• Please read the Announcement concerning missing posts from 10/8/25-10/15/25.
  • This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

How Obama will kill the GOP dead: the "pork" issue

H

HelloDollyLlama

Active member
Joined
Jan 28, 2009
Messages
277
Reaction score
44
Gender
Undisclosed
Political Leaning
Undisclosed
Here is the stump speech Obama will use to kill Republicans in the 2010 Senate races, and in the 2012 presidential election:

In February 2008 I signed the stimulus bill which has created 3 million jobs and saved our country from disaster.

If you remember, the Republican party, almost unanimously, opposed it, claiming it was “pork”, or “porkulus”, which isn’t even a word.

So where was the pork?

The bill had 204 billion in tax cuts for workers, home buyers, car buyers, college expenses, AMT taxpayers.
77 billion for disabled veterans, the unemployed, and recipients of Social Security and Supplemental Security.
54 billion for states to invest in schools; another 5 for states to keep up payments such as police and firemen.
51 billion for roads, rails, bridges, clean water, internet infrastructure, construction and computer purchases for businesses.
21 billion for health care for the unemployed, the poor, and for medical information technology and research.
7 billion for police departments, Homeland Security and airport screening.

So…a mountain of tax cuts for taxpayers, and money for policemen, firemen, border patrolmen, veterans, teachers, doctors, schools, roads, bridges.

So, Republicans…where was the pork in all that?

Then the Republicans tried to stonewall a health care plan which has already saved us hundreds of billions of dollars by breaking up the health insurance monopoly, and prevented thousands of needless deaths and bankruptcies.

They said it was pork.

Pork??

These are the same Republicans who gave themselves an early Christmas in December 2003, in the form of the biggest pork bill ever, including an indoor rain forest for Senator Chuck Grassley, a museum for Ted Stevens, and a swimming pool in the hometown of Representative Jim Gibbins. All while we were running a 400 billion dollar deficit.

These are the same Republicans who set an all-time record in 2005, funding 13,000 pork projects. Ted Stevens alone got a billion dollars for 100 projects in Alaska, including the Bridge to Nowhere that Palin campaigned for and then lied about, and pork for Don Young and his wife. All that while dragging their feet on repairing the damage from Katrina and getting real armor to our soldiers in Iraq.

These are the same Republicans who gave billions to their cronies at Haliburton and Blackwater, with no oversight – the same people whose product defects killed 13 of our soldiers by electrocution.

These are the same Republicans who launched the “K Street Project”, an entire institution dedicated to Republican-run lobbying and pork, the effort which brought Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff to fame.

These are the same Republicans who gave the presidential nomination to John McCain, who has spent a couple of years campaigning for and against earmarks simultaneously – and getting a free pass from the media. Sarah Palin did the same thing – fight for earmark money while campaigning against earmarks.

So you, the American people, have seen what they did with your tax money, and you’ve seen what I did with your money. So now you know what to do – give me a 60-man majority in the Senate, so we don’t have to worry about their endless obstructive tactics again. Then send me back to the White House for another four years, so you can have leaders who spend your taxpayer money on you, instead of on themselves.
 
Let's look at your first claim:

The bill had 204 billion in tax cuts for workers, home buyers, car buyers, college expenses, AMT taxpayers.
Click to expand...

Tax cuts for workers? $13/week... don't spend it all in one place.

Tax cuts for home buyers? Nope

Tax cuts for car buyers? Nope

Tax cuts for college expenses? Will have to research that one.

Tax cuts for AMT taxpayers? Yep, I will give them credit for that.

I'm sure the rest of the list will yield the same results.
 
HelloDollyLlama said:
Here is the stump speech Obama will use to kill Republicans in the 2010 Senate races, and in the 2012 presidential election:.....
Click to expand...
Take a break from the Kool Aide for a minute and ask yourself how Japan did after trying the same thing about ten or twelve years ago. :cool:
 
Go back and read the actual bill.


Gill said:
Let's look at your first claim:



Tax cuts for workers? $13/week... don't spend it all in one place.

Tax cuts for home buyers? Nope

Tax cuts for car buyers? Nope

Tax cuts for college expenses? Will have to research that one.

Tax cuts for AMT taxpayers? Yep, I will give them credit for that.

I'm sure the rest of the list will yield the same results.
Click to expand...
 
Of course this is all based off the assumption that the Stimulus plan works.

If it doesn't, then it'll be the republicans card to play not Obama's.

What could be most interesting is if what the CBO says will happen, happens. Which will likely assure Obama 8 years but potentially give rise to Republicans after it as the long term affects of the "Stimulus" hit us.
 
Southern Man said:
Take a break from the Kool Aide for a minute and ask yourself how Japan did after trying the same thing about ten or twelve years ago. :cool:
Click to expand...

The two situations are so violently different from each other that the comparison is meaningless.

What the current situation does resemble is FDR's effort in 1933, which worked like a charm.

Notwithstanding the recent nonsense from Fox News. The main purveyors of the "FDR prolonged the Depression" nonsense are Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian at UCLA. Trying to ridicule stimulus programs like the ones being contemplated now in Washington , these two guys claimed, with no evidence, that the New Deal recovery took longer than it should have, and that most of the blame for this alleged delay belongs to the National Industrial Recovery Act (the NIRA, not the NRA). This assertion is idiotic: the NIRA was blown away by a Supreme Court ruling only 2 years after enactment, and had very little impact even when it was in force. They claim further that under the NIRA, FDR went too easy on Big Business, which is absurd – Big Business hated FDR more than any man in the twentieth century and wanted him destroyed. They insist, also on no evidence, that without the NIRA the Depression would have ended in 1936.

And the people who are trying to peddle this Cole/Ohanian rubbish to the American people: Fox News. Enough said. They claim that historians agree with this assessment, which is dead wrong.

The argument that FDR’s effort to restore the economy took too long begs the question: compared to what? The Republicans? Hoover had almost four years to fix the problem and he failed disastrously: virtually every economic indicator tanked, including the stock market which dropped something like 90 percent. Hoover signed the Smoot Hawley bill even though he knew it was risky, which made matters even worse. Despite all this, the Republicans nominated him for reelection in 1932, and he made clear that he intended to stick to his own economic plans if reelected. Even after he lost the election, he was still yammering at FDR to continue doing things the Hoover way. So clearly Hoover couldn’t have done it better.

And who did the Republicans nominate in 1936? Alf Landon, who liked FDR and publicly approved most of the New Deal (although he criticized it a week before the election because he knew he was about to get crushed by the voters). Landon would have had to do things pretty much the way FDR did, but he couldn’t have done it without FDR showing the way.

The widespread view held by both historians and economists is that FDR did what he had to do. Despite the necessity of essentially rewriting the textbook for modern economics and fiscal policy right in the middle the worst economic crisis on record, he did just what was needed. Bush’s Fed chair, Bernanke, and conservative economist Milton Friedman are among those who have admitted that FDR’s reform of the financial sector was the key step in saving the economy, and that setting up the FDIC was the best move for stabilizing finance in 70 years. FDR saved the banks and the banks helped save the country.
And just as important, FDR restored the one element necessary to any healthy economy: confidence. Once people knew that we had a president who was going to work like a dog to solve the problems, and that there was going to be a sensible level of oversight to prevent speculation, fraud and other nonsense, people spent, bought, invested, worked.

Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman is one of a number of experts who pointed out that the only time the recovery faltered was when FDR dialed back the New Deal programs in 1937, under pressure from conservatives. It was impeding the New Deal programs that impeded the recovery.

Even the way Cole and Ohanian framed the question was wrong: the issue was never how fast FDR rebuilt the economy, but how well he did it. It was a Herculean task that was going to take a long time no matter who was doing it. But at the end of the day, if you’re undergoing open-heart surgery to save your life, do you want the guy who will do it in 10 minutes with a jackknife, or in 2 hours with a surgical team? Or, in Hoover ’s case, someone who can’t do it fast OR do it right? Any effort to launch a quick fix in 1933 would have led to a speculative-bubble sugar-high like the one that caused the Depression in the first place. Building safely and soundly, as FDR did, was what got confidence, spending and investment going. America saw that, and reelected him three times.

People in the political world never seem to grasp the fact that although their own world moves fast, economic change moves slowly. Note that I said economic, not financial – currencies and stocks can jump all over the place in a day, but the underlying economic fundamentals just don’t change that fast. And when you ask these critics – what could FDR have done to speed things up? – a silence descends.

Only FDR could have achieved what he did: not Hoover , not Landon. Not even FDR’s rivals for the 1932 nomination: Al Smith hated FDR and the New Deal, and John Nance Garner interfered with FDR so much that FDR threw him out of the vice-presidency in the 1940 election, and prevented him from running for president.

FDR achieved a miracle, and raised us up from disaster into world conquest. Without FDR’s brilliant New Deal performance, we never could have built the greatest economy in world history and conquered both halves of the world in WWII. Never, not even during the age of Alexander or Genghis Khan or Napoleon, has a nation risen from such disaster to such greatness in such a little time. From economic catastrophe to world domination in only 12 years, and they say it didn’t happen fast enough? Carping about the New Deal is like whining that Sergeant Pepper isn’t perfect because they should have chucked out "Fixing a Hole". It’s freakin Sergeant Pepper.


So Obama does have a model to work from, which was a proven success.
 
Zyphlin said:
Of course this is all based off the assumption that the Stimulus plan works.

If it doesn't, then it'll be the republicans card to play not Obama's.

What could be most interesting is if what the CBO says will happen, happens. Which will likely assure Obama 8 years but potentially give rise to Republicans after it as the long term affects of the "Stimulus" hit us.
Click to expand...
You're assuming that voters actually have the brains to figure out why the national debt is crushing the economy in 2016. Nah, what they'll remember is that some Democrat wrote them a check that allowed them to buy that big screen, and watch all those great shows on BET.
 
winston53660 said:
With the dow down approx 200 points today what do you suggest?
Click to expand...
Eliminate entire federal departments that are not mandated by the Constitution, and lower taxes in accordance with the huge spending reductions after coming up with a ten year plan to pay off all federal debt and balance the budget.
 
winston53660 said:
Okay after I posted I thought your list would be huge. To huge to be posted. So I'll re-ask. Do you have a list of the ones that you think are mandated by the Constitution?
Click to expand...
I don't have one handy, no, but it would be a short list, as outlined by the Constitution, Article I, Sections 8 and 9. It includes the Departments of Defense, Commerce, Treasury, FBI, Post Office, Transportation, Patents, Weights and Measures, Coast Guard, and Immigration.
 
Reverend_Hellh0und said:
Down 2000 points since the One has taken office.
Click to expand...

Gee, do ya think there's anything else that could affect the economy, like the entire U.S. financial sector collapsing, taking most of the international community with it?

You're suffering from a scorching case of post hoc ergo propter hoc. You could just as easily blame the Dow on the Cards losing the Super Bowl.
 
Last edited:
HelloDollyLlama said:
The two situations are so violently different from each other that the comparison is meaningless.

What the current situation does resemble is FDR's effort in 1933, which worked like a charm.

Notwithstanding the recent nonsense from Fox News. The main purveyors of the "FDR prolonged the Depression" nonsense are Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian at UCLA. Trying to ridicule stimulus programs like the ones being contemplated now in Washington , these two guys claimed, with no evidence, that the New Deal recovery took longer than it should have, and that most of the blame for this alleged delay belongs to the National Industrial Recovery Act (the NIRA, not the NRA). This assertion is idiotic: the NIRA was blown away by a Supreme Court ruling only 2 years after enactment, and had very little impact even when it was in force. They claim further that under the NIRA, FDR went too easy on Big Business, which is absurd – Big Business hated FDR more than any man in the twentieth century and wanted him destroyed. They insist, also on no evidence, that without the NIRA the Depression would have ended in 1936.

And the people who are trying to peddle this Cole/Ohanian rubbish to the American people: Fox News. Enough said. They claim that historians agree with this assessment, which is dead wrong.

The argument that FDR’s effort to restore the economy took too long begs the question: compared to what? The Republicans? Hoover had almost four years to fix the problem and he failed disastrously: virtually every economic indicator tanked, including the stock market which dropped something like 90 percent. Hoover signed the Smoot Hawley bill even though he knew it was risky, which made matters even worse. Despite all this, the Republicans nominated him for reelection in 1932, and he made clear that he intended to stick to his own economic plans if reelected. Even after he lost the election, he was still yammering at FDR to continue doing things the Hoover way. So clearly Hoover couldn’t have done it better.

And who did the Republicans nominate in 1936? Alf Landon, who liked FDR and publicly approved most of the New Deal (although he criticized it a week before the election because he knew he was about to get crushed by the voters). Landon would have had to do things pretty much the way FDR did, but he couldn’t have done it without FDR showing the way.

The widespread view held by both historians and economists is that FDR did what he had to do. Despite the necessity of essentially rewriting the textbook for modern economics and fiscal policy right in the middle the worst economic crisis on record, he did just what was needed. Bush’s Fed chair, Bernanke, and conservative economist Milton Friedman are among those who have admitted that FDR’s reform of the financial sector was the key step in saving the economy, and that setting up the FDIC was the best move for stabilizing finance in 70 years. FDR saved the banks and the banks helped save the country.
And just as important, FDR restored the one element necessary to any healthy economy: confidence. Once people knew that we had a president who was going to work like a dog to solve the problems, and that there was going to be a sensible level of oversight to prevent speculation, fraud and other nonsense, people spent, bought, invested, worked.

Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman is one of a number of experts who pointed out that the only time the recovery faltered was when FDR dialed back the New Deal programs in 1937, under pressure from conservatives. It was impeding the New Deal programs that impeded the recovery.

Even the way Cole and Ohanian framed the question was wrong: the issue was never how fast FDR rebuilt the economy, but how well he did it. It was a Herculean task that was going to take a long time no matter who was doing it. But at the end of the day, if you’re undergoing open-heart surgery to save your life, do you want the guy who will do it in 10 minutes with a jackknife, or in 2 hours with a surgical team? Or, in Hoover ’s case, someone who can’t do it fast OR do it right? Any effort to launch a quick fix in 1933 would have led to a speculative-bubble sugar-high like the one that caused the Depression in the first place. Building safely and soundly, as FDR did, was what got confidence, spending and investment going. America saw that, and reelected him three times.

People in the political world never seem to grasp the fact that although their own world moves fast, economic change moves slowly. Note that I said economic, not financial – currencies and stocks can jump all over the place in a day, but the underlying economic fundamentals just don’t change that fast. And when you ask these critics – what could FDR have done to speed things up? – a silence descends.

Only FDR could have achieved what he did: not Hoover , not Landon. Not even FDR’s rivals for the 1932 nomination: Al Smith hated FDR and the New Deal, and John Nance Garner interfered with FDR so much that FDR threw him out of the vice-presidency in the 1940 election, and prevented him from running for president.

FDR achieved a miracle, and raised us up from disaster into world conquest. Without FDR’s brilliant New Deal performance, we never could have built the greatest economy in world history and conquered both halves of the world in WWII. Never, not even during the age of Alexander or Genghis Khan or Napoleon, has a nation risen from such disaster to such greatness in such a little time. From economic catastrophe to world domination in only 12 years, and they say it didn’t happen fast enough? Carping about the New Deal is like whining that Sergeant Pepper isn’t perfect because they should have chucked out "Fixing a Hole". It’s freakin Sergeant Pepper.


So Obama does have a model to work from, which was a proven success.
Click to expand...

FDR's spending did not end the Great Depression. WWII did. Even then, the stock market did NOT get back to it's 1929 level until 1953.
 
Everything you listed is has no business in that bill. The "stimulus" spending bill is SUPPOSED to jump start the economy. Its SUPPOSED to be targetted at restoring confidence on wall street and within the financial sector (which is the real problem).

The bleeding heart welfare stuff in there should be in their own bills. The way that pork is distributed, the amount distributed, and the total amount in general is paramount to those bills are passed or failed. Instead, they're all wrapped up into one giant bill under the guise of something completely different. Thats false advertising calling this thing a stimulus with so much other junk in there.

Obama could have ridden this out and pumped smaller amounts of money into the system, given tax credits, and cut capital gains to boost the economy. Instead he goes into campaign mode and sells this snake oil bill to put more people on the governments tab and promote bad spending policy for states and the federal government for years to come. Bush got ripped from both sides over this kind of spending before. There's a reason why support for the bill has plummeted since the details have been made public.

Sadly, the economy isn't going to get sustainable rise out of this. You'd think we would have looked at Japan as an example by now. Obama is going to have raise revenue to pay for much of this and to someone like him that means taxes. Be prepared to see more job layoffs as companies tighten their belts.
 
danarhea said:
FDR's spending did not end the Great Depression. WWII did. Even then, the stock market did NOT get back to it's 1929 level until 1953.
Click to expand...
More correctly, sales of supplies to our allies before we became directly involved. Armies of domestic "Rosie the Riveters" kept the momentum going, my 87 year old Aunt among them. God bless her big Republican heart.
 
Reverend_Hellh0und said:
You fail on so many levels.


FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate / UCLA Newsroom


How Government Prolonged the Depression - WSJ.com


Amazon.com: FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression: Jim Powell: Books

need I continue?
Click to expand...
I swear if it weren't for historical revisionism, you right wingers would have nothing to say.

In your fantasy, the New Deal failed, Reagan's tax cuts saved the economy plus he won the Cold War.

The UCLA study has already been thoroughly discredited. "...Shlaes, having passed over the anything-goes" Laissez-faire "policies that led to the financial crash in 1929—and, to a great extent, the devastating economic losses that occurred between 1929 and Roosevelt’s 1933 inauguration—also completely leaves out any specific data on gross domestic product, incomes, consumer spending, production, investment or jobs even for the New Deal period she presumes to explain. Indeed, her pitch is based entirely on emotional misrepresentation.

The basic economic facts from the 1930s—according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources—are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.
The "FDR Failed" Myth | OurFuture.org

Then we have the WSJ article. The editorial board at the WSJ is a collection of supply-side nuts who never pass on publishing any piece of crap that supports their crank economics. The article you cite is crap. Here's why it is crap: the authors discount all jobs created by the federal government under the WPA or the CCC or the like. Talk about sleight of hand to fool the reader.

That's what I love about some members of the American right - there is no history and facts are what we say they are.

I remember when Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke tried pushing this right wing think tank nonsense about the 'failure' of the New Deal and they were properly discredited and mocked for lying.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom