Max wrote:

A note to new Smarchers:

When debating Auros, have statistical FACTS to back up your claims, or... well, look above.

Heh. I'm really glad it was Auros who wrote the above. I think he covered all the bases better than anyone else would have. Or could have.

Plus, I've been feeling too lazy to attempt anything along those lines.

Auros' point about the American media's reporting (or incredible lack thereof) of various Bush scandals that have recently come to light both a) anger me, and b) creep me out a little.

It makes me wonder how much pressure has been put on the media by the current administration... Or, rather, the media that isn't already tied to the current administration.

Hey Auros!
First to some of what the others have said:
Nope actually I’m not new here, don’t be fooled by the new login name I was here when they just started posting excerpts and getting subscriptions for the online version of SM…but I’ve been away for a while and I never was a big contributor, I’ll just see if I can find my old Login…
But I'm back and I'm bad to the bone!
Anyway, Auros, it’s funny your friends suggest to me to bring facts when all you did was regurgitate some of the cheap liberal “interpretations” – not facts – and really use innuendo and association where one could do with solid logic…
Let's start shall we:

Um, actually, no. I agree that it advocates a couple of silly conspiracy theories, and uses innuendo and association where one could do just as well with solid logic. But nobody has yet...
So silly conspiracy theories, innuendo and putting things out of context is not false!
Not to mention facts he simply omits!!!

You mean, for giving about HALF of Americans etc etc...
Well no, actually look back at the polls leading up to the Iraq war - the approval rate was a bit higher than 50% so even a few democrats felt Bush was doing the right things...(remember rates in the 70-80 area)

Again half-right. The vast majority of liberals were behind the Afghan project --
Oh, so please give me the resolutions past by Clinton about Afganistan. Please I would like to know how many troops- sorry, 'cruise missles' he was willing to send. Though I have to admit the majority of the American public was not ready, at that time to go to war since most people didn't realise there was a real threat. But don't blame that on Republicans, give credit where credit is due - the liberal media that convinced the American public that say losing one 'Black-Hawk' is enough to call it quits! How could you go into Afganistan with that logic...
Oh, and please elaborate on the Afgan pipe-line, that's really interesting.
But did not specify what the action would be, nor what was meant by compliance.
That's OK you have 16 other resolutions to clear that up. Plus the cease fire from 1991 which Saddam never complied with.
If war is halted with certain conditions and those conditions are violated - I'm no diplomat, but I'd say you should pass a resolution like 1441 and then take action.

... nobody except the UK who mattered. None of the other contributors have enough of a military power to be relevant. France and Germany do.
My goodness...
Even the U.K stated they don't have enough planes to defend home and send sufficient forces to Iraq, so Germany which is in the process of reducing its forces would have been the deciding factor. And check your history 'jack' in 1991 France, and many other forces were used as decoys to make Saddam think the main attack was coming across the Kuwaiti border, or from the sea. But the predominently American forces made a long quick stab into Iraq encircling the Iraqi forces and defeating the republican guard divisions in the rear. So nothing is really different this time around. The U.S and the U.K carry most of the load. And please to be so patronising about the contributions from other countries like Italy, Spain, Poland, Austrailia, Japan, S. Korea etc. etc.
It's too bad that a new government came into power in Spain and said that if the terrorists don't wan't us there then sure we'll bend to their demands...
This is simply a lie. The intel community in fact said he probably didn't have WMD -- that the team in the 90s had been successful in destroying almost everything,
Sorry again, no facts to support this. If you read what Blix said, they could not account for all the weapons. And your friends are now saying that before the war the media wasn't critical enough about all the inteligence reports and so called experts who were saying there were probably WMD in Iraq. So which is it. Did the intel community say there were and then we didn't criticize enough, or they didn't say there were WMD?

They always want to have it both ways: Bush and his gang went into Iraq out of greed for oil (which would mean billions of dollars coming in) but at the same time saying the war is costing too much money!
We should never have gone into Iraq. But why didn't we go in sooner. Afganistan is not as easy as people thought, but us Democrats almost fixed it with a couple of cruise missiles! (BTW, look up how easy it was for the Russians when they tried. which reminds me I wouldn't want Russian and German troops to do too much, in Chechniya and the Balkans - respectively - their troops have been accused of terrible atrocities on one hand, and standing by as hundreds were killed on the other)
And as for the economy, some facts:

Over 1.5 Million Jobs Created Since August with 10 Straight Months of Job Gains

According to statistics released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 112,000 new jobs were created in June.
(gee it wasn't the over 200,000 amonth we've grown used to lately, but it's not exactly a jobless recovery!)

Nearly 1.3 million jobs have been added since the beginning of the year.
The national unemployment rate stayed constant at 5.6% in June - down 0.7 percentage point from a peak of 6.3% a year ago. At 5.6%, the unemployment rate is below the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Employment over the last year was up in 44 of the 50 states and the unemployment rate was down in all regions and in 46 of the 50 states.
National manufacturing employment is up by 64,000 jobs since its low in January. The ISM Manufacturing survey's employment index reached a 30-year high in May and remained strong in June, indicating further gains in manufacturing employment.

Economic growth since last summer has been the fastest in nearly 20 years. The American economy grew at a strong annual pace of 3.9 percent during the first quarter of 2004 - above the historical average, and continuing the strong growth seen over the previous two quarters.
America's standard of living is on the rise. Real after-tax incomes are up by 11% since December 2000 - substantially better than the gains following the last recession. Since the President's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, personal consumption levels have risen significantly.

Please, do you want me to go on?

P.S: WMD was never the only reason to go into Iraq and terrorist like Al Zarqawi were there before the coalition came. Plus, ask all the family members of those tortured or killed under Saddams rule if they would have prefered it that the west would still be sitting on their $%@^ and discussing the matter in the U.N!

Have a nice day!

Edit - I had to edit in the word atrocities instead of the brutal, truthful, terms I used.

[ July 08, 2004: Message edited by: Saltirin ]

Saltirin wrote:

Not to mention facts he simply omits!!!

I'd love to see you make a 2 hour movie which doesn't omit facts.  It can't be done.

Saltirin wrote:

Anyway, Auros, it’s funny your friends suggest to me to bring facts when all you did was regurgitate some of the cheap liberal “interpretations” – not facts – and really use innuendo and association where one could do with solid logic…

I'm not one of Auros' friends, but his political views seem to closely mirror my own. And I don't believe Auros was using cheap liberal "interpretations".

As far as the "Coalition forces" are concerned, I cringe every time I hear that phrase used on Fox News, as it seems to me a blatant use of propaganda.

I cannot respond further at this time, but a quick question: are you German? :)

Don´t know if Saltirin is German but he/she must have spent the last 15 month or so living under a rock, cut off from the outside world. I mean, not even Bush is mentioning those strangely elusive WMD anymore and still, here we go again. Makes you wonder.

Angelus the Remover wrote:

Another - less widely accepted here and perhaps genuine paranoia on my part - is that Iraq was a staging post for a *hopefully* permanently postphoned invasion of Iran ( troops to the right, troops to the left and a few million fanatical fundamentalists with atomic bombs in the middle.) Apocalypse now anyone?

I was thinking along those lines as well. Not only is the geographic location ideal, installing a government in Bagdad that depends on american military presence to remain in power, absolutely guarantees there will be no opposition from that side to use the country as a permanent military base and staging ground for a possible invasion. American troops can be pulled out of Saudi Arabia and inconvenient mishaps like Turkey refusing to play along are no longer an issue.

Saltirin wrote:

Just a quick reply.
Pretzalz, hat's off to you, at least you support your arguments with some facts. I find it funny that if taxes are lower, Bush is bad, if taxes were higher, Bush would certainly be bad.

Yes, I am opposed to the Bush tax cuts.  I am in favor of higher taxes.  No, I am not a hypocrite.  If taxes were higher, Bush would still be bad, but not because of his tax policy.  And to be even clearer, if Bush had managed to maintain a surplus while cutting taxes and without cutting services/programs I would fully support that, but he didn't even come close to accomplishing that.

If after tax income is higher (allowing people to buy more stuff and thus driving the economy) it's also not good. And if it were lower you'd be out on the streets protesting!
[/QB]

Well, now for some fun reductio ad absurdum,  if lower taxes are better, shouldn't we just get rid of taxes all together, wouldn't that be best?  Oh, wait, that wouldn't work.  Everything inbetween is just degrees.  If someone goes out and gets 5 credit cards, they'd also be able to buy more stuff, it is not something that I'd recommend doing though.

Saltirin wrote:

all you did was regurgitate some of the cheap liberal “interpretations”

Do I really need to look up articles on everything?  Stuff like the Niger Yellowcake scandal (in which Bush claimed that Iraq tried to buy uranium, when the CIA had told him that was false), or the Medicare budget number scandal (in which the administration prevented the true budget numbers from being revealed to Congress), are not interpretations.  Neither is the Valerie Plame scandal.  Nor the House-Floor bribery scandal.  These are all things that actually happened, and no interpretation is required to recognize that they're very, very bad.

[b]So silly conspiracy theories, innuendo and putting things out of context is not false!

Nope, they're not.  But then, neither are they "false" when the president uses slippery language to try to insinuate the idea that Saddam was connected to Al-Qaida, without ever actually saying it, so he has plausible deniability later.  (Dick Cheney, on the other hand, has come right out and lied on that issue.)  It's still misleading, and as I've said, I don't regard Moore as an ideal representative of the liberal cause -- he's our Rush Limbaugh.  But I found this movie considerably better than I expected, and I have yet to see a single instance of outright falsehood cited by anyone.

I'm frankly not interested in debunking the pack of lies you've swallowed, as I have better things to do than sit around here all day.

They always want to have it both ways: Bush and his gang went into Iraq out of greed for oil (which would mean billions of dollars coming in) but at the same time saying the war is costing too much money![/qb]

This is a logical fallacy.  Oil money flowing into the pockets of the likes of Halliburton, when corporate taxes have been cut down to near-zero, does not bring money into the federal gov't.

But then, thinking logically isn't your strong suit, is it?

[b]We should never have gone into Iraq. But why didn't we go in sooner.

No single liberal says both of these; there are some liberal hawks who felt that finishing Saddam in 1991 would've been a good idea.  I'm not one of them.  I'm the Pollack camp that felt that we should've made 1441 clearer, and that an invasion of Iraq after spending several years patching up Afghanistan might well be justified.

[b]Afganistan is not as easy as people thought, but us Democrats almost fixed it with a couple of cruise missiles!

Again, not what anyone is saying.  I supported going to Afghanistan full-force much earlier than we did, because having talked with some actual Afghans, and read up on the topic, I felt that it represented a humanitarian issue parallel to Bosnia, where we'd had considerable success.

[b]Over 1.5 Million Jobs Created Since August with 10 Straight Months of Job Gains

I will now plagiarize liberally from an actual economist.

During the first four months of 2000, the last presidential election year, the economy created 1.1M new jobs.

So saying that in the last ten months, the economy created 1.5M jobs, is no great shakes.  And the number is actually lower than that, because the numbers for those months have been revised downwards, and projections for this month were missed by about 60%.

Furthermore, to find a year comparable to 2004, we need to look back to 1994, when the economy was still recovering from the first Bush recession. In the first four months of that year, the economy added almost 1.3 million jobs.  Between December 1993 and November 1994 the economy gained 3.6M jobs.

You can find all these numbers on the website of the Bureau For Labor Statistics.  But hey, trusting right-wing propaganda is so much easier.

[b]The national unemployment rate

Is an extremely slippery number.  A more meaningful one is discussed here.

[b]At 5.6%, the unemployment rate is below the average of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

Uh, that is, again, false.  Unemployment in the 90s ran considerably lower than that.  Not sure about the 80s.

[b]Economic growth since last summer has been the fastest in nearly 20 years.

If you take the unrevised numbers.  If you look at the later versions, factoring in data that wasn't available initially, they look fairly typical of an economy that's recovering from a recession.

And nobody's saying that the economy is not recovering; we're just saying that it took much longer than it could have (because Bush provided no Keynsian stimulus), that job creation is much slower than it should be, and that the economy is still in dangerous condition because of the deficit.

[b]Real after-tax incomes are up by 11% since December 2000

On average.  But then, the average worth of you, me, and Bill Gates, is $30B apiece.  You feeling richer?

The relevant number is the median -- the income where half the population makes less, and half makes more.  That figure is up a little bit -- maybe 1% -- but that fails to account for sales tax hikes all over the country, which make your after-tax income worth less.  Also, lots of services important to middle-income families -- roads, schools, police, firemen -- have been cut back.

[b]Please, do you want me to go on?

Not particularly.  Right-wing drivel is boring.

Pretzalz wrote:

Yes, I am opposed to the Bush tax cuts. I am in favor of higher taxes. No, I am not a hypocrite. If taxes were higher, Bush would still be bad, but not because of his tax policy. And to be even clearer, if Bush had managed to maintain a surplus while cutting taxes and without cutting services/programs I would fully support that, but he didn't even come close to accomplishing that.
   

OK, Since Auros isn`t here with a few choice quotes from Professor Krugman, here`s a little Removernomics...

Personally I think this whole doctrine of balanced budgets is taken too far most of the time. The only reason we have such a fetish for them is because it is a way for politicians to exert self-discipline on on themselves and explain why their district is not going to get those juicy state contracts etc and take the "moral high ground". Of course some invariably break ranks and the consensus breaks down ( amid usually "partisan" bickering ) so no one need take the rap for business as usual!

Everybody knows that even with a neutral tax policy revenues are highest during a boom and lowest in times of recession and yet demands on government spending tend to rise during the latter ( As more people come onto welfare etc ) and goes down during the former as finding work becomes comparatively easier.

On this basis we can see that you are quite likely to be running a surplus when the economy is doing well - as occured under Clinton and equally that the country will run a deficit when there is a downturn, since the demand on state support rises at the very moment revenues sink. With me so far? Good ;)

Tax for me is not a moral but an economic issue and therefore the question of when to raise or reduce them depends purely on the economic circumstances. There are instances when it is clearly desirable to raise taxes - i.e congestion charging and road pricing to reduce traffic levels and to put a price tag on the otherwise invisable cost to the environment of greenhouse gas emissions and so forth.

Equally there are occasions when taxes need to be cut but here you run into the thorny issue of who`s taxes you cut and when, which to me depends on what the purpose of the cuts is. For instance if you are looking to boost investment then targetting those with significant disposable income.. i.e the rich does make sense if you want to stimulate the market in shares etc... but this has little effect if consumers are unwilling to go out there and spend, so you might want to lower taxes to the "middle class", so they`ll go out and buy more consumer goods - restoring confidence in the economy as a whole.

Basically there are many ways of doing it and I don`t know  enough about the content of Bush`s tax cuts to comment on how justified they were but I`d imagine given his corporate ties they would be the first kind, with breaks given to corporations willing to repatriate investment etc. What threw a spanner in the works in my book was 911 and the "War on Terror" with the knee-jerk rush to increase military spending ( Kiss goodbye to that post Cold War "peace dividend" folks ). Heck, they had to create a whole new government department - "Homeland Security" at a very time when high levels of unemployment and economic  uncertainty looked like turning a recession into a depression.

In those circumstances it is traditional for governments to run deficits by issueing bonds and borrowing on the market to tide them over this phase in the economic cycle. This is something of a gamble because state borrowing tend to hoover up the liquidity of the market since by definition there is less cash for investing. On the other hand if consumers feel wealthier they are more inclined to spend - even if it is on the "never never" and boost demand enough to draw reluctant investors back to the market.

Although  I dislike credit cards ( I`ve recently chopped mine up so as to avoid temptation ) and the way they are thrust at those who are least likely to be able to service them without running into payment problems, I do recognise the value - as much for the state as the citizen  - of borrowing at the economic low point and repaying on the upturn ( Especially for the state when revenues start to rise again ).

Since , moreover a government cannot be declared bankrupt and it`s assets sold off to creditors it has become customary for most nations to have a "national debt" ( The UK`s  dates back to the Napoleonic Wars and we`ve been making the payments ever since ) which they try  and reduce during booms that is the time to raise taxes and in bad times you need to improve confidence *and* fund programs for the needy the national debt must perforce rise.

Finally, I understand why Bush is excoriated here and elsewhere for his tax policy since politicians are quick enough to take credit for good economic performance ( Clinton certainly did for a recovery that began in the last months of Bush senior ) they must expect to take the rap for the bad - even when the seeds of the downturn.. i.e the stock market bubble fueled by the dotcom shares (Mr Greenspan`s much mentioned "irrational exhuberance" ) came with the closure of the Clinton era because such falls and rises often occur with a built in time lag from the root causes. Maybe we can call the current climate "irrational pessimism"?

[ July 04, 2004: Message edited by: Angelus the Remover ]

Originally posted by Saltirin:
[QB]

As for the others; how interesting it is that the question of nationality should come up! So what you're really saying is I can't possibly be German because, as we all know, all Germans think the same and all Germans are against Bush. I love that!

I don't believe I said any such thing. What I asked you is if you were German. And I'll join with Lian, spelling mess, in saying that's exactly what I meant.

Had I wanted to say "You can't possibly be German because of your political views", I believe I would have said that.

So just for the record, no I wasn't born in Germany, but I have German citizenship!

My closest friend has dual citizenship (German/American); he was born to American parents, but in Germany. He's lived most of his life in America, and most of the rest in Korea. I had only wondered if the situation wasn't somewhat similar with you.

I even added a little smiley emoticon, so you wouldn't feel like my question was somehow a snipe at you.

The only thing more disgusting to me than the swill spewed out by the current administration is the many people who eat the swill and like it.

Take this quote from my most recent Newsweek:

I stand for eight to 10 hours a day.  Why is standing limited to four hours?" U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in a newly revealed memo on interrigation tactics, commenting on the length of time terrorism detainees could be made to stand.

I have lost all respect for the Bush administration.  Politics are messy, sure, but these guys are not even qualified.  Why have we let them stay?  Oh yeah, the swill.

A popular econ textbook by Gregory Mankiw, now the president's chief economist, declares -- in italics -- that "when the government reduces national saving by running a budget deficit, the interest rate rises."

There is no argument among serious economists, on either side of the aisle, that deficits raise interest rates, thus making it harder for businesses and invidividuals to get capital to buy expensive durable items (houses, cars) or expand/start businesses.  There is some debate over exactly how pronounced this effect is, but nobody disputes that it happens.

This is, obviously, bad for the economy.

Now, you may suggest that the cuts will allow more investment, or more spending by the working class, but the former has simply proved to be false (one can look at what happened in the '80s or '00s for proof), and the latter would've required giving more than 10% of the tax cut to the lower half of the income spectrum.

The ignorance required on the part of the average supporter of such idiotic policies is breathtaking.  And the corruption of people like Mankiw, who know better and lie about it, is disgusting.