? Why can't the Government "live on less"?