CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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90%
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(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
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15%↑
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CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
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CO-06 (Aurora)
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CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
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35%↓
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
January 14, 2013 08:41 AM UTC
61 Comments
Would constitute burning DC to the ground? Seems like a bit too much poetic license that you are taking.
Forcing the President to spend money, and then not giving him the money to spend – aka DEFAULTING – is burning DC, and the country, to the ground.
Nobody is forcing the President to spend money. He burnt political capital so he could keep spending.
now the President is making sure that they put the money into the account. Congress already spent the money.
The House sought to get the President to spend less. The President resisted and has said he will resist again at the upcoming debt ceiling debate. In fact, floaters are out there that the President may bypass (or is using the threat of such for leverage) the entire debt ceiling debate by minting a trillion dollar coin under an obscure statute intended for coin collectors.
So any argument that the President is “forc[ed] . . . to spend money” as Phoenix Rising tried to make, doesn’t really pass the laugh test.
“The House controls the Budget” do you not understand? If they want to cut spending, they need to do it themselves.
and the Senate said no.
Before it ever got to the President, Congress passed a budget agreed on between the two chambers.
The President and Democratic lawmakers have stated that they’re willing to have a budget discussion – during the budget discussion.
Not on the debt ceiling limit, which is actually a discussion about authorizing debt payments to cover last year’s budget expenses (which the President is required to spend, as previously noted and which you have not refuted).
The Senate reached a deal and the House went along with it because it didn’t want political blame. Even this page acknowledged that the deal was a clear victory for the President.
Let’s disambiguate a bit, shall we?
The budget bill (actually, continuing resolution) was passed earlier in 2012. As it is a continuing resolution, it is essentially an extension of the 2011 budget. Why? Because the House budget was a no-compromise Republicans-only bill. And because everyone assumed that the Congress would pass a bill to replace the sequester targets.
The sequester isn’t a budget per-se, it’s a baseline framework around which future budget baselines were to be calculated – and it also affects the current budget. How did we get there? In August 2011 when the last debt ceiling hostage situation occurred, President Obama proposed a very large deal that mixed revenue and spending cuts in a way that leaned toward the Republican side of the mix; IIRC it even included the Chained CPI Social Security cuts. It was $4+ trillion over 10 years, and it was the second best proposal for balancing the budget available to the House – the top contender being the Progressive Caucus budget, which actually managed to balance the budget within a decade. The House budget wasn’t as effective at reducing the deficit. Republicans rejected Obama’s deal and we wound up with the sequester instead.
So at the end of 2012 the Congress still hadn’t managed to come up with a replacement to the sequester… Once again the President wanted a full scale deal; once again Republicans were unwilling to compromise. The fiscal cliff avoidance measure was negotiated in the Senate because the House couldn’t come up with anything in the way of a compromise measure – it was all or nothing for the Tea Party Caucus. Even Boehner’s Plan B failed.
Where does that leave us?
The President didn’t want the continuing resolution for a 2012 budget, but Congress failed to negotiate a deal to send him a real budget. The President didn’t want the sequester, but the Republican House decided it didn’t want the best compromise offer for reducing the budget deficit available. The President didn’t want the cliff avoidance deal, but Congress once again couldn’t see fit to negotiating a compromise to put on his desk. So here we are, with the budget that Congress passed back in 2012 – a continuation of the budget it passed back in 2011… And the President must execute that budget.
Which part of this is the President’s fault?
I used to work, temporarily,as an operations manager for a company in Aspen.
I came aboard because the owner, who was too nice a guy and, because he did not ensure his administrative capacity was adquate, he allowed a number of people to put his company in a deep financial hole. He asked me to help him save his company.
With 12 large, but failing, jobsites (app. $5 million or so in stone masonry contracts) in Aspen, Snowmass and vicinity, and a disasterous loss at a project in Montana, he had begun to be in the death spiral toward no income.
Owners on huge, expensive construction jobs make progress payments. When work doesn’t get done on a regular schedule..the checks stop coming. When Artie(I will call him) finally started to understand the depth of larceny and mismanagement in his company, he realized he could not pay his bills, vendors would not sell him concrete and sawblades, he could not keep up payroll, etc., owners would not pay…jobs went idle.
At that point, he brought in a couple of investors, a man and woman from his church, who were well-to-do ranchers. The husband became a superintendent and the wife got the job of comptroller. When he gave her control of the purse strings, he did not forsee that her sole priority would be making sure the investment she and her husband made, some $800,000 dollars, was paid back…immediately.
She began to squeeze the purse strings and further crippled the company…teetering on the brink of a total meltdown…he called me.
What I discovered was the comptroller had become almost completely inapproachable and combative and was starving operations because of her unwillingness to authorize purchases and fund operational costs. Artie was unwilling to challenge this woman, to whom he owed a great deal of money…so I explained it to her. In a value-added operation, you must allow the value to be added by spending money, or you will have no income to fund growth.
I explained that, in order to save the company, she had to measure debt-relief against the need to keep income flowing, which is the essential ingredient in funding growth. She wasn’t interested in my point of view, even though I was very successful in starting to turn the company around. I had saved three of their smaller jobs, reestablished credit with most of our suppliers, and we were making great progress on the larger projects, but we needed ever more of our cash flow for operations.
His choice, to allow her to hold sway, drove his company into bankruptcy.
You are a bright guy, Elliot. You figure out why this story is relevant.
On the unfunded projects in your story above vs. the ROI of the spending the GOP wants to have cut?
How about a little deflection, hoss?
In your hypo (and I’m sorry if I missed something as I was reading it rapidly), there was a legit business that was producing profit and which simply needed investment to continue turning profit.
That quite simply is not what we have in DC. Not just that it is government – also that the spending is just encouraging further waste (and will necessitate even more future spending due to the baseline getting raise) as opposed to saving an otherwise profitable endeavor.
you have a comprehension problem. Slow down and read the story..the company WASN’T making a profit, it was floundering, just like the US economy was. You cannot revive a value added business without significant re-investment, austerity (cost cutting) will put you out of business if you go too far.
Neo-con Free Market Miltonheads are determined to drive American wages to third world levels.
I caught the fact the Company was floundering. But it had a viable business model. The problem with the US is the spending model is not sustainable/viable.
long enough to get the economy growing so that sufficient revenue is generated to run the government on a balanced budget and pay down debt.
The spending model is fine. Clinton did a good job with it..Bush blew it up. Govt. spending has been cut dramatically already. More revenue is needed now…not more spending cuts. We need economic stimulus…as in paying customers.
I blame it on the “Vicoprophen”…
Article 4, Section 4
It ain’t that hard. If Congress wants to spend less, they should createa budget that spends less.
If Congress wants to spend less in the immediate moment- they should NOT DEFAULT which raises interest rates and is not Constitutional.
The President is forced by law to spend whatever Congress appropriated through the budget bill. That prevents the President from under-spending on programs for which he does not approve yet accepted as part of signing the budget.
Congress passed the budget – it has the responsibility to ensure that the country can pay the bills it authorized (and mandated). Absent that, the Congress is telling the President to default on the US debt.
Read more: Boehner: GOP will pass ‘responsible’ debt bill – The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/poli…
Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content: http://www.denverpost.com/term…
They are threatening to refuse to pay for stuff they’ve already promised to pay for in the legislation they’ve already passed.
This was never part of the process until Obama became president. The debt ceiling has always been raised as a matter of routine since congress had already racked up the bills. It was raised numerous time under GW, GHW, Reagan, etc. It’s like dining at a restaurant and then refusing to pay because you don’t want to add to your credit card debt.
This new fake debt ceiling cliff is a totally new Republican anti-Obama invention. It isn’t about Obama’s spending. It’s about refusing to pay their own bills. If Boehner is finally going to put his foot down and refuse to let the loonies run the asylum, good for him.
And Obama resisted. If Obama had not resisted I’d think you would have a stronger argument.
Obama argued for a huge spending cut package, balanced in equal parts by revenue increases in order that we balance the budget as quickly as possible within some level of rational compromise and begin paying down our debts. The GOP resisted.
The GOP package was smaller, less effective at balancing the budget, not a balanced compromise, and more damaging to seniors and the poor.
The Progressive Caucus package – not seriously considered by either Obama or the GOP – had more revenues, but it actually balanced the budget (neither Obama’s nor the GOP plan did).
So who has a stronger argument here? Both Democratic proposals addressed the supposed problem – the deficit – more effectively than the GOP budget.
They surname is Insanity.
Fucking nihilists masquerading as patriots.
they won’t get beyond mulling:
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/1…
to give some credit to Boehner for being the adult in the room, and corralling these idiots ?
The man has the shittiest job in Washington right now.
I disagree with Boehner on pretty much every policy issue but he is a grown up, not a childish Tea Party moron, and, unlike them and their fellow travelers, does understand how our system of government works.
He sense of responsibility and understanding of the fact you have to govern too reminds me of the Republicans of yesteryear. They are nearly an extinct breed. My view of him has changed.
Yep. Criticizing unsustainable budget deficits scheduled to occur for as long as the eye can see sure seems like childish thing that only a moron would do.
/sarcasm
Eisenhower levels. He was the last fiscally responsible Republican.
And for how long until people alter their decisions to invest in “leisure” which isn’t all that easy to tax?
It worked for a very long time from FDR through the beginning of Reagan’s time in office (though it started to wane under Nixon).
I think most Democrats would rather rich people invested in “leisure”. “Leisure” means travel or luxury items, which means spending. Spending means circulating money, and that’s good. If it means spending their cash rather than hoarding it in the rigged gambling market that is the stock market, where it gets taxed under capital gains rates, then it’s a start.
Speaking of which, can we agree to end the capital gains tax rate, with a possible exemption on the sale of a primary residence with a top limit on gains?
“Speaking of which, can we agree to end the capital gains tax rate, with a possible exemption on the sale of a primary residence with a top limit on gains?”
I can agree to ending the capital gains tax, but I don’t think that is what you meant to ask 😉
“It worked for a very long time from FDR through the beginning of Reagan’s time in office (though it started to wane under Nixon)”
Didn’t tax revenue increase (not the budget deficit, but rather tax revenue) when Reagan cut taxes? And the same with when Kennedy cut taxes?
Also you are mistaken as to “leisure.” In tax/economic terms it simply means you aren’t working. Maybe you are meditating in a cave and living off the land and off the grid. Maybe you are living on Ibiza. Who knows?
There is a reason I said ‘end the capital gains tax rate’ and not ‘end the capital gains tax’. 🙂
Reagan increased tax revenue because he removed many exemptions – including exemptions on the lower and middle classes. Simplifying the tax code (including taxing capital gains as normal income as Reagan’s reforms did) is I think something we can get behind in a bipartisan manner – provided “bipartisan” doesn’t mean leaving all of one side’s pet deductions intact.
This is always the argument – that the rich will simply take their balls and go home. Bullshit.
The rich didn’t take their balls and go home under FDR – they pitched in with mutual sacrifice to pay for and drive the machine of war (which I might point out they’ve been unwilling to do for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars). Under Eisenhower they benefited mightily from the construction of the Interstate system. They didn’t leave under Clinton, either, and they did pretty darned well.
The people who are leaving are the ones complaining that they have to pay any taxes at all, that government serves no useful purpose and is essentially communism in a nice package. Good riddance – they’re the ones leeching off of society’s deeds and heaping the costs of under-paying their employees onto the rest of us.
most investment happens into companies. The money gets spent on reinvesting in the company instead of stock trade which don’t produce anything real.
First of all stock trades do produce something real – they produce signalling effects and information, amongst other things.
Second, higher taxes raises the relative cost of doing nothing vs. doing something. Without getting into quasi-complicated ideas (substitution v. income effects), a raise in taxes is going to generally encourage more people to do nothing (or less) in the longrun.
At least for modern values of top tax levels, there is no measurable effect on how much “work” the rich actually perform.
A social safety net does not make people lazy. The Nordic countries have a great safety net and are very productive. Your understanding of human nature shows a very limited understanding there of, which explains being a registered libertarian.
So if the price of a Coke quadrupled and Pepsi prices stayed the same, would you drink more Pepsi and less Coke? Why do you think taxes behave differently over the long run (using long-run to bypass income v. substitution effect concerns)
that people will leave the country because of our tax rates? The only response to that is the one I gave above.
consumer choices. If a bit less tax makes an item cost a little bit less but, at the same time, the economy is so bad people are making much less and have much less disposable income, then the coke isn’t really more affordable.
Conversely if a business has so many customers it needs more employees to keep up, it will hire more employees even with slightly higher tax rates. No amount of tax cuts will keep a business profitable and able to provide more jobs if customers with money to spend aren’t showing up.
There is simply not a scrap of empirical evidence to support the right’s constant whining that higher taxes are hurting the economy since they are at historic lows. That’s probably why there is also not a scrap of evidence that all the tax breaks lavished on the wealthiest have created more jobs which tends to negate the theory that, somehow, those breaks will ever start doing what they demonstrably haven’t done before.
You know what my biggest tax cut has been? The one nobody wants. The tax cut we’ve been “enjoying” since GW came to town… owing less in taxes because our business began making so much less. Slightly lower rate doesn’t begin to make up for much lower income. While paying at a higher rate during the Clinton years we were much better off with much more disposable income because business was so good. It’s getting better because our sector, dependent on the housing sector, is getting better, thanks to various Obama era policies.
See how that works? Slash the price of a widget to a nickle and it really doesn’t help if nobody has any extra nickels.
That if you “punish” the top 1% by taxing it, that will cause them to produce less?
And that if you cut a hand up to the working poor, the poor, and the middle class, that will make them work harder?
Then your logic is that the way to “encourage” corporations and the rich to “produce jobs” is to give them a free ride, allow them to engage in the taker behavior but doing the same for the rest makes them lazy.
Also, please defend valuing capital gains over work.
the going Galt argument. Any evidence that that has ever happened?
This is a question of paying for what they have already passed.
Besides, it’s clearly a blackmail move, not a serious policy move. The US government is not going to default. Full faith and credit forbids it and who would want to? Certainly not the Masters of the Universe who owned the GOP long before they unwisely astro-turfed a Tea Party that has now become a huge pain in the ass.
This is simply the Tea Party morons, yes I said it again, who can’t accept that the majority voted against their policies threatening to hold their breath until they turn blue in hopes that the grownups will give in. It’s beginning to look like the grown ups and the Masters of the Universe have had enough.
By the way, when you get together with your fellow pro-immigrant, live and let live Tea Party friends, what size room to you have to book?
have such a way with words… 🙂
I think he just disqualified himself from Republican leadership by using the “ic.”
that was a serious slip up. For an R, using the “ic” is as unacceptable as using the “n” word is in polite society.
My conspiracy friends say that one of the Pols folks is masquerading as this joker to keep up interest in their site. Just saying that there this new replacement for A-BOT and Libertad shows that same sophomoric understanding of the issues as his predecessors. Coincidence or same poster under a different id?
And I don’t as anybody else.
And for what it is worth, I’m a registered libertarian.
building your own roads, hiring your own personal air traffic controllers, keeping the bridges you use in repair, tasting everything you feed your family to make sure it’s safe, paying for your own personal security, dying at the ER door if you can’t produce insurance or cash, etc.
American Libertarians are the most childish of all. I don’t see them flocking to places like Somalia, a true Libertarian paradise where, if you can’t pay for it yourself or take it from someone weaker, you don’t have it.
Mali.
Mozambique.
All the “libertarian” countries of the world are 3rd world hell holes.
All the greatest countries in the world- including the greatest – are democratic republics. Though only one has a privatized central bank – the libertarians hate that too.
This one is smarter than ArapaGOP or Libertad. H-man in 2010 was closer I think.
I think Libertad is just a lone nut, and ArapaGOP was clearly employed by somebody on the right. Also, A-GOP was gone as soon as the election happened.
We should encourage smart Republicans, shouldn’t we? I prefer them.
Although Elliot isn’t a Republican. Keep it in mind when replying to him; he’s a Libertarian, and there is a bit of a difference. I used to think that Libertarians were worse than Republicans, more ideological – but that was when “Republican” to me meant northeastern Rockefeller Republicans. Given a choice between today’s ideological Republicans and Mr. Fladen, who is an ideological Libertarian, I’d side with the Libertarian 9 out of 10 times – after all, today’s ideological Republican combines the worst of Libertarians, religious zealotry, neo-liberal foreign policy, and authoritarian legal policies (except where it collides with the above…)
Today’s Republican Party as a whole also apparently incorporates hypocrisy, a tendency toward corruption, and an “anything for the cause” attitude in the mix.
He’s articulate. He pretty much just states his case and doesn’t engage in addressing comments presenting opposition to his case accompanied by factual evidence and he doesn’t offer anything much in the way of factual evidence to back his own opinions but he writes them nicely and is a more interesting mix than ‘tad or ArapG.
My conspiracy friends say that one of the Pols folks is masquerading as this joker to keep up interest in their site. Just saying that there this new replacement for A-BOT and Libertad shows that same sophomoric understanding of the issues as his predecessors. Coincidence or same poster under a different id?
even if you think one of the dead guvs is the masquerader.