Posts by DogGone

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

I didn't question your character, I asked if you are simply trolling to pile up articles which agree with you. Are you? Did you read the CBO pages I linked?

I also apologized and explained I did not mean to call you dishonest. It is entirely uncharitable to imply that I did when I clarified my comment. I brought you the CBO. You are correct, we can go round and round.

You are very much a goal post mover, aren't you? You start asking how the current course is sustainable, I provide both debt and budget projections, and now you want a plan to pay off the entire accumulated national debt. To be clear, I am calling you a goal-post mover and questioning whether you are a trolling for confirmation.

On the trolling, you described the pattern of this exchange beautifully:

you post a study or quote someone who supports issue A, and I can probably find someone who disagrees with that and proposes explanation B.

It is not about quoting articles and opinions. It is about engaging the arguments therein.

Respectfully, I bow out.

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

Shirley,

Apologies if you thought I was calling you dishonest. I believe the Fox article either quoted Sessions out of context or Sessions made a deliberately misleading selective quote from the CBO. That is intellectually dishonest. As I mentioned, it is easy for a reader of the article to think it was talking about the Federal Deficit implications. Nothing you have said so far indicates I was wrong. Do you acknowledge that the CBO actually calculates that the projected deficit will go down because of the ACA?

The article you link to from Forbes arrives at the numbers by taking the cuts to Medicare that the ACA includes and removing that from the equation as well as by making an assumption that Congress will further increase the law's spending. It says so in the second paragraph. I'm sure you tried to find arguments against this way of adding up the figures to be balanced. Perhaps you came across: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/04/bogus-obamacare-deficit-study.html

You can do math that way. If a $500B bill came out to replace, say, the CIA and NSA with a new agency, thus cutting $1T in costs, you could argue that we can’t afford the $500B new government spending, you can ignore the $1T in savings. You can say that it is hard to know who to believe with all the funny stuff they do with numbers.

You can choose to accept Blahouse has better analytical skills than the CBO or the JCT. That is OK. But, please remember, you asked a forum of ex-JWs for “mathematical answers as to how the current situation is sustainable, not speculation and daydreams” I cannot do better than the mathematics offered by the CBO and JCT.

You quote an article to make a point and I eviscerate the misleading point the article is making, particularly the final quote of Sessions in the article. You than say, take it up with the article’s authors. You then paste another article which doesn’t indicate what you seem to think it does.

Honestly, are you searching for analysis of the budget impact of the ACA or are you trolling the Internet for anything which agrees with your point of view?

Your final paragraph really says it:

All sides are so polarized that getting a clear picture of anything factual is nearly impossible at best. I'm not in government and have no way to access the real figures. I can only read what is publicly available.

If you cannot trust the bi-partisan CBO and JCT, you are correct, getting a clear picture is impossible. I am now convinced that no analysis that I can provide will be sufficient to sway you from your point of view.

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

The gap has been closing due to some hard negotiation... this is with current law, the ACA included. Just a little more work and I think the gap can be closed. I think with some tough reform to Social Security, it can happen. This is why I'm a bull on the US economy, long term.

Shows the budget gap narrowing as a percent of GDP

Debt to GDP dropping under current law

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

Shirely,

Did you read the entire Fox article you linked to? Did you read the May update I linked to and the July 2102 letter to the Speaker therein? It is at odds with the picture you are painting. From the CBO May 2013:

In March 2010, CBO and JCT projected that the provisions of the ACA related to health insurance coverage would cost the federal government $759 billion during fiscal years 2014 through 2019 (which was the last year in the 10-year budget window being used at that time). The newest projections indicate that those provisions will cost $710 billion over that same period. As shown in the figure below, the intervening projections of the cost of the ACA’s coverage provisions for those years have all been close to those figures on a year-by-year basis; of course, the 10-year totals have changed as the time frame for the estimates has shifted.

Those amounts do not reflect the total budgetary impact of the ACA. That legislation includes many other provisions that, on net, will reduce budget deficits. Taking the coverage provisions and other provisions together, CBO and JCT have estimated that the ACA will reduce deficits over the next 10 years and in the subsequent decade. (We have not updated our estimate of the total budgetary impact of the ACA since last summer; for that most recent estimate, see Letter to the Honorable John Boehner providing an estimate for H.R. 6079, the Repeal of Obamacare Act.)

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44176

I find it interesting how Fox used a selective clip from the CBO paper in a way that might mislead the reader. The March CBO update was quoted as saying that the “ACA was projected last March to increase federal deficits by $1,131 billion.” Now, the average reader, not knowing the difference between accounting deficits and the Deficit might think the CBO was saying this would increase the Federal Deficit by $1,131 billion. It was talking about adding up the deficits side of the ledger from the act. It also talks about the other side of the ledger! The deficits are more than offset by savings and revenues as a result of the ACA. The CBO and the Fox article you quote say, in no uncertain terms, that the net result is a base-line reduction in the Deficit. Rather than trust Fox why not read the sentence they quote from the update they cite: http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-13-Coverage%20Estimates.pdf It is on page two. I ask only that you read the sentence before it and the rest of the surrounding paragraph. Would you say the quote from Fox might lead the average reader to think this was a discussion about the effect to the Federal Deficit?

The quotes you select above obfuscate whether it is the CBO speaking or Republican Senator Sessions being referenced from the Fox article. You might want to consider that it is not intellectually honest to add up the costs of a bill and present that as the only side of the ledger. There are also savings and revenues. That is how budgets work, as I'm sure you are aware.

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

Shirley, the letter from the Congressional Budget Office to the Speaker was earlier linked. In all the posts above you may have missed it. The CBO reports that when you add up the costs for the new programs, savings in the act, and new revenues included, the ACA will reduce deficits.

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/44176

Two imporant points though

The projections are noted to be "highly uncertain"
If you felt the country was going bankrupt before you might not be comforted to know it will just do it a tiny bit more slowly.

Personally, I think the US outlook is great given the relative increase in the affordability of labour, the huge expansion of cheap domestic energy, the improvement in the consumer debt load, and the massive changes in spending and revenues that were worked out by the parties before the last election. I'm helping a Canadian company setup a manufacturing plan in the NE right now, precisly because of the energy and labour savings. This shutdown isn't helping things, I might add!

I was pretty gloom and doom on the USA a few years ago. I actually think it is on a great track for economic expansion over the next decade. But, truly, that is just the guess of an ignorant Canadian. I have to respect the Republicans, with whom I'm not ideologically aligned, for helping improve the fiscal outlook.

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

BizzyBee, great example of how to respectfully respond. Bring up the Great Realignment. It adds context while not negating her point.

BOTR- you are clearly erudite and well spoken. I appreciate reading your posts a great deal. But, comments like "objective facts trouble the right wing" are exactly what i'm talking about. Frankly, I think you are too smart, too good for low balls like that.

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

I'm sure my input is not welcome, but here it is: PLEASE STOP BEING SO NASTY!!

Nonjwspouce made a typo and/or her autocorrect changed her words. I do this all the time. A charitable reader could clearly see what word was meant and would read it accordingly. To question her ability to teach her children going way too far. I agree with tootired2care, it should be about the substance of your argument. We can disagree and discuss, sharpen our thoughts; this level of personal animosity, though, is unwelcome.

Nonjwspouce was noting that one poster mentioned how the Democrats are not talking about secession and yet, the story is different looking back in history to the antebellum years. It was very much a Democrat versus Republican issue. In fact, South Carolina immediately seceded BECAUSE the Republican Lincoln was elected President, as they had declared they would. The country was divided and that was reflected on party lines. It was Democrats arguing for a continued balance of slave states versus free states and the Republicans who stood for "free labour". In fact, it was a "radical" element in the party that was calling for emancipation. There are some interesting parallels between this and the current tea party movement.

It was a valuable addition to the conversation and did not deserve to be ripped apart for a simple error.

(DogGone steps down from his soap box and tries to look inconspicuous)

23

Newly released New World Translation still full of numerous errors and abuses

by yadda yadda 2 in

thought i'd start a thread discussing all the scriptures where the watchtower translation committee has taken liberties and abused verses they've translated in the nwt.. worst of all are the numerous places in the christian greek scriptures where 'jehovah' has been inserted where the tetragrammaton or any equivalent of it does not occur in any extant mss and where the context could just as easily mean, or even more likely mean, the identity being spoken of is jesus christ rather than the father.

although in many places out of the 237 in the nt where they have done this the identity is clearly or most probably the father (jehovah) as distinct from the son (jesus), there are dozens of occurrences where this is not the case.. here are a whole lot more scriptures abused by the translators of the nwt, copied from the freeminds website (article written j bowman, scholar):.

adding words.

DogGone

Fair point. Just maybe the title could have been different. Shrug.

23

Newly released New World Translation still full of numerous errors and abuses

by yadda yadda 2 in

thought i'd start a thread discussing all the scriptures where the watchtower translation committee has taken liberties and abused verses they've translated in the nwt.. worst of all are the numerous places in the christian greek scriptures where 'jehovah' has been inserted where the tetragrammaton or any equivalent of it does not occur in any extant mss and where the context could just as easily mean, or even more likely mean, the identity being spoken of is jesus christ rather than the father.

although in many places out of the 237 in the nt where they have done this the identity is clearly or most probably the father (jehovah) as distinct from the son (jesus), there are dozens of occurrences where this is not the case.. here are a whole lot more scriptures abused by the translators of the nwt, copied from the freeminds website (article written j bowman, scholar):.

adding words.

DogGone

It's just my opinion, but I think it is very irresponsible to start this thread before examining the new translation.

369

So are Republicans now openly terrorists?

by Simon in

they seem determined to undermine the us democracy and shut the government down hurting employees and veterans.. what a despicable bunch, hope they get their asses kicked for what they are doing..

DogGone

No one is arguing that the USA is not a Republic.

Some think that means it is not a democracy. As some learned writings point out, the USA is not a Democracy as in the system of government is not a Classical Democracy like Athens. It is still democratic, of course. It is still a democracy through a number of opportunities for the citizenry to participate equally in the selection of thier representatives. The selection of those in power is a public matter, aka a "res publica", aka a Republic.

Some, it seems, equivocate between the techincal definition of a Classical Democracy and a democracy. Understandable for a layperson, I suppose. Amazing the myth is so widespread. Ironic when those making this error accuse others of being idiotic, unschooled, etc.