We ship jobs to China, then buy from them what we used to make. We ship money to the Mid East, etc. for oil to power cars made in other countries instead of Detroit. And all our money allows those countries to build the things we can now only afford to dream about.
And us? We argue over who should get hurt, the poor by cutting funding they need to survive or the wealthy by raising taxes and costing them money they need for their second boat payment.
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Actually they are doing it with the money you still owe them.
…..and its all voluntary on our part.
Very limp issue.
So many things are being done TO us BY us and against the majority will.
VOTE ALL “NO NEW TAXES” POLITICIANS OUT OF OFFICE.
Remember, that 2nd boat counts just like a 2nd home. You wouldn’t want all those hard-working investment bankers and analysts to suffer from an intellectually-restricting environment.
They do important stuff. They shouldn’t pay taxes at all.
#2 bobbo
Yep.
The US has plenty of money, it’s just moved to the upper 10% over the last 30 years. And once it moves up there, it tends to stay there. Trickle down is an illusion.
So what’s new?
Do you actually believe we don’t know this?
You all forget that the second boat is made by someone with a job, and if ‘The Wealthy’ are all buying their second boat…imagine how many jobs will be created.
Try to look several layers beyond your miopic focus and realize that there will always be rich and there will always be poor. We need to
A: Stop printing money
B: Start exploiting our natural resources (people, mineral, research, service)
C: Stop redistributing wealth to those that don’t ‘feel’ like working.
The comments from Uncle Dave and commenters above wouldn’t rate a D in any Econ 101 course. They are completely uninformed. “We ship money to the Mid East, etc. for oil…” Of course we do, that’s where the oil is (well it might be here too, but we can’t drill for it). In return we sell them education for their kids, airplanes, computers, medical equipment, management services and run their oil companies. We’re doing just fine. “Remember, that 2nd boat counts just like a 2nd home.” Remember that 2nd boat and that 2nd home were built by Americans with American tools and materials. It’s called the economy. Almost nothing is a one transaction and done thing. If you trace it out a step or two (or three) you see a lot of American jobs being created. And these are good jobs requiring some real skill. It’s not like we’re making t-shirts or fake iPods.
America, Fuck Yeah!
The only question I have, and its one that libs love to ask the rich, is how much is enough?? The gov’t already takes roughly $2.5trillion every year from us in taxes. How much more do they need?? At what point should government have to decide (like every other company in america the past 5 years) what exactly are it’s priorities?? Fed govt cannot continue to support everything that crosses any senator or representatives desk. Why can’t every department in govt cut 5-10% of its budget (including defense and medicare and medicaid)?? No picking and choosing what projects to fund, just cut ALL of them by that 5-10%. This really seems like a simple problem to solve, especially when the president always compares it to the ‘household budgets’ of common americans. Then why dont they solve it like common americans would??
I know there is a lot of snarky smart-ass answers to all this, but it really is just simple math. But it comes down to do you think the fed. govt. needs MORE money than it already takes in? Me, I think they take in plenty to take care of things…
Madtruck==that is an excellent question and a good turn around.
Do you think “the big three” Medicare, Medicaid, and Soc Sec should be provided pretty much “as is” by the richest country in the world or should the young, sick, halt, lame, and old be cut off and told to find a job?
I was shocked about Greece. Seems they went broke partly by allowing retirement at age 50 at 50 to 80% of regular pay (sic–whatever) and they were rioting in the street when the condition of getting loans was to raise that age to 60 or something like that. IE==still far less than the GOUSA!! Amusing that given even when they work they start with 6 weeks vacation per year. Don’t they realize what “life” is all about?
Silly dumbshit Americans.
The Republican argument that we cannot raise taxes on the rich because they are the job-creators is now a moot point. Yes, they do own factories and USED to employ lots of U.S. workers to make their products, but, when they got the Bush tax cuts, they shut down all those plants and moved the jobs to Mexico, China, and all the other places in the world where they can pay $.02/hour for labor. That’s a little fact the Republicans don’t like to talk about, but everyone knows.
I like the building in the first video – from certain angles it’s shaped like a massive pair of breasts. People used to be envious of large phallic shaped skyscrapers and moon-rockets, but times must have changed.
I’m beginning to think that the West has, in some way, lost it’s collective mojo. This insecurity forms a backdrop for the endless discussions and argument over taxation and monetary policy that’s getting us nowhere. America could fix this by:
1. Forcing Steve Jobs to build his new campus shaped like this, rather than the huge ufo/donut that’s planned.
2. Build a huge female fertility symbol the size of a couple of football fields – NASA could easily do this under the pretext of needing a new vehicle-assembly-building in the shape of a vagina.
Always good to help out a fellow Country and give them our jobs so that we can collect unemployment and raise our deficits and put more burden on our tax payers. You know, those people that still have jobs! At least for now!
ggore, you pretty much nailed it, although I don’t think it started with Bush; it simply accelerated under him. It was happening under Clinton and Bush 1 as well. What we used to think of as ‘Reaganomics’ doesn’t exist anymore, because there was an implied understanding that the tax breaks would be used to expand American business and provide Americans jobs. Nowadays we are shamed into expressing this thought under the boogeyman ‘protectionism’. Well, there is no way the rich are going to be able to invest across the world and be able to maintain and hold those investments. Hedge your bets, divest and come back home where you can count on your returns. Five percent at home is better than 10% abroad, since you’ll still have that 5% when you’re old and feeble.
The reason we don’t build these gaudy, stupid structures anymore is that business in the US is personal, dynamic, and mobile. Wealth is distributed (more) evenly through 50 states, and wherever you go in the US, you’re never far from clean water and produce, competent doctors, affordable public schools, and relatively un-corrupt and responsive law enforcement. The wealthy 10% pull the stings and hoard the resources, but if you act smart and work hard, you can do a lot more than just “get by” in the USA
I guarantee you two blocks from either of these structures are garbage-ridden, crime-infested slave communities you never see – because the respective governments wants you to meet some shnook in a suite at some stupid convention center. There is nothing behind the curtain!
This appears to be some idyllic vision for something maybe discussed under Mubarek’s regime. Unlikely they are thinking of wasting money on something like this under the current political storm. I lived in Cairo for a while and I guarantee it will cost twice as much to build after all the appropriate “fees” are paid. In any case, what are all those water features? They live in the middle of the Sahara desert!
America has become what people emigrated from 150 years ago.
There are still opportunities here, as there were in the mid 1800s outside America, but the underdeveloped world is booming, and our wealth is flowing out of the country to these new economies.
During the great emigration, most people stayed home, as will be the case here. However, our money easily seeks a new home.
Is this propaganda for the masses? I think a lot of folks bit into this plum.
Since I am dependent on my government pension this may be my last post. Hopefully, maybe, please. I lived off the streets in the sixties, it may be a little harder now that I am close to 70.
I’m not gonna say I’m depressed, but watching the slow motion idiocy of our government the last few weeks, I have no faith at all that the STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT we are facing will be addressed with anything but the exactly wrong policies. I can only hope Obama will not come out and say he is working full time on it.
So when the pukes pull tail and finally are hooked by their corporate overlords who in the main want the debt ceiling raised so they can continue their skims and scams, will the voting wingnuts and independents remember this charade a year later, or will they get embroiled in some manufactured issue over gods, gays, and guns?
VOTE ALL “NO NEW TAXES” POLITICIANS OUT OF OFFICE.
It reminds me of a shopping mall, and I don’t like shopping. I sometimes look at the nice buildings around the world. I like thenational assembly building in Bangladesh.
If any one out there in the world wants to hire away some of our politicians and write us a check to compensate us for the loss of their services to help pay our bills in the U.S.A go ahead and do that. Thanks in advance.
its only a model.
There seem to be a lot of misconceptions and misperceptions being promoted today, such as the belief that we’ve never had to pay more taxes than now, when the actual tax burden on the whole economy is at a 50 or 60 year low. And that all those taxes are given to 7th generation welfare recipients who do nothing but commit crimes and beget children and live high on the hog, when 80% of welfare recipients are working families who receive benefits for an average of less than 18 months.
I started paying into Social Security in 1965. Does that make me a lazy bum just because I managed to get old?
You’re being scammed and you’re falling for it!
Uncle Patso said “I started paying into Social Security in 1965.”
Happy Birthday!
Hey! I also paid in from that date, I’m assuming. Sadly, any program you pay x into and get x + Y out of is a form of welfare. Irritates me the liberal talking point that cuts/restructuring are not justified because people have paid for it. Simply not true.
A bad argument in support of a good cause.
Our society has to come to grips with what to do with structural unemployment/under employment. This darwinian survival off the scraps of Rich People has got to stop before real social unrest is unleashed.
VOTE ALL “NO TAX INCREASES” POLITICIANS OUT OF OFFICE!! Let them bake cake.
The problem is that if you tax the “rich” 100% it can no longer cover our current spending binge and we have already gone past the point that it is toxic to job growth or even job retention. We have liabilities that exceed 100% of GNP if you actually count them all.
Just what kind of utopia are you trying to build? Cuba under Castro? A third world ghetto? I’d actually like to know where you expect this to end up.
do-ill==just as irrelevant as always. Can you ever express an argument using less than absolute extremes?
Try it.
1. A society where some people are not massively more rich than others is a society without freedom.
2. If Americans aren’t driving 4x4s on freeways to and from their big houses on large fenced in private yards, Earth itself and certainly the human race serve no purpose and deserve to be vaporized.
3. “from each according to his abilities” – Hmmm. 48% don’t pay income taxes. All you lefties better start collecting from the “poor” to make it “fair”
4. “tax the rich” “burn the jews”: same sentiment, just a difference of degree. Both are premised on persecuting a minority to supposedly benefit the majority.
5. pass a Constitutional amendment requireing that at least one member of a group that votes for a tax increase that passes is chosen randomly and executed. If it’s really that necessary, they are public servants and should take the risk for the greater good. I bet they could come up with another way.
PUT ALL TAX RAISING POLITICIANS IN PRISON.
Abimbo==seemingly you disagree with the stronger evidenced position of VOTE ALL “NO NEW TAXES” POLITICIANS OUT OF OFFICE?
Weird.
I’m going to hack into your phone and send my message to everyone in your address book. I give it about a week, and we won’t have your Kleptocratic Advocacy around to dismiss.
Who should benefit most in a democracy? the top 1% or the bottom 99%. Seems mathematically clear to me. Your friends won’t think so though.
Ha, ha.
And yet many people in these other countries would jump at a chance to come live in the US. Even with things as bad as they now are. I doubt they changed their minds. There’s just one possible exception that occurs to me. The Israelis don’t want to immigrate to the US. And many American Jews want to go there to live. At least as long as Israel receives plenty of US foreign aid. Which most congressmen wouldn’t dare cut. One more sacred cow issue, besides not taxing the rich.