USA Politics

I was checking wikipedia and this is what came up.  As you can see, there is a reason for my mistaking Jefferson and Washington.

In June 1776, the Continental Congress appointed a committee of thirteen to examine forms of government for the impending union of the states. Among the proposals was that from the State of Virginia, written by Thomas Jefferson, urging a limitation of tenure, "to prevent every danger which might arise to American freedom by continuing too long in office the members of the Continental Congress...."

Also George Washington set the precedent for a two-term tradition that prevailed (with the exception of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's four terms) until the 22nd Amendment of 1951.
 
LooseCannon said:
TR ran thrice.

So did Grover Cleveland, but his second running was a lost; he then became the only US president to serve non-consecutive terms.  He did not offer a fourth time.

William Jennings Bryan ran thrice for the Democrats, but never won.
Click to expand...

Yep, and there are others too ... Nixon ran 3 times, losing his first run to Kennedy. And if you count runs which didn't make it to gaining a party's nomination, there's more. Reagan ran in 1976, but lost the nomination to Ford.

But Teddy is the only one who ran for a 3rd term after already serving twice, I think.
 
Well, and FDR, obviously.

Harold Stassen ran for nomination 9 times, and that be the record.  Arrr.
 
Yeah, under the circumstances, I figured FDR was so obvious as to not be worth mentioning.

And then after I posted, I thought: "someone is gonna call me on not mentioning FDR".

And then I decided I didn't care. :bigsmile:
 
The Patriot Act is extended.  Let's see: one can be arrested for freedom of association with suspected terrorist.  That goes against the constitution.  FBI can search and seize without a warrant.  That goes against the constitution.  Pre-emptive strikes against a country that has not initiated war.  That goes against the constitution.  There are more.

Article 1.
Article 2.
Article 3.
 
This reminds me of that South Park episode on "Imaginationland" where the terrorists break through into American imagination and start wrecking havoc.  The only way to the American government to solve the problem is to attack its own imagination because let's face it, "the imagination is running wild".  Great three part episode.
 
Who has experience with this?

Big Brother Wants to Know All About You: The American Community Survey

by John W. Whitehead


“This is Big Brother at its worst.”
~ Congressman Ted Poe (R-TX)

Over the past several years, I have been barraged with emails from Americans expressing their dismay over the American Community Survey, the latest census form to hit randomly selected households on a continuous basis. Unlike the traditional census, which collects data every ten years and is now underway, the American Community Survey is taken every year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. And at 28 pages (with an additional 16-page instruction packet), it contains some of the most detailed and intrusive questions ever put forth in a census questionnaire. These concern matters that the government simply has no business knowing, including a person’s job, income, physical and emotional health, family status, place of residence and intimate personal and private habits.

As one frustrated survey recipient, Beth, shared with me:

    When we first read through the American Community Survey, we thought it was an ID theft scam. I showed it to a lawyer friend of mine. She had never heard of the survey and warned it could be a scam. She said if she’d received this, she would call her congressman and senator to find out if scams such as this were happening to warn others. So I called Washington DC. They in turn told me to call our senator’s office in my state – which I did. I was referred to the Justice Department, who then referred me to my county representative. When I called my county representative, my call was shifted to a Census Bureau employee placed in their offices to field questions about the survey. The Census Bureau representative told me the survey was not a scam. She could not tell me whether or not to fill it out, but said if we chose not to, there could be hefty fines and jail time associated with not doing so. She was no help at all and was evasive in answering my questions.

As Beth found out, the survey is not voluntary. Answering the questions is not a polite request from the Census Bureau. You are legally obligated to answer. If you refuse, the fines are staggering. For every question not answered, there is a $100 fine. And for every intentionally false response to a question, the fine is $500. Therefore, if a person representing a two-person household refused to fill out any questions or simply answered nonsensically, the total fines could range from upwards of $10,000 and $50,000 for noncompliance.

While the penalties for not answering are outrageous, the questions, as Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) has said, are “both ludicrous and insulting.” For example, the survey asks how many persons live in your home, along with their names and detailed information about them such as their relationship to you, marital status, race and their physical, mental and emotional problems, etc. The survey also asks how many bedrooms and bathrooms you have in your house, along with the kind of fuel used to heat your home, the cost of electricity, what type of mortgage you have, the amount of your monthly mortgage payments, property taxes and so on. This questionnaire also requires you to detail how many days you were sick last year, how many automobiles you own, whether you have trouble getting up the stairs and, amazingly, what time you leave for work every morning and how long it takes you to get there. When faced with the prospect that government agents could covertly enter your home and rifle through your personal belongings, do you really want the government knowing exactly when you’re away from home?

As if the survey’s asinine questions and highly detailed inquiries into your financial affairs weren’t bad enough, you’re also expected to violate the privacy of others by supplying the names and addresses of your friends, relatives and employer. And the questionnaire stipulates that you provide such information on the people in your home as their educational levels, how many years of schooling they completed, what languages they speak and when they last worked at a job, among other things.

Americans being ordered by the government to inform and spy on your family and friends? It’s not too far off from the scenario George Orwell envisioned in his futuristic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. “The family,” writes Orwell, “had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.”

Granted, some of the questions in the American Community Survey may appear fairly routine. However, the danger rests in not knowing exactly how the government plans to use this vast amount of highly personal information. For instance, if the financial information you provide on the survey does not jive with your tax returns, whether such a discrepancy was intentional or not, could you be flagged for an IRS audit? Given the increasing amount of collusion taking place between government agencies in recent years, I wouldn’t rule it out.

Another concern with this intrusive questionnaire is that it signifies yet another inroad into the establishment of a permanent surveillance state. Everywhere we look these days, we are either being watched, taxed or some bureaucrat is placing another bit of information in our government files. Now with the American Community Survey, the federal bureaucracy is thrusting its expansive tentacles toward us in an attempt to invade every aspect of our lives.

This survey also hints at a dangerous wedding of governmental and corporate interests – a merger that inevitably results in personal data collected on hundreds of millions of Americans being shared with private corporations. Needless to say, with the Obama administration poised to hire an additional one million census workers, data collecting on American citizens will be intensified over the next several years.

Clearly, this is not what the Founders intended. As Article I of the U. S. Constitution makes plain, the census is to be taken every ten years for the sole purpose of congressional redistricting. The Founders envisioned a simple head count of the number of people living in a given area so that numerically equal congressional districts could be maintained. There is no way that the Founders would have authorized the federal government to continuously demand, under penalty of law, such detailed information from the American people.

However, the Founders did not anticipate the massive and meddlesome federal bureaucracy we have today or the daily onslaught of media images and governmental scare tactics designed to keep the modern American distracted and submissive. Sadly, most Americans do not seem to care that their freedoms are being whittled away or they see no point in resistance. Either way, the reaction is the same: they submit to virtually every government demand, including the highly intrusive and patently unconstitutional American Community Survey.

Thankfully, there are still some Americans out there who value freedom and recognize that it is time to stand up and fight back using whatever peaceful, nonviolent means are available to them. As Beth concludes in her email to me:

    As an American loyal to my country, we have no choice but to stand against this unethical intrusion into our lives. I have called and written to many people. No response. No one seems to be listening. No one seems to care. I intend to vote for those who do care.

March 5, 2010

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig8/whitehead9.1.1.html
 
Right-wing paranoia.

Sure, the survey is intrusive and the fines outrageous. But look what else the article says:

Quotes from only two sources, both Republican. Right there, you know this article is likely to be slanted to the right. And one of them is Ron Paul. Now you know you're dealing with nutjobs. Only the truly insane take Paul seriously about anything.

How about this: "When faced with the prospect that government agents could covertly enter your home and rifle through your personal belongings, do you really want the government knowing exactly when you’re away from home?" That's right-wing militia talk. Sure, the government could invade my home if they want. But I don't expect that or worry about it, because the government doesn't actually do that.

Some of the questions the author complains about are on ordinary census or tax forms. Sure, there are questions which are improper - but the author is angry about perfectly normal questions too.

The giveaway: appealing to the "intent of the Founders". Right-wingers have been raising this cry for decades. It's easy, because the Founders aren't around to spell out their intentions. It's stupid, because the assumption that a nation's government shouldn't change in over 200 years is stupid. It's manipulative, because it pulls at the patriotism which most Americans are raised with, and which right-wingers take to the extremity of nationalism. (Using emotion to overwhelm reason: the same way religions accomplish their evil.)

True, this survey is a bad thing, or at least being done badly right now. But this article is written to appeal to right-wing nutjobs. It's loaded with their code words. I'm not going to worry about it until I hear sane people worry about it.
 
I think you're the one making the mistake.  Speaking of patriotism, the exact opposite it true.  Being patriotic to your country regardless of what kind of rules and laws they set out is the symptom of patriotism/nationalism.  If such private questions, and penalties no less, as this appeared in Canadian politics, we'd be outraged.  The fact that you not only non-chalantly brush it aside but actually call it paranoia shows how far Americans have lost their sense of freedom.  As far as Ron Paul, his criticism of the Fed is often agreed upon by both sides, so you're nutjob call of Ron Paul only shows your extreme left-wing bias.  I'm not expecting something different for a guy supporting Obama though.  He'll help drive your country further into deep debt.

EDIT: The fact that the Dems don't care much about changing the Patriot Act should tell you how little difference there is between the two parties.
 
Genghis Khan said:
I'm not expecting something different for a guy supporting Obama though.  He'll help drive your country further into deep debt.
Click to expand...
To be honest, the debt is not his fault but the previous administration: When Bush entered the office, the total debt of USA GDP was around 50%. When he quit it was around 94%. How Obama will effect it remains to be seen, since what we see here is a result of Bush.

Still not sure what else you can do when the economy is in such a bad shape than throwing money at it to stimulate.

Edit: How do you all like my new sig? Someone on another Forum made it for me.  :D
 
Obama has been practicing a limited form of Keynesian economics, similar to how the UK (and FDR) stimulated some growth during the Depression. If the US was in a regular debt situation, then this wouldn't appear to be so much of a much. I mean, it'd still be an issue, but it'd be less threatening. In this situation…well, my other thought is that the USA has had a much higher debt as % of GDP load, back in World War II. It's certainly plausible that with concerted effort after the recession this can get back under control.

But, of course, most of the blame for the debt load comes from the previous presidents - Bush, Bush, and Reagan, between them, account for about 75% of the US debt load. Obama, so far, is about 15% (yes, a huge amount for one year), and the previous administrations for the remaining %.

Frankly, the US needs to raise taxes significantly to pay for their services, or slash the services offered. The end of the recession will help their funding situation, but some president needs to, like GHWB, realize it's time to stop dicking around and pay for the plans they want, or at least try.
 
Keynes economic theory does not work.  The Great Depression was exacerbated by the spending under the Hoover administration and continued painfully under Roosevelt, the single largest source of the problem.  His effects can still be seen today, when government spending knows no bounds.  The 1970s brought us stagflation which still haunts us today, an experience deemed impossible under the Keynes theory of economics.  Obama’s plan is more of the same thing.  The previous presidents -- all of them -- are responsible for this issue.  The government cannot fix the economy.  Governments work by coercion.  Markets work by voluntary trade.  When will people get this?!

For those that dare to challenge their economic views.
http://mises.org/  Austrian School of economics.  The only one that matters.

http://www.breitbart.tv/the-b-cast-interview-was-obama-a-committed-marxist-in-college/.  Hear this on Obama for the left-wingers who are not convinced.
 
I think you're dreadfully wrong on your analysis of this particular situation.

Firstly, the Great Depression. Hoover's government did not run a Keynesian plan. Hoover raised taxes and tariffs exponentially in order to encourage private industry in the United States. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize Winner in the field of Economics, said that Hoover was a laisse faire guy.

His biggest changes in taxation was to cut the top tax rate and then restore it. For reference, people who think they have it rough now, the top tax rate when Hoover took office was 73%. By the end of his term it had been cut to 24% then put back up to 63%. The tariffs raised by Hoover are best learned about by reading on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act.

These were bad policies and contributed to the deepening of the Great Depression.

Roosevelt's New Deal worked. Period. Historians and economists are almost unified in this opinion. The New Deal didn't end the Depression but it did work to move towards a resolution. The Great Depression was so bad that it took the largest war ever to get the world out of the hole. Except for Germany which did a great job getting out of the hole, because of the full-blown Keynesian program run by the Nazi government. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if Hitler died in 1938, there'd still be statues of him all over Germany.

Stagflation is primarily a result of the deregulation of the economy under Nixon and Ford, not because of Carter (though Carter was incapable of handling the resulting recession, much as Bush was incapable of handling his recession).

All the recent recessions have been a direct result of deregulation. In fact, so was the Great Depression. And government spending has gotten people out of recession and back to work. The most successful period in economic history was the 1950s, during which Truman and Eisenhower (a Democrat and Republican) engaged in HEAVY government spending but had good incomes and management to handle it. They paid off the %GDP debt and took the USA to an area never before considered financially.

Ike liked the New Deal. He liked spending money in the United States. That's why there's an interstate system.

So yeah, I disagree that Keynes was wrong. If he was so wrong, why did so many economists back the global stimulus initiative created by the G20? Why do independent reports on the US stimulus say that it has saved between 1.5 million and 2.5 million jobs (equivalent to around 2-3% of the US job force)? And why do most economists say the recession has ended at least a year before they originally thought?
 
No one questions that government spending can stimulate the economy and create jobs.  It does.  The critique of the Keynesian approach is that such growth may be illusory and short-lived, and it undoubtedly leads to inefficient allocations of resources.  But, when we were in the Great Depression and faced with the threat of world fascism, it was probably worth it.  Now, at least in the U.S., the concern is that the government is not only spending wastefully, it is spending money it doesn't have and will never have.  The suggestion by Moody's that it may downgrade the United States' credit rating was terrifying. 

LooseCannon said:
Frankly, the US needs to raise taxes significantly to pay for their services, or slash the services offered. The end of the recession will help their funding situation, but some president needs to, like GHWB, realize it's time to stop dicking around and pay for the plans they want, or at least try.
Click to expand...

Or, just murder all the baby boomers.  (That was a joke.)  In all seriousness, though, slashing services would only amount to a drop in the sea.  By far, most of the federal spending each year is on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, which will only get worse as the baby boomers start retiring -- when they will stop creating national wealth and start consuming it.  It therefore seems like an inopportune time to create another humongous government entitlement program, namely, the proposed health care plan, which I won't pretend to understand fully.  I suppose if it doesn't bankrupt the country, then once the baby boomers start dying off in droves over the next 15-20 years, we might see an easing of the debt burden. 

The national debt really, really bothers me.  I'm very conservative when it comes to debt, personally.  For example, rather than put my year-end bonus into savings (or spending it), I use a big chunk every year to pay down my mortgage -- which is my only debt by the way.  I don't run a credit card balance; I pay cash for cars; I don't take out loans.  I even work at a firm that doesn't use any debt whatsoever to finance its operations.  Put simply, I don't like debt.  Leverage can make you a ton of money, but it can also bankrupt you.  So, when I see my government leveraging itself beyond what any sane private enterprise would do, it pisses me off. 
 
When it comes to debt, I'm with you. The thing is that these entitlement programs are basically standard in every first world nation except the USA (that is to say, health care included). We have, as you might expect, the same discussions you have in the United States here in Canada, given the robust nature of our entitlement programs. But - and here's the thing - we're willing to make the sacrifice. Now, I think in the USA you have to make some choices. One of them means you'll probably have to raise taxes once you're out of the recession. Now is the time to reform the health care system because if you don't fix medicare, medicaid, and general health care now, it'll be much worse in twenty years.

We've gone back and forth on the issue a few times. I've gone on record saying I don't necessarily support a Canadian or UK-style system for the USA. The US is its own country and needs to figure it out on its own. But many countries are able to provide better general health care than the USA with a much smaller percentage of GDP spent on health care. That does mean the US is doing it wrong. Even when you look at current expenditure, there's so much money going on Medicare/Medicaid alone. I think Canada spends 10.6% of its income on health care - the US spends almost 15%. That's a huge difference given the level of care differential. And as GK has demonstrated, we tend to do it wrong a lot.

You're right. The debt is huge. But it's not as big as it has been in US history, when you compare debt to GDP as a percentage. The highest point for that was after World War II, when it was like 140%, compared to about 86% currently. The Truman/Eisenhower economic plans kept the US economy growing, combined with robust debt repayment plans, and that cut it down significantly. It started rising up again around JFK/LBJ, and took huge jumps starting in 1981.

I feel bad for Obama, because as a politician, he has no choice but to remind Americans over and over again why there is a debt, but realistically, the debt should be the primary focus for all American politicians and not just a political tool. It doesn't help to focus on the past. The Republicans have already proven they're not interested in actually working with the Democrats to reduce the deficit (recently, 9 Republicans sponsored a bill on deficit reduction then voted against cloture on the matter, causing it to be filibustered and die), and the Democrats seem completely incapable of pondering it seriously.

Here's the way I see it. Debt and borrowing for a country is healthy behaviour, because maintaining a responsible credit rating and the ability to borrow is very good. Major debt spending over a period of 45 years excepting 5 is probably very bad. It's not out of control yet. Responsible health care reforms that reduce the cost of medicare, a reduction in national security spending due to the end of two wars, modest tax increases in areas that won't impact the economy heavily, and the end of both the stimulus and the recession will give Obama, in his second term, a chance to put the US back into the positives, much as Clinton did. We just have to see if he can find a way to take advantage of it.
 
That was an official "off the top of my head" number. I tend to be correct, but given the amount the debt has increased in the past year, I'm sure that it will be in that range soon if it's not already. In this case, a number I heard 6 months ago could easily be 4-5 percentage points out of date.
 
My figures were wrong. It was 86% by the end of 2009 and it's expected to reach 94% by the end of this year.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top