3629 What debate?

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Money cannot buy love, but it can put you in a good bargaining position.

-------------------------------------------------------

Yeah.  The debate.  I yelled at Obama to talk faster, more forcefully, and please please throw in a few quotable lines among those long dissertations, just one would do for cripes sake!  I yelled at Romney to quit interrupting and stop with the pandering.  I yelled at Lerher to take control, damn it, do your job, stop letting Romney blow right over you!

I didn't learn much.  I'm left with a few questions, like does Romney know the difference between "compete" and "collude" when talking about businesses?  Given his background, I'd wager not.  He might even figure that without regulation and oversight, big business will feel a proper social responsibility to serve their public.  (Unfortunately, big business considers their public to consist only of shareholders.)

And how come nobody anywhere, not Obama last night (I was yelling at him to ask) nor commentators or columnists today, how come nobody has asked how Romney's plan of turning over a lot of federal functions to the states results in lower taxes?  Yeah, maybe it would reduce federal taxes if the federal government isn't paying that bill, but what is the result on state taxes?  How does it help me if my federal income tax drops by 20%, but my state income tax and sales tax double?  Why didn't Obama ask?

I forget exactly when it was, but a few decades ago a lot of social service programs (including medicaid, foodstamps,  education, and so on) were fully funded and administered by the states.  The result was that the quantity and quality varied enormously.  The secondary result was that people in need and dependent on a program moved to states that had better services - with the result that they overwhelmed the system in that state.  Federal involvement leveled the field.  At least, that's my impression.  Have we not learned from that?

Remember a while back when conservatives were agitating to privatize social security, turn it over to the stock market and other investment?  I was yelling then about nobody remembering why social security was started in the first place.  Hey, remember October of 1929, when folks who had saved all their lives suddenly found it had all disappeared, and they had nothing?  Social security was meant to ensure that nothing like that ever happened again, that no matter what happened on Wall Street, they would at least not starve.  So why on earth would anyone want to hang that safety net back on Wall Street?  Heh heh.  Fate in its wisdom saw fit to teach us again why not.  Notice nobody talks much anymore about privatization.

Romney says he'd halt funding of, among other things, Amtrak.  Yeah, Amtrak has some problems.  (So does the deteriorating highway system.)  Um, we desperately need better mass transit systems.   We don't need to kill off what little we have.  You can travel all over Europe by train.  You don't even need a car at all in England.  What the hell???

I just get so frustrated when people don't learn from history, and keep wanting to try things that we've already found don't work.  Hey, I have an idea - let's not declare war on anyone for a while!  Did you know that the recent wars have cost gazillions of dollars, all of which was BORROWED!  And then Romney's party didn't want to raise the debt ceiling, when it was Bush's personal wars that got it so high?  Does anyone else find it interesting that Romney wants to give the military more than they want?  Is there something he's not telling us?  (Why didn't Obama ask, for me?)  Is THAT his plan to increase employment - start another war and hire all the unemployed as gun-fodder?

Ah.  Stop.  I hope for more from the veep debate.  Biden won't be as polite, and Ryan won't be so cool.
.