First off, how is the government preventing people from saving - please specify how you are prevented from saving. If anything, personal savings rates have gone up recently, which is contributing to the general malaise. Second, if you are pushing the idea that the correct response to a recession caused by a weakness in aggregate demand is for the government to stop spending, and exacerbate the problem, or take other measures designed to decrease consumption and increase savings - that belies a fundamental misapprehension of basic macroeconomics which many of the teabaggers seem to harbor.
dude, isn't preventing people from saving the whole point of keynsian economics? 1. the united states economy is a system comprised of public and private. The whole point of the stimulus is that if the private isn't spending enough to stimulate "demand" the public side has to step in and do it for them. But both sides of the system are connected to each other and what one does necessarily affects the other. 2. the problem isn't the depression. the problem is MALINVESTMENT. The depression is the economy getting rid of all the bad investments and going back to where it should have been without them. We're like a builder who need 100 bricks to build a house, but only has 89. The economy "booms" when he's laying the first 89 (housing prices are going up forever), but then busts when he tries to lay brick #90. The government is now going to pay him to stick around the building site even though he can't lay any more bricks because is bunk. He should have built a house that only need 89 bricks (our standard of living is too high to begin with).
What a bunch of cowards, they can't even admit what they really dislike and instead are using the "tax" reason as a front. Those hats with tea bags look absolutely ridiculous.
and mainstream macroeconomics got us into this crapfest. unless you are going to tell me they knew what they were doing the day before they told us that if we didn't bail out the banks the economy would collapse. Keynes was a snake oil salesman and people intuitively KNOW this, even if they can't put it into words.
that is also why they are also mad about the government spending. if the spending wasn't so high there wouldn't need to be high taxes.
I am not anti-tax, but am against the way our tax dollars have been spent. I feel like regardless of who I vote for, I am going to lose. I want fiscal conservatisim, but I don't think that exists anymore. I have zero confidence in everyone outside of my county & cit elected officials. I see tax cheats at both the federal and state level. I see people representing me that I wouldn't trust to perform the functions of a Wal-Mart greeter. They aren't necessarily the people I have voted for, but rather the people who have been able to run, and win the elections. I don't even know why I bother casting a ballot, when it is a no-win situation.
Uh, no it didn't - the concepts of supply and demand didn't "get us into this mess" any more than Newtonian physics causes a plane to crash. They're the backdrop and set of rules against which economic policy is set - they don't cause anything. Second, it was ignorance of these principles which caused deficits. Republicans, most of the same ones who were teabagging, implemented the counterintuitive principle that one can cut taxes yet increase spending (with trillion dollar war of choice, not necessity) and hope the magic market takes care of things. This has been disproven many times in the past. Further, another thing that was disproven was the main thesis of Keynes opponents the monetarists (that one can control the economy solely by means of monetary policy). When the interest rate is at zero and the economy is sputtering - obviously you can't. Let's face it, when you get former Ayn Rand boy-toy Allan Greenspan conceding that his whole philosophy was basically garabage and that he was wrong to argue for tax cuts and that a stimulus is needed -while a reverse-Atlas Shrugged bailout for the captains of industry is necessary to stave off disaster - you can put Randianism in the dustbin of history along with Phrenology, Luddites, Nihlists, and other epic failures. Laughable - no they don't. If you asked them who Keynes was they would probably think he was the guy who played Bruce Wayne's butler YOu're smarter than that and you just embarrass yourself when you make this assertion. .or...if we hadn't embarked on destructive course of tax cuts, we wouldn't be forced to allow them to expire. Let's make this very clear: tax cuts are not fiscally responsible. It's a concept that many seem to have not grasped.
man...... "Mainstream economics" doesn't refer to "basic economics". "mainstream economics" refers to the mainstream theory of the business cycle...which is currently Keynesian economics. and what have we been doing since 2001? cutting interest rates. If Greenspan actually followed Rand/hayek etc. instead of pretending he did he never would have cut them. I can't tell you how many times I've heard economists say, "I don't know much, but I know monetary policy works!" monetary policy only works at putting off the inevitable. And the problem now is one of degree and not kind. no matter how you slice it, what Obama is doing is unbelievably more than Bush even at his worst. and they are doing it on purpose and admitting it as well. In fact, the claim its a good thing! Tax cuts aren't really good or bad. They are irrelevant to the economy and only matter on a personal philosophical level. What matters is the level of government spending on inefficient, non-good producing crap (entitlements, etc.). It just so happens that higher taxes tends to lend to more government spending. Not anymore though. The republicans showed us the way to avoid that one through deficit spending.
Political parties are comprised of many issues with many people interested in diverse issues. Broad inclusions bring power. For example, a group of tree huggers can't fire up enough people to govern an entire country. The focus is too narrow. I apologize for scattering my answers but I am trying to answer emails and coordinate what amounts to a new board composed of volunteers and enthusiasts. It's amazing.
I have misplaced your email address. Do you still have mine? If so, shoot me a quick "hello" email. I will forward the Alamo Tea Party pix to you and, with one exception, you can upload them if you like.
If they are forming their own political party let them come out with a platform that includes the many issues. But if it is a protest, then one issue at a time is much more effective.
This isn't a new practice though for a protest movement and if you look at a lot of the anti-Globalization protest you had all sorts of groups and issues, several of which were in conflict. If you are going to put together a protest movement you are going to try to get as many people into it as possible. That often means putting up with a range of issues with only a tenuous connection between them.
I'm not pointing out that they are the first to make the mistake, just that it isn't effective. The anti-globilzation protests mainly garnished attention because of the violence that sometimes accompanies it. Of course that marginalized their efforts as well as gained it some bonus press coverage.
I'm with Jon Stewart about the Freaky Friday nature of these protests. Consider Fox News and their pundits have been blasting protestors for years over disrespecting the President and being unpatriotic but now are fine with protestors comparing the President to Hitler. Many on the right also frequenly mocked the out there street theater and costumes of anti-war and anti-globalization protestors now they do they same thing.
well, when you say it like that. lol What I meant was to stop the economy as a whole from increasing savings....which without the government, is just ppl.
news flash: the economic prinicples in place didn't fail us, the lack of ethics did. there goes your theory right out the window.
Wow, this sounds almost like the grassroots organizing that swept Obama into office. What would Sarah think of all this community organizing? What a convenient concept to co-opt. Continuing to defend this partisan political rally as anything but a partisan political rally does not reflect well on your credibility. Your failure to recognize it as such is either disengeuous or naivete. You seem like a nice guy, but you are coming across as either a paid political shill or a gullible political neophyte. It's a shame you couldn't get this same patriotic fervor during the previous eight years when the damage to our civil liberties, economy, environment, military, and credibility put us in this mess, causing more damage to us as a country than any previous administration in the history of our nation. Even more damning is this Orwellian attempt at redirecting the "brewing anger of the masses" at the very administration elected as a result of the abomination created by your party. Brilliant. Most of us recognize this for what it is. Lame. Obama won. SCOREBOARD
