Have I told you how much I love Paul Krugman? Oh...yes, I do go on about what he writes. Here's another solid article about the GOP candidates.
Today, Republican Candidates Have to Be Cynical or Foolish Truthout
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Gabrielle Giffords Resigns
She will get better and she will continue to inspire us. Thank you Gabrielle Giffords for all you have done for us.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Obama Stands Up To Big Oil
President Obama stood up to Big Oil today when he refused to sign the deal on the KeystoneXL tar sands pipeline that was slated to dissect our country as it carried oil from Canada to New Orleans. Environmental activist Robert Redford penned an article today that ran on Huffington Post saying, The president stood up to Big Oil and listened to Americans saying: "We're done with fossil fuel schemes that destroy our land, poison our water and wreak havoc with our climate so that oil companies can make out like bandits." Now we need to continue to stand with the president and make it clear that tar sands pipelines are not in our national interest.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Why You've Never Heard of SOPA
And the people who watch all the social TV will be the first to scream when they realize that the internet was taken away from them by the very same people who have been keeping a lid on the SOPA NEWS...the major networks who will benefit if this legislature passes. Do you see what they are doing folks???
Look behind the curtain.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Why I Support The Occupy Movement
The Occupy movement has taken root because there are forty seven million people in the United States who live under the official poverty line - cruelly calculated at only $22,000 for a family of four.
In 2010 alone, banks foreclosed on 3.8 million families.
Three million people are completely homeless during part of the year.
Forty million people are unemployed or severely underemployed.
And over the last three decades the richest 1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes grow by an average of 275 percent.
In 2010 alone, banks foreclosed on 3.8 million families.
Three million people are completely homeless during part of the year.
Forty million people are unemployed or severely underemployed.
And over the last three decades the richest 1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes grow by an average of 275 percent.
Friday, January 13, 2012
There Are Lots Of Reasons Not To Vote For Romney
Please watch "When Mitt Romney Came To Town." This is the full 28 minute version of Mitt Romney at Bain Corporation. Produced by Newt Gingrich, this video is worth watching...especially if you were thinking that Mitt Romney might be a good choice for President of these United States.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Mitt Romney Has A Problem With The Truth...Again
After Mitt Romney's win in the New Hampshire primary, he gave a speech that many pundits said was setting him up for the Republican nomination and the run against President Obama. He has been tearing down Obama for several weeks as he has felt that the other Republican candidates weren't a threat. But a few of the things that he said about President Obama last night are just not true.
Today Rachael Maddow's blog features one of her followers who set the record straight.
And Politifact has an article today that explains how Romney's statement last night that Obama has raised taxes 19 times as being only half true. You have to read this article to see what a stretch this one is. Really.
Today Rachael Maddow's blog features one of her followers who set the record straight.
And Politifact has an article today that explains how Romney's statement last night that Obama has raised taxes 19 times as being only half true. You have to read this article to see what a stretch this one is. Really.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
REPORT: News Networks Ignore Controversial SOPA Legislation
I would assume that if you are reading this, you are on the internet. As this article reveals though, most news networks are not reporting on what is happening with new legislation called SOPA (stop online piracy now) that would mess with the internet, limit our free speech, and give corporations more power over how the internet operates. Yep, the networks are not touching this news item. That's because the big networks support this legislation and are all for it quietly passing through the house and senate. Sign the petition here.
Read the article here:
Or, watch this video by The Young Turks...
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Who Will Tell Us The Truth?
I will be yelling with a bigger voice this year as I scream about the death of our environment and the sad results we will read about in the daily news day after day. I continue to believe that our people will make a different set of choices. I continue to believe that we will not destroy our home.
If the scientists hesitate to tell us the truth, what do we do?
From Inside Climate Change...
"What scientists are now witnessing as the earth responds to increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases presents many of them with a dilemma: How far should they go in expressing their concerns about how government and society are responding to climate change? This question is particularly charged given that efforts to undermine climate science have become part of the political debate on these issues."
Go here to read more.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Nobody Understands Debt
PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 1, 2012
An OP-ED piece from The NY Times...
In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.
This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation. Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.
Published: January 1, 2012
An OP-ED piece from The NY Times...
In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.
This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation. Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
TODAY I WILL DANCE
Today is a day for New Year's resolutions...today I will dance. Today I will post this video to remind myself to dance through 2012. Enjoy!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)