I'm sticking this little tidbit of news in here on purpose, don't move it.

[PotshotPolka]

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/03/a_dishonest_gimmicky_budget.html

 

Since a rare few of us happen to frequent the N&P section I'd thought I'd share this with the masses.

 

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WASHINGTON -- Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.

Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.

All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.

The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:

"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.

The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.

Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.

And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.

What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.

Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

 

 

/discuss.

 

 

In my opinion the article hits many points FOX, ABC, and all those other idiots following celebrities around have ignored, and its rather objective as well.

[jigglebelljr]

cool and all but wat is this thread for ?

[Chêvouÿx]

...

 

The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.

 

 

Some of those words lost me, I'm not going to lie. But if I understand this well, (and I'm trying to, so please correct me :/ ) the article is saying that Obama is not trying to help the economy, but rather change society? If so, how would society improve the economy and why change society?

 

 

---

 

cool and all but wat is this thread for ?

 

edit: This thread is for pure discussion. Potshot wants to hear people's opinions on the article and how it ties into the current president. Basically, if you want to involve yourself with this thread, learn politics and get up-to-date with current news.

[Frostbyte]

As for tolerating bad schools, I agree. I go to a pretty good public high school, with high FCAT scores (basically Florida's version of the standardized test). I can't count how many times my teachers have told me how the funding goes to the bad, ghetto schools that have terrible credentials and virtually no use for the funding to buy supplies like chemicals and biotech equipment and such. The solution? Send all of the bad kids to the good school, fuck up the test scores, back up the school buses, and increase the numbers of fights etc.. Now, I can't say that for every school, but that is what has been going on in my county.

[PotshotPolka]

I'm glad this thread got off to a healthy start.

 

 

Some of those words lost me, I'm not going to lie. But if I understand this well, (and I'm trying to, so please correct me :/ ) the article is saying that Obama is not trying to help the economy, but rather change society? If so, how would society improve the economy and why change society?

That would be the million dollar question. I can't say why, since I'm obviously not a member of the administration, but the scenarios people outline vary from his plans existing to spawn a new fascist/socialist government run by the antichrist himself, to a freaked out government realizing decades of mismanaging the economy is finally beginning to catch up to them, and they're throwing everything they (and the American taxpayer, and idiotic fool willing to actually buy government bonds) has at the inequities being formed. We can get at this in more detail later.

 

As for tolerating bad schools, I agree. I go to a pretty good public high school, with high FCAT scores (basically Florida's version of the standardized test). I can't count how many times my teachers have told me how the funding goes to the bad, ghetto schools that have terrible credentials and virtually no use for the funding to buy supplies like chemicals and biotech equipment and such. The solution? Send all of the bad kids to the good school, fuck up the test scores, back up the school buses, and increase the numbers of fights etc.. Now, I can't say that for every school, but that is what has been going on in my county.

 

So here's a question, if we simply privatized schools -granted they would be still be subsidized to some extent- would it not be more efficient to allocate funding to the students who excel in classes, rather than those that frequently skip and fail classes; regardless of their ethnicity or social status?

[Frostbyte]

So here's a question, if we simply privatized schools -granted they would be still be subsidized to some extent- would it not be more efficient to allocate funding to the students who excel in classes, rather than those that frequently skip and fail classes; regardless of their ethnicity or social status?

 

Yeah.

[Slavic]

So here's a question, if we simply privatized schools -granted they would be still be subsidized to some extent- would it not be more efficient to allocate funding to the students who excel in classes, rather than those that frequently skip and fail classes; regardless of their ethnicity or social status?

 

Problem with the complete privatization of schools is that there will be more undereducated students leaving high school. The smart kids with subsidized vouchers and the rich would be able to attend the top private high schools, while the poor and average would be have to rely on the low profit margin low standard high school that would most likely provide less of an education then a public school on a budget. A private high school that receives its profits from the poor community is not going to be hiring competent teachers, or adequate school materials.

 

So private schools: produces a higher percent of educated children, while at the same time increasing the percent of undereducated children. It will cut down on our taxes, but I can guarantee you there will be less students with GEDs and even more with hollow GEDs. Their are negatives to each system, you just have to pick and choose which adverse effects you can tolerate.

[PotshotPolka]

Problem with the complete privatization of schools is that there will be more undereducated students leaving high school. The smart kids with subsidized vouchers and the rich would be able to attend the top private high schools, while the poor and average would be have to rely on the low profit margin low standard high school that would most likely provide less of an education then a public school on a budget. A private high school that receives its profits from the poor community is not going to be hiring competent teachers, or adequate school materials.

 

So private schools: produces a higher percent of educated children, while at the same time increasing the percent of undereducated children. It will cut down on our taxes, but I can guarantee you there will be less students with GEDs and even more with hollow GEDs. Their are negatives to each system, you just have to pick and choose which adverse effects you can tolerate.

 

Correct, those are called externalities. Poor education/ lower standards of living have been known to result in higher criminal rates, lower productivity etc.

 

But it still begs the question of whose right is it to say who gets the money, and who doesn't? That's where this really ties into public opinion, and why the government earmarks funds.

[Slavic]

Correct, those are called externalities. Poor education/ lower standards of living have been known to result in higher criminal rates, lower productivity etc.

 

But it still begs the question of whose right is it to say who gets the money, and who doesn't? That's where this really ties into public opinion, and why the government earmarks funds.

 

noted.

 

I tend to favor privatization of schooling systems because it only provides significant benefits to those who are best able to utilize them. Private school voucher systems allow students who are motivated and exceptionally intelligent but living in a poor community the chance to excel and build off of their own skills and ambitions. Those students who don't take schooling seriously are going to receive the same kind of advantage in private schools as in public schools. My only concern is low economic private schools having a worse curriculum then our current public schools.

 

In either case, i'd rather my tax money be spent on voucher programs for students who have earned their right to a proper education.