Suit, either you didn't notice the hole in my argument or you chose to cut me some slack.
I'll address that and your latest post when I have more time. We might not disagree as much as you think. Good debate.
Suit, either you didn't notice the hole in my argument or you chose to cut me some slack.
I'll address that and your latest post when I have more time. We might not disagree as much as you think. Good debate.
Since I built my own home, at least I thought I did, and it happens to be by a road does that mean I now live in government housing?
Give a lib a fish--he eats for a day
Teach a lib to fish--he is back the next day asking for more free fish.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Wallace,
I see something that I consider to be a glaring hole in your argument, tho' I suspect it's not the hole you're referring to:
Comparing and contrasting what Romney says during an election year does nothing to illuminate the *conservative* position because Romney isn't a conservative, rarely says anything that might be construed as conservative, and doesn't have any conviction or credibility on the rare occasion that he does.
But more to the point, I think you're trying to read something into Obama's statement that's not actually supported by the context of the speech or his public statements/ policy positions up until now. All of the evidence supports the position that Obama himself doesn't agree with your interpretation. He really truly *is* ideologically opposed to free markets; particularly the Darwinian reality of winners and losers that it creates. He has never passed on the opportunity to declare that position.
The argument Obama provided last week wasn't an aberration. He was simply reiterating the same point he's repeated many times over the course of his career; that the reason America has been prosperous over the years isn't our freedom to innovate, but our "cooperation" (particularly infrastructure and government "assistance"). This argument is as unoriginal as it is logically unsound, bit it *is* his argument.
"You've heard people brag about 'being in the zone'. They don't know what the Hell being in the zone is about. I played in the NFL for 15 years and I was only in the zone that one time." - "Mean" Joe Greene on the 1974 playoff victory over Oakland
Give a lib a fish--he eats for a day
Teach a lib to fish--he is back the next day asking for more free fish.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
"You've heard people brag about 'being in the zone'. They don't know what the Hell being in the zone is about. I played in the NFL for 15 years and I was only in the zone that one time." - "Mean" Joe Greene on the 1974 playoff victory over Oakland
I didnt read anywhere he said goverment built your business? If you built your home did you do it alone? No of course not, where did you get the materials, the tools, how did you transport them, did you do all work yourself, laying concrete, electrical work, plumbing, did you inspect the house yourself to make sure its up to code? Businesses flourish in this country due to our system they do not do it alone, business rely on other businesses, consumers, banks, and some yes even goverment money. You can twist obamas words all you want but it is a fact that businesses do not build on their own.
"You've heard people brag about 'being in the zone'. They don't know what the Hell being in the zone is about. I played in the NFL for 15 years and I was only in the zone that one time." - "Mean" Joe Greene on the 1974 playoff victory over Oakland
"With love, with patience, and with Faith
....She'll make her way" ~ Natalie Merchant
Businesses are not successful without goverment in some way, that is a fact. businesses do not build their own roads that allow trucks and consumers to reach their locations, government builds those roads, employs police forces to make for a safe shopping enviroments. No businesses succeeds without the help of government along the way, i dont undestand how this is a daming statement.
I think most people are pretty OK with government providing basic infrastructure (roads & highways, etc.), protecting us from our enemies and from one another and being a good alternative to anarchy.
Although I don't think that is the only way Obama's sees governments role....
"With love, with patience, and with Faith
....She'll make her way" ~ Natalie Merchant
Really? A mistake?
I don't think it takes a genius to figure out that Obama believes that government should be responsible for creating jobs and growing the economy by redistribution of wealth. You know, taking what belongs to one by force and giving it to another to whom it does not belong. Obama's belief in the role of government is evidenced by how incredibly much our bloated, wasteful and unsustainable government meddles in far more than providing basic infrastructure and protecting us from our enemies and one another.
So sorry, I don't see how anything is taken out of context if you put it in the context of his actual actions running this country (into the ground)
"With love, with patience, and with Faith
....She'll make her way" ~ Natalie Merchant
"You've heard people brag about 'being in the zone'. They don't know what the Hell being in the zone is about. I played in the NFL for 15 years and I was only in the zone that one time." - "Mean" Joe Greene on the 1974 playoff victory over Oakland
Really? Obama is running this country into the ground? Its not corporations shipping jobs overseas moving all our manufacturing plants overseas? It wasnt banks handing out loans like candy to people who couldnt afford them and basically collapsed the housing market? No your right its Obama who did all this? had we elected Mccain we would be doing fantastic? I am not an obama supporter nor did i vote for him, but im also not going to sit here and blame obama for the problems that this country is facing. Yes he is part of the problem and so is congress and the past presidents .
Give a lib a fish--he eats for a day
Teach a lib to fish--he is back the next day asking for more free fish.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Do I feel capitalism, free markets and competition are running this country into the ground? No.
Perhaps if the government spent less time over regulating and spent more time on proper oversight and enforcement of basic laws... but that is another issue.
So back to the original topic...
Yes, it is my opinion Obama is running this country into the ground and put the last nail in the coffin.
Tell me Dawg, On a scale of 1 to 10...how would you rate president Obama's performance the last 4 years?
Do you feel he has lived up to his promises?
Have his policies made this country better or worse in your opinion?
Last edited by GBMelBlount; 07-22-2012 at 10:08 PM.
"With love, with patience, and with Faith
....She'll make her way" ~ Natalie Merchant
Rating 1 to 10 lol ok 5 i guess
Policies which policies, some we wont know how they affect the country till they come about. Policies are not put into place strictly by the president congress must shoulder the blame also.
has he lived up to political promises? No but but politicians rarely do.
This country was not run into the ground in the last 4 years, This has been happening well before obama took office. Im not making a case for obama im simply saying blaming obama for the country's current state is narrow minded. Do you really think the problems of this country could be solved with our current system of government regardless of who was president? No it cant we have a government full of career politicians who are being greased by corporate lobbyists and their sole concern is not the country but getting re-elected. Its been heading down this path for awhile corporate profits soar while unemployment rises, why? Vote Obama out vote romney in does it really matter, you still have the same idiots in congress surronded by the same lobbyist , all you have done is changed the figurehead.
One policy that you can see the immediate effect is obamacare.
Get rid off it and small business's will start hiring and expanding without the worry of being fined/taxed out of existence.
And how much have your insurance premiums gone down since?
Give a lib a fish--he eats for a day
Teach a lib to fish--he is back the next day asking for more free fish.
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
Your right, part of the problem for sure, but again it does not get passed without congress. Obamacare could certainly be amended and tweeked, I think the biggest hurdle is bringing the overseas jobs and manufacturing back to the us. My point is the damage done to this country is not the work of one man in the past 4 years.
The hole in my argument I was referring to is that I said when it comes to the economy, liberals and conservatives want the same thing but have different philosophies on how to achieve it. That's not really true. They don't want the same thing. Conservatives believe that the money you earn is yours, and that there's nothing wrong with earning as much as you can. Liberals rail against that as greed. Those basic concepts lead to much different philosophies when it comes to what liberals and conservatives want from the economy.
-------------------------------
I've said about all I can say on this subject. There's no doubt Obama believes in big government and that government is just as important (if not more important) than businesses. But it's ludicrous to think that he believes that owners didn't create their businesses. It was a poorly worded sentence, and if you listen to the audio, he stumbles in the middle of the sentence. I'm going to present this argument one final time. Here's the sentence in question:
If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
Now lets include the previous sentence for context, change "that" to what I think he's really referring to, and see if it doesn't make more sense:
Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build those roads and bridges. Somebody else made that happen.
That makes much more sense and is exactly what he meant. It fits perfectly into the context of everything else he said in the speech ... nobody succeeds all on their own. Businesses aren't created in a vacuum.
Corporations are shipping jobs overseas because the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Liberals fail to realize a very BASIC concept of economics, which is, ...in the end, corporations do not pay taxes. Businesses have to make a profit...so the higher they are taxed, the more they will pass off that tax to consumers in the form of higher priced goods. If the tax is high enough, so that the goods would be priced out of the consumers willingness to buy them...then the corporation will look at cutting expenses in some other form...often by moving jobs to countries that are more cost effective.
The culprits responsible for the housing market collapse were Democratic senators Barney Frank and Christopher Dodds. The passing of the Dodds Frank Financial bill was opposed by Bush administration who was trying to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac....all the while Franks and Dodds pulled in over 21 million dollars in donations from PACS and the employees of financial related firms.It wasnt banks handing out loans like candy to people who couldnt afford them and basically collapsed the housing market? No your right its Obama who did all this? had we elected Mccain we would be doing fantastic?
In 2008 Franks was saying: " I think this is a case where Fannie and Freddie are fundamentally sound, that they are not in danger of going under. They’re not the best investments these days from the long-term standpoint going back. I think they are in good shape going forward."
...and who was correctly and honestly predicting the collapse of the housing market? in 2005 John McCain....Who Obama claimed knows nothing of economics...predicted that if the government didnt reign in Fanny Mae, and Freddie Mac...they would would go belly up and force us into near depression. (All this is public record) McCain went to the senate floor in 2005 and was ridiculed by the left.
It might not be the President you should blame ...but rather the liberal policies and corrupt atmosphere of congress....of which he is intertwined.
"I believe the game is designed to reward the ones who hit the hardest. If you can't take it, you shouldn't play"
-- Jack Lambert --
I'd say Clinton played a large role as well. VERY early in his Presidency, he was overly concerned about his legacy and decided that the best way to secure it would to be known as the President that put the most Americans into homes (whether they could afford them or not). It started when he revised the Community Reinvestment Act in '93 and never really stopped during his presidency. They also held a gun to the banks heads with the Riegle-Neal Act, which was passed making compliance with The Community Reinvestment Act a prerequisite for banks to expand, make acquisitions or operate in more than one state.
He wanted to find "creative ways to make home ownership affordable for all".
That's not the American dream. To artificially put people in homes they can't afford just so they feel better.
Fire Goodell
Also, in response to Steeldawg, I'll let Krauth answer:
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/charle...s-all-1.321841
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13
WASHINGTON: And who might that somebody else be? Government, says Obama. It built the roads you drive on. It provided the teacher who inspired you. It “created the Internet.” It represents the embodiment of “we’re in this together” social solidarity that, in Obama’s view, is the essential origin of individual and national achievement.
To say all individuals are embedded in and the product of society is banal. Obama rises above banality by means of fallacy: equating society with government, the collectivity with the state. Of course we are shaped by our milieu. But the most formative, most important influence on the individual is not government. It is civil society, those elements of the collectivity that lie outside government: family, neighborhood, church, Rotary club, PTA, the voluntary associations that Tocqueville understood to be the genius of America and source of its energy and freedom.
Moreover, the greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective.
Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure — roads, bridges, schools, Internet — off which we all thrive.
Absurd. We don’t credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein’s manuscript to the Annalen der Physik. Everyone drives the roads, goes to school, uses the mails. So did Steve Jobs. Yet only he conceived and built the Mac and the iPad.
Obama’s infrastructure argument is easily refuted by what is essentially a controlled social experiment. Roads and schools are the constant. What’s variable is the energy, enterprise, risk-taking, hard work and genius of the individual. It is therefore precisely those individual characteristics, not the communal utilities, that account for the different outcomes.
The ultimate Obama fallacy, however, is the conceit that belief in the value of infrastructure — and willingness to invest in its creation and maintenance — is what divides liberals from conservatives.
More nonsense. Infrastructure is not a liberal idea, nor is it particularly new. The Via Appia was built 2,300 years ago. The Romans built aqueducts, too. And sewers. Since forever, infrastructure has been consensually understood to be a core function of government.
The argument between left and right is about what you do beyond infrastructure. It’s about transfer payments and redistributionist taxation, about geometrically expanding entitlements, about tax breaks and subsidies to induce actions pleasing to central planners. It’s about free contraceptives for privileged students and welfare without work — the latest Obama entitlement-by-decree that would fatally undermine the great bipartisan welfare reform of 1996. It’s about endless government handouts that, ironically, are crowding out necessary spending on, yes, infrastructure.
What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all-giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her gravesite.
Julia’s world is totally atomized. It contains no friends, no community and, of course, no spouse. Who needs one? She’s married to the provider state.
Or to put it slightly differently, the “Life of Julia” represents the paradigmatic Obama political philosophy: citizen as orphan child. For the conservative, providing for every need is the duty that government owes to actual orphan children. Not to supposedly autonomous adults.
Beyond infrastructure, the conservative sees the proper role of government as providing not European-style universal entitlements but a firm safety net, meaning Julia-like treatment for those who really cannot make it on their own — those too young or too old, too mentally or physically impaired, to provide for themselves.
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.
Fire Goodell
Suitanim
Also, in response to Steeldawg, I'll let Krauth answer:
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/charle...s-all-1.321841
“If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
— Barack Obama, Roanoke, Va., July 13
Limited government so conceived has two indispensable advantages. It avoids inexorable European-style national insolvency. And it avoids breeding debilitating individual dependency. It encourages and celebrates character, independence, energy, hard work as the foundations of a free society and a thriving economy — precisely the virtues Obama discounts and devalues in his accounting of the wealth of nations.
What divides liberals and conservatives is not roads and bridges but Julia’s world, an Obama campaign creation that may be the most self-revealing parody of liberalism ever conceived. It’s a series of cartoon illustrations in which a fictional Julia is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all-giving government of bottomless pockets and “Queen for a Day” magnanimity. At every stage, the state is there to provide — preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s on her own is at her gravesite.
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/charle...s-all-1.321841
Krauthammer
So you give Obama a rating of 5 out of 10 in his job performance as President of the United States?
Obama's belief system (and governing) runs contrary to every belief of the founding fathers of our country.
So tell me what things Obama has done you agree with?
What do you feel he has done that has made this country better?
Obamacare?
Stimulus?
I am completely baffled here.
"With love, with patience, and with Faith
....She'll make her way" ~ Natalie Merchant
Wallace,
I understand your argument completely. I simply disagree with your conclusion.I'm going to present this argument one final time. Here's the sentence in question:
If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.
Now lets include the previous sentence for context, change "that" to what I think he's really referring to, and see if it doesn't make more sense:
Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build those roads and bridges. Somebody else made that happen.
That makes much more sense and is exactly what he meant. It fits perfectly into the context of everything else he said in the speech ... nobody succeeds all on their own. Businesses aren't created in a vacuum.
I'm taking his words in context of his entire speech and entire career, not just the preceding sentence. If your conclusion was correct, there'd have been no point in his bothering to give the speech.
His point from the entire speech (as well as countless others where he stayed on message) is that successful people owe their success to the government and should therefore pay whatever he deems to be "their fair share" in taxes.
I believe that his entire argument is a load of fallacious populist bullshit, but it *is* his argument.
This conclusion is inescapable regardless of whether we attribute that one sentence to "bridges" or "businesses", with or without the previous sentence, or even ignoring the speech in it's entirety.
"You've heard people brag about 'being in the zone'. They don't know what the Hell being in the zone is about. I played in the NFL for 15 years and I was only in the zone that one time." - "Mean" Joe Greene on the 1974 playoff victory over Oakland
In keeping with a theme of real World examples, I have a client who is a farmer. I stopped by this morning on the way in to pick-up a check*, and she always gives me some fresh produce to take home. They are up against it because of rain, but I always ask how things are in general just so I know what the barometer for small business is reading in general.
Bear in mind, this woman has no idea what my political background of leaning is. Today she told me they are very worried. Seems a NEW regulation is coming down from one of the dozens that regulate farms and food about food safety. They have a wholesale contract with a fairly large regional grocer, and, in order to maintain that relationship, they will have to be in compliance. This is, in effect, another unfunded mandate, things this farm will have to pay in order to meet some ephemeral benchmark in order to, in turn, stay in compliance with regulations mandated upon this supermarket. There is nobody to pay for it but them. The supermarket won't pay for it, nor will the government agency demanding it. She says this, coupled with the possibility of losing their corn due to drought (although corn is Federal subsidized, they don't receive a penny), will break them. GENERATIONS of farmers put out of business by federal regulations and mandates.
The government didn't help these people. Ever. All the government has done is raise their taxes, and keep slapping regulation after regulation after regulation on them. And they are going to go under. A family farm.
*For advertising. Which they love. By their estimates, my advertising returns about 15-1 for them...just in case anyone tries to tell me I'm a parasite or something.
Fire Goodell