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Clown thinks we should be booted out of the union
By adamg on Mon, 04/23/2012 - 11:28am
Time for the corrupt socialist utopia to go, he snorts.
Hey, clown, Boston Latin School isn't on the Freedom Trail; just a plaque showing where it used to be a couple hundred years ago.
Via Boston Daily.
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Comments
The Commonwealth
is a net supplier of federal revenue to red states. That is for every $1 we ship away to DC, DC only gives us back $.83 or so. Yes, even with the big dig.
Nice to see another blowhard "fiscal conservative" (and I use the term loosely) just make shit up, and slander the cradle of liberty for ideological brownie points. MA is also very middle of the line via state taxation and government fee's. We also have much more valuable assets and a larger economy than a lot of other states, especially comparative in our region.
Why isn't he picking on those communist welfare states up north that are taking more than they pay?
This fanatical GOP information bubble needs to die. Until it does, the GOP is going to continue to shrink into a regional, viscous party based on tribalism and Christianist orthodoxy.
Nice catch. So what is it
Nice catch. So what is it they hate....our low employment rate, 98% health care coverage, or equal protection under the law? Also fun fact most federal spending goes to "Red States" h/t Mother Jones.
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/11/states-fed...
Half true
In percentage terms - yes - in dollar terms we spend a fortune compared to other states. It's like saying that if Warren Buffet spends 30% of his income on housing, he lives just like the rest of us. Common liberal excuse for overspending. Should I pay more for something just because I make more money? Maybe a slight premium for a high COL area - but not much.
Boston residents? - we are getting ready to pass a $32 Billion state budget and the city is proposing about $2.4 billion - that's $5000 per person to run state goverment and almost $4000 per person to run local government. That's about $23,000 per household before we even consider the federal government. Even after adjusting for transfer costs, add in the feds at about $10k per head and I believe we are approaching 100% of the state median household income just to operate government.
This kind of rhetoric (his and yours) is the problem - not the solution - both sides deal in half truths.
We need to increase taxes on everyone (Buffett and the guy working as a waiter down the street) - not to expand services, but to pay down our obligations. We need to lower spending for the same reason. Good conservatives have no problem raising taxes just as good liberals have no problem reducing services so we can get ourselves back on solid financial footing. It's what happens when you spend beyond your means.
Also not entirely correct
I'm seeing that state income tax accounts for roughly 10.1 billion in revenue... which is a far cry from 24b. MA taxes have overall declined in the last 30 years, while we've greatly increased out wealth and economic output. We're in the bottom 40% of states in terms of taxation.
Sadly, larger institutions and a larger economy means the numbers get bigger. Wrongly the GOP uses that misunderstanding to confuse people who see big numbers and get angry.
I agree with you on that last one, and dare this progressive say that we also need to cut some programs that are not terribly important, while implement efficiency (and thus) cost cutting in others.
And I've long been saying that States find a way to get theirs. People complain that MA is a bastion of taxation, while NH is some libertarian, bootstrappy paradise. Nothing could be further from the truth, as a .3% difference separates us:
It might seem that way, but when NH is so closely tied to the MA economy as it is, our rising tides lift their too. They also structure their revenue streams a bit differently, but the end results are the same. Hiding the true cost of government from your constituents so you can claim to be the fiscally conservative candidate is rather belittling IMO. It implies that you think you can fool these little people.
People tend to look at governments like they're households that need to balance a cash budget, but nothing could be further from the truth. Governments finances are more like businesses, where debt and assets are also part of the (healthy) equation. But like you said the key is to pay down obligation in good times, and increase debt in bad to weather the storm.
For some reason we're doing the opposite spending in good, austerity in bad. Call me cynical, but that's a good way to bankrupt the nation (aka starve the beast). Too bad the beast, the government, is simply us by another name.
Huh?
You call what we are doing austerity? The feds are spending like drunken sailors, the state was actually running a fairly flat and now increasing budget and the city in the worst of times had to run essentially a flat budget for a single year and over the past 10 years has increased at about 50% greater than the rate of inflation.
Yes - we need certain levels of government - but we need to spend less at all levels - look at the City - they have cut 1000 employees in the past 4 years - I don't know about others, but I'm not missing any services that I've noticed other than the horse patrols and even if people notice - most of it is probably on the margin. We still have the same number of cops, fire, EMT's and teachers (at least per student) we did 4 years ago. We cut overhead.
The governor, in his infinite wisdom, started his first term hiring thousands of workers - now we've laid them all off (and the budget increases went to pay higher salaries to the existing workers). Anybody notice?
Federal - let's face it, we could easily do without Saturday mail, with operations winding down in Iraq we should get some savings in the military budget and we need to get a handle on social security, medicare and medicaid - sure I'd like to have free retirement and an ironclad safety net but we just can't afford it. Like it or not, government staffing at all levels probably has to shrink 5-15% (and federal income taxes probably need to go up by about the same but only to pay down debt - state and local could probably be reduced).
Maybe not tomorrow, but certainly over the next 5-10 years.
"Peace" dividend?
yeah, I remember all the money we saved after the Soviet Union fell...
And god knows getting rid of Saturday mail will result in oodles of cash filling the coffers. You're pretty accurate in pointing out flaws in the system, but pretty bad at proposing things that are based in reality.
Hundreds of billions is not reality?
Cut 100,000 postal workers as they are proposing - you are probably close to $10 billion in savings. End the wars and you cut probably tens of billions (as long as they don't spend it elsewhere which is where our peace dividend from the Cold War eventually went). Properly reform social security, meidicare and medicaid and you are well into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
5% of boston's budget is over $100 million a year - or if applied to just residential property taxes comes to roughly a 20% cut for every resident of Boston (averages to about $500 per household).
10% cut in state expenditures is about $3 billion - or a 30% cut in the income tax (or a 60% cut in the sales tax)-averages out to a little over $1000 per household.
You don't think the state and local governments can figure out how to be 5-10% more efficient?
15% cut to the federal budget - well that doesn't really cut any taxes because we have so much debt to pay off - but that's about half a billion dollars a year - add that to $500 billion tax increase - or about $1500 per person on average and you are looking at paring the deficit projections by almost a trillion dollars a year. And if you make those cuts at the local level - it gives people some of the money to pay those taxes at the federal level.
Nobody's going to like it - but that's my reality. What's yours?
the reality...
...the reality where one person posting things on the web that he thinks makes sense doesn't actually cause them to come into being. But where industry lobbyists can push forward agendas where our tax dollars are siphoned off into their clients bottom-lines - especially the military-security, financial and medical industries. But you go ahead and advocate for cutting livable wage jobs, government services for people and the like -- I'm sure all the financial benefits of that will just roll into the middle class' pockets....in your reality.
Actually cutting back on wasteful govt spending is not a bad thing, I think we've just got some very different ideas as to what constitutes wasteful govt spending.
Politics v. finance
You argue the reality of human emotion and activity. I'm arguing arithmetic. When the two meet as they ultimately must (reference 2008), arithmetic wins - always. I'm all for closing loopholes etc. as part of the fix - but that's chicken feed in the scheme of it all. The big ticket items are social security, medicare, medicaid and government headcount (at every level). If you don't touch those, you will never fix the problem and if you don't fix the problem you will not like the results. There are no benefits from cutting livable wage jobs and government services from people unless you consider dodging financial Armageddon a benefit. It's the sad reality of fiscal arithmetic. And if you don't think what we are doing is leading to Armageddon - call up somebody in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece or Ireland. Or do a google search on Argentina financial crisis or some crisis in just about any other developing country that overspent its means and ended up devaluing its currency and causing prices to spike domestically.
I'm not even arguing kill the beast as Anondeuce would put on me - I'm just saying trim the fat - 5-10% at the state/local level and 15% of a megabloated federal budget - and still the liberals call you a raging right wing conservative. No wonder we can't get anything done - the sensible people in the middle are under attack from all sides. If I said this on Fox news Larry Kudlow would call me a lily livered tax and spend liberal - and if on MSNBC it would result in the same feeding frenzy these moderate proposals raise out here in this liberal bastion.
The federal government
doesn't pay postal workers paychecks, anymore than it employs or pays people at Freddie and Fannie. But you wouldn't know that from bubble talk.
It's a GSE, which means if it fails the taxpayers are on the dime to pay it's creditors, but that's about it. The only difference is via it's charter it's responsible to answer to the elected congress, and thus the citizens; whereas megacorporations are not (yet apparently enjoy the explicit backing of the US Government as we found out in 2007/8).
It's also a 100% manufactured crisis, due to congressional meddling on how the GSE is supposed to prefund retirement and pensions.
To put it in perspective under current law, to pay someone their pension today the USPS would have had to fully fund the pension pension in 1937. Which is even harder, since people don't work 75+ years typically, let alone have that life expectancy.
Rewrite the law to something more conservative than what is required of private business, and yet not totally insane, and the USPS no longer had a fiscal crisis.
To me it seem the entire crisis is to build up a nest egg that someone is planning to snatch away once they've bankrupted the postal service. And as with a lot of other problems, it's a 100% manufactured crisis, with the main goal to write news stories to prove a ideological pillar of one party.
If governments working, it needs to be destroyed. How else is the beast going to be starved, when everybody loves it?
I was going to ask just those things about the USPS
I was just about to write to ask whether both of these things weren't the case for the USPS. I don't know for sure whether you're right on the pension front, but I have heard people say that if the USPS was put on the same footing as large corporations with respect to pensions, they'd be running an annual surplus. Again, I can't say whether that's the case for sure.
I have now gotten to a point where I tune out all of the discussion about fixing the federal fiscal situation unless that discussion includes actually taking on the following issues: medicare, SS (including the immediate raising of the retirement age to X years old for all persons currently under Y years old), the complexity and loophole-riddennesss of the tax code and the military budget. Unless and until these issues are addressed, we're just nibbling around the edges and kicking the can further down the road (and spending more money to do so).
Really - read this...
Short term the pension fix will help - it won't fix the problem. The postal service -for many reasons is not on stable footing. This is not a manufactured crisis like putting the big dig debt on the T.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46161875/US_Postal_Service_...
or this
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47126893/What_Really_Keeps_...
It's not 100% their problem - some of it's political and some of it is technology/systemic - but the problems are on the horizon - even ignoring the whole pension accounting debate.
And as for the liabilities don't fall on the taxpayer - as you say they do if you don't fix it. It's like saying I cosign on my kid's credit card and I'm not liable unless he overspends what s/he can make - and you see him/her getting deeper in the hole and making less and less money and you do nothing.
Freddie and Fannie huh - the "implied guarantee" of their bonds didn't cost us a dime. Probably the worst example you could come up with. How many billions are they in the hole up to now?
Friend, in the rest of the US
Friend, in the rest of the US you are a liberal.
No, I'm afraid none of those who are calling themselves conservatives would be willing to raise taxes. Are they not 'good conservatives'?
I love Massachusetts partly because the conservatives are not crazy--are like you, in other words, someone with a reasoned position with whom one could have a discussion about facts. But go elsewhere. In the rest of the country, this is not how the conservatives are.
Who
you calling Friend, guy?
I...
am not your guy, buddy..
I am
not your buddy, friend!
Thanks, Adam
I lost one IQ point each paragraph of that I made it through, and tonight's Trivia Night. Now I'm worried I'll drag my team down.
Happily!
As a Californian living in MA, I would happily follow both of my states out of the union, taking our tax dollars, economic engines, and stars off of Old Shitty (er, Glory)!
OK I give up...
Why do we shine a light on this nonsense?
Every time a crackpot gets ignored an angel gets it's wings.
I thought about that
Then decided it's good to remember that we don't really live in a bubble, that we need to be reminded from time to time that people like him exist, because the worst thing you can do is just let them fester.
Moused over link....
"Huh, townhall.com, eh?"....skipped giving them a click of revenue.
TownHall is where reality goes to die. No thanks.
There's a reason ...
... that Sadly, No calls it "Clownhall".
250 years of political evolution....
Maybe this will be the GOP platform in 2250?