FordGT90Concept said:
And frogs....

True, only in a few of them though. Kind of like how a platypus lays eggs. There is always a few odd balls.

The platypus...who says God doesn't have a sense of humor.

I'm not actually a McCain fan, but think he's the lesser of the 2 evils. I haven't really liked any presidential candidate since I can remember. But I think a few have worked out to be decent. I'm a true independent. I want my guns. I'm pro-choice. I think all illegal imigrants should be sent packing regardless of their family situations. I believe war is always a last resort, and even then only if it directly effects our own safety. Using war for strategic planning is barbaric. Thinking your country and citizens are less expendable than another country/citizens is the arrogant behaviour that has the USA held in such low regard by the rest of the world now, and rightly so.

I won't apologise for presenting my own slant on issues. I'm quite happy to think my perspective is correct on most things (I think that's called human nature). But I can be convinced to change my mind if the arguments are valid and convincing. I've seen nothing here that really impressed me to do so.

I've been watching my beloved Wisconsin Dells/Lake Delton get washed into the Wisconsin River for the last 24 hours on the news. The spot where I lost my virginity is now a new river channel. So many memories in that area. The Dells' claim to fame is the sandstone formations, one of the few spots in the world that the glacier never leveled out.

We used to see all the flooding take place to the south (Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio). I still think it's incredibly stupid to think global warming isn't happening. This is more than just cyclical nature. The Dells area set a record for annual rainfall in May '08, since records were kept. The scary part is that the WI dams were questionable 20 years ago. There was a lot of talk about a domino effect if one of the WI dams collapsed. To my knowledge, nothing has been done to reinforce them since. If that domino effect happens, everything along the WI and Mississippi Rivers, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico would see flooding to make New Orleans look trivial.

Not to push any buttons or start any flame wars, but I think you'll find that the Democrats are more likely to invest in public works projects and less in foreign wars right now....

Gerritt

I'm well aware of what Obama wants to do, withdraw from Iraq in the quickest manner possible. I was never for invading Iraq, but I don't want it to turn into another military disaster either (some would argue it's too late for that already). I believe withdrawing too quickly will cause just that. McCain is looking at withdrawing too, but only after the situation is stabalized, even if it takes 100 years (his words).

I'm probably one of those "just say no deal" crowd. I'd have voted for Hillary, and would now vote for McCain instead of Obama. Actually, I might do that just to p**s off Oprah. But then I always figured voting according to party lines was silly. Having seen what a decent government sponsored health care system can do, I believe the USA would benefit tremendously from such a system. I used to pay $70 for Ventolin in the USA. I pay $5 in Australia and have received better attention for my asthma, no cost to me at all. I've also gotten cortozone shots in my bum ankle for free. Wonderful country, Australia.

I also think cutting taxes at this stage would prove fatal to the economy, as pretty much proven by Bush's strategy. I think McCain will have to rethink continuing Bush's tax cuts by November. But I think Obama would increase taxes drastically and spend even more.

Anyway, just my opinion.

dark41 said:

70% of the US economy is consumer spending... retailers, the service industry, and anyone else in this country that relies directly on money spent by patrons for their income is already feeling the squeeze of less money in consumer pockets caused by rapidly rising food and fuel prices, and your idea is to take more money away from the consumers by taxing them higer!? are you insane? If you want to see total economic colapse at this point then raising taxes is exactly what you should be done.

When the current Bush administration took over, the nation had a surplus for the 1st time in a long time and the economy was very strong. Clinton's tax system worked, and you can argue that until the cows come home, but it doesn't change the fact. Experts claim it takes 6 yrs for a government to effect the economy, but I've never believed that. Even if it were true, there should be a turn around by now if it was caused by the previous administration. But of course it's being caused by the current administration. I remember the stock market dropping seriously as it became obvious Bush was going to win the 2000 election. In 8 yrs the USA has gone to a record deficit, partly because of the war, partly because of over spending, and partly because of a failed tax system, as well as a few other things. I'm insane?? The only people who save money are fairly wealthy, which is a huge minority in the USA. Most of us live week to week and always have. You bet your butt I'd increase taxes on the wealthy as obviously reducing their taxes doesn't cause them to spend enough to keep the economy going. I expect those with the good fortune to have money (pun intended) to do a bigger part. The only thing Bush can really piont to as a strength was the stock market records, but even those are now defunct and only a small measure of the overall economy.

McCain probably won't help that much, but since no candidate is perfect, I think his strong points are still better than what Obama offers.

dark41 said:

Thanks to the birth/expansion of a fairly new industry (the tech boom of the late 90's) and the fact that consumers were spending $1.02 for every dollar earned.



dubbya inherited the beginnings of an economic down turn, the tech bubble was beginning to burst around the turn of the millennium.



Yes damn that George Bush forcing thousands of people that only made 35K a year to go out and buy $500,000 dollar houses that they couldn't possibly afford, I'm sure medaling with the magic dials under the desk in the oval office that manipulate the dow jones in order to sabotage his own political carrier is also contributing to this also... Do you see how ridiculous that sounds? That roughly as ridiculous as blaming the economy on the President. The person who is most directly responsible for the economic health of the country is Ben Bernanke chairman of the federal reserve.




I'm not going to argue that the Republicans have clean hands, their fiscal irresponsibility over the past few years is definitely a contributing factor but the cyclical nature of capitalist economies is unavoidable.



The rich already pay the vast majority of the taxes received by the government. The "poor" do not really pay taxes, they pay a comparatively tiny portion of their paychecks into the system and receive a large amount of that money paid back at the end of the year as a income tax refund.

Jim H said:
I'll have to take a course to learn how to spend $1.02 for every dollar earned. But seriously, I haven't been in debt since I sold my house in '97. Living on credit is just plain dangerous, no matter how much you make.

Jim H said:

So the tech boom is over in the USA? It's still growing rapidly in most countries. Dubbya had a clean slate to start with and turned it into a record deficit in 7 yrs. The stock market is back to where it started when he took over, unemployment just jumped 1/2% to 5 1/2%, etc.. I've watched Bush say over and over for the past 7 years how the economy is stronger than ever. Apparently no one informed him that he inherited an economic slow down.

Jim H said:

What I see that strikes me as ridiculous is to blame all of the economic woes on the housing market alone. That, and pumping false economy back into the system to try and cover up the blunders.

Jim H said:

We agree on something.

Jim H said:

My ex-wife, thanks to NAFTA, now falls into that 'poor' category ($16,000/yr). The rich have gotten richer with Bush's tax breaks, the poor have gotten poorer, and the economy isn't any better for it. Sorry, I must have missed the part where his tax cuts made things better, unless only the rich matter.

Another big problem IMO is NAFTA and these free trade agreements. I'd like to see some examples of where they've benefited the citizens of the US because I can sure name a lot that hurt us. Almost as soon as Clinton put ink to the republican's NAFTA, Ray-O-Vac (the biggest employer and only company in the area that payed $11/hr to unskilled laborers as the rest are closer to $7 or $8/hr) closed their doors in Wonewok, WI and moved to Mexico. What did the 500+ ex-employees get in return? Lesser paying jobs, failed mortgages (no such thing as a 500k house in Wonewoc, WI either, the average is around 100k now), and many being forced to move from where they'd spent their entire lives just to continue eating. Etc., etc..

I sincerely doubt there's a quick fix to the current economic problems. Those who sit around without changing anything because they think that the economy will recover by itself, may soon find themselves in deep trouble, similar to those who fail to recognise the effects of global warming and acting upon it. There's too many diferences between now and previous recoveries. Primarily the dollar was based upon the gold standard, which gave it a solid foundation. Now it's based upon nothing and the foundation is the same. Also the US people worked 2 jobs or did whatever it took to make ends meet during the depression. Most people now are too lazy to do so. Then the government keeps printing more money and pumping into the economy. Ever wonder where inflation comes from? We'll never go broke because we just keep printing more money and giving it to whoever needs it at the time.

I'm sorry to say that I have to disagree with both of you. In the hopes of keeping the thread readable I'll not quote what you've said, but respond out of line.

Public Works and Education.
No tax hike. No decrease in "DEFENSE" spending.
Just stop sending troops and contractors to Iraq on our dime. Let Blackwater and Haliberton negotiate their contracts with the Iraqi government. England, our staunchest ally in the Iraq War have announced a withdraw by the end of the year, we should follow shortly, with a minimal force remaining for stability reasons. The State of Iraq is a artificial construct that arose out of WWII and the meddling of western governments. Lets stop meddling and let the Shia, Sunni, and Kurds work it out for themselves, like we did in Yugoslavia amongst some just as diametrically opposed groups or nations, to some degree. We did intervene, but only under the auspices of the UN. Iraq should be the same. If we stay it should be under the same environment, not one of unilateral US decree.

Health Care.
Having travelled the world over, I can not understand why this is such a HUGE unsolvable issue here in the US. Why is it that dynamic economies like that in Germany, England, France and Japan can fund a level of Health Care and the US can not? Maybe it is because of the FACT that TAXES are higher there, but, the number of multibillionaries is lower? Though they all have a well established middle class....hmmm.

Taxes.
My last tax return ran over 100 pages, including the worksheets, schedules, etc.
This is because the US tax code NEEDS an OVERHAUL at least, and at best needs to be thrown out all together and started from scratch. It takes me a month to put my return together, and even at that I'm never sure it's right. Close the loop-holes, simplify the code, and you'll end up with enough money to pay for everything that the citizentry want without raising their taxes. What's the tax rate on a half billion dollar yacht? Less than 1%. Get real. The mega rich are getting tax breaks that the rest of us are not. Close the holes for all of us. It'll mean that I have to pay an extra $2000/year, but I'm more than willing to do it if everyone has to pay the equivilent percentage of their income.

What does any of this have to do with global warming? Just that if you feel that you are ENTITLED to something, you're willing to let someone else pay for it... NO we all need to pay.

Gerritt

Gerritt,
We don't disagree on much that I see here.

AU taxes are roughly the same as US. I paid roughly 25% of my gross in taxes in the USA, then paid medical insurance out of my paycheck, and then paid into social security. I pay roughly 30% of gross in AU, which includes government sponsored health care and pension. My experience with the system thus far is that it works much better than in the USA in general. I actually paid more in the USA for less. Prescription drugs costs are ridiculous in the USA as well. The care I've received here is much more in depth than anything I ever got in the USA (military and civilian). I'd never heard of preventative medicines for asthma until moving here. If a country with 20 million people can afford this system, a country with 300 million people can surely do the same or better.

I have no problem with letting Iraq sort out their own government without our intervention, and providing only a stabilizing military force. I just don't want to see us cut and run completely, unless or until they ask us to. For the record, AU has been every bit as staunch an ally as England in the war. has already withdrawn most of their troops from Iraq and plans on having the rest out before the end of the year.

Taxes, we'll have to agree to disagree. I don't see how someone making $16,000/yr and working 10 hours of overtime per week to get that should be expected to pay the same percentage of their income as someone making $160,000/yr, let alone $1.6 million. This isn't a sense of entitlement, rather a sense of just wanting to be able to live a decent life style where you choose to (rural vs city). But I do agree that the loop holes need to be closed.

Global warming, fact or farce?

dark41 said:

The boom is over... the industry is still here... granted its slowly being outsourced to india and china but that is another issue.



The housing market is a major contributing factor, the printing money to pay debts (see the recent "stimulus package") is election year politics/pandering. The current situation is the end result of a combination of factors... my point was that you cannot lay all the blame for all the economic problems at Bush's feet, people need to take responsibility for their own actions, blaming eveything under the sun on George Bush is a copout... Every turn of bad luck is not the President's fault, bad things happen.




This comes back to personal responsibiltiy, my position on this would be that if it takes two jobs to put food on the table at the end of the day then you're just going to have to man up and work 2 jobs. If you're too lazy to work your way through the hard times then you're too lazy to eat and too lazy to participate in any of the other activities that require money... lazy is not a valid excuse to not work.

dark41 said:

The problem with that is that increasing the taxes paid as a percentage of income as income goes up punishes success. The other issue is that the person who is living below the poverty line's vote counts just as much as the millionare's. So the impoverished person can vote to take the millionares money away and have it redistributed to them and they have every bit as much say in what happens to the rich persons money as they do. This is the eqivalent of me having just as much power as you in deciding if you should empty your bank account into mine or not. This is not fair in my eyes.

Taxes take freedom away from me in that they reduce my ability to do other things with the money. The poor are often the first to vote for tax increases yet they bare none of the pain of said tax increase, we should all bare this burden together and equally so, so that no one forgets that the government gets its money from the citizens.

dark41 said:

You reach a point where you will experience what is called a "dis-economy of scale". Many large corporations like Wal-Mart are super efficient and attempt to cut costs in any way possible (the government does not) and yet their profit growth stagnates. The cause is that as you grow larger you start to need more and more managers and eventually managers to manage managers. Management does not directly generate revenue and is relatively expensive in comparison to the average worker.

The Government will create bureaucracy and mountains of red tape along with managers and so much of it that most of the money going into the "health care" system will be wasted before it gets to the hospital. If you don't believe me look at the pubic school system. Small private schools cost less per student and are much better schools because they don't have greedy self serving politicians figuring out ways to siphon off funds every way they can. We will be better off if we let the private sector manage health care, and remove the taxes that make buying your own private heath insurance cost prohibative to those that are self employed. Laws already require hospitals to give emergency care to patients weather they can afford it or not.

dark41 said:
ROFL!


dark41 said:
Besides public works programs, tax cuts are about the only thing the federal government can do for the economy. I'm all for starting up new public works programs but the timing is bad. The last major push for such programs was after WWII and other wars where lots of vets were coming back with no place to work. Pretty much all the roads in the USA were built because of that. The same could be said for the TVA.

I think there needs to be a push for fusion research and better battery technology (like McCain wants) but things like that can't be sponsored under a public works program as it takes a lot of education to work in those fields. The best candidate for public work programs right now is probabaly in creating a 200+ MPH train system for inter-city travel. Such a program would reduce the need for oil, reduce the amount of emmissions produced by the USA, and provide much needed jobs.

What I think needs to be done is implement a two step program that has two goals of differing priority. The top priority would be to get and maintain energy independence for the economic well being of the nation, the second priority would be to reduce or eliminate the emission of pollutants into the atmostphere.

To accomplish this I would start a new nationally funded research program which focused on developing means of exploiting sources of energy which were renewable or that were based on resouces that we had virtually limitless supplys of (1000 years or more after calculating for growth) and also on ways of greatly improving the efficency of existing technology. The idea would be to create ways of generating power that were clean, efficent, and commercially viable. I would make any discoveries made by this program public knowledge just like the tech developed by NASA and would set up a system of tax breaks and grants for new and existing energy companies that wanted to implement these discoveries into new infrastructure. History has shown us that we can do almost anything if we get the best people and the proper equipment behind them to accomplish set goals (see Manhattan Project and Apollo Program).

The second part of this plan would be to start allowing the exploitation of recources that we have now in the most environmentally responsible way possible using existing technology. With the intent to slowly start phasing these things out as new tech became available that offered an economially viable replacement.

It may take a decade or two but at least by the time it was done the problem would be solved. The way we are going we will end up fighting back and forth forever and never actually start working on real solutions that make sense on a scale that can meet the needs of entire countries.

Global Warming is BS. It's a plot to make Billions of $$$$ from people. Do we have Pollution? Yes, Do we have Global Warming? No.

Jim H said:
Technologies advanced beyond fission and fusion power could potentially be a danger to national security (like fission). Such things need to be researched by the government and completely exploited to know there is no way for it to be weaponized (or at least the steps it takes to weaponize it so we know what to watch for). Then they can become semi-public knowledge (again like fission) where the information required to weaponize it is closely guarded.

I bring this up because the best sources of energy are major sources of heat/explosives. The more powerful the source of energy, the more potent it is as a weapon. Frequently, the weapons (e.g. atomic bomb) came before the associated power sources (nuclear power plant) because it is easier to blow something up than contain its energy.