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Do you really think that the debt got to where it is because of only one party?

Saying that Republican intransigence over this budget caused the downgrade is like saying the assassination of Franz Ferdinand caused World War I, or saying that Caesar crossing the Rubicon caused the fall of the Republic.

The immediate cause was purely incidental. It was in the cards, and it would have happened one way or another. The actual causes are more long-term and complex.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

No, he is saying that the debate was dragged out unnecessarily thanks to the TEA party (they even went against the Boehner bill until the last second, so don't even try to defend them) which resulted in no party getting anything substantial and thus the credit rating downgrade. He didn't say anything about the debt.

His point was, as far as I can tell, that at first you were pointing blame at Obama and the Dems but as soon as the credit rating shifts downward you decide that it's everyone's fault rather than first taking a look at the contributions of the Republican/TEA party to said downgrade.

[✔] [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item] (Three)
[✔] [item]Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]32837[/item] & [item]32838[/item]
[✔] [item]Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury[/item]
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[✔] [item]49623[/item] (Two)
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This is a very short sighted view. The spending vs income problems the nation has had goes well beyond obama and bush.

....Okay, while that may be true, I was only answering your question. Again, it had nothing to do with the debt. Perhaps you are confused because Mayo said "debt ceiling?" Also, his point still stands if I was correct about what he meant.

[✔] [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item] (Three)
[✔] [item]Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]32837[/item] & [item]32838[/item]
[✔] [item]Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury[/item]
[✔] [item]46017[/item]
[✔] [item]49623[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]71086[/item]

I don't think anyone said Obama and the Dems were to blame for our current mess. Actually, I thought we said Obama took a bad situation and made it worse... which is exactly what happened.

What Mayo doesn't understand (and probably won't ever understand) is this 'playing chicken' wasn't a single-party effort. As USD pointed out, the Republicans were voted in to curb spending -- they're being representative of their districts. The speaker was told several times (by the Dems and Obama) that the Republicans plans weren't good enough and the debt ceiling increase had to be greater otherwise Obama would've vetoed the legislation, anyways. (Obama playing chicken!? How dare he.) Also, the first budget that went to the senate was voted down immediately without even so much as a debate. (Reid playing chicken with the debt ceiling!? How dare he.) The one thing that rallied the TEA party was the effort for the BBA. (The TEA Party wanting a balanced budget!? How dare they!)

@ Mayo -Even though you opine that a few of us will do everything to place blame in Obama's lap, you'll will do everything to deflect all responsibility from the President for his share of this mess. Good fucking game, hypocrite.

Going from a $1.5T shortfall to a balanced budget in one fiscal year, during a severe economic downturn and a war, is financially, economically and politically impossible, and the Tea Party never stood a chance. This was obvious even to them and yes they did play a dangerous game with enormous stakes while both Obama and most of the GOP were trying to get shit done. And yes they deserve blame for that.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

You're right. Even the Tea Party knew that... but, in large, they weren't demanding a balanced budget for next year. Where the tea party won is by getting the ball moving on a balanced budget amendment which, in the end, if ratified, would force balanced budgets - that's what they want. They got what they wanted and, in exchange, they gave the votes needed to pass the debt ceiling. Welcome to politics.

That's not even constitutional (for reasons we've already explored - Congress can't abrogate its own authority without an actual amendment to the Constitution), let alone politically or financially feasible.

It would also be even more short-sighted and flatly bad policy than the debt itself. Governments - and businesses - and hell, even biological organisms, sometimes need to run deficits. If there are hard times - a war, a major economic downturn, a catastrophe of national scale such as a terrorist attack or weather disturbance or nuclear disaster - the government will need to run a deficit to do what must be done to get the nation through the troubles. It's flatly irrational to argue that governments should keep ledgers equally even when times are easy and revenues high, and when times are bad and revenues low.

It would also be very bad for the country as a whole. Deficit spending is actually good policy, provided the deficit is less than inflation and rate of growth, because what it does - and it was Alexander Hamilton who first grasped this - is it makes banks, investors and even foreign states stakeholders in the government, without actually giving them any real influence over policy. They have an interest in keeping the American government stable, but they can't actually affect it directly in any way.

All those are conceptual reasons why a balanced budget amendment is unwise. More important than those conceptual reasons, though, is the here-and-now reality that most of Congress understands those facts. People like to blame Congress for the nation's ills but they fail to see that our system is - still - the best in the world, and that our problems are more connected to complex social issues, special interests, and a very few, very bad policies enacted in recent years. What I mean to say is - flatly, it's not going to happen, so holding up all business is quixotic and terrible politics. That kind of brinksmanship the Tea Party engaged in is banana republic behavior.

So yeah, balanced budget amendment is drivel.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

well what we've been doing has been working out great.

The only country that's really doing better than us is the EU. And they accept policies Americans will never accept. Their culture, too, is in many ways more advanced than our own - they are in many ways a wiser and more disciplined people. Don't underestimate that.

Every other country is doing worse. Including China.

The stability and effectiveness of the American form of government is one of the country's greatest enduring strengths and it is too easily and too often overlooked.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I'm not saying we should tear it down and rebuild from scratch, but spending less than we make isn't a bad idea.

I dont want to get used to saying the word quadrillion.

"When heaven falls to earth, even fools can be kings."

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

And like I've said before, Congress would still be the body responsible for providing a federal budget... that budget would have to be balanced based on the projected revenues for the following fiscal year. (They've been talking about a way to bypass this by having a congressional vote with a super-majority or if in time of war or emergency, allowing for debt in certain situations...) The 'balanced' part would be from the amendment and it's not entirely impossible to pass, especially since most states are required to balance their budgets. Fun fact: Germany passed a balanced budget law and Italy is looking to add an amendment to their constitution saying they need to have one, too!

Between the EU and the USA, GDP growth in the EU (~1.7%) is slightly better than the US (~1.3%), unemployment in both countries is jumping between 9 and 10%, and they have inflation rates around 2.5% to our 3.5%. China, on the other hand, was pushing 10% GDP growth earlier this year with a lower 4.5% unemployment. Their inflation is harder to measure since they're always fucking with their currency. If you have different numbers or metrics, please share.

Germany's constitution (and that of most EU members) bears no resemblance to that of the US; their constitutions are much longer and more detailed than ours and go deep into the particulars of civil law. For this reason it is much easier to amend the constitution of an EU nation. Germany itself is a much older and stable country than the US in strictly demographic terms. So any comparison there is moot.

Italy's entire system of government is a joke so no one cares what they do.

None of those details matters. Constitution says straight out that Congress has the authority to legislate on X, the criteria to pass a law are Y, and that the federal government is supreme over the states. The states can't veto the Senate. This isn't the Confederate States of America.

If what you are proposing was constitutional, then every lame duck would pass some sort of trap-door law to make it impossible for future administrations to change existing laws. This is exactly why what you propose is unconstitutional and why our constitution makes it so hard to change how things are done.

You're citing statistics but you don't understand them. The EU calculates jobs differently. The US does not count long-term unemployed as unemployed; the EU does. The EU has a strong social safety net so unemployment does not turn into social decay and civil unrest.

Any statistics that come out of China are pure bullshit simply because the country is huge and very chaotic, especially the southern and western provinces. A lot of China's labor force consists of migrant workers that are totally undocumented, and they also have a lot of peasants, squatters, transients, uprooted peoples and people who officially don't exist. You also ignore that being "employed" in China is a pretty small pittance since they have basically no legal protections for their citizens or workers.

If a factory is polluting an entire province with lead, mercury, dioxin, heavy metals or whatever, there is nothing you can do as it kills your entire family. This isn't a "here and there" sort of deal, it's a nation-wide affliction. If someone razes your house to build a factory or office park on it, there is nothing you can do but become a squatter somewhere else. If you lose an arm or a leg in an accident, there is nothing you can do. If a member of the armed forces decides they want something from you, or decides to blame or frame you in some way, there is nothing you can do.

Because of all these abuses there is tremendous civil discontent swelling under the surface in China. Riots are actually very common because a lot of people feel they simply have nothing to lose, but attract little media attention. You don't ever hear about people setting fire to police stations or tearing down city halls here in America. Ever. In China it happens all the time.

China has a lot of success stories, but it is impossible to achieve success without risking failure. China has a lot of failure stories and those go unnoticed even though they are frighteningly numerous. There is a silent epidemic of bad loans to businesses in China on an unimaginable scale. The country has a massive yarnball of internal debt that is even more onerous in proportion to China's economy than our federal debt is to ours.

As a result of Chinese economic change, the country is having serious problems feeding and housing its own citizens. In China the cost of food has gone up by several orders of magnitude. Imagine if a few years from now a Big Mac or a Ramen Cup cost $10. Because the Chinese economic management infrastructure is so primitive and in such a state of total flux, even with high growth, the prices of staples is skyrocketing. Americans don't seriously worry about starving to death. For many Chinese, starvation is a very real threat even in the midst of supposed prosperity.

There is also a housing bubble. Apartments that are worth nothing and not even built to the most rudimentary US or EU code (as in they are completely unprepared for even the slightest natural disaster, and don't have working electrical wiring) are the objects of ridiculous speculation because of the swarms of rural Chinese coming to the cities. The bubble will eventually burst, and when it does, the fallout will make our own housing crisis look like a footnote.

China also has two huge and seemingly contradictory social problems: a shortage of youth jobs (they are also having problems with youth employment, Google this if you don't believe me) and a shortage of youth as a whole. The legacy of the one-child law has been to create an elder care nightmare that makes our own Social Security problems seem trivial in comparison. We face a situation where the old-to-young ratio is at worst 1-1. The Chinese face a situation where it's more like 3-2.

China is also rife with corruption and abuse of authority. Virtually all their scientific capital is the result of plagiarism or foreign ownership of local enterprises. In the long run this will destroy their progress because without intellectual property rights, there is no incentive to create anything of value, ensuring that other countries like the EU or India or even the US and Russia will have the upper hand so far as science and media goes.

Perhaps China's greatest problem is that they have no real system of succession. Basically, department heads, from the Chairman and President on down, appoint their successors, and where we have parties, they have blocs and loose associations. The system's strength is that it is highly decentralized, but this is also a weakness since its decentralization makes it sluggish and even more susceptible to herd mentality than our own. Most seriously, the system does not provide for resolution of succession crises or impeachment. Human nature being what it is, sooner or later this will result in a serious political disturbance that China will simply not have the legal and constitutional mechanisms to deal with in any way other than violence.

China shows rapid growth on paper, but under the facade of harmony and well-being maintained by the omnipresent military secret police, the country is in a state of dead quiet before the storm.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.