I don't need him to win against the GOP, but I'd like he and the Dems to actually have a policy agenda. I'm tired of we can't do anything.

And I thought he accomplished some pretty major things in those two years, even against an unprecedented use of the filibuster which forced him to water down several of the things he did get passed.

Well thats fine, I was just taking issue with the word "implemented". I'm pleased with the recent speeches he's made, but I know right now that no matter what he does, he has no chance of getting anything like that passed. Hell, FDR could come back from the grave and couldn't get it done. When Obama can't even get the GOP agree on a 10:1 deal for spending cuts:tax increases, then he's just not dealing with reasonable opposition. Hell, conservative hero Reagan and the Dem Congress agreed to a 3:1 deal in 1982!

I guess DT didn't think he did. I obviously didn't either but I am hardly one of his supporters. Would have loved to see something done about the military industrial complex or torture bay but I guess sending more troops to the Middle East is Nobel Prize worthy. War on drugs, corporate bailouts, energy indepedence, open and honest government... Remind me again what the principles of the Democratic party are?

How do you not see this as a failure of leadership? Either the country doesn't want it or he is a weak leader. I have no idea how you could see a third option in there on why he can't do better than a "10:1" cut. If the American public wants it he should have given to them and if they don't want it but it's needed he should give them their medicine. Instead he just bitches about how the GOP won't let him do his job. He's the president of the country not the 436th member of Congress.

He can't just implement a tax increase. If you want to argue that he could be a more forceful leader, then I could go along with that, but if he put a bil out there with a tax increase in it, the House wouldn't even vote on it and the Senate GOP would filibuster it.

I'm not all rah rah on Obama. There's a ton of ways he's disappointed me. But I'm also a realist. He's received more difficult opposition than just about any other President. A quick look at the filibuster usage chart bears that out. Even the Dems extreme hatred of Bush didn't lead to the same level of filibusters.

His entire presidency boils down to what McConnell said, that the sole goal in all of this for the GOP, public needs be damned, is to make Obama a 1-term president.

I'm not sure what it says that Obama is the most beatable president that I can remember and the Republicans can't find anyone to actually beat him. We've got some real crap to choose from.

Fair point. Though I bet that if the S&P did not downgrade them, that investigation would have quietly slipped away with at most a slap on the wrist.

JPMorgan lowered their growth forecast by a full point, saying:


Thank God we're all focused on how much money we should pull out of the economy.

Considering how bad they are at their job, they need to get more than just a slap on the wrist

SI

Probably right on that as well.

Actually he could have. He had to sign in the bill to extend the Bush tax cuts.

Quick questions (too much Hannity this week):

Is it true Obama's new spending policies are responsible for the increase in debt?

Are there significant economic policies in place now (can see health care down the road) that are radically socialist/left?

What specifically has Obama done that has prevented the continuation of the Bush tax cuts from working (creating jobs)?


I thought i knew the answers to these things but the easiness they are being said and promoted has given me pause. If they are not true, i would think people who have legitimate problems with Obama would also be angered by this rhetoric.

Yeah, it's not like economists have tried for a couple of decades now to get the public to save more, then started griping when they did :rolleyes:

Conditions change. Saving is good during normal conditions, but during a demand crisis the government is the only entity that can fill the output gap.

John Kerry says, "hi!" :)

Watch less Hannity FFS.

1. No. The increase in the debt has been a long-term problem. And all spending is authorized by Congress anyways, so it's really their spending that's running up the debt.

2. Healthcare isn't radically socialist/left. And there aren't any other policies that are radically socialist/left (unless you talk to one of those "all taxes are socialist" wackos).

3. Obama hasn't "done anything" to prevent the Bush tax cuts from working. The fact is that most economists have come to agree that tax cuts do not spur job creation. It's not just true here - it's true overseas in other economies too. It's a fallacy.

[citation needed]

The administration itself doesn't agree with you.

He was talking about the Bush tax cuts though, which are to higher-income individuals. Tax cuts for higher-income individuals have not been shown to create jobs.

Pretty interesting little graph here. Part of this study.

http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/no...in%20press.pdf

A graph of what Republicans and Democrats think the distribution is would be interesting as well.

I think that was in the PDF. It wasn't too much different in my opinion.

That graph kind of reminds me of the old stories about how many people said they watched PBS versus how many actually watched it.

Tom Coburn: Idiot. The Gabrielle Giffords thing is how long ago, and he says "Thank God I can't bring a gun on the Senate Floor"????

(although in a dark humor moment, I wonder if the NRA will grade him down for that statement)

Coburn: Good thing I can't pack a gun - Reid J. Epstein - POLITICO.com

In general, I'm sympathetic ... but would prefer if the "guidance" were defined first (e.g. no felons etc.).

Not sure what the hispanic support for Rep vs Dems are, but this will help ... considering hispanics have (or will soon) exceed african americans as the largest (il)legal minority group.

Obama to deport illegals by 'priority' - Washington Times

Not in good taste, but I think people get too carried away with that stuff. It's an expression we use all the time.

I found the part where he implied Senior Citizens could pay for their MRIs with Apple Pies.

If we're doing graphs, I really want to see the "Amount politicians get paid in relation to the budget vs. what people think they get paid." Cause it is funny how many people seem to think that we'd be able to balance the budgets if politicians stopped getting paid, or at least had their wages significantly reduced.

Well then on top of that Steve, we should look at what they get paid from the US directy. Then how much they actually make through various means, then how much total compensation they receive.

Your right though, here is a facebook post that was nearly worthy of the facebook thread:

Sad ... my gut tells me its true. I don't blame it all on Obama but it happened on his watch so he owns it.

Pre-Market Report - Aug. 19, 2011 - CNNMoney

Just a scenario.

Wall Street set to follow global stocks lower - Business - msnbc.com

No President ever deserves all of the blame or all of the credit but there is a clear vacuum of economic understanding & leadership at play which is directly (and indirectly) causing instability in the markets, imho.

While I am curious what the Pres will have as a "Jobs Bill" speech...my expectations for it could not be much lower. Simply calling it a "Jobs Bill" is probably the wrong approach in the first place (though I can let it slide until hearing it) as the country needs to have direction outside of "hire people". Giving tax incentives to businesses to hire people when there is no real business incentive for them is basically a different form of welfare. We need to stop this kind of nonsensical policy.

The country needs leadership, vision, and a logical incentive for business to use their cash. You can have 2 of those 3 and probably get by, but you need to have more than 1, for certain.

The problem is, we have lawyers running the country instead of business people.

We have lawyers paid for by business people

SI

I'd be curious on how this poll would turn out now.

About a year ago, I had a conversation with someone I would qualify as an otherwise fairly intelligent individual who was going on and on about how welfare people are bilking the system and bankrupting our country because they were making tons of money to sit at home. He started making some conclusions and talking about how to solve these problems and the logic just didn't add up.

So I asked him, "How much do you think the average American makes"? His response: $100-200K. Once I had finished shaking my head at him (and it's a bit baffling since neither he nor I make anywhere close to that), I got to thinking "how many more people make horribly faulty assumptions based on numbers like that"?

Is that how you can easily get away with continually saying things like "taxing people over $250K kills small businesses" (because unless your accountant is an idiot, something like that would be incorporated). Or my belief that a significant portion of society is going "no, you can't do things to rich people because I might be among them one day" (yeah, you're not)?

SI

Don't forget earmarks. Man, if we just got rid of those, everything would be solved!

Yeah, I loved John McCain's campaigning against 1% of spending and how that would fix government.

At least earmarks required you to just shunt, say, $500M of the regular transportation budget specifically to your state. Instead, you just attach it to another bill or create an omnibus bill: "Hey, the $500M fund for the Hubert H Humphrey Homeland Security Defense Facility could have gone to any state. We were just lucky that money magically found its way to Minnesota".

SI

FWIW, the poll started pretty positive and has trended negative as the days went on.

Continuation of health care reform will be a major reason why I lean towards Dems (e.g. but would seriously consider Romney if he comes back into the fold of some sort of serious health care reform). Rooting for you Obama ... make it a reality in 2013.

White House Faces Political Dilemma On Health Law Challenge | FoxNews.com

I thought that this was a legit set of questions and I didn't want it left by the wayside.

1) Techincally, the President signed the Stimulus bill which spent a lot of money that we didn't have in order to try and prevent a full blown depression. Any president would have signed a bill of that magnitude, because they all knew that the alternative would have been a long slow decline of the economy. The Republicans have been squaking about the size of it and how it has burdened the economy ever since it was singed. Hindsight is always 20/20, and we have the privilege of saying that it was the worst choice ever because we didn't dive into a depression.

2) The policies that they are talking about besides the healthcare bill which is in no way socialist, are the government bailouts of the auto industry and banking industry. Money that was spent to keep small businesses, suppliers and to prevent a further escalation of the financial crisis. Had everything been allowed to fail, the US would have no auto industry at all, and any future competitor would need a full generation to catch up. Had all the banks been allowed to fail all this current finger pointing would be needless because we would be looking for who to fire for not having done what we did. Oh, and Bush II started this whole process with the first round of bailouts, which is a conveniently forgotten fact.

3) Businesses are making money hand over fist, and not spending it because they fear. Jobs that were lost were lost for good. Hence the reason why the unemployment rate has been slow to recede. It's going to take a good 10 years for those numbers to come back. This shouldn't be much of a surprise, and it won't have any bearing on who the president is. All this finger pointing by the Republican party is all a set up to try and win the 2012 presidential election. There are no policies that Obama has set up that have worked against the Bush tax cuts. Frankly, if the cuts had been allowed to expire, it's my opinion that Wall Street would have responded much better than they did with the crapfest of a deal that we got. Wall Street realizes that money needs to flow into the system, and that revenues need to be increased.

I do tend to find it amusing that people consider Obama's policies to be socialist or far left. It seems absurdly strange to me considering every other Western industrialized democracy. If we consider a country like the UK as "far left", were exactly should the rest of the world see us? Lunatic right wing madmen (ok, some already do)?

I've not been keeping up on this but boy, how far has he fallen ...

Edwards drops one prominent DC lawyer for another – CNN Political Ticker - CNN.com Blogs

Glad to get this one out of the way and think it was a distraction, I think the real prize is Syria.

BTW - if I was that Lockerbie "I'm not dead yet" guy, I would be leaving town.

Tripoli facing three-sided advance by Libyan rebels | World news | The Guardian

Good to know they are planning for it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14560983

I agree with this and thought it unfair when it was done to GWB also. However, you would think Obama's team should be managing this better ...

Of course Obama deserves a vacation - CNN.com

I have a much bigger problem with the House & Senate extended recesses than the President's mini-vacations. Especially when the H/S members may be doing many other things even when IN session.

Saving is always good, consumers should not go into debt to boost consumer spending to save the economy. If anything it generally weakens the health of the economy as increasing debt levels increases the probability of default (the magical phenonmenon which justifies charging interest on all loans).

A lot of factors go into 'output' and the government is not the only source of demand as it were. The population itself has a certain level of necessary demand (your food, shelter, energy requirements to actually live) and the technological revolutions of this century are the biggest and best explanation of the expansion of demand and consumer spending (even better than credit card debt, which has also boomed, but not as much relatively).

The people of today live with more conveniences and standard of living than any time in history, and get there through technology and productivity continually growing. If it takes government investment to set the environment for growth, than by all means go ahead, but the moment it becomes just about throwing money around the less it all will really work in the end. We just end up with a few more fat cats with more zeroes in their account balances.

Pro tax cuts:
http://www.house.gov/jec/tax/taxrates/taxrates.pdf

How high incomes react to tax cuts:
Soaking the rich | The Economist

Supply-side economics:
Supply-Side Economics: The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics | Library of Economics and Liberty

All of these are obviously biased towards the 'cut taxes on the rich creates jobs' but give the gist of the argument (and have a bundle of citations to papers of varying quality on the topic).


I prefer the multiplier line of thought, similar to that mentioned by this:
Econbrowser: Pocketful of Multipliers (II): Options for Stimulus Packages

Again, start digging into citations made in the article to get at a variety of opinions.

The problem with reading economists is you can hire an economist to spout whatever nonsense you want them to. Taking a poll of them is just taking a poll of which side has made more bribes!

I've already stated my opinion, high income tax cuts will not create jobs... not based so much on philosophy but on what I consider to be common sense, a wealth of capital is already in the hands of the decision makers, tax rates only impact marginal returns on extracting the money out of a business (i.e. income), and tax cuts in a perfect ideal republican-sponsored supply-side REagnomics world can still only increase capital supply and marginal return on investment... neither of which are the key factors holding back investment (as JonInMiddleGA might say, all those jerks don't deserve jobs in the first place, the losers!!!).

The worry warts are things like 'double dip recession fears', inflation, job numbers and its relation to consumer spending, debt levels, and the fact that taxes right now are so goddamn awesome for looting corporations of dollars. Gotta extract those dollars before the INEVITABLE tax hike, sorry conservatives, your own elephants will help put them in when the time for the reaper comes, they already are targeting poor taxes like increased fees, sales taxes, and loophole reductions that mostly benefit low incomes like earned income, student deductions, etc...

Demand creates jobs, not cuts to income taxes. Seriously, we have one of the lowest top tax rates in our nation's history and high unemployment.

I love reading those articles where they cherry-pick points and ignore others.

As John Stewart said you can get $700 billion simply by taking HALF of everything that the poor have.

But that's not real money. To get real money ($1.4T), you can take everything they have!

SI

I'll be damned, economics IS a science.

I disagree about Libya and think Syria is yet to be determined.

Obama has done okay in Libya. Regardless of the number of tomahawks, NATO is definitely front and center and this is not a US-NATO war. Its great relief to not see any muslim country protests (that I know of) vilifying US (or NATO) on Libya.

Syria is interesting. I think the intent was to get Libya out of the way first and then focus on Syria ... not sure the number of Arab countries that have condemned Syria already but building consensus is the right way to do it vs go it alone.

Libya, Syria Show Obama In Way Over His Head | FoxNews.com

That's just a guy that is looking to fault Obama no matter what. He trashes him for intervening in Libya and not intervening in Syria. If Obama had done the opposite I'd bet this guy would have the same criticism in reverse.

Yup, looks as if Libya is done (e.g. hopefully the post mortem will limit killings to only top henchmen and no Iraqi-like lawlessness) and time to start focusing on Syria.

I hope Obama can (or wants/planning to) start organizing the other countries. Unfortunately, with Iran backing, problems Syria can cause in Lebanon vs Israel etc., this one will be a tougher nut for Panetta and CIA. It was before my time and I'm sure there are good reasons why we got rid of the policy, but I'm all for targetted assasinations ...

I'm a little surprised with the last sentence below, didn't realize that.

Syria's Assad warns against military intervention - World news - Mideast/N. Africa - msnbc.com

Interesting development, probably not coincidental. I speculate there is going to be some bad news coming out on the investigation.
Standard & Poor's President Reportedly Resigns | FoxNews.com

FWIW. I didn't see what the total $ would be. I would prefer to see the money go to some sort of "bailout/relief" of home owners who are underwater.

Parts of Obama jobs package coming into focus - Business - US business - msnbc.com

Payroll tax cut makes no sense considering we just had a massive debate over the deficit where we agreed to cut a ton of money. It doesn't feel like a fix for the entitlement problem is to cut what is currently funding it.

I've read through his patent reform ideas and they are shit. Doesn't get anywhere close to solving the problem.

The infrastructure stuff makes sense. Not sure on the school thing, but there are a lot of things that need to be upgraded. This should have been done 2 years ago. His jobs bill should almost be exclusively this. Just find necessary projects where we can enhance our infrastructure for 50+ years and do it. No pet projects, just real enhancements.

More tax breaks, even though he just got mad at the Repubs for refusing increases? Hypocritical much?

I'm trying to understand who exactly thinks this is a good argument. This statement just stinks of complete incompetency and being out of touch with the "little people". If we ever slip into despotism or some sort of widespread civil unrest, people will hang wealthy Democrats (save maybe for Matt Damon :) ) just as quickly as wealthy Republicans.


Hint...when the banking industry needs nearly $1T to stop from collapsing civilization as we know it...the problems are FAR WORSE THAN YOU CAN CALCULATE.

I understand what you're saying, but there were recent revisions to the growth rates for 2008/2009 that showed much more contraction than thought at the time of the first stimulus.

But I won't argue the point that the bankers that run the Treasury aren't connected to the millions of unemployed.

Right, but there are 2 fundamental disconnects from the President & his administration/advisers...and it has little to do with bankers (though they are certainly living in a different world and by different rules than the rest of us).

Was it really not obvious the country was in massive contraction mode? Did it not appear obvious that the jobs being contracted were the construction & tradesmen sectors? This is on the President & the crap his party wanted to work on instead of getting these people to work. If unemployment were at 8% or 7.5% right now with rising inflation, we'd have different issues to debate but people would be working and focused on increasing their personal wealth (to the extent they can) rather than just surviving. We'd be talking about how to reduce the cost of essentials instead of how f'd everything is.

I disagree. The stimulus and auto bailout were the first things done. Now there was plenty of talk at the time that it wasn't enough, but then again at that point the GOP blocked any idea of a bigger package with the filibuster.

I also don't think you can say that the lost jobs were mainly in construction and tradesmen. If you look at labor charts unemployment has been rather equally spread over all sectors. There are certainly plenty of people in construction and trades that need work, but there are also plenty of teachers, retail workers, etc. that need jobs.

I'm not sure there was anything legislatively that the Dems could have gotten passed due to their moderates and the GOP in the Senate. However, the big failure, IMO, is not having an agenda to fight for. I have no idea what the Dems would do if they could. Maybe if they had a plan they could convince the public that it's the right thing to do.

I do agree with this. If I recall correctly Obama wanted a larger stimulus package and had to negotiate down. Its disengenious for the GOP now to say it didn't work ... not to say Obama's original would have worked in the first place. I think the rootcause is the housing mess.

Complete anecdotal evidence, the building sector is WAY down. That is affecting everyone associated with it (architects, engineers, contractors, etc).

MONEY IS FREE! SPEND MONEY!

How hard is that concept?

Sure, we can find ways to spend it better, eliminate waste and all of that, but seriously if someone was offering you what is essentially free money, what would you do?

Give me some, and lets see. Call it an experiment. :)

So when the Dems sponsor & pass bad spending bills, that the Repubs vote object to & vote against anyway, then it is the Repubs fault because they didn't go along with it or agree to do more. I don't really follow how public talking points espoused by some/certain members of a party really has any bearing on the bill the Dems can & should be pushing.

The problem I see is that its always more convenient to point to how crazy the Repubs are & not blame the party that actually passed the bill...or blame them for not submitting a bill to vote because it might get filibustered. If that is of concern then let them try it & be held accountable to the voters for it as opposed to a platform of "we wanted to do more but the other guys are meanies who will vote it down so we won't even try & get an official record of it". That's lame & lightweight.

The real problem as I see it though, is that the Dems had (have) no idea how bad the economy really is, nor how to actually correct it. The Repubs don't either but they will have nobody to blame for that but themselves in 2012...for the bills passed (or not passed) since 2010. Rest assured...the Dems will get another shot at it.

Large businesses all over the US have been banking that cash, and not spending it on expansion, workers or company infrastructure. So, the money has been made available, the onus was given to spend, but the end result was that rainy day funds were filled and execs took huge bonuses.

I wholeheartedly agree the Dems need to stand for something, but your initial post was that the Dems should have passed different legislation. That wasn't going to happen. The agreed to stimulus was watered down from 1 trillion to 800 billion with @40% of that being inefficient tax cuts due to GOP and moderate Dem intransigence. It's not about blaming anyone, but that's what really happened.

And my point only point about the stimulus is that bad legislation is worse than no legislation which is why the Dems were voted out in large part, at least in my opinion.

But I guess the nuance I'm speaking to (in the first post you mentioned) is more about leadership. Its intangible in a sense...but its clear to me that we don't have it in the right positions. I actually think Hillary has it but I don't think Obama has it at all. And that is why the Repubs believe they can get away with being detractors, rather than working with him.

They had large advantages in both the House and Senate. They had a new President riding a populist surge. That's on them if they couldn't get something passed. Can't blame the Republicans for that.

The problem is that Obama told us it would work. He showed us charts on what it would do for unemployment. None of this happened the way he said. So he has no trust on the issue. He can't come out and say "this will help" when it was shown his previous estimates were complete shit.

I agree with spending, but I don't think he has anyone's trust on it, including mine.

BUT IT WILL TRICKLE DOWN!!!!!111

You're right. Money needed to be pumped into the country and instead the people who were given it cheap just sat on it. Lot of people saw this coming a mile away.

Yeah, including many random pop-economists on message boards I believe. I'm not sure how an administration could possibly have been more out of touch with what needed to be done. Which is why I both, was glad to see the Dems get kicked to curb in 2010, but saddened to see the Repubs come in as I know they won't solve anything either.

Yes and no. I wish they had pushed harder, but the GOP voted in a block to stop anything greater than the stimulus that was passed. The decision to filibuster everything really has made it nearly impossible to pass legislation. I don't see a failure in legislation so much as a failure of political will to push for something knowing the GOP would oppose. The Dems are far too willing to cave because of GOP opposition.

I had actually recalled seeing labor statistics showing near 20% unemployment for construction a little while back (maybe a year ago?). Given the massive drawback in housing construction, it also would seem to coincide with that. The rest of the sectors such as teachers, retail workers, etc. can be a chicken/egg problem as if 20% of a workforce are unemployed, then certainly nobody is buying retail to furnish the houses, paying taxes (and typically a higher rate for new construction) on the property to keep teachers employed, etc.

If you're the government, How do you boost the construction sector other than, say, infrastructure projects.

SI

Quote from Waters and NYT about attempts to spend a great deal of taxpayer's monies to create so few jobs. Another example of Stimulus of Good Intentions that reality did next to nothing real:

I am actually pro-green jobs (as I have ranted before), but those statistics hold for 'jobs' created across all categories of the stimulus... not just the supposed green sector. I believe ages ago someone even put up a news article in a chart in one of these threads about wasted money (in Delaware or something, been a couple years). At the time the numbers were shockingly bad across the bad even then, I would not be surprised if they are downright terrifying by now.

The stimulus did not work and would not work at any level of funding because it was used as a tool for politcal corruption, funneling millions into the hands of well linked people who did not even make an effort to turn it into jobs (it would have cut into the amount of the pie they would be able to steal outright).

This is why you have to have extremely clear and hard to game scenarios for federal spending for it to have an effect on the economy. You can't just create some massive subsidy that is 80-90% stolen to get 10% effect. You need to find one thing with clear goals and obvious transparency (build X number of oil pipelines or high capacity power transmission stations to shore up infrastructure) and watch it like a damn hawk to see it actually gets done. Instead we gave out billions to the corrupt segment of the construction industry (not to badmouth the good construction companies out there, but when no bid contracts start flying around you see a high number land in the hands of cousin Earl who doesn't even have workers, he just hires out a subcontract...).

Take all the vast amount of money and throw it into a tax incentive directly linked to domestic employment, it might look like a drop in the bucket (say 1-5 thousand per worker after you average it 150+ million ways) but those numbers would be big money for small and large businesses that hire a lot of workers. Even better, cut the loopholes and take the revenue from obvious political corruption (say trillion dollar tax holidays, the multi-billion dollar loopholes around executive compensation, or the ludicrious corp pork) and you can actually give out reasonably large sized per worker incentives.

Good news, you make up a portion of the incentive on the backend as those workers pay their individual income taxes. Even better, you cut the bleed on unemployment costs which will save further money. Even better you have actual employment figures so you get a nice stock rally (okay I have to point out where I get my cut somewhere along here).

For housing construction the best thing right now would be a massive rally in employment figures, because competition for workers will at least stabilize and probably grow wages, give people more certainty on future incomes, and let them buy houses. There is simply too much excess housing inventory, if you look at the numbers it is truly insane, even if we had high paying jobs at like 1-2% unemployment, some places have more inventory than even an ideal world could occupy.

Over capacity leads to price softness, the housing boom in construction was based on making insane returns over expenditures to actually building a house, it should be no surprise that the number of people involved in the industry grew dramatically, the inventory grew dramatically, and that the percentage numbers after a crash will be huge.

We do not want to restore the housing industry to its boom size, it actually needs to be a few degrees smaller, but all the pundits don't understand such mathematics. Sure you may have big double digit percentage declines, it actually should be expected, the sector is just overexpanded, no amount of subsidy (short of a bubble, yuck) will get it back to those numbers. And the efficiency on such spending would be really bad as well (it is possible to spend 2 dollars and only get 1 dollar of value... traditional microeconomics can show that at some point returns are marginal and those numbers conform to reality, not historical employment numbers).

We do need infrastructure spending, simply because we want to be competitive with other countries and in my opinion good infrastructure has a multiplier effect on economies (see Interstate system and the growth of the automobile, one of the bigger positive sum economic phenonmenons of the last century). Boost it by directly building that infrastructure, not shovel ready bullshit that is really just shoveling a pile of money to mobster Mel.

Thats exactly it...but as SportsDino said...not just digging holes to fill them back in projects, high speed rails to connect 2 cities that nobody wants to commute between (not that some HS rail isn't needed....just sayin its not always viable), or building more city halls. Projects that actually accomplish something.

That "something" in my mind is (and has been) energy infrastructure to facilitate energy independence. Not burying power lines for aesthetics or some crap...I'm talking about instituting new standards for energy which, I believe, will require a lot of retro-fitting of "fueling" stations (not necessarily gas), regional & national energy grid construction for increased load sharing/redundancy/supply from anywhere in the country, new energy source facility construction, or even the ability to fuel (or charge) our vehicles from this grid in the comfort of our home. And let's not get hung up on what the energy source is for now...so long as it isn't oil-based.

We have a society that loves powered things. We love our suburban homes with yards, we love our computers & home entertainment systems, we love our AC in the summer & heat in the winter, we love vehicles that can tell us where to go (if not bring us there). In short, we love the the entertainment & convenience that comes with having powered devices so why don't we make this cheaper, cleaner, & more sustainable for the future.

In order grow green energy sources, we are going to need an awful lot more high-voltage transmission lines, and square miles of wind generators and solar farms. But there are significant environmental opposition (as well as nimby) to all three such proposals. The reasons for the failures in reaching a critical mass is that everyone expects reliable energy and that means still being connected to the grid. Right now, solar is a niche market for the well-to-do (and even they are still rely on traditional sources).

Thats my understanding as well Bucc. Aren't you in the industry? Or did I have you confused with somebody else?

I know there is a lot of environmetal & nimby concerns but my thinking is that if you have the national & regional grids in place which can support high capacities of power sourcing, you can essentially source energy from anywhere, to anybody. Then you can allow the states/municipalities that are more welcoming to being a national/regional energy source to be the home for the best possible combination of cost, sustainability, environmental impact, etc. But the key is getting the over the top greenies out of the policy driver's seat, which is something the Dems won't do (i.e. the Tea Party of the left). Simply using today's technology (from what I understand of it) is better than doing nothing & continuing the coal/oil based power sourcing just due to the multiplicative effect it would have on the economy.

Somewhere amidst all this talk of housing & construction this note fits somewhere: Habitat for Humanity is now the 6th largest homebuilder in the U.S. As they continue to climb up the list, I have to think that the pressure on them to stop building from scratch & put more efforts toward rehabbing existing properties is going to increase.

Habitat builds more houses, moves into top 10 in U.S. *| ajc.com

Pretty good news.

Al-Qaeda's No. 2 Leader Killed In Pakistan. U.S. Official Says | FoxNews.com

I swear there are 100 hundred #2 and #3 leaders in Al Quaeda.

I won't complain if they're bogged down by excessive upper middle-management ;)

I guess you can't ever get rid of the #2 guy unless the main guy just goes streaking all by himself.

I used to help with that project back in Shreveport. The rebuilds I was apart of were always for elderly who had no desire to move. Not sure if that was a trend or not.

I know the Newburgh group has been doing rebuilds lately.

#2s are a little more rare, but we have killed at least 100 #3s. For the longest time, it was that any time some middle manager in Al Qaeda was killed that wasn't Bin Laden or al Zawahiri, they were somehow the #3.

SI

It's hard to win a terrorist championship without at least a couple #1 type leaders. You can't just cobble a staff together full of mid rotation guys.

Agreed on all those #3's. And don't forget all those country franchisee's #1's.

I'm gonna move to Azerbaijan and get on the leadership depth chart. Hopefully I won't flop and be known as the Shia Tim Tebow.

You would think there would be more press on this pending vote. Israel is against, US promises to veto etc.

I like Abbas and how he has kept his "part" quiet (for the most part I think). I don't know all details of the "statehood" but my inclination is to support the Abbas part at least.

Should be an interesting Sept 20.

Palestinians to present statehood bid to UN general assembly | World news | The Guardian

I'm rated as post-modern - moderate, liberal on social issues.

Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology - Pew Research Center

Not that good of a test, imo. Changing one answer can jump you two catagories; changing two answers can take you to an extreme. I did a control the first time and then changed 1 and then 2 answers the next two times.

This is gold in more than one way. :)

And far too black & white on many of the questions/statements.