Quote:
Originally Posted by shakran
I'm not an idiot. I know there were expenses generated by 9/11. I also know that a great many more dollars were spent elsewhere than on 9/11 cleanup.
BTW, Reagan did not win the cold war. The USSR went bankrupt - Reagan got lucky.
If anyone won the cold war it was bin Laden because he drove them to bankruptcy because they were stupid enough to dick around in the middle east. . . oh wait, that's what we're doing now, isn't it. ![Wink](/tfp/images/smilies/wink.gif)
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You were so close. Of course they went bankrupt, and Reagan was the president who drove them into bankruptcy.
Oh, and their socialist form of government helped greatly.
Quote:
Originally Posted by shakran
There is a difference between deficit and debt. If you don't know that basic fact, then you need to study more before you are qualified to discuss the economy.
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In the context in which I mentioned it, you're making a distinction without a
difference. If you still don't comprehend, here's a quote from Washington Post business columnist John Crudele, written at the time of the "balanced budget" claims. (He doesn't agree with you.)
================================================================================
All right, here I go again trying to explain how our elected officials in
Washington are perpetrating a fraud by proclaiming that there is a budget
surplus.
Over the past year, the federal deficit - which is money owed by our government -
rose from $5.486 trillion to $5.618 trillion. Those are government numbers right out of Barron's.
That means the federal debt climbed by $132 billion. Which means the federal
budget DEFICIT last year was $132 billion. There was no surplus of $70 billion,
or any other amount, as Washington is claiming.
When the economy weakens - as it always does - the true deficit numbers will increase.
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[QUOTE=sob]
Yes. Cutting taxes raises government income. You said it yourself, in post #16 of
this thread.[ QUOTE]
Quote:
Originally Posted by shakran
Uh, no I ddn't. Let's work on reading posts correctly right after we work on
economics 101.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by hakran, post #16
There's an economic boom after just about ANY tax cut.
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So your position is that an economic boom DOESN'T increase government income?
Talk about Economics 101!
Quote:
Originally Posted by shakran
How is cutting taxes on the rich while expecting the poor and middle class to shoulder the tax burden NOT robbing Peter to pay Paul?
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I'll make it easy for you (and no, I'm not claiming I wrote this):
Suppose that every day, ten men go to dinner. The bill for all 10 comes to
$100. If we paid it the way we pay our taxes, the first four men would pay
nothing, the fifth would pay $1, the sixth would pay $3, the seventh $7,
the eighth $12, and the ninth $18. The tenth man, the richest, would pay $59.
The ten men ate dinner every day and seemed quite happy with the
arrangement until the owner threw them a curve. Because you are all such good customers, he said, I am going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.
Now, dinner for the ten men cost only $80.
The first four were unaffected. They still eat for free. Can you figure
out how to divvy up the $20 savings among the remaining six so that everyone gets his fair share? The men realize that $20 divided by 6 is $3.33, but if they subtract that from everybody's share, then the fifth and sixth man would end up being paid to eat their meal.
The restaurant owner suggested it would be fair to reduce each man's bill
by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the 10th man with a bill of $52. Outside the restaurant the men began to compare their savings.
"I only got a dollar out of the $20," declared the sixth man, pointing to the
tenth, "and he got $7!"
"Yeah, that's right," exclaimed the fifth man. "I only saved a dollar, too.
It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!"
"That's true," shouted the seventh man. "Why should he get $7 back when I
got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks."
"Wait a minute," yelled the first four men in unison. "We didn't get anything at
all. The system exploits the poor."
The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he
didn't show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They were $52 short.
And that is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up at the table next time.
Also called "offshoring."
Quote:
Originally Posted by shakran
What the hell are you talking about? I have never heard a
democrat advocate inviting terrorists into the country. Would you care to cite a source? Hint: Marvel Comics does not count.
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Well, then you'll have to struggle through this without any pictures to help you.
The 684-page INS inspector general report was released with little fanfare during a congressional hearing in September 2001. Its most stunning allegation -- that the Clinton-Gore White House had hijacked the INS for partisan political purposes in what amounted to massive voter fraud -- never emerged as a campaign issue until after election day, when it became evident that Al Gore owed his near-victory in Florida to hundreds of thousands of newly-minted citizens in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
According to the IG report, many of those new voters should never have been
granted citizenship.
Some were convicted felons. Others had overstayed tourist visas and were working illegally. Close to 200,000 never underwent any background check, so INS does not know to this day whether they were eligible for citizenship. Few passed an English language and citizenship test worthy of the name. Some could not understand their own swearing-in, because the ceremony was conducted in English.
The investigation into INS shenanigans began with a May 1996 report in the
Washington Times about an INS whistleblower who criticized the acceleration of the naturalization process under Clinton-Gore. It quoted other INS employees who revealed the existence of a program known as Citizenship USA, and questioned the motives behind it.
Citizenship USA was an initiative of Vice President Al Gore that was ostensibly
part of his National Performance Review to "reinvent" government. Internal White House memos, obtained by the House Judiciary Committee in 1997, showed that the vice president was well aware that the effort could be perceived as a "pro-Democrat voter mill."
On March 28, 1996, White House aide Doug Farbrother e-mailed Gore detailing his efforts to get INS to waive fingerprinting and background checks "to make me confident they could produce a million new citizens before Election Day."
Gore then wrote Clinton: "You asked us to expedite the naturalization of nearly a million legal aliens who have applied to become citizens." The risk, Gore warned, was that "we might be publicly criticized for running a pro-Democrat voter mill and even risk having Congress stop us."
Congress did complain -- but only after the election.
In response to those complaints, the Joint Management Division of the Department of Justice hired KPMG Peat Marwick to review the Citizenship USA program, which ran from Aug. 31, 1995 through Sept. 30, 1996. They found that of the 1,049,867 aliens naturalized under the program, INS never did fingerprint checks on 180,000 persons.
"Applicants who were ineligible because of criminal records, or because they
fraudulently obtained green cards, were granted citizenship because the INS was moving too fast to check their records," says Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who chaired the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the IG report last September.
In addition to those 180,000, Smith said, "more than 80,000 aliens had
fingerprint checks that generated criminal records, but they were naturalized
anyway."
The initial review by KPMG Peat Marwick led to a temporary slowdown in the
numbers of new citizens. But not for long.
By 1999, the numbers shot up once again, with 872,485 aliens granted citizenship, according to INS statistics made available to the Western Journalism Center. And during its final year in office, the Clinton-Gore administration used streamlined naturalization procedures to mine yet another 898,315 new citizens, just in time for voter registration deadlines last October.
INS officials said in interviews that they received 1.3 million applications
during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Some 400,000 of those applying for citizenship were rejected.
By contrast, fewer than 250,000 aliens were naturalized during FY 1992, the final year of the first Bush administration. "Naturalizations were averaging between 200,000 to 300,000 per year before then," said INS spokesperson Elaine Komis.
In other words, despite hearings in 1997 that roundly condemned the
administration's naturalization program, and promises from the INS to reform its own procedures, it was back to the Democratic voter mill -- just in time for the 2000 election.
According to the newly released inspector general's report, the latest rush of
naturalizations took place without any significant changes to the flawed
procedures that led to the abuses found during the Citizenship USA program in
1995-1996. Hundreds of thousands more persons were granted U.S. citizenship without any background checks just prior to November 2000.
In presenting his report before Lamar Smith's subcommittee on Sept. 7, Deputy Inspector General Robert L. Ashbaugh noted that repeated requests for interviews to the vice president's office had been denied. Similarly, top presidential advisers Harold Ickes and Rahm Emanuel -- identified as having played key roles in hijacking the INS for political purposes -- refused to answer questions.
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Do I need to remind you of any terrorist attacks, or the length of time OBL spent planning the WTC attacks?