On a lighter note, I got paid today!!! :rockwoot: :boobs:

That, no. On the other hand I will spread some blame to Obama for refusing to discuss any changes to that law passed 3 years ago that we now know delivers significantly less than promised, at a significantly higher cost than promised, and has been pretty much a complete disaster in implementation so far. I'll also spread some blame for refusing to discuss any potential cuts, Obamacare related or not, before a budget or debt ceiling increase is passed.

Inflation? America has increased our national debt by more than 70% over the last six years. That isn't inflation.

I haven't heard anyone say they refuse to raise the debt ceiling. What I have heard consistently though is people saying they want spending reductions to get the rate at which debt is growing under control before they will increase the debt ceiling.

We can make some cuts, sequestration pretty much proved that. Despite the post-apocalyptic vision the Obama administration and their lackeys in the media desperately tried to sell about sequestration the end result has ultimately been relatively painless. I fail to see the harm in trying to hammer out some additional cuts before we write another blank check for the next year or two.

The only reason the debt ceiling has to be raised so often is because congress refuses to pass anything long term. Theyre already talking about raising the debt ceiling until only February so we can do all of this again in 4 months. Congress passes budgets, not the president, if we dont have a budget its their fault.

If you want to reduce the budget then do it before the money is spent, dont talk about cutting back the day before bills are due.

Its been two weeks since signups started, and the actual coverage for the plans doesnt start until January. Neither you nor anyone else knows how well its doing. The Obamacare horse has left the barn, theres nothing to negotiate.

That's like saying that shooting your dog is a step in the right direction for controlling unwanted pet breeding. Now it may well screw you all on debt servicing costs, since there's talk of downgrading your Federal government from AAA.

Two points on that. The first is what EponXero said: How can you know the ultimate real costs or effectiveness of a programme when it hasn't even started?

The second is who will you blame for it not providing the promised services, when it was cut off at the knees by the opposition? A crippled programme will not have a hope in hell of providing anything close to what the original proposals promised.

And I recall the first pass of this idiocy, in which the Tea Party adherents were saying 'not a penny more.' It's rather immaterial, though, as you currently have a political hostage crisis.

The spending that increased the debt started under Bush. It was necessitated by a lack of controls on fiscal institutions that started decades back and hasn't been corrected by successive governments; both Republican and Democrat. Take a look at a graph of debt vs. year, corrected for the value of the dollar of any given year, and note when the majority of that debt took a big upswing. Odd how conservatives simply have different ways to waste your money, isn't it?

The Province of Ontario went through a microcosm of what you're experiencing, back in the '90s. The then-Premier started by spending his way out of a recession and then changed horses in mid stream, deciding to go for fiscal restraint and cut-backs. Either strategy has been proven to ultimately work but, unfortunately, only if you stick to your guns. His actions screwed our economy for a decade and it could have been even worse.

He says it all for me

[youtube]A3BHujm3cpY[/youtube]

He had me there, for a while, but then went off the rails a bit. The fact is that there was a deal in place, a contract if you will, that was vacated. That deal should have gone through, as phase one. You then start doing what you should have been doing for the last couple of years, which is getting spending more under control.

The rest of his points may be quite valid but they're serious issues that require both a fair bit of time, and voter involvement, to address.

Yes, take the money out of politics. How do you do this? By voting out liars. By voting out those who work only as part of a political machine, rather than doing the will of the electorate. The voters do that and as long as you have people who will vote based solely on what party a politician is a member of, that mess will never be fixed. Hidebound voters seem to be the majority, with a very small swing percentage making the ultimate decisions.

And the banking issue needs to be addressed. For one thing you need to follow our lead, in requiring that banks have more basic capital backing their investments. Reduce the amount of funny money and you limit the number of failures.

Those are long term goals though, not the immediate issue.

It isn't just the signup system, though that is a pretty good indication. They admitted things were going poorly months ago when they had to delay the employer mandate because they couldn't figure out how to enforce it after 3 years. At the same time in the interest of fairness they should have also delayed the individual mandate, but they wanted a political victory so they didn't. I believe plenty of people know exactly how well it is doing, but because the answer is poorly they aren't talking about it.

The Congressional Budget Office, a somewhat non-partisan agency, has changed their tune on what Obamacare will cost and how many people it will cover over the next 10 years. That's about as good of an estimate as we will see and is also the agency Obama depended on for his estimates when selling it to the American people.

Cut off at the knees? How so? They were working with effectively unlimited resources for the 3 years they had to build out the exchange website and that has been a clusterfuck. That may have been crippled by a lot of things, but none of them appear to be the opposition. I'm not aware of a single provision in Obamacare that hasn't been funded so far due to the opposition.

After six years of basically a blank checkbook under both Bush and Obama with mediocre results at best I think it is time to reign it in. The immediate economic danger of Fortune 500 companies failing was dealt with years ago. Agree or disagree with how it was done, it doesn't really matter.

The spending now is different and meant to build growth in the American economy. So far in my view and after years of this going on the results have been shitty. What I mentioned before doesn't help either, the roadshow that happens every time cuts are mentioned. The Democrats and the media went on a jag for months before sequestration about how devastating it would be if sequestration went in to effect. The end result barely moved the needle. I think we can make some cuts and I don't see pushing for them as an unreasonable position.

We've YET to see the actual damage it will cause...but it's starting

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/0...nthly-premium#