Oh oh. I think we need some emrgency tax cuts...Follow

Tax cuts, hell. I'm waiting for him to issue the directive that lowers gas prices 30 cents a gallon just before the election.

And I ride a bicycle pretty much everywhere.

If they do send me a $1000 check, I'll just donate it to Kerry/Edwards.

Bah like Kerry/Edwards wouldnt spend it on booze and hookers to stimulate the economy, sheesh how niave of you Moebius.

My most likely eve of the election event is the capture of Usama bin Laden.

I'm like the Susan Lucci of this board....I never get the Emmy.

No no, a tax increase is the obvious solution to a slowing economy. At least that is Smash's answer to all the ills of American society.

More taxes = better everything, happier worker bees, productive industry

Totem

Lol. Um... Yeah!

I think he was being sarcastic...


What I find amusing is how Smash has to literally tap dance to get this bit in since the "dramatic slowdown", is relative to the "record growth" of the previous years. Kinda hard to crow about this downturn without also admitting that Bush managed to push us out of a recession in 2001 with equally dramatic increases in 2002 and 2003.


It's all relative folks. You have good growth in the 90s, followed by a "sharp downturn" in 2000 and 2001. That's then followed by a "sharp upturn". When you've got a growth of 5+% a year, just leveling off is a "sharp downturn".


I just find it amazingly funny that no one talks about the huge growth the Bush created with his tax plan that makes this "downturn" seem so large. A 3% growth in GDP (especially since we're only looking at a single quarter in this case) is hardly a disaster guys. It's a bit below ideal growth, but not by much. It's only relatively dramatic because the growth of the previous two years was so large.


Whatever. Focus only on the negatives if you want.

Well. Yes and no. Economic growth only "counts" if it's higher then inflation rate increase. Basically, if your growth rate is the same as inflation, then you really didn't grow since the average cost of goods increased at the same rate as the total "value" (this is pretty abstract though) of your economy as a whole.

However, the other side of the article that isn't mentioned is that inflation dropped from 2.1% down to 1.8% during this same time period.

So yeah. It's still "growth". It's still good. It's not on the same scale as the couple years previously, but you generally can't maintain a large relative growth for a long period of time.


Growth, like love, comes in spurts... :)

Ok, if you're counting growth before factoring in inflation, then I understand. I would count it like a business counts profit. Amount of money made *after* expenses. What do I know, I slept during Economics because it was 1st class in the morning.

Tut Tut. Economics is a great lesson, especially when your teacher describes the fixed costs of a brothel. Hilarious.

that;'s the shortest thing I've seen Gbaji post.

Yeah. There's a plus-minus to that type of system as well though. The biggie is that since you have a larger number of parties, each one typically represents the views of a smaller segment of socieity.

You pretty much have a choice between either having two parties were neither party perfectly matches your personal views on all issues, or having a number of parties where one is much more likely to match your views, but has a smaller percentage of the total population as members.

I tend to think that a society that flew off the handle and still ******* about a president being elected with less then 50% of the total popular vote would have a huge problem with the multiple parties system. The party in power might represent their constituent's views *very well*, but they will win power often with something like 20-30% of the total vote (and potentially less). I just don't think Americans would go for that at all. The nations of "majority wins" has a hard time letting a party have power with just a plurality.


It kinda makes sense in a legistlative system though, since it allows the "little guys" some representation. It makes very little sense when electing an executive though since it gives a relatively small block of voters a very large amount of the power. Vagarities in political shifts can easily give say the "KKK party" enough votes as a block to beat out numerically any other single party, where that particular set of ideals would likely never have any real influence on a larger party's policies, and would never beat a larger party on its own. Ultimately, we do something similar on the legistlative side anyway with special interest groups, so it's not like the smaller organizations and movements have no voice in our government. You take the good with the bad though.

I'm waiting for the requisite Smasharoo response on how the economy was never really growing, it has been in a recession since Clinton, Bush has caused the languishing of growth and stimulus ever since his horrible tax cuts, and how things are empirically better by just having Kerry in the race and how he has singlehandedly caused jobs to exponentialize by simply declaring his candidacy.

Incoming pure Smasharooism. You all have been warned.

Totem

Oh yes, he'll disagree with me, but the gist of his rebuttal will still be the same: Bush has done this badly, Bush hasn't done that well, things were soooooooo much better under Clinton, blah blahblahblah. Kerry is the next best thing to sliced bread, the second coming of Slick Willie, the savior of all mankind, but not in a religious way.

We've heard it all before and I'm sure we'll hear it all again a thousand times more before November.

Totem