In the past three days, two conservative blogs have posted on issues which get at the heart of the anemic private sector job creation in the Obama administration — and demonstrate why if the Democrats continue to set economic and regulatory policy, we won’t see the level of job growth promised when the president sold us his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (AKA the “so-called stimulus”).
The first piece relates directly to that legislation. Over at Powerline, John Hinderaker quotes from a study of the near-trillion dollar bill by economists Timothy Conley and Bill Dupor. Reporting “their findings in a paper titled ‘The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Public Sector Jobs Saved, Private Sector Jobs Forestalled‘, they found that the “stimulus”
. . . created/saved approximately 450 thousand state and local government jobs and destroyed/forestalled roughly one million private sector jobs. State and local government jobs were saved because ARRA funds were largely used to offset state revenue shortfalls and Medicaid increases rather than boost private sector employment.
By sending hundreds of millions of dollars to the states, the Democratic legislation helped bail out many spendthrift jurisdictions, delaying their day of reckoning. No wonder so many states have been struggling this year to find ways to cut spending. Thanks to the 111th Congress, they, in the early Obama years, had federal resources to balance their budgets — and no incentive to economize.
So, the “stimulus” didn’t stimulate the private sector because so much of it went to state and local governments.
Today, at the Washington Examiner, Conn Carroll details how the National Labor Relations Board is trying to game the system in favor of unions, thus making it more difficult for private companies to expand and innovate:
Unions are a major drag on a firms competitiveness. Studies show that unionized firms spend 15% less on research and development than non-unionized firms and 6% less on capital investments. If a firm is in a competitive industry, this can mean death. If a firm is in an international industry, which pretty much all of them are today, it means less (sic) jobs here in the United States.
Read the whole thing!
I have to wonder how many of those 450,000 state and local jobs are positions of people whose job is to actively impede economic development and job growth; I am thinking of bureaucrats in charge of environmental, labor, and tax regulations as well as those whose job is to process and delay paperwork for new factories, businesses, and infrastructure.
And as it has been pointed out, the public employee unions act essentially as money laundering operations for the Democrat Party. They get billions in tax dollars which become salaries, part of which is taken out for union dues, and most of those dues will find their way back to the Democrat party as direct or indirect campaign contributions.
Which is why the Stimulus focused on unionized public employees.
Which drags the economy, in several ways.
Since the government gets revenue by appropriation (i.e. by force, or by borrowing backed with the threat of future force), it does not face the private sector’s incentives for efficiency – and so its spending tends to be inefficient.
But furthermore, other than basic law and order (i.e. police, courts and military), government generally does not produce things of economic benefit – and should not try to. Government spending redistributes purchasing power – again taking from the efficient and productive (who would otherwise create financially sustainable jobs) for the benefit of the inefficient and unproductive (including government bureaucrats). When government does produce economic values – for example, education, or postal service, or automobiles – it does so (again) less efficiently than the private sector would in its place.
Finally, a large/growing government produces more and more regulation, which actively drags on businesses that would otherwise create jobs.
Thus: as you grow government, you punish efficiency, reallocate resources to inefficient uses, close off private-sector opportunities and create an increasing active drag on the private sector. Which is why the Soviet Union fell.
The Democrats are on limited time with their public unions parasites given the deficit, the unemployment.job creation, & the inflation problems. These 3 issues are tied to tax payer monies to public unions. We no longer have this money to give. Public unions are likewise on borrowed time; all Obama is trying to do is extend the clock. Good luck with that in the current environment. It’s ain’t gonna happen.
yes all public service employees are communists, the secret is out, the teachers, the firemen, the police (specially the police) the people that work at the water treatment center, COMMUNIST, the trash collectors, the road repair (secretly I’m told they are socialist, but don’t tell their union leaders that) yes each and everyone of them is stealing from you with the goal of imposing a 1000 year democratic rule on the entire world. As a private sector employee I can tell you the dark secrets I learned by attending a TOWN MEETING, at which they gathered in a circle and summoned Hastur the Unspeakable, who spake in tongues so twisted my blood froze and my hair turned white and I being crooning campaign songs from the 60’s. …. i could go on but lets remember we elected people to hire people to do all the crap work that we didn’t want to do that makes our lives nice.
Does that comment have anything to do with me? I sure hope not, because if it did, it would mark its author as a raving dumbass. It must be about something/someone else.
No, ILC, just another brave soldier from Timmeh’s “Army of Left-Wing Strawmen.” I believe his unit markings indicate he’s from the “If-You-Question-Massive-Deficit-Spending-On-Non-Essential-Public-Employees-Then-You-Hate-Teachers-And-Firemen-And-Want-To-Live-In-Somalian-Style-Anarchy” brigade.
lol just reading Lovecraft at night. general statement
“But furthermore, other than basic law and order (i.e. police, courts and military), government generally does not produce things of economic benefit”
bullshit we made 14$ for every dollar we invested in Nasa, the military was also the inventor of the internet and that helped keep the US the most competitive nation on the planet. Plus you can’t separate the stability of a regulated market and country from the profit that arises from the clear enforcement of law. quit the ridiculous “small government” mantra that means nothing, it’s all tied together. Without an educated public, without a healthy public there would be no one to run the business’s you want and no one to purchase the products you are trying to sell.
and for the record how many business’s do you know that are actually managed properly? cause I’ve been doing this private business thing for 14 years in four separate companies and only one of them was run efficiently. They all made money and two of them are still in business but I learned a long time ago that the reasons that companies succeed is not that they are run efficiently or even well, it’s just that their competition is usually worse than them. So maybe this is why I don’t buy the “only business’s can handle money well”, because I’ve almost never observed this in the real world.
Source? And meaning of “we”?
As I said. You quoted it yourself Tim, the word MILITARY… why do you not read your own quotations of me?
Not for long. You’re behind the times, I can see.
Again, Tim: You are able to read your own quotations of people, right? What do you think I might have been referring to, when I said “police, courts and military” in the thing you quoted?
I explicitly acknowledge the benefit to the economy that flow from the one thing that government legitimately produces, which is law and order… and you try to pretend I didn’t. Nice.
And where am I against an educated or healthy public? Yikes Tim, you clearly DO NOT READ, nor think before you respond.
My actual point was that education could be done much more efficiently by the private sector. But understanding and answering people’s actual points is clearly too far off your radar.
So, as usual Tim, answering you is a waste of time. I chose to humor you on your first comment, but I am not even going to bother reading the second. Enough lameness for one day.
@Ilovecapitalism um you said this, “Thus: as you grow government, you punish efficiency, reallocate resources to inefficient uses, close off private-sector opportunities and create an increasing active drag on the private sector. Which is why the Soviet Union fell.”
which really is either the stupidest history analogy I’ve ever read or an out right lie. The Soviet Union didn’t have private property, nor were they allowed private profits, remember “Tetris” guess who got the money from that, the government. The USSR crashed for a myriad of reason, including bankrupting their client states, overspending on the military, the destruction of an entire generation of citizens, the inability to innovate in technology because of an over reliance on espionage, the destruction of several natural areas that fed millions of people, crappy work ethics, horrible products for export, and many many more.
But I really can’t take you as a serious intellectual because just when you start to make a point you reveal that you reached it by accident. So laugh at me all you want but if your the product of a private education you should ask for your money back.
“you’re” deng!!
With higher taxes and levels of regulation
Like green energy schemes, cowboy poetry festivals, and rail systems that no one outside the northeast corridor uses.
By blocking energy exploration and development, for example, or driving lightbulb production offshore.
For example, through health care mandates so onerous that politically-connected companies beg for waivers and receive them.
So far, the Army of Facts is crushing the Army of Strawmen.
For the sane people – Tim’s comments about education combine a couple fallacies that Big Government advocates use typically. I touched on his use of Straw Man, but there is also the “I See Government Doing It, So Government Must Do It” fallacy.
The latter is similar, but not identical to Bastiat’s Fallacy of the Broken Window. For those who don’t know it, here is a recap. A baker has a glass window. A kid throws a rock at it, breaking it. Now the baker must pay to replace it. Is that a bad thing, or a good thing? Did it just detract from the amount of wealth in the world, or add to it?
The common-sense (and correct) answer is: Of course it’s bad; it destroyed wealth. But the left-wing (or Keynesian) answer is that it’s good, because now the baker is forced to “stimulate the economy” by giving business to the town glazier.
The fallacy stems from a limited intellect that can only count things which it sees right in front of itself; it cannot count the things that are unseen because they could have been, but were prevented from coming about. In other words, the leftist sees the glazier making a new window and says, “Look! economic activity!” But what is not seen, and therefore not counted by the leftist, is: the productive new machine that the baker *didn’t* buy, or the factory loan that the banker *didn’t* make; which is better economic activity that died before it was born, because the baker had to withdraw funds just to re-do a window.
The same kind of limited intellect is prone to the Fallacy of “I See Government Doing It, So Government Must Always Do It”. Imagine Pavel, a Soviet auto worker, and such a victim of Soviet propaganda that he didn’t know about private automakers, and so afraid of having to make his own way in the world that he did not want to know. If ILC came along and said “Private auto-making would be more efficient”, in a stupid fit of outrage and fear yPavel would try to accuse ILC of being against autos!!1!
Pavel might tell ILC, “Without the autos from our Soviet car company, there would be no way to get people to the business’s [sic] you want and no one to purchase the products you are trying to sell!” That is a fallacy. The root of the fallacy is that Pavel *sees* the government making autos (and truth be told, as a dependent sort of individual, Pavel likes it), and leaps to the assumption that government *must* make autos; that government is the Great Source of Autos, to which we should all bow down.
That’s one piece of what Tim doesn’t get. It doesn’t matter if the military invented the beginnings of the Internet (but, by the way, private companies developed it into what we know today). Tim thinks: because government did it, government must have done it; only government could do it; praise government!
What Tim doesn’t see is that, yes actually, the private sector could have done it faster and probably better or more cheaply/efficiently, had the government not been in the way, e.g., by heavily regulating telecommunications for decades. Same with NASA. Same with everything the government does, or pretends to do, other than the three functions for which government truly is essential and the only workable solution: the protection of individual rights to life, liberty and property via police, courts and military (defense from foreign attack).
(continued) Through over-regulation (forgive the redundancy), government prevents entire industries from progressing or even from being born; then the advocates of Big Government, such as Tim, claim that “more research spending is needed” to solve the problems of malaise, such as slowness of innovation/research, that the overly-large government has imposed on society.
So it has always been. Big Government advocates and other parasites offer “poison as food, poison as antidote.” First they create problems through (over-use of) government, then then claim that additional government is the essential solution to our multiplying problems.
Tim, you reading Call of Cthuhulhu? Been on my book pile for over a year now since recommended by a reader. . . Loved the first
twofour* pages, so dense and insightful, I had to put it to down to savor it.(Uh-oh, I just hijacked my own thread.)
*Just picked up the book to realize I’d read further than I thought!
And yet, anyone capable of even rudimentary observational analysis will conclude that wherever there is a private option, it is always vastly preferable to the public one. Private schools — better than public schools. Private housing — better than public housing. Private transportation — better than public transportation. Private restrooms — better than public restrooms.
Also, privatized pensions work way better than Government schemes like social security.
Without an educated public, without a healthy public there would be no one to run the business’s you want and no one to purchase the products you are trying to sell.
And yet, somehow, humanity managed to function, grow, and profit for literally millenia prior to the development of the Obama Party’s overarching, all-powerful government to “protect” it.
Meanwhile, when one considers the health and education of those receiving the most government support and assistance, it is obvious that government is in fact making matters worse in terms of an educated and healthy populace.
Meanwhile, let’s make it clear exactly what Timmeh is protecting here.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for financial crimes like Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But the new report, obtained by ABC News, says senior employees of the SEC spent hours on the commission’s computers looking at sites like naughty.com, skankwire, youporn, and others.
The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC’s internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.
So it’s very simple, Timmeh. You are trying to use firefighters and police officers to protect the jobs of people being paid six figures to surf porn sites on government computers. Instead of acknowledging government waste, you start demagoguing.
You don’t have anything intelligent to add to this. You’re just a knee-jerk big-government welfare addict like your fellow Obama gays.
@Dan I’m a huge fan, I’ve read quite a few of his books and later anthologies, he’s very wordy, (they were paid by the word) but I love the richness of the world he could create with words. It’s dense but worth it.
The famous example of NASA’s ROI was based on the R&D work of private companies, research universities, and the independent laboratories like JPL contracted by NASA…not by NASA salaried bureaucrats. NASA like DARPA is best when it acts as a clearinghouse of ideas and facilitator of funding.
When they start to move programs in-house is when the inefficiencies and massive redundancies set-in. Does anyone really believe that it actually requires 20,000 NASA employees to just to service and operate that Space Shuttle program? One smart engineer doing the real work and ten supervisors checking his work, while another twenty engineers and redundant middle-managers to dbl-check the work of the first ten…and of each other.
Talk about a red herring.
All this time I thought it was Algore. Damn. And I think it’s worth noting that the liberals are hell bent on destroying the internet with some bastardized notion of “fairness” as the excuse.
@Tim,
You might also want to check out CJ Moore’s work, or some of the other authors from the era. Planet Stories has been collecting a lot of lesser known authors from that era. I’m currently working on Who Fears the Devil? The Complete Silver John. Wellman writes some good Apalachian horror.
NASA built the space shuttle to fly to the International Space Station.
NASA built the International Space Station so the Space Shuttle would have some place to fly to.
That pretty much sums up the efficiency of Government programs.
Wasn’t that the critter on that three episode series on South Park?
North American Aviation designed the Space Shuttle on-contract to NASA.
Rockwell Intl. built the Space Shuttles orbiter for NASA. Rocketdyne built the SSM engines. Thiokol Corp. builds the solid fuel boosters and Lockheed Martin builds the external fuel tanks.
The ISS was built by an international inter-agency group who mostly farmed-out the actual work to private and semi-private companies and agencies. The Russians still own their modules separately from the operating consortium.
Tim @ #12 solves the great mystery of the “invisible hand” in guiding capitalism:
That is what happened in the state controlled economy. They mirrored capitalism:
1) All capitalists set out to bankrupt their customers. It is the genius of capitalism.
2) All capitalists overspend on the frills and starve the enterprise. That is so basic to healthy enterprise.
3) When bankrupting their customers doesn’t do the trick, capitalists exterminate an entire generation of buyers. Clever.
4) Capitalists don’t do R & D, they spy and copy and come in second or third or just sit back and bankrupt some more customers.
5) Capitalists look for natural areas to destroy so their customers can’t eat or even think about buying their goods or services.
6) Capitalists search out unions and beg them to promote crappy work ethics and lard-butt entitlements.
7) Capitalists specialize in crappy services and goods for export so they are certain to fail at exporting anything.
Whew!
Now lets take a peek at The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
1) The USSR taught workers to under achieve any quota, because meeting it meant the next quata would be increased. Brilliant.
2) The USSR overworked and underpaid its collective farmers who somehow decided not to play, but turn to theft and subversion instead.
3) The government bureaucracy quickly learned to under produce and pass the buck and sabotage production as an excuse for failure.
4) The permanent over class grew fat and happy by squeezing the massive underclass at the point of a gun.
5) There was no private economy, save the humongous black market which clothed and fed the masses.
6) People did not plant flowers or smile much, because the effects of cheap vodka had not yet killed them at the very early ages as reported in the world tables of death rates.
7) The USSR built high quality …. ….. ….. ….. oops ….. ….. …..
Then Tim also tells us that he has worked for four crappy capitalist companies, two of which are still in business. Now, I assure you, that if Tim had taken his enlightened self to the major players in those companies and told them how to run the place and make great goods and services and lots of profit, he would have been executed. Instead, he looks at government and likes what he sees. You can’t be fired. You get all sorts of perks. You get a retirement fund straight from the taxpayers. You have all sorts of civil service rules and protections. You are in the service sector. You do not have to manufacture anything. You get on the treadmill at 20 and step off at ……. 85? I don’t think so. Maybe Tim can tell us when the government should stop making the employees come to work.
@The_Livewire I’ll check it out, glancing over these it’s amazing to see new reprints of books my dad had in the collectors section. lol I remember my friend quoting from Moorcock’s Elric. Did you know they finally wrote two new books to the “Witches of Karres” series? It’s truly one of the great sci-fi books from the 60’s.
@VtheK I’ve always been curious what was the rational for building it in low earth orbit instead of high where we could have used it for ship construction? While the space station has been a waste the technology to construct it has paid off well in terms of satellite construction, launching and maintenance skills.
@ILoveCapitalism your argument is based on the premise that when not faced with the cost of a needless repair or regulation the company would use the extra profits to expand or update the business. This is almost never the case and profits almost always go into the pocket or into dividends. This is why factories are rarely retooled and instead it’s cheaper to build a new one than improve the old. The reason that the broken window is the analogy is that the window HAS to be fixed. Once more I remind you that absence of government and regulation does not equal a positive environment for capitalism.
Nice of you to completely overlook the fact that your previous statement to this was completely bogus and you managed to cover yourself in stupid. The reason I make these points is that we are currently trapped in the mode of thinking that all taxes and regulations are bad and that argument is inherently stupid, dangerous, and wrong. Building a political party around such dumb ideas is sure to both wreck the country, the party and our economic futures.
Because greedy capitalists just hoard their profits in big vaults like Scrooge McDuck.
This is one of the stupider things I read from the left; apparently a lot of people think it’s true. The thought that profits may be available for additional investment, or may be spent on goods or services (creating additional jobs) never seems to occur to them.
@V the K yeah cause that would never ever ever happen http://tiny.cc/p9qq5
Tim @ #28 has Levi’s hyperbole turrets syndrome:
No, Tim, you saying that “all taxes and regulations are bad” is the core of anyone’s argument is “inherently stupid, dangerous and wrong.”
Suppose I said: “Tim wants everything taxed to the maximum and regulated in every conceivable way.”
That would make me as “inherently stupid, dangerous and wrong” as you saying that any of us thinks “all taxes and regulations are bad.”
Try your little stupidity branding without so much blatant stupidity.
Tim, your link is a view into a pathetic brain. Since times may be a bit tough for a worker, his best strategy is to max out his credit, right?
If a corporation can not begin to assess what damage Obamacare will do to its labor costs in budgeting for the next fiscal year, said corporation should: a) hire like crazy to prime the payroll pump and send the employees spending at Wal-Mart; b) hold tight until the picture comes into focus; c) liquidate, take the profits and run to Australia; d) get a Pelosi/Obama/union-style Obamacare waiver.
Tim, starting Monday, you are unemployed. You have 99 weeks plus whatever else you can squeeze to sit back and see what you want to do. How much time do you give the farmer that lost his crops and buildings to the dikes that were opened on the Mississippi? How about the chump that works at the rotten McDonald’s job that is now vacant because the clod hoppers got flooded out and they don’t have credit to max out or a printing press to grind out scrip and they can’t afford to eat at even McDonald’s?
Why, it is the corporations to blame. From your perspective, corporations must provide jobs and pay higher taxes and not go overseas and trim profits while still attracting endowment funds, retirement funds, insurance funds, mutual funds, state pension funds, etc. to invest in them.
Gosh I wish you would take a crayon in hand and draw this out in big letters and fat lines so someone as stupid as me can understand how really, really smart you are.
As V started to suggest, if Tim were in a band, it might be called “Army of Straw Men”.
P.S. Borrow-and-spend (Democrat strategy) does not create wealth – not for individuals, not for nations. It bankrupts them.
Obama 2012 slogan: “Bankrupt America? YES WE CAN!”
Right, ask any successful entrepreneur: the way to build a successful business is to hoard your profit and never invest any of it.
Double Face Palm
Even Teh Kittehs can’t believe teh stupiditeh.
@Helio Yes obviously addressing a point from the previous poster is ridiculous, all corporations are saints, each going out of it’s way to make sure it’s employees are treated fairly. At no time ever has a corporation ever blatantly robbed from, trapped employees in debt circles, produced dangerous products, hired thugs to intimidate or kill employees, or ever did business with dictators to turn a profit. I’m not the one saying that there are absolutes, I’m saying that treating all taxes as parasitic, and all government as evil as @ILoveCapitalism was stating was a really bad idea.
sends in the drop bears
Tim.
You are a remarkably dim bulb. ILC can run circles around you and tap dance at the same time.
Show me the exact words where ILC appears to lead you to this: ” I’m saying that treating all taxes as parasitic, and all government as evil as @ILoveCapitalism was stating was a really bad idea.”
I will personally fly to ILC’s location and beat him senseless with a wet noodle if he ever implied in any manner whatsoever that all government is evil.
For your rumination: All taxes are parasitic. They drain the blood of the economy. But taxation is a necessary parasite that runs the common defense, promotes the general welfare and keeps the state operating.
Your job is find any person on this site who favors no government, no infrastructure, no law and order, no social contract.
Your other job is to figure out why your misuse of the word all cements you as mental midget.
You will not be able to nail ILC with your idiotic assertion. Why do you build such a deceit. Do you enjoy punishment?
@Ilovecapitalism “P.S. Borrow-and-spend (Democrat strategy) does not create wealth – not for individuals, not for nations. It bankrupts them” um don’t all start ups borrow money from banks to get business’s going? and than have lines of credit (debt) with which to buy goods and pay bills while waiting for receivables? Isn’t it also true that despite our debt spending we still managed to become the sole remaining super power in the world? Isn’t it also true that if our lines of credit came to a close our financial markets and government would crash? See once again you say really ridiculous things that have no bearing on the business world.
Tim,
You are a bank. You examine the business plan of a “start-up” and make a big loan. Things get off to a rocky start and the “start-up” needs credit to make pay roll. Then creditors come to your bank because bills are not being paid by the “start-up.”
You are the bank. Remember? Your call, Ace. Are you going to loan more money and keep that pay roll funded and pay off the creditors or are you going push for reorganization under bankruptcy and try to save some part of the bad loans you made?
You are the bank. Your call. Get off the pot. Study this first:
http://smallbiztrends.com/2008/04/startup-failure-rates.html
You don’t have enough understanding of the economy to wobble a dust bunny.
FIFY, Timmeh.
Ah Heliotrope, I see you already had him in hand. Thank you 🙂
I thought this was an interesting rant point from Tim:
At no time ever has a corporation ever….trapped employees in debt circles
Which apparently means that, if you spend too much, it’s your company’s fault because they’re not paying you enough.
It explains so much about Timmeh.
We have to understand that Timmeh’s worldview centers and rotates around what is best for Timmeh at any one given point in time.
For example, Timmeh screams and cries that saving money is “hoarding” and that companies should be punished and forced to spend it.
That means one of two things:
1) Timmeh has no savings of any type, no retirement or other accounts of any time, and lives completely paycheck to paycheck
2) Timmeh is a hypocrite
Now, Timmeh, make this statement: “A well-run business has no savings, spends all of its money the instant it gets it, and borrows more when it has already spent all that it has.”
And if you can’t make that, you’re a hypocrite.
Heliotrope, you have brilliantly pushed Timmeh into revealing his hypocrisy.
If Timmeh states that the business should go bankrupt, he contradicts all of his previous statements.
If Timmeh states that the bank should continue to float bad loans, he contradicts his previous screaming fits in which he blamed banks’ continuing to float bad loans on deep-sixing the economy.
What you’re making obvious is that Timmeh is all about theories and never once has managed a practical application.
@Heliotrope Yeah I used to believe banks worked that way too, but what really happens is that a buddy from the same fraternity makes a loan to another buddy, despite horrible mismanagement the company crawls along until they are bought by another company that is looking to diversify their holdings. Company is milked for a few years than through mismanagement it is forced to come up with a new business plan
“So it has always been. Big Government advocates and other parasites offer “poison as food, poison as antidote.” First they create problems through (over-use of) government, then then claim that additional government is the essential solution to our multiplying problems.
Comment by ILoveCapitalism — May 17, 2011
Comment #3 “Since the government gets revenue by appropriation (i.e. by force, or by borrowing backed with the threat of future force), it does not face the private sector’s incentives for efficiency – and so its spending tends to be inefficient.”
yes it’s a conflation but I hardly had to stretch
ILC,
Live in fear that Tim will brilliantly force me to lash you senseless with a wet noodle. On a move civil note, linguini or angel hair?
Angel hair! The true pasta lover can’t wait the full 12-14 minutes it takes to cook linguine.
ILC,
We must be brothers. How often is Linguini left all flour bound and pasty because the chef hasn’t got the Moxie to coax it.
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt, wrong answer.
Not only did you “stretch”, Tim: You lied. You are a liar.
I have indicated that I am against Big Government. I have also indicated, in this thread and on many other occasions, that I am against your dumb Straw Man alternative, of No Government.
There is a third alternative: Small Government. Government has certain legitimate functions, things that only it can do. Anything that government does beyond those, is illegitimate.
But things like truth, accuracy, “third alternatives”, are clearly well beyond the capacity of your limited intellect. In the classic fashion of all Big Government advocates, you cannot afford them; you can only mislead.
(continued) So, to my comment that Big Government advocates (such as yourself) classically offer “poison as food, poison as antidote”, we may now add that Big Government advocates (such as yourself) characteristically lie about their opponents, in lieu of presenting coherent and honest defenses of their own parasitic, Big Government positions.
And Timmeh is unintentionally hilarious.
Yeah I used to believe banks worked that way too, but what really happens is that a buddy from the same fraternity makes a loan to another buddy, despite horrible mismanagement the company crawls along until they are bought by another company that is looking to diversify their holdings. Company is milked for a few years than through mismanagement it is forced to come up with a new business plan.
And as we see, Timmeh, as a good and loyal Obama supporter and Obama Party syncophant, knows exactly of what he speaks.
One has to remember that Timmeh’s actual business experience is limited to what he and his fellow Obama Party government supporters do. That’s why he thinks it’s normal for corrupt gays and lesbians, along with their fellow Obama black people, to do exactly what he described; that is normal practice in the Obama Party.
NDT, there is a saying, which I can’t quite remember – something along the lines that lefties constantly accuse others of what is normal leftie practice?
Maybe I’m thinking of “It takes a thief to recognize a thief” or “A fisherman can always see another fisherman from afar”, I don’t know.
Anyway, Timmeh touches on yet another example of economic distortions CAUSED BY BIG GOVERNMENT… to be solved by yet more Big Government. “Poison as food, poison as antidote.” Think about it. What enables (and BTW, forces) companies to become empty shells subject to financial manipulation is the toxic combination of government regulation (driving out self-regulation) and artificially low interest rates (bailing out the incompetent and making financial speculation and excessive borrowing both possible and virtually mandatory).
Many years ago, I was asked to canvas the views of people in a housing project. We had a problem with illegal tenants, guns, drugs and violence.
Very quickly, we learned that the 10% of sensible people were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the crowd that complained about the oppressive conditions imposed by government control.
People like Tim are not prone to workable solutions. They can not begin to think straight until their boogie men are erased. And even then, they are haunted by the shadows they see lurking behind every tree.
i have become incredibly underwhelmed by the phrase ” small government” since it has come to mean nothing else than opposing things the opponents support. It means nothing more than green lighting every government extravagance that your supporters crave while denying that there is any other way, just like the Republicans from 2000 to 2006 or the Democrats on the election of Obama. Neither party has in any way paid more than lip service to the idea of limited military expenses, facing the Medicare/medicaid crisis or shoring up social security. While I lambaste the democrats for not facing this, I ridicule the Republicans who passed every extravagance without even funding their projects with tax increases and instead passing tax cuts without thinking or planning for the consequences. You want madness look at the past without your blinders on.
LOL 🙂 You reeeaaaaallllllllllly do not know me.
Timmeh seems unable to relate to people except as caricatures, just as he seems unable to relate to ideas except as bumper sticker slogans. “Corporations Bad. Government Good.”
So, Tim, howsabout you join the TEA Party and get behind fiscal repair? Howsabout you get behind Paul Ryan?
Sorry, but the TEA Party is not a wing of the Republican party. It is Democrats and Republicans alike who are fighting the Spendocrats. Now, truth be told, the Spendocrats are most of the Democrats and too many of the Republicans.
But you do have a choice. Unless, of course, you want to take your socialist/communist ideas with you. In that case, go for the Spendocrats and Obama. Obama is the best thing you have for the time being.
@VtheK “Timmeh seems unable to relate to people except as caricatures, just as he seems unable to relate to ideas except as bumper sticker slogans. “Corporations Bad. Government Good.”
Comment by V the K”
*points to pot, points to kettle* who has a website devoted to doing this exact thing??
@Helio I considered the Tea Party but I don’t take them serious, the initial ideals were great but considering that they are now little more than an ultra conservative wing of the republican party, and that despite their lip service to not care about social issues they always seem to find time to vote for some anti-gay fluff legislation when it floats by. Nope the goal is to continue to isolate social conservatives and drive them off a metaphorical cliff while building inroads in with independent voters that can be swayed with good solid ideas, not sound bites and attack ads.
Guys, cut Tim a break…
When you want to date 15 year olds, it’s hard to see things in a more mature manner.
Tim:
You couldn’t document this if 100 billion dollars were riding on it.
Furthermore, if you are all about being gay first and foremost, move to The Netherlands and help drive the Muslims out and live happily ever after.
So, Timmeh is saying we shouldn’t take his arguments any more seriously than I take my schtick on my own blob? Because… I’m sort of already there.