An interesting stat that I heard on CSPAN that was broadcasting a briefing / discussion on the latest budget. They had pointed out that Bush (43) has accumulated more national debt then all of the other 42 presidents combined. They stated that at the end of bush’s first year we had about 5.8 Trillion in debt. at the current rate we are spending, we will be at 8.3 trillion by the end of this year with a projectory of about 11+ trillion by the time bush is ready to leave office. Fiscally responsible are we?
They stated that the current budget proposal does not have enough money in it to support the current operations in the “sand box”, which means that there will be another ammendment requested for this budget at a later time.
The current budget proposal reduces / cuts national programs and bolsters foreign and combat spending. I am all for supporting our troops, don’t get me wrong. When do we start to imporove our lives at home. I am lucky in the fact that I have made a good life for myself. There are many who suffer in this country. There are many schools which are underfunded (plenty in my area). When do we redirect funds to bolster our infra-structure rather than an infrastructure of another country who spits on our grand gestures?
(Me stepping off my soap box) 😎
Jon
In a post-9/11 world…
Jon, why do you hate America and Freedom so much?
— Ben
Don’t hate…
Where do you get that I hate America and freedom?
My ideals are for Country first. I want to know why I build a school in a foreign country and let the schools at home be neglected. Why do we spend to rebuild a country and let millions suffer after our own natural disasters? I am all for supporting our freedoms. Bring our troops back and stiffen security at our borders. Internal policies will need to be changed to allow greater flow of information between agencies. Pull the reporters out of the soldiers pockets so they can do their job, rather than using them as PR pieces.
I consider myself to be very patriotic. I didn’t quite understand what it meant till i served, but since have had a great deal of respoect and admiration for those who serve both in the military and in the government. The military is severely underpaid with many families on federal assistance (food stamps and the like).
I don’t hate much. I don’t understand a spending budget that neglects the hand that offers it. Explain that to me. How do things at home get fortified and expanded when the resources that are required are sent to different areas of the world? History has proven that War is hell. The objective in war is to kill people and break things. A police action doesn’t work (Vietnam?). I am a war monger, I believe victory is achieved through superior firepower. If are there to take out a couple nasty dictators (or the like) then do so and come back home, but standing up a goverment in a country that has been around longer than ours has been thought of is insane and too expensive for one nation to undertake.
Sarcastic much?
I’m certain Ben was being sarcastic.
History doesn’t support that…
History doesn’t entirely support that assertion, I think. Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies on May 8, 1945. For four years, it remained occupied by the Allies, until the alliance broke down in 1949 and two separate states emerged: East and West Germany.
West Germany remained occupied until 1990. Even today, Allies maintain posts there… but Germany is part of that Alliance.
So what I’m saying is, if we’re going to go in and win a war, we have to plan on something like a fifty-year occupation in order to stabilize the country. The difference with Germany was that we had many nations, banded together to support the occupation.
In Iraq and Afghanistan, we stand alone.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Oops
Yeah sorry. I was doing my best impression of the right-wing media gadflies, who every time someone makes an honest criticism of the Bush administration, they accuse them of being against freedom and America. 🙂 Sorry the sarcasm didn’t come across.
— Ben
I’m Tapping
I’m calling on Executive Privilidge to tap your phone.
Who’s funny now, Mr. Liberal Lawyer?
Anyway, I think we need to fund the military because we’re rich and we push our beliefs on everyone else. As a country, we’re rich, and people are always jealous of the rich folks. Now granted, we have the dirty skeletons in our closet (the poor, drugs, etc), but we’re still the big house up on the hill.
But more importantly, we think we know what’s best for everyone. Hey, the Jews suffered in WWII (which they did, I’m being glib but please don’t take that as a lack of understanding for what occurred), so let’s give them back their Holy Land. Forget that they haven’t been there in a while and the Muslims had moved in, we’ll do what’s right. Oh, Muslims and Jews don’t get along? Oh well, those silly turban-heads will get over it.
They didn’t.
Hey, there’s oil in Iraq. Why don’t we bust in Iraq, set up a democracy, and then we’ll get oil for a long time! Forget we had to learn, fight, and arrive at our idea for democracy for almost 300 years. The Iraqis will figure it out in a couple of months. Thousands of years of infighting will melt away when they see our American plan, because it’s obviously the only true way.
Oh, and by the way, Islam is bad. Find Jesus.
Yeah, we give a lot of money away, but we also act like pompous asses a lot as well. The thing is, our plan might work…in about 60 years. Look at Germany, Italy, and Japan. They’re pretty close allies to us now, but I bet they didn’t like us too much after WWII.
I still think we take the money we spent on Iraq and put it into renewable energy sources and we can forget about the Middle East. There’s plenty of hydrogen in our neck of the woods.
Perhaps if they found oil in an elementary school somehwere in the US, education could get funded properly.
And by the way, there’s a big flap out here because the Bush Admin made a deal for the United Arab Emirates to take over the Port of Baltimore. All the local politicians are in an uproar, even though security is still done but the US. Sporadically, mind you. A fella here had the idea of paying the homeless minimum wage to search containers coming into the ports. Probably wouldn’t work, but sounds good in conversation.
My $.02 Weed
Hydrogen
I think you’ll find that free hydrogen is extremely rare. The most abundant source is in water (I hear there’s a two-for-one deal extracting it from water… how cool!), but you still have to extract it.
To extract that hydrogen requires energy. Actually, using today’s refinement techniques, it takes considerably more energy to liberate the hydrogen than is extracted from it. It’s useful to remember the Laws of Thermodynamics (using Matthew-speak):
So unlike petroleum, Hydrogen is not–for us–a source of energy. It’s an energy transport mechanism. I understand that petroleum is actually an energy transport mechanism, too, but it’s transporting the energy of the sun stored within the earth for millions of years, so the opportunity cost for us appears to be very low.
So anyway, how do we get the energy to liberate the hydrogen? We’re back to burning oil or coal, or using solar or wind power. It’s a net loss. I think hydrogen is a wonderful thing, and we should pursue its use vigorously, but it’s not a solution to our energy problems. It’s only a solution to pollution. But in that capacity, I totally support it. I like having less pollution!
There are also massive coal and oil fields under Utah. Several wildcat strikes by small oil companies and one major coal mining operation were phenomenally successful. Shortly after those strikes were found, and prospecting began in earnest, Bill Clinton stepped in and declared an enormous tract of land (1.9 million acres) the “Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument” in 1996.
Of course, environmentalist groups were in favor of the monument move. But they had a very unique bedfellow in financing the lobbying for this monument, one you would probably not suspect:
Several major oil companies.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Supply
***I think you’ll find that free hydrogen is extremely rare. The most abundant source is in water (I hear there’s a two-for-one deal extracting it from water… how cool!), but you still have to extract it.***
You mean you don’t have hydrogen floating around out there. Poor souls…
All very true, but we have to use oil energy to extract oil too. The key is getting the cost of extracting hydrogen below that of extracting oil.
Also, and if we run out of hydrogen, we’ll be in big trouble. Oil may run out within ours or our kids lifetimes.
It’s all a net loss in the end. Darn entropy!
If the oil companies stepping in, it had to be because of their deep empathy for environmental causes. Never because abundant oil lowers prices. Actually, I wonder what their motiviation was…
My $.02 Weed
Energy usage
You completely missed the point. It costs more energy to chemically de-bond water through electrolysis than you get out in free hydrogen. This isn’t something that’s going to be trivially overcome. We have to break chemical bonds in order to get hydrogen, because it basically doesn’t exist freely in nature. It’s always bound to something else, like water. So we electrolyze it, remove the Oxygen from H20, and then when we burn it we get H20 out again. We have to put in more energy than we take out.
This is not the case with petroleum. We are getting “free” (to us) energy from the earth, for a pittance in terms of extraction cost. It is a false economy, but we’re not talking about long-term entropy at all. I’m talking cold, hard cash: you’re going to put more money into making hydrogen than you can possibly get out in energy. It’s not an energy source at all. It’s a transportation medium, like a battery.
You’re not alone in “not getting it”; George Bush has shown a complete lack of understanding in pushing for energy reforms based on hydrogen. He apparently thinks it’s another free resource that generates wealth, like oil, just floating around the planet. But it’s not.
You burn more energy making hydrogen than you get out of it, short term, long term, etc.
Now, you can also make hydrogen from natural gas and… you guessed it… oil. But in the case of oil, you’re still living in the same land we are now, just eating hydrogen instead of gasoline/diesel.
With natural gas, we solve some of the problems, and although it’s a finite supply like oil, we produce far more domestically than we consume.
The most promising avenue is high-temperature electrolysis of water to get past this “put more in than you get out” problem. We’ll still put in more energy than we get out, but the use of nuclear reactors for this purpose dramatically extends the end of our “free energy” window. We have gobs and gobs and gobs of uranium in the US… and pretty much everywhere else on the planet. If we were willing to dump our waste in some godforsaken stretch of wasteland like the West Desert of Utah, we’d have room to store the waste at an ever-increasing rate for tens of thousands of years.
I’m all for the nuclear economy, and although I lean towards being an environmentalist, I can’t disagree more strongly with the anti-nuke faction. Yes, we need to store the crap somewhere. Guess what? My backyard is the nation’s biggest chunk of useless, geologically stable land. Please, put it there. It would create jobs and if we can get past all the “Not In My Back Yard” idiots, we could have a whole lot more nuclear reactors in the US and get onto a hydrogen economy.
More nukes! More nukes! More nukes!
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Ahhhh
So we just need to build a pipeline to whatever moon of Jupiter it is (Io?) that has the vast reserves of natural gas?
Nuclear power is great for powering my house but I’d be a little leery of driving my new Plymouth Plutonium…but if you use the nuclear power to perform th electrolysis, you can use the nuclear power for my heat and send me the hydrogen for my car!
BRILLIANT!
Actually, don’t they have a couple of options for fuel cells. From using fossil fuels through pure hydrogen? I bet we find a nice bacteria that eats human fat and emits hydrogen. How American is that? “Lose weight and power your car!!!”
Why can’t we ship the stuff to the sun? Seriously, launch a huge tanker rocket that heads to the sun. Launch it so that it’ll fall in the Barnson backyard in case of failure, or Detroit, but ship it to the sun. A really big incinerator. I wonder what the cost would be for that. You don’t need re-entry panels, or anything besides a shell and engines. Heck, if they start doing leisure rides to the edge of the atmosphere, they can jettison that into a path to the sun while they’re up there. Paid for by tourists.
My $.02 Weed
The sun
The arguments against space storage of nuclear material are outlined here: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov/ymp/about/space.shtml
These are not MY arguments. Just some.
Dear Ohio Voters
Dear Ohio voters, thanks so much for showing up at the polls at the 2004 Presidential election. To the special 136,000 of you who decided the election by voting for Bush, please read the Wandering Moose’s post above. Also, you may be interested in a previous barnson.org thread counting the 36 billion reasons why the war in Iraq continues.
Which thread is that?
Matt is there a way you can link the previous thread mentioned?
If I knew…
If I knew which one it was, yeah 🙂 We’ve discussed Iraq here, a, uh, a few times indeed!
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Very True
}:)
Whoa Now
Hey, I’d be the first to agree Bush is a horrible president, but let’s not assume John “Flip-Flop” Kerry would have done any better.
Kinda like the block my mom lives on. Used to be a nice neighborhood, but then some of the houses went Section 8 (another wonderful liberal idea gone haywire). So in moved this family where the dad was drunk, the mom yelled at the kids all the time, except when she wasn’t watching them walk into the road. A Normal Rockwell moment indeed. We all hoped they’d move or get evicted or something. And our prayers were answered, as they left one day.
And then the drug dealer moved in.
So be careful, because you may get what you wish for.
My $.02 Weed
Understood
It would be hard to make a case for Kerry without the “grass is always greener” theory.
BUT
In Bush’s 2000 Campaign his promise was that the Military was a war fighting force not a nation building force. His platform was that the military was spread too thin and that we need to bring our soldiers home. The should be deployed for conflict, but NOT to rebuild a nation. Yet first thing he did after 9/11 was say we need to get these “evil doers” (how stupid a phrase) and rebuild Iraq in a democratic fashion. This is where he lost my vote. I voted for Kerry in ’04 not because i thought he was any better of a canidate, but because he was not Bush 🙂
Hm?
I’m not sure I understand your point. I certainly had no illusions that John Kerry would be the best president ever, but I can’t imagine he could possibly have done worse than what we have.
As for Section 8 housing, I’m stumped. Even liberals haven’t figured out a way to stop people from being @$$holes.
— Ben
Again
Again, how is it so bad? Up here in Ceciltopia, things aren’t that bad. Maybe my white, college-educated view is skewed, but Clinton made a mockery of the presidency and didn’t do much to prevent terrorism. Bush inherits a national catastrophe. He goes overboard on spending and rhetoric.
i can imagine a bunch of ways he could have done worse. I can imagine a bunch of way he could have done better. All I’m saying is be careful before you wish someone, anyone but Bush, because you may get just that.
Section 8 housing is where they overpay the owner of the house to allow “needy” people to live there subsidized. HUD bought a house on over here for $100,000 to use for Section 8, then sold it for $60,000. That’s $40,000 of our money to someone because HUD overpaid for a shack.
I’ve seen section 8 housing go to good people too, but it’s been abused too much. It’s definitely not something a conservative came up with, but it’s probably not a liberal problem so much as government beaurocracy being slow to catch these things.
My $.02 Weed
Ahem
Clinton made a mockery of the presidency? He balanced the budget and created a surplus, and made the mistake of one dalliance with an intern. Bush on the other hand has created the biggest budget deficit in history, and led us into an unjustified war in which thousands of Americans have died. After that, I can’t help but think that “anyone but Bush” can’t help but be SOME improvement.
As for Section 8 housing, you’re right that the problem (as with pretty much every government program) is bureaucracy and red tape. Bureaucrats are astoundingly good at taking a good idea and preventing it from working. And, unfortunately, anytime you introduce a program that is meant to help the disadvantaged, there will ALWAYS be people who will abuse it. But I’m in favor of keeping the programs rather than denying help for people who really need it.
— Ben
Hmm
Maybe he balanced the budget by cutting corners on defense. And then 9/11 happened.
Maybe not.
Who knows.
My $.02 Weed
Maybe not
From Stupid Budget Tricks by Timothy Noah (emphasis added):
If you want to calculate how defense spending really changed under Bill Clinton, the best way is to look at the raw numbers. According to the White House budget office, the federal government spent $298.4 billion on national defense in 1992 and $294.5 billion on national defense in 2000. That represents a fairly modest cut in response to a momentous event—the Cold War’s end. If you factor in inflation (which, conservatives frequently complain in other contexts, confounds the true meaning of the term “budget cut”), it represents a 17 percent reduction in “real” spending. A 17 percent defense cut, after inflation, over the course of eight years, could not and did not balance the federal budget. To say that Clinton balanced the budget “largely” at the expense of national defense is a lie. Clinton balanced the budget through a variety of means. Tax increases helped; Pentagon cuts helped; and a booming economy helped a lot.
— Ben
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc
Wow, dude. 🙂
Event A: Clinton makes budget cuts in defense, much like many other presidents have made in the past.
leads to
Event B: 9/11
I reel from the force of this argument. It’s a stunning example of a cohesive causal relationship that factors in every conceivable variable.
Just, wow.
Laziness
I don’t have time to go research all the ills of every democratic and republican president. I just get annoyed when it’s doom and gloom because of Bush.
Yes, he’s spending at a fast rate, but he also was at the helm when our country was attacked on its own soil in the most deadly way since Pearl Harbor. It’s not a bad idea when you know bad people are out to get you to close ranks, be suspicious, and splurge on a big gun and a alarm.
Personally, I think Bush is an idiot, but he had a tougher job than Clinton. Clinton inherited an economy that was rolling from the dot com boom and raised taxes to take advantage of it to balance the budget. Wow, there’s a tough one.
I don’t like “defending” Bush, but reading over and over how horrible the world is and how it’s all Bush’s fault is getting old. It’s not that bad. Really.
For everything I ready about Bush, I want to scream about how the Democrats have abused Maryland for their own gain. The real problem with Bush and Republicans as well as the Democrats and Maryland is that when you have a party that controls the whole shebang, they seem to abuse the power. When you have the power split between parties, then nothing gets done unless both sides agree on it, which is usually not much but the important stuff. so you have less government, which is always good.
Didn’t Clinton send troops to Somalia? That worked well. Bosnia/Serbia too? Wasn’t he president when the market crashed in the late 90s? I’m sure that was his fault.
My point is that Bush is in a much more difficult spot as president than Clinton was. Who knows how Clinton or Kerry would have handled it, but to say you can’t see it being any worse than we have it now is rather pessimistic and show a sharp lack of imagination.
And Rowan, I’ll try to hold back he force of my arguments from now on as to keep your head from spinning. Least I can do…
My $.02 Weed
oh weed
I hate to keep arguing with you, but you’re just spouting off, so I have to respond.
— OK, first, maybe Bush isn’t the worst President of all time. I’ll concede that the crimes committed by Andrew Jackson (massive slaughter of Indians) and Warren Harding (rampant cronyism and scandal) were probably worse.
— “…he also was at the helm when our country was attacked on its own soil in the most deadly way since Pearl Harbor.” Let’s look at Pearl Harbor then. FDR led us into war, but he did it right. He asked Americans to sacrifice economically, so that when the war ended in 1945, the American economy was stronger than ever. Bush went to war and then gave tax cuts to the richest Americans, leading us into the biggest budget deficit ever.
— “Clinton inherited an economy that was rolling from the dot com boom and raised taxes to take advantage of it to balance the budget.” Clinton was elected in 1992. The dot-com boom, by all accounts, began in 1996. And of course he raised taxes to balance the budget. That’s the way a balanced budget works – either you pay a little more now in order to get the balanced budget, or you pay a LOT more later when foreign loans come due.
Look, I’m not saying Clinton was the best president ever. But every time I point out the horrible crap Bush has done to the country in the past 5 years, someone has to say, “Well Clinton was a bad president too,” as if the two things have anything whatsoever to do with one another.
I respect that your life is pretty good where you are, in Ceciltopia. But ask the 30,000 Ford employees who lost their jobs to outsourcing how their lives are going. Ask the people displaced by Katrina because Bush appointed unqualified cronies to run FEMA. Ask the seniors who are having so much trouble getting their medications because Medicare Plan D is a clusterf*** meant to benefit the pharmaceutical companies. And don’t tell me “Kerry wouldn’t have done any better.” The fact of the matter is that we got stuck with Bush and he’s seriously f***ed things up. You may call me pessimistic, but I think I’ve got some pretty good reasons for being pessimistic.
— Ben
Ben Oh
How is Bush responsible for Ford cutting 30,000 jobs due to outsourcing? If Ford can pay a foreign worker $10 a day to build a car versus $100 a day here in the US, which is the better option for the business? America is becoming an economy of service, not an economy of manufacturing. How do you blame that on Bush?
Yes, FEMA f***ed up Katrina? But Bush was right there for NY when it got hit. Perhaps it was the difference between Guliani getting right on it versus Nagin not doing his job? Bush is partially at fault here but what president would have been able to prevent displacement from a Category 3 hurricane? Would SuperClinton have single-handedly moved the hurricane back into the gulf?
Again, Medicare Plan D was created by the Social Security Agency. SSA is a government agency. Perhaps SuperClinton would have gotten the SSA to come out with a non-beaurocratic mess. I doubt it. Are you saying the plan won’t save seniors money? Name me something related to health care that isn’t a complex mess. I guess it all Bush’s fault.
Actually, to balance the budget, you can raise taxes or you can cut spending. I personally think we need to trim some fat from the government. You don’t always have to take more money.
As I see it, Bush’s tax “cuts” to the richest Americans was a removal of double-taxation. Companies were taxed on dividends, then the dividends were taxed again when paid out to shareholders. Why not tax the rich again when they go to spend it? Those rich, they have no right to their money! Bring in the Socialism! Eurpose is such a shining example of how to run countries. We’re so bad off here, we should be like Sweden…almost bankrupt.
WWII transitioned the country into a global economic manufacturing giant. It had very little to do with people tightening their belt as much as a paradigm shift in our society. The balance of power came across the ocean after that war. FDR did a good job there.
If Iraq becomes a US ally, and we get 50 more years of cheap oil, is that good or bad? Will you boycott the return of $1.50 gas because soliders died to bring it to you?
I’m not spouting the only one spouting off. All I hear is rhetoric from you as well. And I have some good reasons to be optimistic.
Just a difference of opinion. You say donkey and I say independent.
My $.02 Weed
As If To Decide your Spat
As if to decide your spat, the 3/10/2006 AP-Ipsos poll took national headlines by reporting Bush at an all-time popularity low.
http://www.ipsos-na.com/news/ap
-30% said they thought the U.S. is on the ‘right track’ -67% said the nation is on the ‘wrong track’ -More than 50% disapproved of the administration’s handling of the economy, domestic issues such as health care, education, environment and energy, as well as the relief effort for victims of Hurricane Katrina and foreign policy
Hmm
Also, merits mentioning the breakdown of party affiliation for people mentioned in the survey was 51 Democrat, 39 Republican, 8 Independent, and 2 not quite sure.
Congress didn’t get a good rating either. 66 to 31 disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.
Popular opinion is no way to decide how you feel. We learned that in middle school, hopefully 🙂
My $.02 Weed
*sigh*
1. Bush supports outsourcing of American jobs. He has proposed and gotten tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas. It was a big issue in the 2004 debates.
2. Why Bush is responsible for Katrina: Bush slashed funding requested by the Army Corps of Engineers to reinforce and repair the levees. Additionally, rather than hire someone with, oh, experience in emergency response to head up FEMA, Bush appointed a guy whose previous experience was as the Judges and Stewards Commissioner for the International Arabian Horse Association, a job he was forced to resign because of lawsuits over disciplinary actions. He was appointed, by the way, because he was the college buddy of Bush’s re-election campaign manager.
3. Medicare Plan D was heavily promoted by the Bush Administration, to such an extent that they concealed how much it would cost in order to get it passed through Congress.
I can talk until I’m blue in the face, and it won’t do any good. You can call this rhetoric if you like, but the purpose of all the links is so you can see that I’m not making this stuff up. I just don’t understand why there are people out there who are STILL willing to give this guy the benefit of the doubt.
This is my last contribution to the discussion.
— Ben
Finis
You can sigh, but most of your “references” seem to be leftist-leaning publications. I’m sure I could find similar right-wing rebuttals if I cared enough.
My point is not that Bush is the best president. My point is that it’s NOT THAT BAD. It really isn’t. The media portrays a small subsection of all the goes on, and only what it thinks will sell and promote it’s agenda. Has Bush made some mistakes? Yes. Did Clinton make mistakes? Yes. Bush did get a drug proposal through. Clinton failed on health care. Bush puts his toilet paper on with the paper hanging in. Clinton puts it on with the paper hanging out. You and I can cite sources that say which way it better forever.
I just get sick of hearing how bad it is when I know I’m getting fed only part of the story. I’m sick of it when the Republicans did it to promote the war in Iraq. I’m sick of it when the Democrats try and tell me the economy is bad. Everyone had spin and it’s jaded me…my inner cynic is overloaded. I know I can argue both sides of any story and find “genuine” proof on the internet that I’m right. Where does that get me?
Is there any impartiality anymore? My $.02 Weed
The only truly impartial
The only truly impartial person concerning an issue is someone who doesn’t care about the issue. And I’d really rather not have that kind of person making decisions when it comes to said issue, precisely because they don’t care.
Partiality is a good thing, so long as it’s respectful and willing to be swayed.
Good Topic
Seems to be a good topic for your audio podcast idea.. ??
CNN/Gallup Poll
Wandering Moose,
http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/03/13/bush.poll/index.html
Looks like this 3/13/2006 poll dropped Bush’s approval rating to a new low of 36%.
‘…along with weakened support for GOP handling of the battle against terrorism, have given Democrats a 16 percentage point lead over Republicans when registered voters are asked which party they will support in November.’
Seems like your pain and your soap box are par for the course with the majority U.S. sentiment towards the current adminsitration.