Believe this at your own peril. When Bush took over, gas at the pump was $1, now its $2. Now, that's 100% inflation in 6 years. College tuition going up 12% a year nationally. Health care rising 12% a year nationally. Housing going up 15% a year on both coasts (until last year when the housing bubble began to go pop). Anyone who thinks inflation is running 2% a year just doesn't get it. It would be worse, but we've offshored our manufacturing to China to take advantage of the 20:1 labor cost advantage, so not everything is going up. We've offshored a lot of call center and IT jobs to India, so not everything is going up. The govt. chooses to understate inflation so they don't have to give such big raises to social security recipients, a change made in the 1990's. Gold has gone from $250 an ounce in 2001 to $650 an ounce today. Why? Because smart money is diversifying out of the dollar. Oil has gone from $30 a barrel to $60 a barrel. In 2000, $.80 would buy a Euro, now it takes $1.30 to buy a Euro. That's over a 50% loss of purchasing power against the Euro. Do you wonder why we are paying $60 for a barrel of oil? Do you think it has nothing to do with the huge budget deficits and rapid expansion of the money supply, in excess of the rate of growth of the economy? Well, it does. Many nations that used to store their entire cash reserves in the US dollar are moving to diversify and hold portions of their reserves in Euro, Yen, or Gold. That's why the dollar is at a low ebb, and that causes us to pay more for anything we import, and our biggest import is oil, hence the price at the pump. The deficits do matter, they matter a lot. If we hit a significant recession, which is being indicated by the inverted yield curve and the problem in the housing market nationally, it would be nice to drop interest rates. But suppose inflation has kicked in and nobody will buy our bonds at 5% anymore if our currency is inflating at 4%? We'd have to raise rates to get people to lend to us. The deficits will remove an option the govt. formerly had at its disposal to deal with the next recession, which could elongate or deepen it. The deficits matter, both budget and trade.
I didn't start this thread, you did. You posed the thread title as a question. Then somebody replies with some answers that annoy you, and you lash out with personal insults. Typical SF. It's nothing personal, amigo. It's a forum for discussion. Some of us enjoy it.
And a mere 1 is outspoken for Bush. 4,588 are abstaining or are watching Oprah in an old folks home. I know a generals and several admirals who have very mixed feelings about the management of this war. But apochryphal generals of anonymous internet characters don't count. :grin:
One can write about what has already happened, this war is four years old and already longer than WWII. Contemporary accounts have great value in historical assesment. But I'm confident of what the future historians will find.
Alan Colmes doesn't get to speak nearly this much. I like what Stewart called the show, 'Hannity and Whatever.'
Saddam may have been punchless, but many were concerned and he wasn't at all cooperative. I question if we needed to go in as fully as we did, but something had to be done as Saddam was making a mockery of the UN. Everyone else was sitting back and letting Saddam show his ass and only responded by wagging a finger. (Kind of like we're doing with N Korea). Unfortunately, Bush decided to go in all guns blazing. We've completely made a mess of the country that was Iraq (that is us, unilaterally). So when people ask why we're responsible for Iraq, it's because we've totally crippled any sense of stability in Iraq. For some reason the Bush administration thought we would be received with open arms... fault of the dems? I wonder what the best solution is now. We are responsible for what's happened, but I also think we are incapable of solving the problem. I wonder if swallowing our pride and asking Iran and the rest of the world for help would be in the best interest of stability in the middle east. We should want peace more than glory, but if we decided to go that route we'd have to do it as gracefully as possible. We've already lost alot of respect in the world, but hopefully if we bowed out carefully we wouldn't lose alot of power. I blame for Bush for getting us this deep in doo doo. We may be the most powerful nation, but the rest of the world is catching up and the more allies we have the better off we are. How unqualified was Brownie? I got the feeling he was a scapegoat. The state of Louisiana and city of New Orleans seriously dropped the ball. FEMA is obviously run as inefficiently as many federal organizations (maybe something should be done about that across the board), and ultimately Bush is responsible, but I'm not sure many presidents before would have fared much better. I blame Blank-o, the chocolate mayor, and whoever re-elected Nagin.
Then it should have been the UN that dealt with him, don't you think? We were not told America was going to war to defend the UN from mockery. He had been President of the Arabian Horse Association for leadership experience. Probably had a staff of 6 or 7 people. He had ZERO experience in any emergency response field. But he was a major Bush supporter. Cronyism, not professionalism, was this administration's practice for agency appointments and Louisiana paid the price. The state and the city were overwhelmed and were right in the middle of it. There were failures but nothing on the scale of the FEMA disaster. FEMA was responsible for emergency response and they came too late, with too little, were too confused, and were poorly led. Very, very poorly led. Brown was directly responsible, but many lower heads in FEMA should have rolled, too. And Chertoff, who diverted FEMA funds into Homeland Security was responsible, too. Ultimately the buck stops with Bush, who appointed both men, and who lounged around his ranch for days after the biggest natural disaster in American history before he finally came to New Orleans. But it was just a photo-op. He did not kick asses and make things happen like a President can do.
The point is the UN was doing nothing effective. I think we committed ourselves far too much, but at the time wasn't Saddam's dog and pony act getting very old? I always placed more blame on Chertoff, but damn... President of the Arabian Horse Association... You win this argument unless one of the many Bush backers wants to take over here. 4 more years! I still place alot of blame on the locals though. They fumbled the ball and then had the gall to get pissy when FEMA wasn't there to bail them out. Couldn't we see the hurricane coming? It wasn't taken seriously enough.
