powerofbinary

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/10/tea-party-linked-lawmakers-shun-strike-on-syria/ The tea party opposition stands in contrast to senior GOP leaders, including House Speaker John A. Boehner, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and 2008 presidential nominee Sen. John McCain of Arizona. Tea party activists say their stance is a rejection not only of Mr. Obama but of Mr. Bush, arguing their opposition is based on not just foreign policy concerns but on the question of spending. “It is not just an Obama thing, it is also Bush,” said Ted Stevenot, president of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, a Tiffin, Ohio, tea party group. “They just get the credit card out to pay for these interventions. We can’t afford this.” It was a different story in 2001, when not a single Republican opposed a resolution authorizing Mr. Bush to launch military action in Afghanistan in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington.

He would insist they all wear a burqa?

Does living frugally include not buying health insurance?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/18 History has its way of playing unexpected tricks on us. Exhibit A: If it weren't for the Tea Party's vehement opposition, the U.S. would probably be dropping bombs on Syria right now, and very possibly sinking deeper into prolonged military involvement there. So let's give thanks where thanks are due, recall the patriotic far right's true roots in America's radical history, and do what we can to cultivate those roots so that they’ll give rise to a healthier plant in the future.

When in poverty every single decision you take must be the right one - you cannot afford to make a single mistake. Who never makes a mistake? For instance you get a job offer but have to pay to relocate or get a car. You do not have the immediate money to do either. What do you do?

I'm more pessimistic. Poverty is a hard trap to get out of and it is the minority who do so. Blaming those who make all the right decisions but still remain in poverty is easy to do but analagous to Ron's 'disease is the product of sin' viewpoint.

There's no law which says poor people need to buy or rent their own private living space, drive newer cars everywhere, have cable or satellite TV, etc. Money goes much farther when you spend $300 to rent a room instead of $600 for a one-bedroom apartment, take a bicycle to work instead of using $4 a gallon gasoline, don't have a $60/month TV bill, etc. According to Ron 'disease is a product of sin'. You seem to be saying that poverty is always a product of sloth and bad financial decisions?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023869372 It’s a simple tweak that would reign in an out-of-control financial sector, stimulate jobs, generate billions of revenue, and possibly prevent another heart-wrenching crisis. Nobel Prize-winning economists like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman want it. Billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates want it. Polls show the majority of Americans want it. Even the Pope wants it. We’re talking about a financial transaction tax (FTT) — a tiny tax of, say, less than half a percent: maybe 3 cents per $100 — on Wall Street trading. It’s simple, more than fair, widely supported by the public, and long overdue.

This thread is about food stamps, medicaid, and handouts to compensate for low wages. All of those programs are federal. State in this context is nation-state i.e. federal.

http://www.taxpayer.net/media-center/article/opinion-assault-on-food-stamps-for-the-poor-is-appalling-in-light-of-blaten While the GOP has been pushing to slash food stamp benefits, there has been very little discussion, from either party, regarding federal agriculture policy that enables American agribusinesses to receive lucrative subsidies, which enable them to rake in huge profits regardless of market conditions. In the op-ed “Farm Bill’s Corporate Welfare is Unacceptable” (Jan. 2013, U.S. News and World Report), Ryan Alexander, president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, wrote the following regarding decade-old price and commodity supports: “Under current law, businesses that produce commodity crops — corn, soy, cotton, or wheat for example — receive a variety of federal supports. One of these, direct payments, provides a per-acreage subsidy for certain farmland owners, regardless of prices, crop yield or profitability. As a result, some farm businesses making hundreds or thousands or even millions of dollars each year also receive a generous annual check from the federal government even if they don’t grow a crop.” Alexander also wrote about the out-of-control spending of the highly subsidized federal crop insurance program: “This friendly sounding program provides generous federal subsidies (on average, 62 percent) to encourage farm businesses to purchase federal crop insurance policies. Unlike the insurance policies that most people or other businesses are familiar with, crop insurance actually insures not just crops, but the expected revenue from selling those crops. It’s as if your homeowners insurance didn’t just promise to pay you if your house burned down, but guaranteed you a profit when you decide to sell, even if you bought it at the peak of the bubble. Federal crop insurance is out of control. In fiscal year 2012, the total cost of the crop insurance program set a new record of $14 billion. And here’s the kicker — 2012 was a year of near record profits for agriculture.

I'm saying that corporations get the benefit of billions of $'s of state welfare.

None - Unless you can prove otherwise? Thought not.

'General Welfare of the United States' - Sounds a bit socialist. http://consortiumnews.com/2013/10/03/americas-government-by-extortion/ With all the Tea Partiers’ talk about their “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, they ignore the reality that the Founding document was written primarily by Federalists, such as George Washington, James Madison (who was then Washington’s protégé), Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris (the chief author of the Preamble). The Federalists despised the concept of states’ rights (as enshrined in the Articles of Confederation) and believed in centralizing power in the federal government, albeit with a system of checks and balances to restrain ill-advised decision-making, but with few other limits on what elected representatives could do for the nation’s well-being. That is why – in both the Preamble and in Article I, Section 8 (the so-called “enumerated powers”) – the Framers included language giving Congress the authority to “provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States” and “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers.” As historian Jada Thacker has written, “The Constitution was never intended to ‘provide limited government,’ and furthermore it did not do so. … This is not a matter of opinion, but of literacy. If we want to discover the truth about the scope of power granted to the federal government by the Constitution, all we have to do is read what it says.” Given the malleable phrase “general Welfare” and the so-called “elastic clause” for passing all “necessary and proper” laws, Thacker notes that “the type, breadth and scope of federal legislation became unchained. … Taken together, these clauses – restated in the vernacular – flatly announce that ‘Congress can make any law it feels is necessary to provide for whatever it considers the general welfare of the country.’

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/15/mcdonalds-wages-taxpayers_n_4100866.html?ref=topbar Taxpayers are shelling out $1.2 billion a year to help pay workers at McDonald’s, according to an estimate from the National Employment Law Project published Tuesday. The organization used estimated figures from a study by University of California-Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on how many fast food workers rely on public assistance programs like food stamps and Medicaid for its analysis. Overall, low wages at the top 10 largest fast food chains cost taxpayers about $3.8 billion per year, NELP found. As Republicans in Congress fight to curb spending on entitlement programs like food stamps, the report offers an often overlooked solution: Companies could pay workers more to decrease their reliance on public assistance. "A very easy policy fix here would to raise the minimum wage," said Sylvia Allegretto, the co-chair of Berkeley’s Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics and one of the authors of the Berkeley/UI study. "The firms that pay a large share of their workers at or near the minimum wage -- these workers disproportionately have to rely on public subsidies."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/shutdown-republicans-government-spending-delusions The reality is that the story of exploding interest burdens is utter nonsense since there is zero precedent for the country ever allowing the debt to expand in this way. This makes as much sense as arguing that someone driving west in New Jersey risks falling into the Pacific Ocean. People driving west in New Jersey invariably turn or park their cars before ending up in the Pacific Ocean and the United States has always taken measures to reduce deficits long before they posed a fundamental threat to the economy. The real question is why the primary (ie non-interest) deficit rises and this is the story of the broken US healthcare system. We pay twice as much per person for our health care as the average for other rich countries, with nothing to show for this money in terms of outcomes. We pay 2.5 times as much as the UK. If our costs were at all in line with those in other wealthy countries, we would be looking at explosive budget surpluses running into the trillions of dollars annually. This fact raises the obvious question, why are projections of deficits based on unaffordable healthcare costs always treated in the media as a basis for cutting benefits to seniors rather than a reason for cutting payments to providers like doctors, drug companies, and medical device companies? There is no explanation except the bias of the media. Obviously they identify much more with rich doctors and the people who profit from the bloated prices charged in the United States by drug companies and medical equipment providers than with the seniors who are dependent on Social Security and Medicare.