Interesting Yahoo article for everyone
Heart Attack Symptoms You Are Most Likely to Ignore Yahoo! Health
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
Conservatives
I came across this article today and I had to post it (with credit of course). I don't consider myself liberal but I am definitely not a conservative. I have found over the years that I do not care for conservatives very much. Generally I find them stuffy, anal, and very rigid. Yes that is a generalization but not I did say generally. This article is good because even though it appears to be a humorus piece there are some truths to it.
courtesy Huffingtonpost.com
courtesy Huffingtonpost.com
Ellis Weiner
Posted: December 31, 2009 03:28 PM
"This is How Conservatives Are Made"
Read More: Child Abuse , Conservatives , Idiots , Miller , Morons , National Review , Republican Party , Stupid Fathers , Tax , The Corner , Home News
The Corner, as my fellow intellectual masochists know, is the daily blog of the formerly-relevant National Review. Like the Jewish resorts in the Catskills--once the site of so much vitality and schpritzaturra, now mostly mouldering ruins in appalling states of neglect--this is where you go to wander around in a haze of alternating depression and morbid fascination.
Two days ago we had a fine opportunity to undergo the latter. Here, in its entirety, is the apercu of John J. Miller--conservative, writer, and proud father:
'They Just Took My Money' [John J. Miller]
That's what my 8-year-old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift card from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it.
This is how conservatives are made.
Truer words were never inputted. This is indeed how conservatives are made, and this is how they come off the assembly line: whiny with victimization, pissy about money, and in full possession of an eight-year-old's understanding of the real world.
Now, you or I would have pounced upon this "teaching moment" and used it to instruct the lad in the following manner. We would have pointed out that:
1. The "missing" money was kept by the store in the form of "sales tax." The store pays that money to the state (and sometimes the city) government over the year. All states charge taxes on most things (although usually not on food) when you buy them. Why?
2. Because all of us, no matter what this poor child's idiot father and his friends believe or want to believe, share certain needs and provide for each other certain benefits simply because we live in the same area. Look around, young budding conservative. What do you see? You see paved and maintained streets, and street lights, and traffic lights, and police cars and fire engines. Ask daddy to lift up a manhole cover and look inside: See? It's an entire fucking sewage system. Who pays for all this? We all do, via that tax and other taxes.
3. Do you, o son of a smugly moronic father, benefit from such expenditures? Every day. Never mind if your house catches fire or you need to call the cops or the streets have to be cleared of snow or state universities need funding. Take a look at that Clone Wars book. How do you think it got to Borders in the first place? A nice (or a not-nice) man (or woman) drove it, and ten thousand other books, in a big truck across our nation's fine superhighway system.
Without such roads, the book would have cost even more than $7.99. Ask your (idiot) father what "economies of scale" means. When he says, "Don't worry about that. You're too young to understand it," ask him why the hell, then, he feels entitled to interpret a little pisher's confusion as being the beginning of a socio-economic world-view. Then come back here and we'll talk.
It takes a special kind of man to respond to a second-grader's bafflement about finance with some shirt-poppin', chest-swellin' pride over the boy's blameless, understandable, and correctable ignorance. But that's what you'll find at the Corner.
These are people for whom no partisan score is too petty, no lie too egregious, no tortured "observation" too contrived or invented. To them, "true" is no different from "could be true if you squint hard enough and clap loud." When they're not projecting onto others the qualities that only they, themselves, ever actually display ("I am ideologically, reflexively hostile to taxes, so my 8-year-old is, too!"), they're just making shit up and hoping someone, somewhere--the American Enterprise Institute, the Club for Growths (sic), the Koch family--will pay them for it.
You wonder why the Republican Party, and the political right, are so horrendously dishonest when they're not displaying (or pandering to) Olympian levels of plain old provincial ignorance? Now you know. They're raised by the John J. Millers of the world. This is how conservatives are made.
Cross-posted at What HE Said
Two days ago we had a fine opportunity to undergo the latter. Here, in its entirety, is the apercu of John J. Miller--conservative, writer, and proud father:
'They Just Took My Money' [John J. Miller]
That's what my 8-year-old son said about the sales tax on the ride home from Borders a few minutes ago. He had a $10 gift card from Christmas, bought a Clone Wars book for $7.99, looked at the receipt, and wondered why he still didn't have a full $2.01 on it.
This is how conservatives are made.
Truer words were never inputted. This is indeed how conservatives are made, and this is how they come off the assembly line: whiny with victimization, pissy about money, and in full possession of an eight-year-old's understanding of the real world.
Now, you or I would have pounced upon this "teaching moment" and used it to instruct the lad in the following manner. We would have pointed out that:
1. The "missing" money was kept by the store in the form of "sales tax." The store pays that money to the state (and sometimes the city) government over the year. All states charge taxes on most things (although usually not on food) when you buy them. Why?
2. Because all of us, no matter what this poor child's idiot father and his friends believe or want to believe, share certain needs and provide for each other certain benefits simply because we live in the same area. Look around, young budding conservative. What do you see? You see paved and maintained streets, and street lights, and traffic lights, and police cars and fire engines. Ask daddy to lift up a manhole cover and look inside: See? It's an entire fucking sewage system. Who pays for all this? We all do, via that tax and other taxes.
3. Do you, o son of a smugly moronic father, benefit from such expenditures? Every day. Never mind if your house catches fire or you need to call the cops or the streets have to be cleared of snow or state universities need funding. Take a look at that Clone Wars book. How do you think it got to Borders in the first place? A nice (or a not-nice) man (or woman) drove it, and ten thousand other books, in a big truck across our nation's fine superhighway system.
Without such roads, the book would have cost even more than $7.99. Ask your (idiot) father what "economies of scale" means. When he says, "Don't worry about that. You're too young to understand it," ask him why the hell, then, he feels entitled to interpret a little pisher's confusion as being the beginning of a socio-economic world-view. Then come back here and we'll talk.
It takes a special kind of man to respond to a second-grader's bafflement about finance with some shirt-poppin', chest-swellin' pride over the boy's blameless, understandable, and correctable ignorance. But that's what you'll find at the Corner.
These are people for whom no partisan score is too petty, no lie too egregious, no tortured "observation" too contrived or invented. To them, "true" is no different from "could be true if you squint hard enough and clap loud." When they're not projecting onto others the qualities that only they, themselves, ever actually display ("I am ideologically, reflexively hostile to taxes, so my 8-year-old is, too!"), they're just making shit up and hoping someone, somewhere--the American Enterprise Institute, the Club for Growths (sic), the Koch family--will pay them for it.
You wonder why the Republican Party, and the political right, are so horrendously dishonest when they're not displaying (or pandering to) Olympian levels of plain old provincial ignorance? Now you know. They're raised by the John J. Millers of the world. This is how conservatives are made.
Cross-posted at What HE Said
Monday, January 9, 2012
PERSONAL RANT: ENTITLEMENT PROGRAMS I
Over the past few weeks I have been hearing politicians speaking about entitlement programs and since they are generally speaking negatively about them and the politicians all seem to be republicans I figured that entitlement programs had to be connected to social programs since most people (mostly republicans) seem to have a thing against welfare and anything that will help folks who quite often can't hgelp themselves. I was wrong. Apparently according to this article I found social security and Medicare are a part of this. Check out this definition I found online. After you read it you may shiver the next time you hear about how Washington wants to cut these things.
courtesy Auburn.edu
http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/entitlement_program
Entitlement program
courtesy Auburn.edu
http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/entitlement_program
The kind of government program that provides individuals with personal financial benefits (or sometimes special government-provided goods or services) to which an indefinite (but usually rather large) number of potential beneficiaries have a legal right(enforceable in court, if necessary) whenever they meet eligibility conditions that are specified by the standing law that authorizes the program. The beneficiaries of entitlement programs are normally individual citizens or residents, but sometimes organizations such as business corporations, local governments, or even political parties may have similar special "entitlements" under certain programs. The most important examples of entitlement programs at the federal level in the United States would include Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, most Veterans' Administration programs, federal employee and military retirement plans, unemployment compensation, food stamps, and agricultural price support programs.
The existence of entitlement programs is mainly significant from a political economy standpoint because of the very difficult problems they create for Congress's efforts to control the exact size of the budget deficit or surplus through the annual appropriations process. It is often very hard to predict in advance just how many individuals will meet the various entitlement criteria during any given year, so it is therefore difficult to predict what the total costs to the government will be at the time the appropriation bills for the coming fiscal year are being drafted. This makes it even harder for government to smooth out the business cycle or pursue other macroeconomic objectives through an active fiscal policy -- because these objectives require careful pre-planning of the size of the budget deficit or surplus to be run. In the first place, the amount of money that will be required in the coming year to fund an entitlement program is often extremely difficult to predict in advance because the number of people with an entitlement may depend upon the overall condition of the economy at the time. For example, the total amount of unemployment benefits to be paid out will depend upon the changing level of unemployment in the economy as the year wears on. Some very large entitlement programs (including Social Security pensions and government employee retirement programs) have been "indexed" to inflation, so that the size of the benefit is periodically adjusted according to a fixed formula based on unpredictable changes in the Consumers' Price Index. Perhaps more significantly, the amount of spending on entitlement programs is impossible for the Senate and House Appropriations committees to even attempt to adjust or to control because those committees do not have the jurisdiction to rewrite the laws that specify who gets how much and under what conditions. The various specialized standing committees who do have the jurisdiction to rewrite authorizing legislation each tend to be dominated by members whose political interests lie in expanding their particular entitlement program, not in cutting it back, and the political influence of the organized special interest groups that support the programs tends to be overwhelming on the specialized committees when such proposals arise.
Since the middle 1980s, entitlement programs have accounted for more than half of all federal spending. Taken together with such other almost uncontrollable (in the short run, that is) expenses as interest payments on the national debt and the payment obligations arising from long-term contracts already entered into by the government in past years, entitlement programs leave Congress with no more than about 25% of the annual budget to be scrutinized for possible cutbacks through the regular appropriations process. This very substantially reduces the practicality of trying to counteract the ups and downs of the overall economy through a "discretionary" fiscal policy because so very little of the budget is available for meaningful alteration by the Appropriations and Budget committees on short notice.
A Glossary of Political Economy Termscopyright © 1994-2005 Paul M. Johnson
Department of Political Science, 7080 Haley Center, Auburn University, Auburn, AL 36849
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