Well, according to Dick Morris strategy, $6 here and $6 there and pretty soon you're talking real money!
Who HAS all that money? Whose lap did it finally end up in? Government doesn't have it. Politicians don't have it. Even entitlement recipients don't have it for long. I know, "they earned it"
A lot of it was air money, of course, but the gamblers, big and small, were all in it to their teeth. When the game was up, the debt for the big guys was erased by government and transferred to the little guys, for example the underwater mortgage holder, and their children. But it's good that the rich have it (what was left of it, and the IOU's), because they create jobs with it. If the rich had not been bailed out, unemployment would have been much higher. Think of the bailout of the rich with your kids' future earnings as a stimulus!
I understand that is the spin, but I think it is a bad strategy that is intended to fail. Boehner wants to be able to say he "tried" but just couldn't get all the cuts, so can we now go back to business as usual, eg raising taxes to "share the burden" and logrolling for lobbyists. By cutting all the lowhanging budget fruit first, he insures there will be fanatical opposition to the really tough stuff, and they will lose some of the "moderate" republicans. This piecemeal approach also gives the democrats the opportunity to vote for budget cutting, thereby insulating themselves from election attacks. Obama and the Senate will never go along with serious pruning of the size and scope of government, so it is better to put it all on the table now and force a vote rather than drag it out and confuse matters. Unless of course you don't want to prevail in the first place, but only want to look like you're trying to do something. It's bad politics and it's also bad as a negotiating strategy. You never want to preemptively make a concession. Instead, you wait till the last possible moment, then get something valuable in exchange for your concession. Boehner did the opposite. He folded early and got nothing. So either he's a remarkably poor negotiator or he had no intention of playing hardball in the first place. How do you think Michelle Bachmann would have played those cards?
Any Congressman who votes to approve Odumbo's $1.6 Trillion deficit budget should be tarred and feathered. $60 Billion cut? Not even worth the effort. Odumbo is the BIGGEST THREAT AMERICA HAS EVER FACED SINCE THE WAR OF 1812!
agreed wholeheartedly. but i didnt expect any different from the guys who "negotiated" the tax breaks.
As I ponder this notion, doesn't seem correct. After all, what would have happened to the US had we lost the War of 1812? Not as much as had we lost the Revolutionary War... and THAT'S the kind of threat Odumbo poses.