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Thorgi Duke of Frisbee
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  1. 1. Death Penalty

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Interesting, but I have two problems with their methods:

 

1) It's unfair to say the President has "broken" a promise when it requires congressional action, he attempted to get them to do it, and they refused.

 

2) It's unfair to compare the promises of the GOP as a whole to the promises of a single person (the President). The GOP is a group of people and they can't control what each other does. They're not a singular entity that makes singular decisions.

 

It reminds me of when Politifact said John Stewart was lying ("Pants on fire") when he used information from a History Channel special. The source of the information was clear in the broadcast (they played a small clip) and it's not an unreasonable source to rely on.

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http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/05/21/120521taco_talk_talbot?mbid=social_tablet_t

New Yorker hits the nail on the head.

"And, eventually, the Court will do the right thing on same-sex marriage, just as the President did last week. As in the Loving decision, the Court will reaffirm that the “freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” And it will finally uphold that freedom for gay and lesbian Americans."

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Time and Newsweek are just resorting to sensationalism to sell their advertising circulars.

 

Also: Obama is not a leftist socialist. The core idea of Obamacare, the individual mandate (at least for catastrophic coverage), was developed and advocated by the Heritage Foundation in the 80's, for heaven's sakes. Generally, the government forcing folks to transfer their wealth to private enterprise is antithetical to socialism. Obama does not push for mass nationalization of private industry in any form common to socialist philosophy. When it comes to the economy, Obama is a centrist who pushes certain regulations, but regulatory regimes are not inherently socialist. He *is* a market interventionist, which socialists are as well. But calling all interventionists socialists is like calling all Christians Catholic; the categories overlap, but are not the same. Indeed, socialist market intervention would be very different than anything proposed by Obama or the Democrats.

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http://www.forbes.co...vidual-mandate/

 

Just because Heritage supported it doesn't mean they were right. In their own words:

If citations to policy papers were subject to the same rules as legal citations, then the Heritage position quoted by the Department of Justice would have a red flag indicating it had been reversed. . . . Heritage has stopped supporting any insurance mandate.

Heritage policy experts never supported an unqualified mandate like that in the PPACA [ObamaCare]. Their prior support for a qualified mandate was limited to catastrophic coverage (true insurance that is precisely what the PPACA forbids), coupled with tax relief for all families and other reforms that are conspicuously absent from the PPACA. Since then, a growing body of research has provided a strong basis to conclude that any government insurance mandate is not only unnecessary, but is a bad policy option. Moreover, Heritage’s legal scholars have been consistent in explaining that the type of mandate in the PPACA is unconstitutional."

 

 

Obama supports redistribution of wealth which is the whole basis of socialism. It's the whole basis of the death tax and his taxes on the wealthy. Just because they're called "taxes" doesn't make them any less socialistic in their ideals. He's pretty clear on his support for redistribution.

 

Again, I am not opposed to regulation. I am opposed to redistribution and unnecessary governmental control of the markets.

Edited by Yantelope V2
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No, the basis of socialism is worker/state/common control of the means of production, not every single means of redistributing wealth. If all redistribution is socialism, then patently non-socialist redistributions (redistribution for the benefit of the wealthy or capitalists) would be socialism. So eminent domain for the benefit of private interests, like when a municipality rezones a poor neighborhood of single-family homes into an industrial zone for the benefit of a new manufacturing plant, would amount to socialism under your rubric. That is simply not socialism even though it is redistribution.

 

Then again, all taxes are redistribution of wealth, too, and a great many laws that aren't taxes are designed not to redistribute, exactly, but rather to allocate the distribution of wealth.

 

Just because Heritage supports something *usually* means that it's wrong. It also usually means that it's not socialist.

Edited by Mr. GOH!
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I'm sorry, let me rephrase, the type of over taxing the rich to give to the poor type of redistribution that Obama advocates is socialistic in nature. The idea of the individual right to health care is socialistic. You might not think that all socialism is bad but it's pretty clear that Obama is socialistic in nature. He'd love to have the government control the means of production. It's just the methods he uses to gain control are different. Rather than the traditional military state he does it through "regulations" and "taxes". It's a slow and steady change over to socialism and it doesn't mean America will be instantly turned into a rotting cess pool. It means that the standard of living will continue to decrease for every American much like the trend we are seeing in the EU right now. They sky isn't falling with Obama and socialism. It's just making life a little less comfortable one day at a time until eventually our economy implodes.

 

Edit: I mean, crap, you don't even have to look overseas. Just look at the failure of liberalism at the state level.

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-state-budget-20120515,0,1532582.story

Edited by Yantelope V2
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Well, the recession was a direct result of the housing bubble and bad financial decisions and "creative accounting". That bubble bursting was something you can blame both Republicans and Democrats for as there are many of them on record saying they didn't want to be the ones to pop the bubble. I think Barney Frank even said he wanted to "roll the dice" on fannie may and freddie mac. That was a failure of regulation for sure brought about only by initial government intervention during the Clinton era.

 

That aside it didn't really have anything to do with the growing federal debt or budget defects. I think that problem will be far worse because you can't just work the bad money out of the system. You have to either eliminate many entitlements which will make a lot of people very upset (like the protests in Greece) or you have to crank up taxes and still cut a ton of entitlements and everyone makes less money while financing the debt. So really we're talking about a completely different animal than a typical economic market bubble.

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It's a slow and steady change over to socialism and it doesn't mean America will be instantly turned into a rotting cess pool. It means that the standard of living will continue to decrease for every American much like the trend we are seeing in the EU right now. They sky isn't falling with Obama and socialism. It's just making life a little less comfortable one day at a time until eventually our economy implodes.

 

Quite, the economic problems we're seeing worldwide has everything to do with a too controlled economy and nothing to do with capitalism run wild.

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Can I just say for the 800th time that I'm not against regulation? The aforementioned housing bubble was an example where the government should have stepped in and shut down the selling of bad mortgage backed securities and there are plenty of records showing that they knew it was a problem way ahead of time.

Edited by Yantelope V2
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Also the issue with Greece isn't being a socialist state, it's an issue with being part of the Euro. Its currency is controlled by several other nations which severely impairs it's ability to manoeuvre in cushioning the effects of the recession. America controls it's currency and therefore has wriggle room that Greece lacks. Considering both america and europe went into recession and some european nations are heavily socilised and america most deifently isn't we can quite easily rule out "sociliasm" as the deciding factor in "why the economy has gone tits up".

 

The world overall is just going to have to grin n bear it. Money is fucked up, it won't magically fix itself over night and cock blocking fixes or blaming it on folks based on whether they're an elephant or a donkey doesn't really help matters.

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