Someone who watched the SOTUA, can you explain to me whats going on exactly? I've never been into politics at all but what Obama said sounds fantastic for the middle class American.
without even really listening to it I am sure it probably sounded a lot like an "American Dream"...aka not happening with their completely effed political system, but yes anyone that has a synopsis it would be greatly appreciated.
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Someone who watched the SOTUA, can you explain to me whats going on exactly? I've never been into politics at all but what Obama said sounds fantastic for the middle class American.
Here's a good summary, but you have to actually read the points and not gloss over them.
Here's the Republicans response by joni Ernst
Ted Cruz's response.
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Pass the bacon.
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It's amazing to me. Now that "Obamacare" is in place and people using it here in GOP heartland country, you have this interesting dynamic.
People who complain each and every day about "Obamacare" and how it needs to be repealed yada yada yada yet, unbeknownst to them, are actually using and enjoying things in the affordable care act. And that goes back to several surveys that were done before it was even enacted. The majority of people did not like Obamacare when asked the simple question of do you think it should happen or do you like it? But, gasp,those same people were in favour of every single item in the actual act if those points were separated from the name of the act or obamacare.
The bulk of the general voting populace are not educated one bit on where the parties actually stand. It's "my daddy voted republican and by gum I'm going to as well!". Heck, parents in these parts will literally disown kids for voting democrat (not kidding).
It isn't a shock that as one gets more education they tend to lean democrat. While not a perfect party by any stretch, by and large their ideas are what people agree with. If only most of the population would actually stop complaining and listen.
The GOP are in tough I think even though they will have money coming out of their ears. The way the party is set up, in order for anyone to win the republican nomination the candidate has to move very far to the right and then that will come back to bite them during the campaign. The democrats will be able to run a very centrist themed nomination season and they will do so if they are smart (which is in question).
Last edited by ernie; 01-21-2015 at 08:49 AM.
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It's amazing to me. Now that "Obamacare" is in place and people using it here in GOP heartland country, you have this interesting dynamic.
People who complain each and every day about "Obamacare" and how it needs to be repealed yada yada yada yet, unbeknownst to them, are actually using and enjoying things in the affordable care act. And that goes back to several surveys that were done before it was even enacted. The majority of people did not like Obamacare when asked the simple question of do you think it should happen or do you like it? But, gasp,those same people were in favour of every single item in the actual act if those points were separated from the name of the act or obamacare.
The bulk of the general voting populace are not educated one bit on where the parties actually stand. It's "my daddy voted republican and by gum I'm going to as well!". Heck, parents in these parts will literally disown kids for voting democrat (not kidding).
It isn't a shock that as one gets more education they tend to lean democrat. While not a perfect party by any stretch, by and large their ideas are what people agree with. If only most of the population would actually stop complaining and listen.
The GOP are in tough I think even though they will have money coming out of their ears. The way the party is set up, in order for anyone to win the republican nomination the candidate has to move very far to the right and then that will come back to bite them during the campaign. The democrats will be able to run a very centrist themed nomination season and they will do so if they are smart (which is in question).
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n fact, after controlling for other state characteristics such as low per capita income population and average insurance premiums, I observe a positive association between the anti-ACA spending and ACA enrollment. This implies that anti-ACA ads may unintentionally increase the public awareness about the existence of a governmentally subsidized service and its benefits for the uninsured. On the other hand, an individual’s prediction about the chances of repealing the ACA may be associated with the volume of advertisements against it. In the states where more anti-ACA ads are aired, residents were on average more likely to believe that Congress will repeal the ACA in the near future. People who believe that subsidized health insurance may soon disappear could have a greater willingness to take advantage of this one time opportunity.
Well the next step is to figure out a way to cut costs in a system that is full of red tape. Providing affordable care is actually an economic benefit similar to providing homes for the homeless. It gives you something that you can fall back on in times of need and that tends to make people more productive.
Someone who watched the SOTUA, can you explain to me whats going on exactly? I've never been into politics at all but what Obama said sounds fantastic for the middle class American.
There is a huge problem in the world(not only the US) where the rich are gaining more wealth while the middle/lower class have been sitting at pretty much the same spot for the past 20-30 years. This lack of social mobility is destroying the US probably more than other countries because on top of that, they have a very poor social net to help lower/middle class people move up.
In 2014 Obama proposed a lot of different policies including patent reform, immigration, work VISAs, etc, etc and almost none of them were implemented because of Congress being full of a bunch of idiots.
Obama has his ideas, and a guy like Paul Ryan has his ideas, and while they disagree a lot about what to do, they do seem to agree that there is a fundamental problem. This issue is that nothing seems to get done because of the gridlock.
I'm mentioning Ryan because he is probably the only guy Obama has a chance of getting to the table to hammer out some deals.
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Don't like being so blunt about it, but the guy doesn't represent what you think he represents.
Quote:
Mr. Ryan has become the Republican Party’s poster child for new ideas thanks to his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” a plan for a major overhaul of federal spending and taxes. News media coverage has been overwhelmingly favorable; on Monday, The Washington Post put a glowing profile of Mr. Ryan on its front page, portraying him as the G.O.P.’s fiscal conscience. He’s often described with phrases like “intellectually audacious.”
But it’s the audacity of dopes. Mr. Ryan isn’t offering fresh food for thought; he’s serving up leftovers from the 1990s, drenched in flimflam sauce.
Mr. Ryan’s plan calls for steep cuts in both spending and taxes. He’d have you believe that the combined effect would be much lower budget deficits, and, according to that Washington Post report, he speaks about deficits “in apocalyptic terms.” And The Post also tells us that his plan would, indeed, sharply reduce the flow of red ink: “The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan would cut the budget deficit in half by 2020.”
But the budget office has done no such thing. At Mr. Ryan’s request, it produced an estimate of the budget effects of his proposed spending cuts — period. It didn’t address the revenue losses from his tax cuts.
The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has, however, stepped into the breach. Its numbers indicate that the Ryan plan would reduce revenue by almost $4 trillion over the next decade. If you add these revenue losses to the numbers The Post cites, you get a much larger deficit in 2020, roughly $1.3 trillion.
And that’s about the same as the budget office’s estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration’s plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible — which you shouldn’t — the Roadmap wouldn’t reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.
And I do mean slash. The Tax Policy Center finds that the Ryan plan would cut taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population in half, giving them 117 percent of the plan’s total tax cuts. That’s not a misprint. Even as it slashed taxes at the top, the plan would raise taxes for 95 percent of the population.
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I'm mentioning Ryan because he is probably the only guy Obama has a chance of getting to the table to hammer out some deals.
He's probably less insane than most Republicans, but his economic policies are right out of the, take from the middle class and poor and give to the rich, Republican playbook.
All he talked about during and after the SOTU was how will the Dems pay for free college, sick pay, minimum wage etc. These things don't come for free blah blah. Obama said, by taxing the rich more, closing loopholes etc.
In 2012 when Ryan was running as VP, he had big plans of cutting trillions from the budget. how? by cutting social programs and giving the rich tax breaks, wtf?
Don't like being so blunt about it, but the guy doesn't represent what you think he represents.
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Whats your point? He is also in charge of the Ways and Means Committee so he has a lot of influence over what deals get done when it comes to taxes. That is all I said.
Ryan has also come out today and yesterday and said he likes a couple things that Obama talked about(income tax credit for low income families) and that he thinks he could get some deals done.
He is also of the spend less/tax less camp. But of course that has nothing to do with what I actually said. Like I said, he has his ideas, and Obama has his. Getting to the table and getting a deal done is what is important.
He's probably less insane than most Republicans, but his economic policies are right out of the, take from the middle class and poor and give to the rich, Republican playbook.
All he talked about during and after the SOTU was how will the Dems pay for free college, sick pay, minimum wage etc. These things don't come for free blah blah. Obama said, by taxing the rich more, closing loopholes etc.
In 2012 when Ryan was running as VP, he had big plans of cutting trillions from the budget. how? by cutting social programs and giving the rich tax breaks, wtf?
His own economic policies will never get passed in their entirety. As long as Obama has the veto pen he will have to compromise. My point was that Ryan came out after the SOTU and said he thinks they could hammer out some deals. Who else said that? Nobody. The rest of the GOP are busy acting like morons.
Someone who watched the SOTUA, can you explain to me whats going on exactly? I've never been into politics at all but what Obama said sounds fantastic for the middle class American.
American politics in a nutshell:
A. Are you going to take away $1 from a super rich person and use it to provide a tax break or health benefit for a family of 4 earning the median annual salary?
You hate hard work and want to punish achievement.
B. Are you going to try and prevent companies from establishing laws to facilitate their escape from US tax obligations?
You hate capitalism and want to bring in communism.
C. Have you, as a politician, ever proposed to do A?
Then it's the thin edge of the wedge for your ultimate goal of doing B!
D. Have you, as a politician, ever proposed to do B?
Then you also secretly dream at night of doing A!
E. If you approach either of A or B, then it stands to reason you're eventually coming to confiscate our guns.
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His own economic policies will never get passed in their entirety. As long as Obama has the veto pen he will have to compromise. My point was that Ryan came out after the SOTU and said he thinks they could hammer out some deals. Who else said that? Nobody. The rest of the GOP are busy acting like morons.
Whats your point? He is also in charge of the Ways and Means Committee so he has a lot of influence over what deals get done when it comes to taxes. That is all I said.
Ryan has also come out today and yesterday and said he likes a couple things that Obama talked about(income tax credit for low income families) and that he thinks he could get some deals done.
He is also of the spend less/tax less camp. But of course that has nothing to do with what I actually said. Like I said, he has his ideas, and Obama has his. Getting to the table and getting a deal done is what is important.
What i'm saying is that it doesn't work that way. Just because paul ryan says he thinks they can work out some deals doesn't mean they will. Paul Ryan wields no policy power internally. His 'ideas' are so outrageous they won't stand up to public scrutiny, and if he's so alone compared to the rest of his GOP brethren as you believe, nothing will get passed either because that brethren, who for the sake of this argument don't agree with said deals, won't put up the votes.
In the end what you get is a negotiation through the media of what the two acceptable positions are and more rallying towards the 'the truth is somewhere in the middle' crowd.
Paul Ryan is posturing for a presidential or vice presidential run, but given any actual levers of power within government, will do his best to horribly mismanage things.
Here's an article detailing exactly what I said above:
Quote:
At its core, Paul Ryan’s appeal is simple: He's what stupid people think smart people sound like.
MSNBC's commentary after the vice presidential debate in October captured the narrative pretty well: “It was Scranton Joe vs. Think Tank Ryan. Heart vs. head.” And that reputation has helped Ryan hustle his way from unimpressive legislative aide to brains of the Republican Party in a decade's time.
His popularity among voters isn't much of a surprise. Ryan's good-looking and articulate. Most importantly, he can convince people there's intellectual gravitas behind his words. It’s sort of like the Ross Perot phenomenon, a man for whom 20 million people voted in 1992. Since Perot talked like a dweeb, people assumed he had crafty, intelligent plans for the country. Plus he whipped out bar graphs from time-to-time.
And who doesn't love a good bar graph?
Ryan likes bar graphs, too. Nevermind that his are upside down and backward and layered in ####, like his gross overstating of Medicare's crisis and his quest to privatize the program. Whatever problems that system has can be solved by expanding the subscriber pool to include the healthy and unhealthy—not by allowing private companies to run the program for profit, which is essentially Ryan’s plan. A plan that, it should be said, isn’t based in the realities of the program, but in Ryan’s rigid adherence to free-market economic dogma.
But what's more bizarre is Ryan’s popularity among the liberal commentariat, who have helped develop his reputation as a serious thinker worthy of sustained engagement.
Take Ezra Klein, everyone's favorite center-left Wunderkind. In April 2010, he defended Ryan admirers in a piece called “The virtues of Ryan's roadmap.” Essentially, Klein argued that we needed something more than critique, more than snarking the other #######'s solutions. And he thought the congressman's budget plan was an “honest entry into the debate,” seeing an opening for a bipartisan conversation about the deficit.
Let's hold hands and make those painful cuts together!
A few months later, in August 2010, Klein took to defending Ryan against the slander of that vicious Bolshevik, Paul Krugman. Klein crowed:
I don't think Ryan is a charlatan or a flim-flam artist. More to the point, I think he's playing an important role, and one I'm happy to try and help him play: The worlds of liberals and conservatives are increasingly closed loops. Very few politicians from one side are willing to seriously engage with the other side, particularly on substance.
A three-part interview Klein conducted with Ryan showed the love affair at its most nauseating. He calls Ryan's plan “impressive,” even if he himself, if given the opportunity, “wouldn't balance the budget in anything like the way Ryan proposes.” Sure, Klein is sharp enough to push back and confront the congressman on the details, but he doesn't realize that Ryan’s playing at a different game than him.
Klein wants to tinker with numbers to make Washington run smoother; Ryan wants to use data to obscure a different mission—the complete dismantling of the welfare state.
...
So when Ezra Klein finally realized, a couple years after his first round of interviews with Ryan, that he was getting wined and dined only to get rushed out the door with a handful for change for the bus the next morning and finally broke down, complaining that Ryan had not actually been as serious and truthful as he first thought, it's hard to have any sympathy.
“Quite simply, the Romney campaign isn’t adhering to the minimum standards required for a real policy conversation,” Klein complained. Republicans weren’t playing fair. They were playing at politics, while he was trying to construct sound policy.
This is a long quote, and a longer article, but truth and brevity are not necessarily linked. Ryan provides such a volume of bullspit that it takes an equally large shovel to sort it:
Quote:
When Mitt Romney introduced Ryan as his running mate who years ago, he described Ryan as an "intellectual leader of the Republican Party." In the conservative magazine Commentary, James Pethokoukis wrote that "It's probably safe to assume that no elected official in America understands the ins and outs of the labyrinthine U.S. budget the way Paul Ryan does."
This hyperbole might be expected from the right-wing echo chamber, but the mainstream press quickly adopted the same perspective.
A McClatchey news story described Ryan as a "policy wonk" and a "conservative thinker." The Daily Beast called Ryan a "number-crunching policy wonk." With a bit more distance, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ryan "hopes to position himself as the party's big thinker in advance of a possible 2016 presidential run"
For too long, reporters have been bamboozled by Ryan, who claims to be a both a budget expert and something of a social philosopher. But he's just a slick talker who appears to have flunked basic math in high school or college, because his budget numbers never add up.
Throughout the 2012 campaign, reporters kept asking Ryan to explain his draconian budget, but he could never provide a coherent answer. His stump speech was little more than warmed-over babble about the evils of "big government", the importance of being "self sufficient" and the dangers of people becoming dependent on government instead of lifting oneself up by one's bootstraps.
His most popular metaphor was the anti-poverty programs had failed because instead of being a safety net they'd become a "hammock," robbing people of their self-esteem and initiative.
Ryan -- a millionaire who made his money the old-fashioned way, by marrying a wealthy wife who inherited her fortune -- worships at the altar of novelist Ayn Rand, the philosopher of you're-on-your-own selfishness, whose books have been required reading for his Congressional staffers.
Ryan has made his reputation demonizing poor people. Not surprisingly, he wants to slash programs that help low-income families and children. Last year he was pushing a plan that would have thrown an estimated two million children, elderly, and disabled Americans off food stamps.
Despite this, the mainstream media have continued to give Ryan credit for being a serious budget guru and social policy expert. This can be seen in their reaction to Ryan's release on Monday of a 205-page report on the history of anti-poverty programs, going back a half century to President Johnson's Great Society programs, which concluded that they had failed. The report examines eight types of federal anti-poverty programs: food aid, social services, housing, cash aid, education and job training, energy, health care, and veterans affairs.
In the report, Ryan claims that federal programs have contributed to the nation's high poverty rate and created a "poverty trap." According to the report, "Federal programs are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse."
The report was meant to justify Ryan's proposed budget, which would slash anti-poverty programs like food stamps, family assistance, college aid, child care subsidies, and housing vouchers. Ryan, who has also opposed extending unemployment insurance to the long-term jobless and raising the minimum wage, claimed that social science findings support his view that these programs have failed.
The headline in TIME magazine read: "Paul Ryan Critiques War on Poverty In New Report: Claims federal healthcare, nutrition and education programs have failed to address U.S. poverty rate."
The Los Angeles Times headlined its story: "Paul Ryan calls for cuts to anti-poverty programs
Bloomberg News' headline told readers: "Paul Ryan Sees $799 Billion War on Poverty Failing Poor."
The Washington Post headline echoed the same point: "Ryan Report Questions Efficacy Of Anti-Poverty Programs" (although it was retitled "House GOP budget will focus on reforming welfare, overhauling social programs" on the website). The article said that Ryan's report provided an "often stinging" evaluation of government anti-poverty efforts.
CNN's version was "Paul Ryan Wages War on the War on Poverty."
The National Journal headlined its article, "Ryan Says Some Poverty Programs are Hurting the Poor."
These headlines are both accurate and misleading at the same time. Ryan did say that anti-poverty programs hurt the poor. But neither the headlines nor the news stories in the mainstream media managed to tell readers the most important fact about Ryan's report. He's wrong.
The reporters didn't bother to contact any social science experts who might have explained that Ryan's report was full of holes. For all its footnotes, the report got it wrong, mostly by misquoting and misinterpreting studies that examine the impact of a wide variety of anti-poverty programs.
To cite just one example: Ryan's report cited a study published in December by Columbia University's Population Research Center measuring poverty trends since the War on Poverty began in the 1960s. Columbia Professor Jane Waldfogel and her colleagues looked at an alternative measure of the poverty rate known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in government benefits like food stamps and programs like the earned-income tax credit. They found that the poverty rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012. But Ryan only cited data from 1969 onward, ignoring a full 36 percent of the decline.
"It's technically correct, but it's an odd way to cite the research," Waldfogel told Fiscal Times. "In my experience, usually you use all of the available data. There's no justification given. It's unfortunate because it really understates the progress we've made in reducing poverty."
Fiscal Times didn't ask Waldfogel what grade she'd have given Ryan if he handed in his poverty manifesto for a class, but several professors I consulted said that Ryan's report would have earned him a D in their courses.
It wouldn't have been difficult for reporters to find out that Ryan's report was bogus. Since we recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of LBJ's War on Poverty, there have been many reports and commentaries by academics and think tanks examining the history and legacy of these anti-poverty programs.
The well-respected Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been evaluating anti-poverty programs for years and has plenty of experts ready to talk to the press. On Tuesday the CBPP released a report, "Ryan Report Distorts Safety Net's Picture." The CBPP concluded that the Ryan report is "replete with misleading and selective presentations of data and research, which it uses to portray the safety net in a negative light. It also omits key research and data that point in more positive directions."
For Paul Ryan, it's not about actually imposing a budget, it's about repeating something that's outrageous enough times that it becomes accepted:
Quote:
On the front of immediate fiscal politics, Mr Ryan's budget "plan" is best seen as an elliptical statement about the future allocation of the GOP's bargaining power. It says that House Republicans are happy to concede Mr Obama's Medicare cuts, will seek to stymie at every turn the implementation of Obamacare, are going to fight like hell against further tax increases, and intend to demand a budget plan that balances the books sooner rather than later. The more fanciful the proposal, the stronger the commitment not to give ground to the White House.
On the front of big-picture public opinion, I hazard that Mr Ryan seeks to make his vision of government seem decreasingly radical and increasingly reasonable simply by repeating it. You can think of Mr Ryan's fantasy budget as a gambit in a diffuse cultural negotiation over the bounds of reasonable opinion in the ongoing negotiation over fiscal policy—a sort of ideological meta-negotiation. You may think that proclaiming the same "radical", "deeply unpopular" ideas again and again and yet again can't possibly make them more palatable and mainstream, but there's a queer phenomenon psychologists call the "mere exposure effect" that suggests otherwise.
I actually think Paul Ryan follows a rather traditional line of republican / conservative lawmakers. The basic premise, while they're out of office, has long been to inflate the costs of items that they favour (corporate and high earner tax cuts, corporate / military spending) while attempting to hold the overall budget constant. Eventually, they know that the fiscal situation will come to a head (due to the tax cuts / military spending) but that, when it comes to making the requisite cuts, no lawmaker on the democratic or republican side of the isle will dare touch corporate / military spending and corporate tax cuts.
In that respect, they're happy to reverse engineer their assumptions to make their vision fit and come to fruition. Hence Ryan's ludicrous budget with it's bat##### crazy assumptions. He knows, at the end of the day, that if the fiscal situation is dire, lawmakers are more like to cut welfare and public research programs than cut spending for corporate and military expenditures.
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There is a huge problem in the world(not only the US) where the rich are gaining more wealth while the middle/lower class have been sitting at pretty much the same spot for the past 20-30 years. This lack of social mobility is destroying the US probably more than other countries because on top of that, they have a very poor social net to help lower/middle class people move up.
In 2014 Obama proposed a lot of different policies including patent reform, immigration, work VISAs, etc, etc and almost none of them were implemented because of Congress being full of a bunch of idiots.
Obama has his ideas, and a guy like Paul Ryan has his ideas, and while they disagree a lot about what to do, they do seem to agree that there is a fundamental problem. This issue is that nothing seems to get done because of the gridlock.
I'm mentioning Ryan because he is probably the only guy Obama has a chance of getting to the table to hammer out some deals.
So, if those thing are good, why did Congress turn them down? Money I'm assuming?
