Obama's plan for a government circle-stimulation

[collegestudent22]

Fairly irrelevant - the factual versus fictional quality of an enemy is highly secondary to their effectiveness, the primary source of the effect is the perception of a dire threat; and furthermore, the real concern here, is not the actual real nature of the threat or not but rather how people react to the threat;

Certainly, it has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the "fear-mongering", but I would much rather have a President that blows a real threat out of proportion than one that makes one up to get a party policy wish list passed.

and furthermore while the extremists may, certainly, exist, at the same time they may not be as monolithic and immediate and massive threat as they were billed and sold as.

God forbid our country overreact to an attack on our own soil! IIRC, before 9/11 terrorists were billed as non-threatening and not our problem. Which mindset would you rather be in? Because I would rather be in the one that keeps me and my fellow Americans from being DEAD.

and the economic "crisis" does not

... Right. What?

It's a recession, not a crisis. They happen all the damn time. Unemployment is still under 10%. Only a few dozen banks have closed. The stock market still has days when it starts going up (at least until some more stimulus talk comes up....). Consumer confidence - at least before Obama starts going on about how bad the crisis is - is fairly high. Many industries continue to experience record profits, despite the recession. Without Obama and the rest of Washington's fear-mongering the recession could be over before the year. I HIGHLY doubt that will happen now.

Oh, and now Obama has paraded a small-business CEO out in front of the cameras to push his stimulus. Too bad his business is only benefitting from the bill due to the fact that it SELLS SOLAR PANELS. "Obama's plan is so awesome, and I'm totally going to ignore the fact that if I ran a small coffee shop, I'd be screwed under it."

[Deacon]

To preserve independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

Can I get your source for that? It's beautiful.

How dare you try to let logic take over in a time of crisis! That's just not the way America does things anymore.

Yes, Obama's "changing the way Washington works" even further away from level-headed logic than it already was. As his most trusted advisor, his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, "Never let a crisis go to waste."

FUCK I hate these crooked, sniveling weasels.

Because I would rather be in the one that keeps me and my fellow Americans from being DEAD.

And, like Lincoln, suspend the Bill of Rights to suit his purposes, to take the velvet glove off the iron fist. I think we've done far more harm than good in this kind of effort. I truly believe that taking a much lesser role as the World Police would be better for pretty much everyone, and reacting to "security threats" with an embrace rather than a bullish rampage would help. I truly hate how incredibly un-level our heads are as a nation and how far up our asses our unlevel heads are stuck. As a nation--as a world, for that matter--we are well and truly fucked because of this. It seems we've left the age of great thinkers behind, where those great thinkers may be in the pub on the corner or on the steps of Capitol Hill.

All the shit that's buried in this bill...it's just incredible. It's like years of frustrated jackasses who think they're owed something, "Obama, I need my own house with my own kitchen and bathroom," have suddenly had their Christmas come early. Go back and undue Clinton's welfare reform (which didn't go nearly far enough), while you're at it! Awesome! Every time I hear some white trash or ghetto trash or other perpetual leeches on society being referred to by the incredibly euphemistic "fixed income communities" and demanding free shit for no particular reason that everyone else has to pay for, any actually productive member of society, filtered through the incredibly inefficient muck that is government bureaucracy, I just get angrier and angrier.

What the fuck is all this?? What the HELL is going on?! Is this permanent? Will we have to go to total meltdown before people start slapping the SHIT out of these people, and we get back to sense?

SDF>KSHDJFGLK:SDJLKAJ ARGHGHGHGHHHGGHH

[collegestudent22]

To preserve independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

Can I get your source for that? It's beautiful.

Here ya go. It's down near the bottom, under "Freeing the Nation from Debt." The full quote is:

"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39

What the fuck is all this?? What the HELL is going on?! Is this permanent?

Edward R. Murrow once said, "Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions." Well, we just went and did that in this election, and look what we got.

[Deacon]

Thanks for the source, sir!

[ampersand]

I just thumbed through Bernald Goldberg's newest book/diatribe about the "love affair" the television and newspaper media has with Obama, and of the after-effects of such an "institutionalized bias."

The scariest thing about that book is that we've gone through the whole election and a few weeks into the new term, and we still do not know very little about the President other than what he will permit to be released about him.

[Mae Dean]

I have very little to add here except to point out what pretty much everyone has known for quite some time: CS22 is a fucking idiot.

Consumer confidence - at least before Obama starts going on about how bad the crisis is - is fairly high.

Um, sir? Which reality are you living in? Would that be the reality where Consumer Confidence is at an all-time low since the index was created in 1967? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that's the reality I'm in.

I'm not going to debate the bill, because for the most part, everyone's pretty much already made up their minds about it one way or the other. I just want to take every opportunity to call attention to the fact that CS22 is a moron of the highest order, and responding to him only makes him stronger. There are many other points he makes that I'd love to do one of those big, long, quote-laden posts about, but this is the only one with easily-found hard proof of him being incorrect. Like, easily found as in "Go to google. Type in 'consumer confidence'. Get barraged with a wave of how amazingly poor consumer confidence is right now."

Seriously, dude. You're in another fucking world from the rest of us.

[collegestudent22]

Um, sir? Which reality are you living in? Would that be the reality where Consumer Confidence is at an all-time low since the index was created in 1967? 'Cause I'm pretty sure that's the reality I'm in.

And there's absolutely no chance that the lack of confidence is due to the fear-mongering that Bush and Obama have participated in on the issue? Because the economy was in MUCH worse shape in the early 80s and as your source says, consumer confidence was higher then than it is now.

Also, the Consumer Confidence Survey™ is based on a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. households. That really isn't that big of a sample size, since according to the 2000 Census, there are 105 million households in the US.

Like, easily found as in "Go to google. Type in 'consumer confidence'. Get barraged with a wave of how amazingly poor consumer confidence is right now."

Seriously, dude. You're in another fucking world from the rest of us.

I never meant it wasn't poor. I meant it was due to the fear-mongering from Washington. This is CLEARLY evidenced by the fact that the huge dip on the graph on the side occurs in OCTOBER, despite the fact that Bush started "dealing" with the problem in the beginning of September, and the subprime mortgage bubble broke in 2006.

Although, I did phrase it incorrectly. Perhaps a better way to say it is this: "Consumer confidence - at least before Washington started going on about how bad the economy is - was fairly high." Because that's what I meant.

[Deacon]

I do sometimes wonder how much of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy:

NEWSCASTER: The economy is terrible, and you're all going to die penniless and alone! You, sir, the one whose eyes just went wide when I announced this: how confident are you as a consumer?
CONSUMER: G-g-g-ghost! Like, let's get out of here, Scoob!

EDIT: NINJA'ED!

[adciv]

Also, the Consumer Confidence Survey™ is based on a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. households. That really isn't that big of a sample size, since according to the 2000 Census, there are 105 million households in the US.

It doesn't need to be big, it just needs to be big enough.

Consumer Confidence Index. Interesting how it upticked in September.

[StruckingFuggle]

Also, the Consumer Confidence Survey™ is based on a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. households. That really isn't that big of a sample size, since according to the 2000 Census, there are 105 million households in the US.

This is a very common misconception and one of the reasons that it's so easy to abuse statistics - because most people don't know better, and in fact, strongly know believe worse.

[collegestudent22]

Also, the Consumer Confidence Survey™ is based on a representative sample of 5,000 U.S. households. That really isn't that big of a sample size, since according to the 2000 Census, there are 105 million households in the US.

This is a very common misconception and one of the reasons that it's so easy to abuse statistics - because most people don't know better, and in fact, strongly know believe worse.

I am under the impression that the sample is not large enough, and I believe adciv's source supports that. Not having studied statistics, I am not sure of that however.

Consumer Confidence Index. Interesting how there are three WIDELY varying curves that are being averaged together.

Regardless, my point stands. Consumer confidence was improving up until the point where the government felt it had to just FUCK WITH SHIT and started acting like we were entering "GREAT DEPRESSION 2.0"^TM.

[Mae Dean]

I wasn't pointing to WHY the consumer confidence was low - I was just saying that it WAS low, and not high. You can draw conclusions as to the cause until you turn blue in the face - (Though, I'm not convinced CS22 actually gets angry or offended by anything. I have a mental image of a retarded vulcan on the other side of the monitor) but to say consumer confidence is actually fairly high is patently absurd.

I remember when I was younger, before I gave a shit about politics, I heard something about the nation's unemployment rate being 5%, and everyone at the time was saying how absurdly high that was. The 5% statistic stuck in my head. So to hear it said that "Unemployment is still under 10%" like it's some indication that things aren't going to hell in a handbasket is a insane to me. That's one out of ten people. Think of ten people you know. One of them doesn't have a job. Hell, in my own personal monkeysphere, I know of at least 10 or more people out of work... and I don't really know that many people. Justify it however you want - things are not going well for the country right now, dude.

[adciv]

This is why I like to get the numbers from the source

From here and here, the unemployment numbers going back to 1947 and through the end of 2008. Because that's what they had that I could find easily and I don't feel like adding the single month of January yet.
Short term on the left (since 1970), Long term on the right (since 1947)

Up to the end of 2008 we were below the short term average, just above the long term average and well within one standard deviation of the norm on both. January is currently listed as 7.6%. The data for the past few months is still being revised, they will not be 'set' for another month or so. The 5, 10 and 20 year are based on the current year, looking back. I could probably improve this by centering on the year. Will look at doing that later.

Short term numbers:

Code: Select all

Average	+1 STDEV	-1 STDEV
6.11	     7.47	    4.75

Long term numbers:

Code: Select all

Long Term	+1 STDEV	-1 STDEV
5.56	       7.03	    4.08

[StruckingFuggle]

Out of curiosity, adciv, how was "unemployment" defined for the purposes of that study?

[adciv]

No clue.
*edit*
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