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That's it.. I'm not voting for McCain...

BurlyShirley

Rex Grossman Will Rise Again
Jul 4, 2002
19,180
17
TN
Thanks for the warm welcome! And thanks for illustrating another commonly used form of fallacious reasoning: Ad hominen statements.

Instead of actually addressing a single point I made, you simply bypass the whole discussion by trying to discredit me with name calling. I'm ignorant? Really, show me how. I only half paid attention to my education? Give me an example of what I said that was inaccurate.

Hey, I’m certainly not above being wrong, and I actually appreciate being corrected so that I do have the facts strait, but you haven’t made any effort beyond name calling to do this.

It's amazing to me how many people resort to simple name calling instead of actually making a valid point.
:rofl:

still wrong.
 

BurlyShirley

Rex Grossman Will Rise Again
Jul 4, 2002
19,180
17
TN
Thanks for the warm welcome! And thanks for illustrating another commonly used form of fallacious reasoning: Ad hominem statements.

Instead of actually addressing a single point I made, you simply bypass the whole discussion by trying to discredit me with name calling. I'm ignorant? Really, show me how. I only half paid attention to my education? Give me an example of what I said that was inaccurate.

Hey, I’m certainly not above being wrong, and I actually appreciate being corrected so that I do have the facts strait, but you haven’t made any effort beyond name calling to do this.

It's amazing to me how many people resort to simple name calling instead of actually making a valid point.
You got it!!!!!!
Only took three tries.
 

1000-Oaks

Monkey
May 8, 2003
778
0
Simi Valley, CA
We were in serious danger of a major sea and airborne invasion that could have been mounted by Hussein at any moment before we took the war to him, after clearing it with his old buddy Dick Cheney.

Havent you people been listening? The man was a threat...
I know it's a new concept, but try to imagine random suicide bombers in Time's Square, movie theaters, rock concerts...bridge, rail & water supply sabotage, etc.

Or ask an Israeli, they're somewhat familar with these "non-threats".
 

Defenestrated

Turbo Monkey
Mar 28, 2007
1,657
0
Earth
I know it's a new concept, but try to imagine random suicide bombers in Time's Square, movie theaters, rock concerts...bridge, rail & water supply sabotage, etc.

Or ask an Israeli, they're somewhat familar with these "non-threats".
wait a minute!



 
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1000-Oaks

Monkey
May 8, 2003
778
0
Simi Valley, CA
"The rooster crows every morning before the sun comes up, therefore, the rooster causes the sun to come up."

<big snip>

As politically convenient as it is to latch onto false-cause reasoning when it suits your own political prejudices, it puts you in a position of ignorance when it comes to choosing a presidential candidate. It also makes you look a bit silly when you confidently and smugly put this type of fallacious reasoning on display in a public forum like this.
Hot damn, about time somebody with common sense has the balls to stand up to the circle-jerkers in this forum...logic and facts are a b*tch, huh?
:cheers:
 

NateLeoni

Chimp
Oct 17, 2008
3
0
well fire fox has a spell check built into the browser...
Good Lord! Please tell me that you guys aren't really that petty! Virtually everyone misspells words and makes typos from time to time, and there is just something feeble and a little bit pretentious about people who like to draw attention to everyone else&#8217;s grammar and spelling mistakes.
 

Defenestrated

Turbo Monkey
Mar 28, 2007
1,657
0
Earth
Good Lord! Please tell me that you guys aren't really that petty! Virtually everyone misspells words and makes typos from time to time, and there is just something feeble and a little bit pretentious about people who like to draw attention to everyone else&#8217;s grammar and spelling mistakes.
bgaarsoe are you saying that it took you 3 tries to correct a typo; and it was an extremely ironic typo at that...
 

JohnE

filthy rascist
May 13, 2005
13,430
1,949
Front Range, dude...
I know it's a new concept, but try to imagine random suicide bombers in Time's Square, movie theaters, rock concerts...bridge, rail & water supply sabotage, etc.

Or ask an Israeli, they're somewhat familar with these "non-threats".
Thats what I get for agreeing with you...sheesh...
 

ohio

The Fresno Kid
Nov 26, 2001
6,649
23
SF, CA
Thanks for the warm welcome!
You're welcome.

I actually appreciate being corrected
Well then today's your lucky day!
I'm stuck at home with a busted achilles, and so have nothing better to do than spend a Friday afternoon correcting you on the off-chance that you aren't just 1000-Oaks other sign-in, and are actually a new member that is somewhat different than the right wingnuts that show up every two weeks for 10 posts, claim to be open to argument, and then disappear when their feelings get butthurt.

"The rooster crows every morning before the sun comes up, therefore, the rooster causes the sun to come up."
No dude, everyone knows that daylight causes the sun to come up. Duh. The sun's afraid of the dark. That's why it also goes away just before dusk.

This is an example of a logical fallacy known as the false-cause fallacy. Another effective example of this type of fallacious reasoning is your statement above.
fallacious. nice word. da bitches get all fallacious on me.

Without offering any discussion about the current economic crisis or the economic landscape of the 90s, you conveniently conclude that Bush’s economic policies destroyed today’s economy and Clinton’s economic policies are responsible for the wealth generated in the 90s simply because their administrations coincided with these economic events.
I have a longer account in response to 1000-Oaks in another thread about how GWB didn't destroy the economy, he just avoided every opportunity to lift it out of the .com crash, let alone doing it in a sustainable manner. He also chose several routes that made a bad thing worse. See that thread.

Here are some of the details you could have mentioned that contributed to our current economic crisis:

Regulatory changes during the Clinton administration, aimed at strengthening Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), penalized traditional home loans and encouraged loans to poor and low-income families--aka sub-prime loans (heard that term before?).
This is something right wing pundits dug had to find, but the reality is that these loans are actually an insignificant portion of the sub-prime market. Even if they weren't, you could at best use this to nail the lender-borrower errors, but it has nothing to do with the major market collapse. That was driven by an outflow of money from the .com crash (which despite the bubble bursting still created tremendous value and capital ythat had to flow somewhere) to the highly-profitable sub-prime market. Why was it highly profitable? Extremely low fed rates and even lower oversight.

Over the past 8 years, the Democrats in congress took the spirit of the CRA to heart and pushed government sponsored Fannie May and Freddie Mac to make more of these sub-prime loans—ostensibly to help “poor” people realize the American dream.
Again, this is an insignificant proportion of the loans awarded.

With the same goal in mind, HUD eventually stepped into the picture and greatly increased the housing credits they provided to Fannie and Freddie for the purchase of such loans. Fannie and Freddie, being the largest mortgage broker in the country and having huge amounts of HUD money available to buy mortgages from other brokers created a ready market for sub-prime mortgages. This is what put the sub-prime train on the tracks and sent it on its way.
Speaking of false logic... HUD is again a very small proportion of the total loans, and I'm not sure you understand how their loans work. Almost by definition they couldn't have anything to do with this debacle.

Then you're somehow claiming that FM/FM are large therefore they were connected to HUD and "created a market." Say what now? I can't correct what I can't follow.

At the same time, the Fed continued to keep interest rates low to encourage borrowing. (This was a carryover from the dot-com implosion.) This encouraged borrowing of all types, including sub-prime loans.
Fed might set the rates, but this was "carry-over" from Bush's idiotic economic plans. Read the papers. He was criticized heavily at the time.

Mortgage-backed securities, although not new, also contributed: These securities essentially gave brokers the ability to package up these bad loans and send all of the risk associated with them down the line to someone else.
Correct.

Credit-default swaps in and of themselves may not have been a problem, but since they “insured” the bad mortgages that were being promoted by Fannie, Freddie and other brokers, they had the effect of establishing confidence in these risky investments, making them more palatable to investors. And since these “insurance policies” were unregulated and did not require that capital be set aside to satisfy claims, they greatly accelerated the collapse of the housing market when the collapse finally came. (Note: These credit-default swaps were not a Bush initiative as some have claimed.)
Correct. However, stricter regulation would have required the policies be asset backed or additionally insured. Stricter regulation that would be vetoed by Bush's office.

In the middle of all of this, Fannie Mae CEO and Democrat financial contributor Franklin Rains was getting rich to the tune of 90 million dollars using Enron-style accounting to inflate revenues to increase personal bonuses. He was also a big proponent of the sub-prime lending, again, because, in his words, it helped the “poor” realize the American dream. (Ironically, the end result really was trickle-up poverty.)
Rains and FM contributed to the right as well. Somehow because he's black, all of a sudden he's Obama's best friend...

Franklin Rains eventually got caught and caused the Bush administration to take notice. As a result, the Bush administration tried twice to gain more oversight over Fannie and Freddie, but both times, the proposed bills were universally supported by the Republicans in the house and the senate and rejected by the Democrats.
Show me the bills and the votes. If this was more than 2 years ago, it's a statistical impossibility. If it's more recent, I bet it's a very loose interpretation of the bill or what they were rejecting.

If either of these bills had gone through, we probably would not be facing a financial crisis today. (Remember that Fannie and Freddie own 70% of ALL mortgages and more sub-prime mortgages than all other brokers combined, so they were the most significant piece of this meltdown puzzle.)
(And then people like you come along and boil all of this down to, “Bush was in office at the time, therefore, it is his fault.”)[/QUOTE]
It's a solid effort and it works for the .com crash because he literally had just arrived in office and that was the cards he was dealt. However, he was in office before the problem of sub-prime lending even started and he was there when it happened. If you can foresee and avoid a (no, THE) major economic disaster over a period of 8 years, 6 of which with a rubber stamp congress, then yes it is entirely ****ing your fault.

And if you were to look into the Clinton years, you would see something similar: Many things contributed to the economic prosperity of the 90’s that had nothing to do with Clinton. Don’t get me wrong, I am not beating up on Clinton. He actually came into office with the goal of changing the left’s reputation for being fiscally irresponsible, and he accomplished this: He did a much better job of managing spending than Bush has. But he was also the beneficiary of the end of cold-war military spending (the peace dividend) and the unprecedented dot-com explosion, and this is key!
And Bush could have been the beneficiary of the shifting capital from the .com explosion. Face it, he screwed the pooch.

No matter how you try, you will not be able to establish a link between Clinton’s economic policies and the astounding growth of internet-based businesses during the dot-com boom. (This was an emerging technology boom.) Nor will you find a causal link between increased taxes and economic growth in the 90s, as you have implied above.
Clinton doesn't get credit for creating the internet boom. He gets credit for keeping it moving and using the inflow of cash wisely. It is the right time to raise taxes and get those revenues into the office. You won't find a causal link between increased taxes and economic growth, but you will find a causal link from shifting the tax burden UP to economic growth (see my posts in other threads for an explanation. This is not by definition true; just from our current tax curve). You will also find an extremely high inverse correlation between higher taxes and deficit spending. Try as they might, all those tax-lowering republicans can't lower spending, so it is goddamn irresponsible for them to mortgage my future on their false promises. If you're going to spend, you damn well better tax to bring in the revenue.

During the dot-com boom, many companies were doubling and tripling in value in a single year, and huge sums of money were being paid to the government in the form of capital gains tax and income tax. Clinton was again the beneficiary but not the cause of this remarkable, if unsustainable, growth.
Ignoring that money that stays in the market isn't taxed. It's only when it is liquidated that it is taxed. Ignoring that, I don't see your point.
 

ohio

The Fresno Kid
Nov 26, 2001
6,649
23
SF, CA
You should also note that for several years, economists and financial experts warned that the dot-com bubble was about to burst, and it did, near the end of the Clinton administration. Few Clinton supporters care to remember that this put our economy in a tail spin during the last year of Clinton's second term. Of course, Clinton was not responsible for this, but neither was Bush who ultimate got the blame.
See above. Bush didn't get the blame for the .com bubble bursting. He gets the blame for doing everything humanly possible to perpetuate human misery and economic stagnation in the wake of the bubble bursting. There was a tremendous amount of value generated in the bubble. The burst was relatively insignificant... we rode it out in about a year despite 9/11 and have been riding high on a much improved tech infrastructure ever since.

As politically convenient as it is to latch onto false-cause reasoning when it suits your own political prejudices, it puts you in a position of ignorance when it comes to choosing a presidential candidate. It also makes you look a bit silly when you confidently and smugly put this type of fallacious reasoning on display in a public forum like this.
Who ya votin' for junior?
 

Defenestrated

Turbo Monkey
Mar 28, 2007
1,657
0
Earth
JFK practiced what is known as demand-side economics, which is also a policy reflected in Obama's tax plans...

Reagan practiced supply-side economics (trickle down) which, are coincidentally is reflected in McCain's tax plan...

Now it will be a hard task proving the effectiveness of supply-side economics as, in many cases, the economic growth (not synonymous with an increased quality of life!) was triggered by other coincidental factors.
 
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1000-Oaks

Monkey
May 8, 2003
778
0
Simi Valley, CA
I'm stuck at home with a busted achilles, and so have nothing better to do than spend a Friday afternoon correcting you on the off-chance that you aren't just 1000-Oaks other sign-in, and are actually a new member that is somewhat different than the right wingnuts that show up every two weeks for 10 posts, claim to be open to argument, and then disappear when their feelings get butthurt.
Actually I REALLY try to avoid this forum - utter waste of time and electricity...but every few weeks I can't help look and see what kind of propaganda from the Huffington Post is being mindlessly regurgitated.

Has nothing to do with feelings being "butthurt" any more than when a dog whizzes on my truck tire; the dog is just doing his thing.
 

ohio

The Fresno Kid
Nov 26, 2001
6,649
23
SF, CA
"You won't find a causal link between increased taxes and economic growth, but you will find a causal link from shifting the tax burden UP to economic growth (see my posts in other threads for an explanation. . . .”

This is actually a bit intriguing to me. No one ever takes the tax curve into consideration when talking about this kind of stuff. JFK, for example, substantially reduced taxes in certain tax brackets and stimulated economic growth, which ultimately lead to increased tax revenue. Although counter intuitive, this is a well-known phenomenon. But, you obviously couldn't ride this idea all the way down to zero taxes. No taxes means no tax revenue, regardless of economic growth. Please send me the link to your post.
Thanks for the long reply. I won't hit on it all, but I will quickly reply to this. There's nothing counter-intuitive about either trickle-down/up, nor about demand/supply-side econ, in EITHER direction. They're each just opposite slopes on the same curve. The laffer curve makes perfect sense. The issue is that we just on't know where on the curve we are. Republicans insist that we are on the high-tax side, yet every time they lower taxes, we lose revenue. Democrats insist we are on the low side, and incredibly every increase in taxes over the last 40 years (not just clinton and .com bubble) has been accompanied by increased revenues. Similarly with trickle down/up, we all agree the the curve has a peak, but republicans think that we are overburdening the rich, yet every shift down of tax burden has been accompanied by economic slowdown, while every shift up has accompanied economic acceleration. The point of a curve/peak is that I'm not saying we should shift 100% of the burden to the wealthy, but to find the peak you keep shifting until it causes flight or slowdown... one step back is your peak (for a given time/situation).

Arguments for why consumer spending rather than increased investment are the true economic engine may be hard to find as a white paper (but I will dig for something after this post), since at this stage it is an accepted fact by both liberals and conservatives. This Bush's tax refund, which was as progressive a tax as is possible - pretty much straight wealth redistribution. The timing and amount was wrong, but the principle was right... money in the pockets of middle class and poor is much more likely to be spent than in the pockets of the rich, and that stimulates the economy. History has proven again and again that lowered cap gains has little effect on the economy, while lowered tax burden for the middle class has a major effect.
 

ohio

The Fresno Kid
Nov 26, 2001
6,649
23
SF, CA
Here you go... Ahead of the Curve is apparently a book about this and sounds like it is written for the non-economist. Here's an executive summary:
http://www.aheadofthecurve-thebook.com/08-04.html
http://www.aheadofthecurve-thebook.com/index.html

Essentially I'm describing trickle-up, although it would be inaccurate to claim that trickle-up is just accepted as fact. To be clear, what is accepted as fact is that consumer spending is the most effective lever for economic growth. Trickle up argues that putting more money than we currently are into the lower classes will lead to more consumer spending and return more economic growth than the cost of the investment.