100,000 new troops apparently. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/promises-promises-questions-about-romney-vows-to-cut-taxes-expand-military-balance-budget/2012/04/27/gIQA58SclT_story.html
Republican platform to balance budget: (you can't make this shit up)
1. Dramatically increase military spending and hire 100,000 additional troops for the war Republicans will start shortly after taking office.
2. Give the richest Americans massive tax cuts by eliminating all forms of taxation that don't actually involve work. (dividends, interest, capital gains)
3. Eliminate all estate taxes so billionaires never need to relinquish their possessions. (that farm you have your eye on will be locked into a single family for 1000 years)
4. Eliminate most Medicare benefits (opposed 2 to 1 by Ammericans)
5. "Reform" social security. (average 25% cuts across the board)
6. Cut waste (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA......right)
Quiz: What do most Republican voters say the number one issue is?
Answer: BALANCING THE FEDERAL BUDGET!!!!!
How is this not brain damage?

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It seems to me that both parties are incapable of running the country. But over the last 12 years the Republicans have just gone completely insane. The Democrats are far more reasonable these days.
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MarsAttacks! says
Bullshit. With the Ryan plan tax cuts, there's no way to balance the budget ever. They are draconian cuts costing hundreds of billions of dollars every year. You always see one side of things.
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MarsAttacks! says
If you eliminate all of those things, you will only save about 10% of the current deficit.
I've said this before, everyone with a brain has said this before, dumb fucks just don't understand:
There are only three things that make up 90% of the budget. The military, social security, and medicare. Only *ONE* of those three things is paid for out of the general fund. If you eliminate social security and medicare, the budget would be balanced, but you'd then get to reconcile payroll taxes with income taxes.
2/3rds of americans support both social security and medicare, and everyone seems to support the ridiculous unnecessary military spending.
If you're not willing to touch these three things (and by "touch" I mean, "eliminate or radically reduce"), and you're not willing to raise revenue, YOU WILL NEVER BALANCE THE BUDGET.
Counting on a 5% growth rate or other bullshit is never going to happen in a mature, fully industrialized economy.
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Some of the founders of the republic foresaw two basic risks, both of which have now become manifest. First, the emergence of two strong factions. Second, the people might start voting themselves money from the public treasury, leading to bankruptcy. Democrats and Republicans have become rival patronage networks, ideologically incoherent and untethered from reality. The Republicans throw reality to the wind, saying they can cut taxes and increase spending and balance the budget at the same time. Democrats are slightly less unrealistic, saying they can pay for everything by borrowing $1 trillion/year for at least a decade, even though no civilization has ever tried to borrow that much for that long. Republicans work for the military-industrial complex (war all over the world), Democrats work for the medical-industrial complex (ObamaCare) so we can poison and butcher each other at home. Both factions work for the prison industry (drug war), so for-profit prisons can rent cheap prisoner labor to corporations (this already happens with office furniture etc.). Part of the problem is, neither faction holds its own leaders to account, both just follow the leader.
Nixon was forced to resign because leaders within his own party looked at the evidence, saw he had broken the law, and held him to account. Does anybody think that would happen today? Look at Bush's war in Iraq, and Obama's endless lies about ObamaCare. Tribalism trumps reality, so reality suffers. People end up in debt peonage, toiling in cubicles with furniture built by prisoners, each day another day older and deeper in debt, but always blaming the other tribe, just like the Orwellian 1984 characters who blame Oceania or Eurasia or whatever the enemy is today. After Nixon, who started the drug war, Republicans made a pact with religious fundamentalists, who didn't bother with reality and were therefore more reliable partisans.
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curious2 says
Correct. I think you've nailed it.
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"Other Romney proposals would make states responsible for programs such as Medicaid, and reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent “through attrition.” "
The federal workforce is 2 million people. All he has to do is close down the Department of homeland security and voila a 200k employee layoff.
No more spying on Americans = instant 10% cut in our federal workforce.
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CBOEtrader says
Have no doubt, Romney is going to do exactly the opposite if he wins.
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curious2 says
Yep, those two "accomplishments" are certainly of equal importance, better get the articles of impeachment drawn up quick.
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jvolstad's website
Mitt is going to increase the military by 100,000 troops? I can think of five prospects for the troop increase. His five panty waste sons.
Sign em up Mitt. The military now takes gays
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Hey, I think those guys came knocking on my door one Saturday morning.
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curious2 says
Bzzt, wrong. Democrats want to raise taxes. They support the current levels of federal spending, and simply want to pay for it.
Republicans also support current levels of federal spending, but do not want to pay for it. They believe the lie that cutting taxes will cause us to have 5%+ GDP growth. Never going to happen.
curious2 says
I can think of many things that the U.S. civilization has done and is doing that have never happened before in history. Arbitrary amounts of paper debt is pretty minor. The U.S. debts (and deficits) are not abnormally high in terms of GDP. Nobody has ever had a $15 trillion economy.
curious2 says
It's fun to equivocate, but this is just bullshit. Nixon resigned because HE ACTUALLY BROKE THE FUCKING LAW.
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Kevin says
Actually, if you check what happened in 2009-2011 when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, you might see the opposite: they increased spending while also extending the Bush tax shift. Obama supporters boast that he cut taxes on 95% of Americans, so if you want to stay on their team, you'll need to learn the script.
Kevin says
That's absurd. The U.S. debt is the largest of any country in history, and even as a function of GDP it is approaching WWII levels, when the country was facing bankruptcy. Look at Zimbabwe or Weimar Germany for examples of what can happen in these situations. Bernanke and the current crop of elected politicians may think they are the first to discover the printing press, or at least the financial printing press, but they aren't. Others have tried this route, and it has a high risk of ending very badly.
Kevin says
Please look up "equivocate." I can't even guess what you're talking about there.
Lastly Kevin, your game show buzzer sound effects seem to distract you from math. If you persist with the profanity I'll simply ignore you.
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curious2 says
Yep, nobody wanted to raise taxes during the recession. Now that the recession is over they're openly calling for raising taxes.
curious2 says
Two very unrelated things. The debt is the largest AND SO IS THE GDP.
As a function of GDP, it's high, but it's not anything outrageous. We've been here before, and MANY MANY other countries are in much deeper debt.
Lets say that I make $500k a year and have a million dollars in debt. You make $50k a year and have $500,000 in debt. Who's in better financial shape?
Talking about debts in terms of absolute value when they're entirely in the form of fiat money is ridiculous. Do you think we'd be better off if we had half the debt and half the GDP?
Comparing the US to weimar germany or zimbabwe is the kind of thing that ignorant people do. If you really don't understand the difference, you have no business talking about them.
curious2 says
"endless lies about Obamacare".
curious2 says
Oh no, how will I survive?
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curious2 says
How long have you been predicting devaluation? (also known as interest rates at record highs)
How long have interest rates been declining to record lows? Reality doesn't support your narrative.
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I don't think Mitt would increase military. Both parties have been nicklediming soldiers left and right for a while now.
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FortWayne says
I think Republicans are devoid of popular issues and they know it. I mean seriously, what's left? More deregulation after the banking crisis? The Ryan bill cuts taxes for rich people (literally) down to 0%, so nothing left there. Drill baby drill is a pipe dream since excess oil will simply be sold at a profit overseas, and that should be obvious in the first year or two if Romney gets elected.
The only thing left is to invent a threat and turn it into eternal war. George Orwell 101.
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Other than "Gays, Guns, n' God" the Republicans have nothing.
But of course the populist "Gays, Guns, n' God" candidate (Rick "Frothy" Santorum) lost. It was the Big Business candidate (Mitt "Corporations are People" Romney) that won. It's all about the money.
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You have to be more specific. It's not just about "money", it's about money in the average person's pocket. The economy sucks, so dumb people assume that a rich guy must know something about how to make money for them. In truth, Romney knows nothing about creating jobs and building businesses -- only about extracting money from existing ones.
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iwog says
I don't think they'll do well this year. Romney isn't salty, no conviction. The message of "economy would be better with us" isn't really believable.
But if Obama restarts the hand outs he might lose. Tea party formed out of frustration with Obamas Carter like unaccounted spending spree which resulted in local corruption.
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Kevin says
True that. He's a typical Wall Streeter that knows how to buy and sell paper for a short term profit. But that's it.
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The best way to deal with military budget is to work backwards. We must ask ourselves as a nation exactly what role the military must serve. I think the reasonable position would be to agree that the military capability should serve as a deterrent from enemy attacks. In other words, the potential advesaries must know that if they attack us, the retribution can be swift, decisive and crushing. However, this does not mean at all that we should waste money on military adeventures that involve invading other nations for strategic resources or other "strategic reasons." Nor does it mean that we should interfere in disputes of other nations. What we must do is gather intelligence so that we know what we must do to retain technological superiority over other nation states in regards to military capabilities. That in turn should drive our budget.
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Cloud says
I take it you've never read 1984 then. Paint me surprised.
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I just started reading The Communist Manifesto. By page nine I recognized the arguments used by the libs here on Patrick.net (Marcus, Vincente, Quack-Man, Kevin, wtfkr80, Ellie, et al) are basically communistic ideas. They'll probably accuse me of Thought Crime's, or "unconventional emotions".
Why am I not surprised?
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Honest Abe says
Yes, yes, what they post is exactly what is written in the Communist Manifesto. You must have read those 9 pages really carefully.
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Bigss, have YOU read the Communist Manifesto? Seriously, have you?
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Honest Abe says
Yes, actually I have. You, though, just lie about it.
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I have Abe on ignore, but from this quote above, I have to wonder...
Is it my observation that things have swung so far to the right that many of Nixon or Reagan's policies are to the left of our supposedly socialist President ?
Is it my belief that paying our bills rather than irrationally being willing to default on our debts in a continuing "starve the beast strategy" that will never work, is the better fiscal policy ?
I guess it's ultimately the belief that taking our taxes a very small fraction of the way back toward where they were under Eisenhower that makes me seem like my beliefs come out of the communist manifesto.
Is there anyone more clueless than Abe on this forum ? Who knows what causes his rigid one dimensional authoritarian views on everything.
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marcus says
Apparently, the likes of iwog talking about the need for the very richest in society to carry their load and not be given massive tax breaks (or any other comment that Abe/Cloud... don't agree with) makes you a communist or socialist or whatever the hell they think those words mean. You know - all the stuff people say that is outlined in the first 9 pages of the Communist manifesto. At least the version Abe read.
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Cloud says
I prefer to be able to read your posts. They're invariably good for a laugh.
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The Rushbots are always entertaining, yes.
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jvolstad says
Whoa whoa there pal.
We run a volunteer army now. Which means mental defectives, juvenile delinquents, and brown kids with no path to anything better. Do not think for a moment about trying to dragoon Pretty White Trust Fund Babies into your hobby. I'm sure they'd be well liked in the communal showers, but Mormons do not do the gay thing.
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Cloud, you have some serious hate issues.
Every time you think you're describing "liberals" you're actually just talking about your own frustration and hate.
It's not about them. It's about you.
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Patrick, with all due respect I have to agree with Cloud. Jovlstad had some hate filled comments as did wtfkr80. Clouds comments, I'm sure, were simply a reaction to the hate speech spewed by those two individuals.
BTW, I seriously doubt that jovlstad would call Romneys sons pantie wastes to their faces. It looks like any one of them could defend themselves, and their honor.
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Patrick says
Cloud just has nothing better to do, leave him alone. If he wasn't hating liberals on pnet 24/7 he might be going out in to society and interacting with real people which would be dangerous. Pnet is providing a much needed a public service in cloud's case.
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It's not about electing Romney, it's about getting him in office, so the sooner we can contemplate his replacement.
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Cloud says
Patrick says
Liberals do have a serious disrespect for the sovereignty of the Family unit.
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Cloud says
Obviously you failed to read the book very carefully. Actually you managed to miss the entire point of the book all together. Oppressive police state big government is bad. Big government in and of itself isn't the problem. Pretty piss poor analysis even by cloud standards.
Or would you consider places like Sweden living embodiments of 1984?
Of course as someone who's only thought is to hate liberals cloud somehow totally missed the complete and total stripping of civil rights, well as huge growth of the police state, and the complete destruction of the bill of rights under Reagan and Bush II.
As a middle of the road moderate (which would be known as a flaming liberal commie fag in clouds distorted world) I will never ever understand hard right conservative view that a police state is a very good thing, but any kind of government aid to it's citizens is communism and perhaps even anti christ devil worship. Big government of jack booted thugs good, big government of social welfare bad. Check.
Cloud could you explain this to me. Just use short words, it's ok.
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Cloud says
So what you're saying is, that parent-dependent Mormon layabouts should not be welcome in the military. Why do you consider Mormons to be suspect? Is it their propensity for terrorism?
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Cloud says
No, Jesus does:
Luke
14:25 And there went great multitudes with him: and he turned, and said unto them,
14:26 If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.
14:27 And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple.
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Cloud says
Yes and Romney follows the path a true prophet that taught your religion is wrong, corrupt and an abomination.
"My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right — and which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight: that those professors were all corrupt . . ."
–Joseph Smith, "History of the Church", Vol. 1, p. 5-6
Romney would be overjoyed if your admiration for his family is what brings you to the one true faith. I do not doubt that he approve if you would welcome two of his "bothers" into your home to learn more about how you can fill that emptiness inside of you and fill it with that goodness you admire.