Newt- Winning GOP nomination? I hope not

[XgrimX]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154

[Truth]

confirmed reptile

[Taluvill]

At least he's trying to work with the other side, can't say that about most, especially our current president.

[Truth]

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Jz3hxUVaICs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Hasbinbad]

At least he's trying to work with the other side, can't say that about most, especially our current president.
Are you trolling?

[Hailto]

Careful, don't insult the god-king in Hasbin's presence.

[Truth]

Refer to him as His Presidency

http://saxangle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Obamas-fascist-world-government.jpg

[Soandso]

how can anyone still defend this presidency? the constant references to jimmy carter aren't even fair to jimmy carter.....

[Hailto]

The o-baaaa-ma chants were ridiculous, i forgot about that shit.

[purest]

obama luda 2012 comin for that number one spot

http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2481/obamaluda.jpg

[Hasbinbad]

What the fuck.

I didn't say I support His Presidency, I asked if tallivull was trolling or not..

If anything, Obama is a moderate conservative.. Saying he doesn't reach across the aisle from his base is ludicrous.

[Hailto]

Moderate Conservative, lol.

[Hailto]

Who do you consider a moderate Liberal then, Joseph Stalin?

[booter]

Obama is more of a centrist who leans slightly to the right (as evidenced by the policies he has enacted since taking the presidency). Also, he's a corporate shill.

[Hasbinbad]

Obama is more of a centrist who leans slightly to the right (as evidenced by the policies he has enacted since taking the presidency). Also, he's a corporate shill.

[Hasbinbad]

America: where poor kids clean feces from rich kids.

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[Humerox]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gNEytWO851w" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[visage]

Can't believe people are falling for that sack of crap.

Newt cheated on his first two wives. What a loyal person. Imagine what he would do to America.... Say's alot about his character , yet he wants to preach about Obama and his associations. Funny....

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/03/newt_gingrich_cheated_on_his_w.html

[visage]

obama luda 2012 comin for that number one spot

http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/2481/obamaluda.jpg

Luda for president... plzzz

[visage]

Newt Gingrich Cheated on His Wives for America By Dan Amira Facebook Twitter ShareThis Counter Email If Newt Gingrich runs for president, as he's expected to do, he won't be the only candidate in the Republican primary field with three marriages under his belt. Buddy Roemer, the former Louisiana governor who has already formed an exploratory committee, shares that distinction, as does Donald Trump, who claims he may run. But Gingrich has an extra burden in his efforts to explain his marital history to socially conservative primary voters. Gingrich didn't just get divorced, he also cheated on both of his first two wives. And furthermore, he left both of them when they were sick. As Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall recaps today:



Let's remember, Newt famously dumped wife #1 for wife #2 while wife #1 was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. As in literally went to the hospital to present her with divorce papers while she was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer.

He eventually dumped wife #2 for wife #3 shortly after wife #2 was diagnosed with MS back in 1999. And he was having the affair on wife #2 with wife #3 while he was turning the country upside down trying to drive Bill Clinton from office over his affair with Monica Lewinsky.


David Frum, George W. Bush's former speechwriter, believes it's not so much the infidelity, but the aforementioned "arrogance, hypocrisy, and — most horrifying to women voters — the cruelty" that will be so "politically lethal."

But Gingrich, naturally, is trying to frame his misdeeds in the best light possible under the circumstances. In a recent interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network's David Brody, he discussed the issue in religious terms that the voters he hopes to win over may understand:



I found that I felt compelled to seek God’s forgiveness. Not God’s understanding, but God’s forgiveness. I do believe in a forgiving God. And I think most people, deep down in their hearts hope there’s a forgiving God.


If God can forgive him, then surely Iowa caucusgoers can, too. And besides, Gingrich has a pretty good explanation for why he did it:



There's no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.


Sometimes you just feel so passionate about America that you need to go have some extramarital affairs. We've all been there.

Posted for lazyness

[visage]

America: where poor kids clean feces from rich kids.

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Your point being? Beat's these kids and their parents sacking up the free lunch and wellfair systems. The parents should be doing the cleaning of Feces and the kids with disciplinary issues should be too. Make them clean up the shit in which they shit into. Don't pity cleaning up bathrooms its a job. It's a moronic thought none the less. Regardless people need to get a clue and realize what real work is.

[Humerox]

is this stupid motherfucker serious?

someone needs to make him clean the the senate and congressional bathrooms so he can set an example.

i'd knock this fucker out irl.

[Diggles]

humerox trolled by visage, sadly, spear of the nation was obviously going to be the first victim

[Humerox]

lol...

w/e

that guy raises my hackles.

[Humerox]

i c what u did...

I didn't even see what visage said...i was talking about Newt.

[Truth]

newt is like 100% right in that vid tho

[Humerox]

he'd be right if he'd suggest non-working welfare parents with no disabilities come in and clean the rich kids' toilet scum.

[Klath]

Newt Gingrich would be a disastrous choice for the GOP. Newt has too many skeletons in his closet and if he were to get the nomination and fall under the sort of scrutiny afforded candidates in the general election, these skeletons would all come out. The details of his ethics scandal, his use of campaign donations, his treatment of his ex wives, affairs, etc... It would all come out with a vengeance.

This is amusing -- you know things are bad when Jack Abramoff is accusing you of corruption. (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68547.html)

[Taluvill]

Well, the worst part is I don't remember making that first post, although I'll admit it is very vague. The point is this: Obama has spewed mostly bullshit out of his mouth, and put out not shit for bills, and the ones that passed had more than their fair share of corporate doodling on them (see: Obamacare, although that will get shot down in a few weeks anyways) (Also, see Stimulous. a durr duh durrr that fed jobs to the unions. "shovel-ready jobs" under his stimulous package is great when jobs are being given to more than just the people who are guaranteed jobs already through their union.... but their not.)

It's really easy to put out really shitty bills/ideas, watch them get shot down, and then whine that those bills didn't get passed. The problem is more than Americans won't take the time to read the bills going through congress/senate, they just listen and hear that "the republicans won't work with me because they hate America!" If they took the time to look at any of them, they would realize that most of the ideas are really, really bad.

I guess the worst part about the more recent posts is people take everything Newt said in that particular argument completely out of context to try and blackmail him. Ingenious strategy when it's all the democrats have to run on next election. They have to start early though, because they have to try and whittle down their opponents any way they can so that their candidate looks better than what the GOP has to offer.

Newt's argument was that in the poorer regions of America at the moment, most children, regardless of their race or nationality, are brought up in a world where unemployment and welfare are the standard of living, and they grow up learning bad habits like living off of the government and getting involved in gangs, selling drugs, etc etc. His point was that we need to get into those communities and change the culture of what is going on there so as to set the standard for the future and fix what is happening now.

Learn to not listen to everything that our lovely liberal news stations show you, they are really good at taking things out of context.

[Taluvill]

but they weren't* Meant that the jobs were being given to people who already had guaranteed jobs through their unions, which payed a large portion of Obama's campaign fee's I might add.

[Klath]

Learn to not listen to everything that our lovely liberal news stations show you, they are really good at taking things out of context.

Yes, we'd all be better off drinking the kool-aid that FOX News serves up. :rolleyes:

You may believe that the stimulus package was a waste of time but the general consensus among non-partisan economic sources including IHS Global Insight, Moody's.com, Economy.com and Macroeconomic Advisers is that the economy "could have been worse" without the ARRA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Rec ommendations_by_economists)

[Humerox]

Learn to not listen to everything that our lovely liberal news stations show you, they are really good at taking things out of context.

so he wasn't really advocating making poor children work off their school lunch money by cleaning bathrooms in the school, among other nice little jobs, right?

there was nothing out of context in his hypothetical suggestion for a solution to a problem we all are aware of...he was deadly serious.

the man is a complete moran.

[Loke]

I'm not sure who said it, but I remember hearing some where "Newt Gingrich is what a dumb person thinks smart people sound like" or something to that affect. We're so far gone, it doesn't matter. Once the rest of the world quits allowing us to borrow; us, and anyone we owe money to is going to be in for a rude awakening. I don't think anyone can fix that, the only thing they can really do is quit making it worse by putting it off and pretending it isn't going to happen. First the sub-prime, now euro zone. They're all results of reckless lending and investment that is being subsidized through the printing presses. In time I think we'll see that the MF global fiasco is going to negatively impact the the commodities market on a huge scale (more so than already). Shit is in shambles, but all people care about is who cheating on their wife or who should have to pay more taxes. Shit is ridiculous and its all coming to an end here in the not to distant future imo.

TL;DR - Doesn't matter, we're fucked regardless.

[Humerox]

Doesn't matter, we're fucked regardless.

/thread

we may not make it the 10-15 years i've been projecting.

nín hǎo

[Loke]

we may not make it the 10-15 years i've been projecting.


I'm really hoping for 3 more good-ish years before we start to see any real decline. I'm naturally pessimistic though. If they can some how keep convincing people the dollar is strong for a few more years I think I'll be golden.

[Hailto]

complete moran.

Oh you

[loopholbrook]

Every candidate except Ron Paul, Jon Huntsman, and Rick Santorum has now surged. Now that Newt has surged we can safely count him out. So now it's onto Paul, Huntsman, and Santorum. I think it's fair to count out the latter two. So it's looking like THE best candidate will get the nomination.

[Hailto]

Id like to see Paul as well, but I think its going to end up being Romney.

[Humerox]

Oh you

yeah...memes ftw

[G13]

Yes, we'd all be better off drinking the kool-aid that FOX News serves up. :rolleyes:

You may believe that the stimulus package was a waste of time but the general consensus among non-partisan economic sources including IHS Global Insight, Moody's.com, Economy.com and Macroeconomic Advisers is that the economy "could have been worse" without the ARRA. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Recovery_and_Reinvestment_Act_of_2009#Rec ommendations_by_economists)

Actually that isn't true.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/22/cbo-stimulus-hurts-economy-long-run/?page=all

Carry on with your propaganda

[Klath]

Actually that isn't true.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/22/cbo-stimulus-hurts-economy-long-run/?page=all

Carry on with your propaganda

The Washington Times? And you accuse me of spreading propaganda. :rolleyes:

Still, even with the bias, all the WT story really says is that the effects of the stimulus aren't as good as originally forcasted.

Here's how Politico reported the same CBO information:

CBO: Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68965.html)

When you compare the two versions of the story, pay attention to the cherry-picked details and wording in the Washington Times version and what they chose to include and what they chose to omit. It is clearly written to cast the stimulus in the worst possible light.

Just for the record, here's how the director of the CBO compares the various policy options raised by Democrats vs Republicans:

CBO ranks Democratic and Republican stimulus proposals in one chart (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cbo-ranks-democratic-and-republican-stimulus-proposals-in-one-chart/2011/08/25/gIQA2WuSRN_blog.html)

The information in their chart is pulled from here (PDF) (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/118xx/doc11874/EconOutloook_SummaryforWeb.pdf).

[G13]

The Washington Times? And you accuse me of spreading propaganda. :rolleyes:

Still, even with the bias, all the WT story really says is that the effects of the stimulus aren't as good as originally forcasted.

Here's how Politico reported the same CBO information:

CBO: Stimulus added up to 3.3M jobs (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1111/68965.html)

When you compare the two versions of the story, pay attention to the cherry-picked details and wording in the Washington Times version and what they chose to include and what they chose to omit. It is clearly written to cast the stimulus in the worst possible light.

Just for the record, here's how the director of the CBO compares the various policy options raised by Democrats vs Republicans:

CBO ranks Democratic and Republican stimulus proposals in one chart (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/cbo-ranks-democratic-and-republican-stimulus-proposals-in-one-chart/2011/08/25/gIQA2WuSRN_blog.html)

The information in their chart is pulled from here (PDF) (http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/118xx/doc11874/EconOutloook_SummaryforWeb.pdf).

You whine about the Washington Times and use Politico as a source? Really?

http://news.investors.com/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=592709&p=1

Recovery: After nearly all the stimulus money has been spent, the Congressional Budget Office now admits it cost more than advertised, did less to boost growth and will hurt the economy in the long run.

In its latest quarterly report on the economic effects of the Obama stimulus, the CBO sharply lowered its "worst case" scenario while trimming many of its upper-bound estimates for stimulus-fueled growth and employment.

The new report finds, for example, that the stimulus may have added as little as 0.7% to GDP growth in 2010 — when spending was at its peak — and created as few as 700,000 new jobs.

Both are down significantly from the CBO's previous worst-case scenario.

The report also lowered the best-case estimate for added growth in 2010 to 4.1% from 4.2%.

In addition, the CBO says the extra infrastructure money didn't boost growth as much as it previously claimed, because states reacted by spending less out of their own budgets on highways.

So in other words, the CBO now says it's possible that the stimulus had virtually no meaningful effect on growth and employment despite its massive price tag.

Again, you are seriously being disingenuous and spreading lies and propaganda. Fitch just downgraded it's outlook on the US economy as negative. You claim the Stimulus wasm't as good as originally expected? It wasn't even in the same ball park and it cost almost 900 billion in tax dollars. It wasn't even close to original projections, hence you're engaging in blatant propaganda that would make Goebbels stand up and applaud. Where do you think the stimulus money came from? The money tree? Obama's stash?

By all estimates, the Stimulus has been an absolute disaster. Only 6% of the stimulus was only used towards infrastructure projects. Billions were wasted on corruption like we've seen at Solyndra and Brightsource, where the Obama administration basically paid back their millionaire and billionaire campaign bundlers with your tax dollars, yet you continue to shill for a corrupt administration.

You're not even aware how the Obama Administration is calculating their unemployment numbers. You parrot talking points like "3.3 million jobs created or saved" without a firm grasp of the facts. First of all, the Obama Administration is no longer counting/calculating in their unemployment numbers people who have stopped looking for work because they can't find a job. Their 99 weeks have run out and they have no money. Apparently they are no longer considered real people by the Obama Administration.

They have completely dropped out of the job market, because like any market, the job market expands and contracts. The labor participation rate in the job market is declining at an alarming rate, yet here you are shilling for the Government.

The job market as a whole has shrunk significantly over the last 3 years. To put it in perspective, 315K people LEFT the job market last month because they can't find work. Magically they are no longer counted by the Obama Administration, so they aren't counted towards the unemployment rate. The real unemployment rate is past 15%. Only 120K jobs were created in which the majority are retail and temp jobs for the Holidays, yet the propagandists are telling us that the unemployment rate is going down? It doesn't even pass the laugh test, but go ahead and trot out your Keynesian sycophants for Big Government.

During this same time during Reagan's presidency in the 80s, a million jobs were created in one month. To even sustain the current unemployment rate, in reality we're going to need to see consecutive 250K positive jobs per month. That's never going to happen if the Government keeps sucking the public dry to fund their economic disasters like Obama's Stimulus.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UB_3VhTQFjM/Tj1Y9XjXpDI/AAAAAAAABPk/_b9Kr9sC0_g/s400/nondefense+expenditures.jpg

People are unemployed for a longer period since the Great Depression. Median income has dropped. Health Insurance premiums have gone way up. The inflation rate has climbed more than 3%. Food stamp usage has skyrocketed. Home values have dereased. 4+ trillion has been added to the debt within 3 years before interest. The poverty rate is expanding. Do you have any idea how much of a disaster that is economically?

Here's a report just released by the Census Bureau.

http://content.govdelivery.com/attachments/USESAEI/2011/12/05/file_attachments/72483/Manufacturers%20Shipments%20Inventories%20and%20Or ders%20%28October%202011%29.pdf

http://news.yahoo.com/factory-orders-dip-0-4-percent-october-150305291.html

These numbers indicate a downward trend in manufacturing. If produced goods and services are not moving off shelves as expected, manufacturers will be forced to cut prices which will reduce profit and cut into demand. When you have the Government taking money out of the private sector to re-distribute to their political cronies, which is exactly what we saw happened with the Stimulus, it's long term economic impact can be felt for decades as we are now seeing with these CBO projections.

Here is what the director of the CBO actually stated:

http://cboblog.cbo.gov/?p=3026

What you are not grasping is the fact that the Stimulus is going to be a long term drag on the economy because it's going to hinder private investment. This 3+ million job number you keep trotting out is the number being pandered by the Obama Administration. It's a lie. The real number is around 700K, which were mostly temporary jobs for the Census in 2010. There are "green jobs" within the Stimulus that cost millions of dollars per job. The CBO also released a report that says each "saved or created job" in the Stimulus cost US taxpayers more than 200K PER Stimulis job. What a bargain.

Doug Elmendorf, an economist for the CBO, clarified this when he stated the following:

The elemental truth of the matter is that putting money into ventures that generate losses, as was the case for the bulk of the so-called stimulus spending, reduces the resources available to society. As resources are reduced there is less economic growth and less demand for workers.

You don't even understand basic economics. You've been brainwashed to believe that Government Spending can create wealth and jobs on it's own without taxing somebody else.

[Klath]

Doug Elmendorf, an economist for the CBO, clarified this when he stated the following:
The elemental truth of the matter is that putting money into ventures that generate losses, as was the case for the bulk of the so-called stimulus spending, reduces the resources available to society. As resources are reduced there is less economic growth and less demand for workers.

You don't even understand basic economics. You've been brainwashed to believe that Government Spending can create wealth and jobs on it's own without taxing somebody else.

roflmao

You realize that Doug Elmendorf never said that, right? Your quote is from a satirical blog (http://azconserv1.wordpress.com/2011/11/18/sluggish-economy-blamed-on-lazy-americans/) -- nice research there, sport. What are you going to do next, quote The Onion?

Your credibility is shot.

[Hasbinbad]

Bronson shot down. More at 11.

[Hasbinbad]

Adultery For Me, But Not For Thee: A Master List of Gingrich's Hypocrisies (http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/98097/newt-gingrich-scandal-hypocrisy)

[G13]

Bronson shot down. More at 11.

Nope

[Hasbinbad]

Maybe next you can quote great medieval leaders as reported by J.R.R. Tolkein..

[Klath]

Nope

You accuse me of, and I quote, "engaging in blatant propaganda that would make Goebbels stand up and applaud" and then you turn around and try to pass off a quote from an obviously satirical blog as though it were genuine.

Oh, the irony.

http://gifs.gifbin.com/1233928590_citizen kane clapping.gif

[G13]

You accuse me of, and I quote, "engaging in blatant propaganda that would make Goebbels stand up and applaud" and then you turn around and try to pass off a quote from an obviously satirical blog as though it were genuine.

Oh, the irony.

http://gifs.gifbin.com/1233928590_citizen kane clapping.gif

You are engaging in blatant propaganda

I made an honest mistake with that quote. I take responsibility for that. Instead of trying to use it as an excuse so you don't have to debate the merits of my entire post, why don't you refute what I actually said in the entire body of my post.

You pasted and quoted freaking Wikipedia like it's FACT and you want to play the source game now? Really bro? There is a lot of information within my post that you can't even begin to refute. Go ahead and give it a shot and let's have a discussion.

[Hailto]

Im pretty sure Klath breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed that one mistake you made in your argument, because he can now justify it to himself that its okay to not actually respond to anything you've said.

[Klath]

I made an honest mistake with that quote
You were spreading misinformation.

You pasted and quoted freaking Wikipedia like it's FACT and you want to play the source game now? Really bro?

Absolutely. Lets play. I pasted a quote from Wikipedia that had references to the original sources. You posted an unsourced quote that turned out to be from a fake news blog. See a difference?

There is a lot of information within my post that you can't even begin to refute.

The argument is over whether the stimulus helped or hurt the economy. If I have to choose between the opinion of IHS Global Insight, Moody's.com, Economy.com, and Macroeconomic Advisers and a guy in the Project1999 forums who can't fact-check his sources then I'm affraid you're seriously outgunned.

[Hasbinbad]

I made an honest mistake with that quote. I take responsibility for that. Instead of trying to use it as an excuse so you don't have to debate the merits of my entire post, why don't you refute what I actually said in the entire body of my post.
I am totally ignorant of what you two are talking about, and I fucking hate Bronson, but the man has a point here.

First he admitted his mistake, which - even if you think that is facetious - had to have been a hard thing for Bronson to do based on watching him in action previously (he is as stubbornly pig headed as they come).

Then he makes a perfectly reasonable request to not continue to employ ad hominem (however justified it was before his apology), and address the rest of his message.

Now I feel ill.

[Awwalike]

Now I feel ill.

yo dawg are you ever going to tell me what bank you use?

[Hasbinbad]

I don't use a bank, nor will I ever. I use a credit union.

[G13]

You were spreading misinformation.

You can't quantify "saved jobs" in an economy. Your premise doesn't begin to address Opportunity Costs and Negative Externalities such as private investment, that is adversely affected when the Government taxes private investors to employ people in public jobs (even temporarily). Those are resources that are shifting in an economy. It isn't new wealth being created. You can only calculate created jobs. In order to understand economics, which you clearly don't, you'd understand that Government doesn't create wealth. All Government does it taxes private income and calls it "revenue".

In order for Obama to have even been able to spend a trillion dollars he has to take it from someone else. The Government can print money, but if it prints too much that causes inflation. The wealth you have sitting in the bank devalues as a result, therefore it shrinks. People who use class warfare rhetoric always base their arguments on the premise that there is a set sized pie. That wealth is somehow this finite resource. That's a fallacy. Wealth can expand and contract depending on the markets. Just ask the people who's 401K plans lost a third of their value overnight after financial crash of 2008.

https://encrypted-tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ_isW5imgVk9twwwEa19ITWso8KEogg hAZbXaBZr7h76jBxX51

We have a president who has ran a record trillion+ deficit 3 years in a row. If the Stimulus was such a success, why is our Government running and accumulating such debt and deficits? The Stimulus cost more than the entire 8 year Iraq War. Claiming the Stimulus was a "success" is spreading misinformation, unless you believe that success with your tax dollars that have been confiscated from you were efficiently spent in the following examples:

Obama's stimulus "created" 3,545 Green Jobs. Total amount of Stimulus/tax dollars invested = 17.2 billion. When calculated, that equals 4, 853, 000 per saved or created job.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-green-tech-program-that-backed-solyndra-struggles-to-create-jobs/2011/09/07/gIQA9Zs3SK_story.html

Look at all the taxpayer money that was wasted just in this "Green Jobs" program alone. See those billions next to Solyndra? That's an example of Obama paying off his crony rich elite bundlers like George Kaiser with your tax money. These people donated and bundled millions for Obama's campaign, and in return they get Government grants in the billions where we now have solar panel factories with brand new equipment sitting empty and collecting dust. Meanwhile Kaiser and friends pocketed a nice profit off of their campaign investment. The Stimulus dollars hard at work:

https://lpo.energy.gov/?page_id=45

In comparison Obama only helped small businesses, the engine of the US Economy, with 645 million. You're not addressing what kinds of jobs the Stimulus "created". They are Government jobs. Census workers. The DMV. Teachers. There isn't any productivity in the public sector anywhere near that which occurs in the private sector.

http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/agency/reporting/agency_reporting1.aspx?agency_code=73

Zero jobs created in August 2011

http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-money/801-economy/179317-expectations-low-for-august-jobs-figures

6.4 billion in stimulus funds just disappeared:

http://watchdog.org/1530/6-4-billion-stimulus-goes-to-phantom-districts/

Absolutely. Lets play. I pasted a quote from Wikipedia that had references to the original sources. You posted an unsourced quote that turned out to be from a fake news blog. See a difference?

Taken directly from Wikipedia:

Anyone can be bold and edit an existing article or create a new one, and volunteers do not need to have any formal training. The people who create and edit articles in Wikipedia come from countries all around the world and have a wide range of ages and backgrounds. Any contributor to this encyclopedia, unregistered and registered alike, is called a "Wikipedian," or "editor" more formally known.

I even clicked your Wikipedia link again and it directs you to a specific area on the page which is headlined with the following:

Recommendations by economists

On the very area you have used as your only source, it stated the following:

On January 28, 2009, a full-page advertisement with the names of approximately 200 economists who were against Obama's plan appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The economists denied the quoted statement by President Obama that there was "no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy." Instead, the signers believed that "to improve the economy, policymakers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth."

Here's the ad:

http://www.cato.org/special/stimulus09/cato_stimulus.pdf

The argument is over whether the stimulus helped or hurt the economy. If I have to choose between the opinion of IHS Global Insight, Moody's.com, Economy.com, and Macroeconomic Advisers and a guy in the Project1999 forums who can't fact-check his sources then I'm affraid you're seriously outgunned.

http://blogs.reuters.com/james-pethokoukis/2011/07/06/obama-really-might-have-made-it-worse/

Respected Stanford economist John Taylor, perhaps the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, has analyzed the actual results of the ARRA. Not what the White House’s garbage-in, garbage-out models say happened, but what actually happened as gleaned from government statistics. Taylor, simply put, looked at whether consumers actually consumed and whether government actually spent in a way that produced real growth and jobs....

Taylor's piece: http://johnbtaylorsblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/no-bigger-stimulus-would-not-have.html

Individuals and families largely saved the transfers and tax rebates. The federal government increased purchases, but by only an immaterial amount. State and local governments used the stimulus grants to reduce their net borrowing (largely by acquiring more financial assets) rather than to increase expenditures, and they shifted expenditures away from purchases toward transfers. Some argue that the economy would have been worse off without these stimulus packages, but the results do not support that view.

I'll refer to my points in my previous post you have still failed to properly address for my evidence to confirm what the above source is stating. Lower median income. An expanding poverty rate. A shrinking job market. More food stamp usage than ever before. If the Stimulus was a success, you would see these areas trending up. Not down. We're talking about a trillion dollars of wealth here. Not monopoly money.

African American Unemployment is the highest it's been in almost 30 years.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/02/news/economy/black_unemployment_rate/index.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/sandp-considering-first-downgrade-of-us-credit-rating/2011/08/05/gIQAqKeIxI_story.html

One thing the Stimulus did do was expose hacks and frauds like Stiglitz and Krugman. Economics is now thankfully trending away from failed Keynesian policies and towards the Austrian school as it should be.

http://news.investors.com/Article/587616/201110101854/A-Pair-Of-Nobel-Aces.htm

Failed Policy: The Nobel Prize for Economics goes to two Americans who have separately exposed the flaws in government stimulus spending. For a Keynesian president, it's the Anti-Peace Prize.

[Loke]

Bronson, you've clearly got a decent head on your shoulders and while I agree with just about everything you posted, my only real question is this: given that you're clearly not retarded, why have you spent the past like 2 years convincing us all you are?

[Hasbinbad]

Bronson, you're way over my head with all that economics jibber jabber dude, I can't even pretend to keep up.

I do have a couple of honest, basic questions for you, and one observation about the first sentence in your last post. First the questions - mind you these are not meant to be snide or rhetorical, and I would appreciate it if you could use your education and knowledge to give me real answers, but please do dumb it down for the lay person:

Is it "A-OK" with you that millions of hard-working middle-class Americans are actually or very close to actually losing their retirements and homes, which they have spent their entire lives working for?
Is it "A-OK" with you that simultaneous to the above scenario, 2 huge stimulus packages went to bail out banks and auto companies to "stop them from going bankrupt," and came out of that deal with billions of dollars in profits, while we got basic low interest payments in return for it? They made huge profits off of the money we gave them which was just supposed to keep them afloat long enough that they could make their own money. Isn't there something wrong with that?
What does "7.7 trillion dollars" mean to you? Is that scandal true? Because those loans would make both stimuli packages seem like chump change, and nobody was ever consulted about it. Don't we have starving / sick / homeless / working poor / mentally ill people in this country that money could have helped? Don't we need to buy asphalt and better ways to create energy?
Do you think it's cool that we live in a system where I can go find a dumb person, have them sign a contract I know they won't be able to fulfill, and then make bets for them to default on the contract, making a huge profit where no service was provided? Shouldn't that kind of stuff be best left in vegas?
What about all of those people now being able to give unlimited amounts of money to politicians, ensuring that US policy reflects their interests?
Do you know what the tax rate on the richest bracket was in 1954? What else do you know about the achievements of this country during that era and the years immediately following? Weren't there rich people then regardless of their taxes? Wasn't that the era of Sinatra and the high life? What has happened to this country as tax rates on the rich have been eroded over time (hint: wealth concentration and disparity)?
Why were 23 million jobs created during the Clinton administration?

Now for an observation:
You can't quantify "saved jobs" in an economy.
My observation is that just because you can't quantify something doesn't necessarily imply that it doesn't exist. For instance, if I asked you to quantify all the stars in the universe, you wouldn't be able to do that, because our understanding of the universe is limited. In the same vein, our understanding of how "saving jobs" works is limited.

Mind you, I'm definitely not defending Mr. Obama or agreeing with the empty rhetoric "created or saved X # of jobs," I'm just saying that concept can't be discounted out of hand simply because you don't have the proper metric to quantify it.

Carry on.

[Hasbinbad]

Bronson.. ..why have you spent the past like 2 years convincing us all you are [retarded]?

[Humerox]

Bronson, you've clearly got a decent head on your shoulders and while I agree with just about everything you posted, my only real question is this: given that you're clearly not retarded, why have you spent the past like 2 years convincing us all you are?

Gotta chime in here.

[Klath]

Taken directly from Wikipedia:

As I said before, the specific information I quoted included references. See those two links at the end of the text on the wiki page?

On the very area you have used as your only source

If you’re going to include the reference to the ad from Cato then at least include the reference to the response:

“On February 8, 2009, a letter to Congress signed by about 200 economists in favor of the stimulus, written by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that Obama's plan "proposes important investments that can start to overcome the nation's damaging loss of jobs," and would "put the United States back onto a sustainable long-term-growth path."[60] This letter was signed by Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow, Lawrence R. Klein, Eric Maskin, Daniel McFadden, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. The general consensus among non-partisan economic sources including IHS Global Insight, Moody's.com, Economy.com and Macroeconomic Advisers is that the economy "could have been worse" without the ARRA.[“

The Stimulus cost more than the entire 8 year Iraq War.

That's a gross underestimate of the cost of the war (talk about a complete waste of time and money). I’ll even use a source from Cato:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13436

"Just to date the study has found that appropriations have been between $2.3 and 2.7 trillion; with an additional $884 to $1,334 billion already incurred for future costs for veterans and their families. This makes a total, incurred thus far, of from $3.2 Trillion to $4.0 trillion in inflation-controlled 2011 (constant) dollars through FY 2011. The final bill, going out to 2020 will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion."

If the Stimulus was such a success, why is our Government running and accumulating such debt and deficits?

One can legitimately make the argument that the stimulus did not live up to expectations. It didn't. It was an imperfect bill that was diluted in order to get it to pass. And, to be fair, for a variety of the factors you've mentioned. However, we also didn’t get a picture of just how bad the recession was until this year.

If you were expecting the stimulus to reverse deficit spending then obviously you're going to be disappointed. My hopes for the stimulus were that it would prevent a collapse of the economy into a depression or a prolonged recession. Many economists believe it did exactly that.

that is adversely affected when the Government taxes private investors to employ people in public jobs

Tax rates are at near-historic lows and investors are doing pretty well. Companies are sitting on historic stockpiles of cash.

The CBO also released a report that says each "saved or created job" in the Stimulus cost US taxpayers more than 200K PER Stimulis job. What a bargain.

Those costs include the equipment and materials to carry out the job. Making a highway, for example, has a high cost in materials. When all is said and done you've not only employed someone, you have a better highway.

I'll refer to my points in my previous post you have still failed to properly address for my evidence to confirm what the above source is stating. Lower median income. An expanding poverty rate. A shrinking job market.

Employment and jobs market are lagging indicators which appear to be improving (slowly). If you look at leading indicators, the outlook is better.

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index
http://www.conference-board.org/data/bcicountry.cfm?cid=1

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

“The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 8.6 percent in November, and nonfarm payroll employment rose by 120,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.” The rate hasn’t been that low since March 2009.

See those billions next to Solyndra?

I see $527 million (with an M, not a B) next to Solyndra. Still, poor use of the money.

One thing the Stimulus did do was expose hacks and frauds like Stiglitz and Krugman.

Krugman wasn’t particularly happy with the stimulus bill and predicted that it wouldn't live up to expectations due to the way the money was apportioned. The parts of the stimulus that were most successful were the parts that Krugman pushed hardest for, like infrastructure spending. In any case, it's nothing but conjecture on the part of the Austrian Schoolers that their approach would have left us any better off.

[Lanuven]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CWKTOCP45zY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

[Loke]

Krugman may not have agreed with the stimulus package as it was, but he does agree with the highly questionable fundamental idea that the point of a stimulus is to increase aggregate demand, which in theory increases production. It is the rationale that the World Wars helped numerous nations out of depressions through massive government spending. Setting aside the questionability of what impact war spending had on economic recovery - the vital mistake I see us making is failing to recognize that the kind of spending they are talking about is only effective when put to productive use. Creating a job for the sake of employing someone, or producing a product for the sake of production (yes, that is worded awkwardly) does nothing if those goods and services are not produced to meet a demand that already exists in the market.

Sure, improving that highway might benefit the individuals that are employed to build it, and the people paying for it will have a nice new highway to use, but unless the utility that highway provides is higher than the costs of production, it doesn't make sense to build it. It is like people in Wisconsin complaining about us turning down $800 million in federal money to build a high speed rail. Because the money is coming from the government, they treat it like it is free and act like we turned down a free high speed rail. If that were the case I would agree - however, if a private company came in here and offered to build a high speed rail from Madison to Milwaukee for the low price of $800 million, I feel the average person would feel the utility they would receive from that train would not be worth spending that sort of money considering the cities are already connected directly by interstate, only a 70 minute drive and taking the bus is dirt cheap.

Stimulus plans will always fail because they are built upon flawed concepts.

[G13]

As I said before, the specific information I quoted included references. See those two links at the end of the text on the wiki page?

You're acting like Moody's is an innocent and credible source when they share large responsibility for the Financial crash of 2008. This is the same Moody's that attacked lawmakers who tried to reform CountryWide and Novastar and who gave CDOs and MBSs "money safe" ratings.

Because Moody's did this, the GSEs were allowed to expand worldwide and look for investors. They were able to entice investments because of the special rates they were afforded by the US Government, as well as guarantee that the investments would be covered by the Feds in case of a default. Nobody would have invested in these risky loans without Moody's giving them the green light to do so. Moody's also directly profited from this. It became big business. This is all documented here:

http://www.amazon.com/Reckless-Endangerment-Outsized-Corruption-Armageddon/dp/0805091203

Chris Dodd also inserted an amendment into the Federal Deposit Corporation Improvement Act in 1991. The amendment extended federal bailout authorization to insurance companies and investment banks, including AIG, which just happened to be a constituent of Dodd's. Dodd was repaid with sweetheart loan deals.

If you’re going to include the reference to the ad from Cato then at least include the reference to the response:

“On February 8, 2009, a letter to Congress signed by about 200 economists in favor of the stimulus, written by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, said that Obama's plan "proposes important investments that can start to overcome the nation's damaging loss of jobs," and would "put the United States back onto a sustainable long-term-growth path."[60] This letter was signed by Nobel laureates Kenneth Arrow, Lawrence R. Klein, Eric Maskin, Daniel McFadden, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. The general consensus among non-partisan economic sources including IHS Global Insight, Moody's.com, Economy.com and Macroeconomic Advisers is that the economy "could have been worse" without the ARRA.[“

Says it right there in the bottom the ad in big letters. It's your source. Why did you originally ignore it and pretend there wasn't any objection to Obama's Stimulus by mainstream economists.

That's a gross underestimate of the cost of the war (talk about a complete waste of time and money). I’ll even use a source from Cato:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13436

"Just to date the study has found that appropriations have been between $2.3 and 2.7 trillion; with an additional $884 to $1,334 billion already incurred for future costs for veterans and their families. This makes a total, incurred thus far, of from $3.2 Trillion to $4.0 trillion in inflation-controlled 2011 (constant) dollars through FY 2011. The final bill, going out to 2020 will run at least $3.7 trillion and could reach as high as $4.4 trillion."

The stimulus costs an average of more than 300K per "saved or created job". Is that money well spent in your opinion? Obama is running 1 - 1.5 trillion annual deficits for 3 years and counting.

You won't find any disagreement with me about the cost of the Iraq war. If we're going to use your premise and calculate all future potential costs that haven't been paid out yet though, then let's be fair. Obama's stimulus will cost much more in opportunity costs and interest than the original 787 billion dollar price tag. The price tag along over 10 years is more than 3 trillion. There is also a study by independent economists that claim that the Stimulus cost more than a million jobs in the private sector.

http://bx.businessweek.com/obamas-stimulus-plan/view?url=http%3A%2F%2Fc.moreover.com%2Fclick%2Fher e.pl%3Fr4637527745%26f%3D9791

Let's also look at another one of Obama massive entitlement. Obamacare.

Setting aside the fact that Obama stole 500 billion from medicare in an effort to try and make his bloated bill look deficit neutral, the true cost could potentially be 6 trillion. If not more.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/obamacares-cost-could-top-6-trillion/

One can legitimately make the argument that the stimulus did not live up to expectations. It didn't. It was an imperfect bill that was diluted in order to get it to pass. And, to be fair, for a variety of the factors you've mentioned. However, we also didn’t get a picture of just how bad the recession was until this year.

There is no argument. It didn't even come close to Obama's projections and it damaged the economy in the long term. It will cost trillions of dollars and have accomplished very little. I've already outlined and provided many examples of the blatant fraud and abuse littered within it. Apparently a Wikipedia article has a section that claims otherwise, quoting keynesian economists and corrupt credit ratings agencies, so it must be true.

If you were expecting the stimulus to reverse deficit spending then obviously you're going to be disappointed. My hopes for the stimulus were that it would prevent a collapse of the economy into a depression or a prolonged recession. Many economists believe it did exactly that.

Which economists? I can cite hundreds who disagree who are far more credible than Krugman. ZERO jobs created in the month of August. Obama not counting people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months and stopped looking for work. These people could be digging in dumpsters and they aren't considered unemployed by the Obama Administration.

You've been brainwashed into believing that Government Spending creates wealth and prosperity. You need to go smack whichever ideologue filled your brain with such nonsense and demand your money back if you paid any tuition.

Tax rates are at near-historic lows and investors are doing pretty well. Companies are sitting on historic stockpiles of cash.

Why would anyone want to hand their money over to the Government so it can be flushed down the toilet? If you're to talk about tax rates then you need to include the 2.5% self-employment tax, Loss of deductions in the AMT brackets, historically high county property taxes, historically high state income taxes, historically high sales taxes, historically high individual health insurance costs for the self-employed, No 401k match or deductions for the self-employed and historically high college tuition.

Secondly the top 5% are responsible for 37% of all consumer spending. If you raise their taxes, especially during a recession, it's going to dramatically reduce consumer spending and lower GDP. Even Obama believes that raising taxes right now would be a bad idea.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aufAtuTwKlE

Almost 50% of the US population do not pay income taxes. On the contrary, they also benefit from wealth re-distribution in the form of tax subsidies. Obama has increased Government spending by 30% within 3 years, and is running annual trillion dollar + deficits. Even if you confiscated 100% of all the wealth of the rich, it wouldn't even come close to covering these deficits.

Those costs include the equipment and materials to carry out the job. Making a highway, for example, has a high cost in materials. When all is said and done you've not only employed someone, you have a better highway.

Only 6% of the Stimulus funds went towards Infrastructure Projects.

Employment and jobs market are lagging indicators which appear to be improving (slowly). If you look at leading indicators, the outlook is better.

The Conference Board Leading Economic Index
http://www.conference-board.org/data/bcicountry.cfm?cid=1

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

“The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage point to 8.6 percent in November, and nonfarm payroll employment rose by 120,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.” The rate hasn’t been that low since March 2009.

I've already outlined quite clearly how the Obama Administration came up with that phony 8.6% unemployment number many times within this thread, yet you are still disingenuously pandering the Obama Administration's numbers. 350K people LEAVING the work force completely offset those 120K mostly holiday retail jobs. The labor market is shrinking, yet you're claiming the market is improving? It doesn't pass the laugh test.

I see $527 million (with an M, not a B) next to Solyndra. Still, poor use of the money.

17.2 Billion in total Green Job investments allocated within the Stimulus at a cost of 3.5 million per "saved or created job".

Krugman wasn’t particularly happy with the stimulus bill and predicted that it wouldn't live up to expectations due to the way the money was apportioned. The parts of the stimulus that were most successful were the parts that Krugman pushed hardest for, like infrastructure spending. In any case, it's nothing but conjecture on the part of the Austrian Schoolers that their approach would have left us any better off.

Krugman claimed it wasn't big enough after it failed. Krugman also claimed this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/15/paul-krugman-fake-alien-invasion_n_926995.html

[Klath]

I've already outlined quite clearly how the Obama Administration came up with that phony 8.6% unemployment number many times within this thread, yet you are still disingenuously pandering the Obama Administration's numbers. 350K people LEAVING the work force completely offset those 120K mostly holiday retail jobs. The labor market is shrinking, yet you're claiming the market is improving? It doesn't pass the laugh test.

You are wrong. Here are the latest seasonally adjusted figures from the Department of Labor:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Look at the U6 numbers.

If you'd like them for a longer period and with finer granularity, try here:

http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp

The last time U6 (and U3) unemployment was this low was March 2009.

[loopholbrook]

WE NEED TO CHANGE THE NAME OF HOLOCAUST!

[Hasbinbad]

Bronson, you're way over my head with all that economics jibber jabber dude, I can't even pretend to keep up.

I do have a couple of honest, basic questions for you, and one observation about the first sentence in your last post. First the questions - mind you these are not meant to be snide or rhetorical, and I would appreciate it if you could use your education and knowledge to give me real answers, but please do dumb it down for the lay person:

Is it "A-OK" with you that millions of hard-working middle-class Americans are actually or very close to actually losing their retirements and homes, which they have spent their entire lives working for?
Is it "A-OK" with you that simultaneous to the above scenario, 2 huge stimulus packages went to bail out banks and auto companies to "stop them from going bankrupt," and came out of that deal with billions of dollars in profits, while we got basic low interest payments in return for it? They made huge profits off of the money we gave them which was just supposed to keep them afloat long enough that they could make their own money. Isn't there something wrong with that?
What does "7.7 trillion dollars" mean to you? Is that scandal true? Because those loans would make both stimuli packages seem like chump change, and nobody was ever consulted about it. Don't we have starving / sick / homeless / working poor / mentally ill people in this country that money could have helped? Don't we need to buy asphalt and better ways to create energy?
Do you think it's cool that we live in a system where I can go find a dumb person, have them sign a contract I know they won't be able to fulfill, and then make bets for them to default on the contract, making a huge profit where no service was provided? Shouldn't that kind of stuff be best left in vegas?
What about all of those people now being able to give unlimited amounts of money to politicians, ensuring that US policy reflects their interests?
Do you know what the tax rate on the richest bracket was in 1954? What else do you know about the achievements of this country during that era and the years immediately following? Weren't there rich people then regardless of their taxes? Wasn't that the era of Sinatra and the high life? What has happened to this country as tax rates on the rich have been eroded over time (hint: wealth concentration and disparity)?
Why were 23 million jobs created during the Clinton administration?

Now for an observation:

My observation is that just because you can't quantify something doesn't necessarily imply that it doesn't exist. For instance, if I asked you to quantify all the stars in the universe, you wouldn't be able to do that, because our understanding of the universe is limited. In the same vein, our understanding of how "saving jobs" works is limited.

Mind you, I'm definitely not defending Mr. Obama or agreeing with the empty rhetoric "created or saved X # of jobs," I'm just saying that concept can't be discounted out of hand simply because you don't have the proper metric to quantify it.

Carry on.
Please Bronson, I'm looking for actual insight from someone with your background, and not being snide.