The International Monetary Fund has finally stated the obvious: the United States lacks any “credible strategy” to stabilize its mounting debt — and our lack of restraint is now posing a threat to the world economy. The IMF does not mention President Obama’s decision to launch a third war and spend billions in Libya.
In the meantime, Obama is reportedly about to call for higher taxes. The failure of the Democrats to deal with the debt crisis and the decision to go to war in Libya will undermine the credibility of the Administration on the issue. Because of their failure to control congressional spending for years, the Democrats will now go into the next election with a demand for higher taxes and record spending. This is not to forget the wasteful and wild spending of George W. Bush. However, the Democrats had an opportunity to show greater fiscal control and anti-pork policies. They did not.
The IMF rebuke is well deserved. What is astonishing is that we have political system that appears immune from the disaster caused by leaders of both parties.
Source: FT
“If someone pays 10% and another pays 35% then the one paying 35% pays more. It doesn’t matter how much one has.”
Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy … It has nothing to do with basic accounting, dingleberry, but everything to do with the wealthy having the means to hide their money … tax shelters, off-shore accounts … .
“This is the problem with Liberals. They don’t understand basic accounting.”
HHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!! That’s funny coming from you …
Buddha Is Laughing
Your problem is that America has been giving to the needy. Remember the war on poverty. It didn’t work. The Roman Empire didn’t give to the poor. Get your facts in order when making comparisons to History.
Gotta go … she’s awake
Oh, we understand basic accounting, Jim. It’s you and your neoconservative greed is good brethren who don’t understand disproportionate representation and the very real threats to social stability that record income inequalities are creating. Almost every empire that has crumbled from within has had those features in common: the rich partied and rode rough shod over the needs of society as a whole as the poor starved and suffered. That is the poor starved and suffered until they came for the rich whom they outnumbered vastly.
Jim,
Okay Jim … have a nice day
rafflaw
1, April 13, 2011 at 4:33 pm
Blouise,
keep that little one away from the Ipad! I never even bring mine out when my grandsons are over. Our two year old just love to push buttons and turn things on and off!
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I don’t own an iPad. This is hers! Her father bought it for her last year and she takes it everywhere. The really scary thing is, rafflaw, she knows how to use it. He set some kind of parental control on it and she gleefully goes through scads of youtube sesame street and muppets and other ones she’s allowed on. I told him he needs to make certain when we go out to eat that he has that feature shut off so that she can’t mess with the establishment’s TV’s … can’t you imagine some important play being interrupted by Bert and Ernie
Blouise,
“I need sympathy here … this child is an expert on the iPad and she has learned how to sync it to everything. I have one of those new apple boxes and she manages to get onto my TV and my computer via her iPad … I’m happily typing away when bam … a youtube video of Sesame Street starts playing in a window on my computer. Scares the hell out of me while she laughs and laughs. She is 2 1/2 years old!!! If I hold her on my lap she is sometimes content to just try and interrupt my typing.”
Lol – I feel your pain, sister! My daughter was raised in the computer age and STILL knows more than I do! She cannot understand how we functioned before computers …
“She’s napping now.”
QUICK! Do stuff!
Blouise
You forget one thing, we got out of the depression. Also, how many illegal immigrants are living here and we don’t even know it? The number is quite high as I do live next to the Mexican border. Circumstances are exactly the same. We don’t build anything anymore and yet we want everyone to get a college education to do what I don’t know. I do know that our debt problem is an American killer if we don’t address it. No pain no gain! Tough cuts are necessary and I am tired of hearing the rich should pay more. The rich are already paying more. If someone pays 10% and another pays 35% then the one paying 35% pays more. It doesn’t matter how much one has. This is the problem with Liberals. They don’t understand basic accounting.
Buddha Is Laughing
1, April 13, 2011 at 4:32 pm
Blouise,
Shame on you for letting facts and context get in the way of those po’ ol’ rich folk bilking the masses and destroying the economy for their own selfish ends!
Have you no shame?
=============================================
Where in the hell do people get these ideas?! The 1840’s?!
Buddha, how in the hell are we going to get anywhere when so many of our fellow countrymen are that badly educated?
Blouise,
keep that little one away from the Ipad! I never even bring mine out when my grandsons are over. Our two year old just love to push buttons and turn things on and off!
Speaking of John of Orange … now we really know why he gets all sniffly and weepy when he sees kids in the school yard …
Poverty in John Boehner’s District
Greg Kaufmann
April 11, 2011
For forty years, Tina Osso has worked on food and poverty issues serving nearly all of speaker John Boehner’s 8th Congressional District of Ohio. She came to that work in 1973, when the oil embargo resulted in her losing her job, and she unexpectedly found herself in line at a food pantry, where she began volunteering.
Ten years later, she founded the Shared Harvest Foodbank where she still serves as executive director today. The food bank distributes food to pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, nutrition programs for seniors and children, and operates antipoverty programs as well.
Osso describes herself as “an aging hippie, a political activist and a stand-up comedian wannabe, trying her best to do the right thing at the right time.” But among her colleagues she’s earned a reputation as “a longtime people’s advocate,” according to Lisa Hamler-Fugitt, executive director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Foodbanks in Columbus.
“She has her finger to the pulse of those in need in the 8th District as much as anyone, and that need is greater now than it has been in decades,” says Hamler-Fugitt.
Indeed in 2009, childhood poverty rose over six points in the Boehner district to reach 19.1 percent, or 29,173 kids. Overall, 14 percent of Boehner’s constituents live below the federal poverty line of $22,400 per year for a family of four. Shared Harvest’s work has more than doubled—it distributed approximately 7 million pounds of food in 2007, and 16 million pounds in 2010.
To respond to increased child hunger, the food bank started a backpack program that provides weekend meals to kids identified by schools as chronically hungry. The warning signs include physical manifestations such as sunken eyes or crusting around the mouth, or behaviors like rushing food lines or hoarding food.
“These are kids ages three to twelve who are at a critical point in their brain development and need adequate nutrition,” says Osso. “We’re only in eleven of the forty-eight school districts in our territory and we now serve about 2,100 children a week. It’s stunning.”
Boehner has many constituents living above the official poverty line who are struggling with hunger as well. In 2010, the number of residents enrolled in the food stamp program (SNAP) in the six counties represented by the Speaker climbed to over 152,000, an increase of over 47,000 people since 2008. Nevertheless, food stamps would be slashed under the House GOP 2012 budget.
“It’s no crime to have childhood poverty and hunger in a district,” says Melissa Boteach, manager of Half in Ten, a national campaign to reduce poverty by 50 percent over the next ten years. “But it is a crime not to do anything about it.”
Osso has a history of reaching out to Boehner to try to get him to understand his constituents’ needs, beginning in the mid-1990s, when he was Chairman of the House Republican Conference. She attempted unsuccessfully to involve him in work on a “trigger mechanism” policy to potentially raise funding for an Emergency Food Assistance Program that hadn’t seen an increase in thirteen years.
More recently, she wrote Boehner a letter describing the impact Republican cut proposals would have on seniors in his district. Shared Harvest provides 1,750 senior citizens a monthly box of food, at $20 per box, through the Commodity Supplemental Food Program. The need is far greater, however, and Osso writes of seniors routinely reading the obituaries to see if a participant has passed away, thereby opening a slot. The House Republican cuts would result in 500 current participants being removed from the program.
“How do I go about doing that?” she asks the Speaker. “Explaining that they will have to go hungry because of a budget deficit?”
She invited Boehner to a CSFP distribution site in Hamilton, Ohio, to meet people like “Mr. Murray, who is 94 and outlived his children, or 97-year-old Mrs. Garret, who lost her husband in World War II.”
Boehner has neither visited nor responded to the letter.
“It’s just been a battle to have him even understand what his constituency is going through,” says Osso, “and I don’t think he even understands to this day.”
Osso attributes Boehner’s lack of empathy to “his perception of his own life and how he was able to quote-unquote pull himself up by his bootstraps. It’s just his inability to understand anyone else’s life experience and circumstances other than his own, so he uses that as the stick by which he measures people.”
Within the district, however, she sees many of Boehner’s constituents learning the hard way that struggles with poverty and hunger are far more pervasive than they ever imagined.
“So many people find themselves in line at food pantries who never thought they’d be there,” says Osso. “I think the best thing that could come out of this Great Recession is for people to understand that it only takes one or two paychecks for most people before they’re standing in line. Maybe that will change the conversation in this nation and we stop blaming poor people for being poor, and start working on solutions to poverty.”
Like other advocates, her frustration with the budget debate is palpable.
“It’s not just the cuts to the programs that we manage. It’s the overall meanness of this budget that targets the most vulnerable populations in our country—the weakest and the ones with the smallest voice,” she says.
Despite years of frustration in trying to get Boehner to respond to his constituents who are struggling, Osso hasn’t entirely given up, and she still has a message for him.
“We just want you to meet your constituents who are involved in making sure their neighbors have enough to eat, and we want you to meet those neighbors who are suffering silently behind closed doors. They are so embarrassed to be hungry,” she says. “We’re fighting each other over crumbs when we should be seeing each other for who we are and working together.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/159861/poverty-john-boehners-district
Blouise,
Shame on you for letting facts and context get in the way of those po’ ol’ rich folk bilking the masses and destroying the economy for their own selfish ends!
Have you no shame?
Stamford Liberal
1, April 13, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Blouise,
“I agree … I was typing with the 2 year old on my lap so was taking shortcuts thus “nunbnuts””
Using the grandchild as an excuse again, I see …
=================================================
I need sympathy here … this child is an expert on the iPad and she has learned how to sync it to everything. I have one of those new apple boxes and she manages to get onto my TV and my computer via her iPad … I’m happily typing away when bam … a youtube video of Sesame Street starts playing in a window on my computer. Scares the hell out of me while she laughs and laughs. She is 2 1/2 years old!!! If I hold her on my lap she is sometimes content to just try and interrupt my typing.
She’s napping now.
Okay, so not all rich people are douche bags … but I bet the Koch Bros. are having temper tantrums right now …
“Patriotic Millionaires”: Raise our taxes, please!
By Justin Elliott
Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, a group of dozens of the wealthiest Americans that formed last year during the fight over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, is now jumping into the budget battle just as President Obama is expected to call for an end to the Bush cuts on the rich.
“For the fiscal health of our nation and the well-being of our fellow citizens, we ask that you increase taxes on incomes over $1,000,000,” the group writes in a new letter to Obama, Harry Reid, and John Boehner. “We make this request as loyal citizens who now or in the past earned incomes of $1,000,000 per year or more.”
Last year, Obama signed a bill to extend the Bush tax cuts after originally proposing that the two highest tax rates return to 36% and 39.6%, up from the Bush tax cut levels of 33% and 35%.
One of the signatories of the new letter, film and television producer Linda Gottlieb, explained her participation to me this morning: “For me to be sitting and hoarding my money is insane,” said Gottlieb, whose producer credits include Dirty Dancing and who now teaches at NYU’s Tisch school. “We all give to charity, but that’s not the same as creating a more equitable society.”
Gottlieb said she has been upset by the experience of her grandchildren, who attend a New York City public school where arts education has been cut and parents have had to organize an auction to try to fill the gaps. She added that raising taxes on the wealthiest people would be an important way of reducing the deficit.
“For rich people to moan and groan — nobody likes to pay increased taxes — but it’s not going to change your life in any important way,” she said. “What it can do is help your country.”
The millionaires who comprise the group are in the process of reaching out to more of their wealthy peers and may take a trip to Washington at some point down the road, according to Erica Payne of the Agenda Project, the New York-based progressive group that is behind Patriotic Millionaires.
Meanwhile, Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that any tax increases are a “nonstarter.” So expect a big fight on this ahead.
http://www.salon.com/news/taxes/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/04/13/millionaires_demand_higher_taxes
Did someone suggest a corporate tax holiday??? Why do they need a holiday when most of the big ones don’t pay any taxes now? How about a taxpaying special where all corporations are allowed to pay their full tax rates without any credits or deductions for one year only. That increased revenue could go a long way.
Elaine M.
1, April 13, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Jim,
Don’t forget the savings and loan crisis that our country had to deal with starting in the late 1980s. So many of our country’s financial problems have been brought upon us by…deregulation. We can thank both Republicans and Democrats for that–and Alan Greenspan.
**********
Blouise,
Wake up, you dumb, financially challenged Liberal, will ya! Leave those poor rich folks alone. Let them spend taxpayers’ bailout money to their hearts’ delight.
😉
==================================
Poor Jim … he honest to god wants to go back to the good old days of slavery
Jim,
“The solution if (is) what we did in the 1840s. High tarriffs and begin building everything at home. Not more taxes for the rich!”
In the 1840’s we had:
Approx. 23,191,876 population (1850 census)compared to 308,745,538 (2010 census)today. Also the population from 1840 to 1850 had increased by 35% which created a whole different set of economic situations such as a rapidly-growing economy … at least in the North. In fact, in the South where population growth was smaller,the tariffs you mention were hated and are part of the problem that eventually led to the Civil War.
Also, and very important, a great deal of the economy between 1840 and 1850 was based on slave labor.
Try again ….
Someone should clue in John Bonehead, Eric Cantdo, Mitch McConjob and Paul “The Whiz” Lyin’, that trickledown is not an internationally acknowledged method to help anyone but the rich. And go wake up Reagan, and tell him. Tell him, tell them that some of us have been on to them from the gitgo, and always will be.
Jim,
Don’t forget the savings and loan crisis that our country had to deal with starting in the late 1980s. So many of our country’s financial problems have been brought upon us by…deregulation. We can thank both Republicans and Democrats for that–and Alan Greenspan.
**********
Blouise,
Wake up, you dumb, financially challenged Liberal, will ya! Leave those poor rich folks alone. Let them spend taxpayers’ bailout money to their hearts’ delight.
😉
Bob From District 9,
Greetings from Ohio Congressional District 13(Sutton) and 10(Kucinich)
Kaptur is doing steady work on foreclosures.