How's that taxation and socialism werkin' out fer ya?

[August]

Originally Posted by Stealth Hunter

But you just said that the administration in the White House has a big hand in controlling the finances of the country...

"certainly not the least of which is the sitting administration"

...and now "it rests squarely with the party that controls Congress"... shouldn't they both be to blame if they both have a lot of power in it? Which is it: Congress, the White House, or both?

Quit yanking my chain. You know that controlling is NOT at all the same thing as being an influence. A guy who posts all those long messages with the fancy charts and diagrams can not be that obtuse.

Congress controls the money. Congress votes in new laws. Congress is the one responsible for the nations debt. End of story.

[Stealth Hunter]

Originally Posted by August

Quit yanking my chain. You know that controlling is NOT at all the same thing as being an influence.

Even if half the process is dictated by their influence? Give me a break. The decisions and actions of the president and the Executive Branch affect the country just as much as the decisions and actions of Congress/the Legislative Branch do.

Originally Posted by August

A guy who posts all those long messages with the fancy charts and diagrams can not be that obtuse.

"Fancy" charts, eh? "Long" messages? Like it or not, you're going to have to read these "fancy" charts and "long" messages when you're dealing with debates. That's how the process works. Evidence. It's all about the evidence and facts.

Originally Posted by August

Congress controls the money.

And it has nothing to do with the actions the president/Executive Branch make... lol.

Originally Posted by August

Congress votes in new laws.

Votes in? Only when there's a veto by the president that sends it straight back to Congress. The president otherwise has the power to sign it into law... or do a pocket veto, but that falls under the aforementioned category.

Originally Posted by August

Congress is the one responsible for the nations debt. End of story.

Hate to burst your bubble (well- ok not really "hate"), but you have a lot more to blame than just Congress for the economic meltdown. The appropriate citations/sources are attached to the guilty parties listed.

The Federal Reserve, slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

109th Congress, supported a mortgage tax deduction that gave consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses (the .pdf is of the bill Congress and the president agreed to in September 2005).

Home buyers, took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Mortgage brokers, offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, he encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Real estate agents, most of whom worked for the sellers rather than the buyers and earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

Wall Street firms, paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, failed to provide much-needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market due to clamors to deregulate them more to eliminate government influence.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up; a parallel of the thoughts held about the stock market just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 hit (Black Tuesday, that I mentioned earlier).

[tater]

YOU said:

On the day President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion. The numbers from the Treasury Department in September 2008 showed the national debt then stood at more than $9.849 trillion.

I subtracted the two. You didn't provide other data.

Since you said "on bush's watch" I toook your ending number, above, and subtracted from the obama number YOU posted.

Right now, the debt stands at $12.759

12.759-9.849=2.91

Yeah, I rounded it up to 3.

Sorry, I didn't look the numbers up, just used what YOU posted.

[Stealth Hunter]

Originally Posted by tater

I subtracted the two. You didn't provide other data.

Yeah I did. You just didn't investigate any of my sources.

http://agonist.org/amc/20090123/bush..._national_debt

When "W" left office on January 20, 2009, the national debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08.

Originally Posted by Tater

Since you said "on bush's watch" I toook your ending number, above, and subtracted from the obama number YOU posted.

But you didn't figure up the total increase; you didn't check any of my sources to see what they said or not. While that's a peeve, if you would have, you would have seen the final figure when he left office. I simply rounded it to $10.627 trillion (the $887,048,913.08 up).

Originally Posted by tater

12.759-9.849=2.91

Yeah, I rounded it up to 3.

Sorry, I didn't look the numbers up, just used what YOU posted.

What's with the "YOU"? I haven't done anything wrong. YOU just didn't read any of my sources to find out the information they had in them. I was simply showing the change from when he took office to September 2008, two months before the election.

[August]

Originally Posted by Stealth Hunter

Even if half the process is dictated by their influence? Give me a break. The decisions and actions of the president and the Executive Branch affect the country just as much as the decisions and actions of Congress/the Legislative Branch do.

Look, generalizing your argument to include any and all affects upon the country does not at all support your statement that Obama inherited the national debt from Bush. As Platapus points out the President asks Congress for appropriations. Congress can refuse and has done so many times in the past.

[CaptainHaplo]

Throw all da bums out!

[Platapus]

When in doubt
Vote them out

[Stealth Hunter]

Originally Posted by August

Look, generalizing your argument to include any and all affects upon the country does not at all support your statement that Obama inherited the national debt from Bush.

As far as the position of presidents are concerned, it does. This isn't hard to understand. When Bush left office, the debt was at $10.627 trillion, raised half of what it had originally been. When Obama came in, the debt level was at $10.627 trillion and had been raised half of what it had originally been. Again, this isn't hard to understand. It really isn't.

Originally Posted by August

As Platapus points out the President asks Congress for appropriations. Congress can refuse and has done so many times in the past.

Just like the 109th Congress could have rejected the idea of mortgage tax deductions. But, they didn't. Read the proposal that was approved by the House, Senate, and president:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d051009sp.pdf

Furthermore, the Executive Branch does have the power to provide government watch over the markets... which it did not do when the first bank crashed in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financi...7%E2%80%932010

The reason why we are where we are at now and who's watch it happened on are two different things. Do not think I'm trying to mesh them together here. There are multiple parties at fault for the reason why it failed; who's watch it began and happened on, however... well, you already know.

What's with the "YOU"?

Its the Theodore Kaczynski method, when you feel you have a really big thing to say write it in big letters

[Catfish]

Texas ! But Taxes ?

Yeah go Texas, and the rest of the USA !

You cannot tax big companies, they are the job makers !
You cannot tax the middle class since they are doing the job !

Tonight, Jon Stewart overviewed the media's reaction to a report that many poor households don't pay federal income tax before comparing it to the non-reaction over the fact that Exxon Mobil also doesn't pay. Inside, video of Stewart's magnificent juxtaposition

http://tv.gawker.com/5516642/jon-ste...ated-reporting

So tax the poor !
What, they do not earn enough in a 40-hours week to pay taxes ? Kill them all !


Greetings,
Catfish

[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Stealth Hunter

Actually, the debt Obama has now was inherited from Bush in October 2008.

As was said by the Republicans when Bush's debts started climbing in 2001. I don't know the reality, but that's what they always say.

As for Reagan, I don't know who's been saying that (I'd like to find out) nor do I know how they figured this up. While the debt did increase during the Regan-Bush era, and continued to do so throughout the Clinton era, the greatest increase came under George Jr.

Sorry. I wasn't talking about now, but then. That was the Democrats' biggest shouting point while Reagan was in office.

Didn't mean to confuse.

[Fr8monkey]

You ar all forgetting the budget Obama had in his first year was proposed... and passed... by Bush and the Republican controlled Senate in the fall of '08. The huge debt isn't his fault.

Originally Posted by Catfish

You cannot tax big companies, they are the job makers !

So the Big Corporations can send them jobs to China and collect their billion dollar bonuses.

[Catfish]

Microsoft Supplier Uses Child Workers And Pays Them $0.65 Per Hour :
http://www.businessinsider.com/micro...sations-2010-4

But it is not only Microsoft, just think about it when you buy your next product.

The thing is, some oil companies do not pay taxes at all in the US, that is what the link i posted in the earlier post was about, if in a highly ironic way. The press just repeats what the latest rumours are about, not anything like the truth, no time for research - news is a fast market.

As soon as a big company is being urged to pay taxes, i guess this equals communism, in the US. Only losers like average men pay taxes.

Greetings,
Catfish

Microsoft Supplier Uses Child Workers And Pays Them $0.65 Per Hour :

Thats what we get with free markets and no pesky government regulations hindering business.

[tater]

Originally Posted by Tribesman

Thats what we get with free markets and no pesky government regulations hindering business.

No one is forced to buy from M$.

It was public outcry that has changed the way products have changed such practices in the past—remember all the PR crap Nike got, then they altered what they were doing?