Ever wonder why the stimulus package isn't working?Follow

It certainly is working, Totes. Maybe not as intended, but no states have gone bankrupt nor has Medicaid gone belly up!

Poppers and coke don't count as a stimulus package, Redd, regardless of their physiological effects on your junk, dude.
:D

Totem

I don't support the plan, but it was quite clearly stated that it would take multiple years before it had visible signs of working. You should realize that investments, which is clearly what this plan was, don't pay off immediately. You realize you can argue against political issues without fabrications and intellectual dishonesty, right? You debate politics like a god damn corporate news pundit.

/insert gratuitous *** joke
Your brain wasn't the only thing your bud wanted to massage, Red. :D

Lol, ok, true story here. Once upon a time I actually was interested in art, music, drama, and all such fuzzy concepts. This was back in high school. Needless to say I've evolved since then, but that is a topic for another thread. Anyhow, in a fit of creativity or self-exploration-- take your pick --I signed up for a one act play festival.

The gist of what happened was I got goat roped into playing the main part of a drama where in a role reversal men were housewives and the women went off to work. It took place in supposedly the living room of my house where after all the pancake they applied to my face I looked like a homosexual Ken doll.

Anyhow, I go onstage after a couple of weeks practice and memorizing lines, the lights dim, the curtain goes up, and...

Vrrrrrrrt! <sparks> Zzzzzzzzt! <smell of burning electrical wires>

...nothing.

I utterly and completely froze up on stage. No lines could be recalled, no idea what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to stand, nothing. One of the people associated with the play was furiously whispering my lines to me just offstage, but... nothing.

Lol, the curtain goes down and along with it my budding acting career.

What does all this have to do with poppers? Well, the guys who convinced me to do this dumb one act play were doing their best to get me try amyl nitrate later that evening at the big party that all the "thespians" (as they called themselves) from the various schools threw. The thing is these guys were obviously light in their loafers and I wasn't having any of some stuff they were attempting to get me to take "to loosen up." All I knew was I from that afternoon onward despised anything and everything to do with acting. Draw from that your own conclusions, but when I learned from some druggie friends later what poppers were used for, it just confirmed my opinion drama is utterly gay.

The funny thing is, once I got used to public speaking I actually enjoyed being a ham, but back then you couldn't dragged me back onstage with wild horses.

Totem

Up here on the fringe 20miles of newly paved highway opens tomorrow - thanks to stimulus money.

My agency has already hired a new person for a mandated but previously unfunded program that now is receiving...yes, stimulus money.

But Friday I have the day off - with no pay cuz of 'teh crisis'.

Some are quite droll.

Explain how US spending money on social problems is responsible for a worldwide economic downturn.

The expert economists pretty much agree that the 'bad economy' is largely due to an unregulated out-of-control financial sector that took the worlds monies for a joy-ride (how soon the subprime mess is forgotten).

Get a clue, get an original thought - you parrot every other ignorant anti-government (and by extension anti-american) right-wing bozo on these boards and on the hate-mongering talk radio shows.

Can you really not see the difference between you saying "all liberals are stupid" and Elinda saying "ThiefX is stupid"?

So I have firsthand knowledge of this. In California, a huge fraction of our University system is running on federal stimulus money. Which is an investment in the future, not much in the present, although of course it does save some jobs.

Yup. Which was the first sign that something was amiss...

The term "stimulus" usually implies something which takes effect *now*, not in a few years. Otherwise, it's just normal fiscal policy. The whole thing was a bait and switch from the start.



First off. Government spending is rarely if ever actually an "investment" in the financial sense.

Second. See point about this being sold to the public as being a "stimulus".




The day that the politics being discussed isn't already rife with fabrications and intellectual dishonesty, this will be true.




Lol... Moo...

Sure. But first you need to qualify your whole statement by recognizing that 'success' is different to different people. Not everyone measures success by how much money they make.

Regardless, I don't believe that people succeed financially due to chance of circumstance. I think they succeed for many reasons. Some are provided with a lot of support. Others are 'driven' to succeed. Some make innovation pay off. Still others come by wealth by hard work and stringent budgeting, some by dumb luck, still others by marriage, inheritance, etc.

Liberalism doesn't reward laziness, but recognizes that a society is only as strong as it's weakest link. I can't imagine living in an America, with all the riches, the resources, the privilege and benefits that we have and know that, despite our wealth, we knowingly and willingly let people starve, go uneducated, slip to the fringes and out of existence.

Ok. But it's the political Left which defines "success" almost exclusively by how much money you make. Virtually every single social program liberals propose are tagged in some way to earnings. It's more than a little unfair to chastise a conservative for responding to those same criteria when discussing those very same programs.



Agreed. I think Varus' point was to respond to the oft-repeated Smasharoo claim that those who succeed just won the ****** lottery by falling out of the right one and nothing more. I think it's important to recognize that a significant portion of those we might label "successful" arrive at that success as a result of their own efforts.



Sure. But the programs they support do nothing to strengthen those links. They simply bypass them. So "society" may be better off because the whole is strong, but the individual links are no better off. To follow your analogy, imagine a chain being used to hold a bucket full of "stuff". Social Liberalist policy essentially takes the weak links out of the chain and puts them in the bucket. While that link is no longer in danger of breaking and disrupting the whole chain, it's now increasing the weight which must be born by the remaining links.

That's one approach. The Classical Liberalist (modern US conservative) approach would be to actually strengthen the links themselves, thus allowing them to each carry their share of the load rather than contributing to the load carried by the rest. The analogy somewhat falls apart because when a link breaks it doesn't have the same effect on society as a link in a chain does, and it's possible for the link to be repaired.

The larger point is that if each link is a person, the Conservative approach works to make each individual better in actual fact, not just make it appear that things are better for them by removing responsibility. Providing free food and housing for a poor person does not make them not poor. And this is a fundamental difference of viewpoint between liberals and conservatives. A liberal will say that it's the end result which matters (does the person have food and a place to live). The conservative will say that the means matters (does the person have the ability to provide food and housing for himself).

I happen to believe that the conservative approach creates a healthier society, and allows for a much greater degree of personal liberty.




And I can't imagine that we pursue policies which increase the rate at which people can't feed themselves or obtain education without needing government assistance. The chain analogy works here in that it shows that as you remove the load on each link, it increases the load on the remainder. This increases the number of other links which are now in danger of breaking. At some point, you get too many links in the bucket and not enough carrying the weight and the whole thing falls apart.

Even before that point, you see signs of this. Katrina was a failure of government to provide assistance to the people of New Orleans, right? But wasn't the earlier failure that so many people needed government assistance to survive in the first place? To what degree did a culture of dependence on government add to the misery and suffering? What happens to someone dependent on the government for their food and housing if/when the government fails to provide those things? We saw a small example of this during that hurricane. Imagine if the government collapsed financially somehow, or some other problem occurred which prevented it from being able to deliver those goods and services that people have come to depend on? What happens to all of those people?


No. It's better to encourage people to provide for themselves. It's not perfect. But it is better...