Paypal was made by a libertarian that disliked the government interfering with transactions
so much that they created a system to where the government had less interaction.
Picking two issues like pot and pro-choice when the democrats oppose about everything else
that libertarians stand for is... odd.

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When someone responds with 2-3 memes and that's basically it, what else do you expect as a response? It's not childish to tell it how it is, it is however childish to add nothing other than recycled garbage memes that are 10 years old.

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"Civil disobedience is still disobience."

Im still laughing at the fact he wants an internet killswitch xD

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Well it's not necessarily that HE wants it since I haven't heard of him endorsing it as of yet... However some strong supporters of his support that bill.

Far as a job update goes his approval has spiked at a week long high of 43%!
Disapproval at a it's lowest in a week now at 49% down from a high of 54%

Other related news items,
Missouri passed "Proposition C" which decriminalizes not buying insurance and rejects the Obama healthcare bill.
Other states have similar votes coming up I believe.

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Seriously.

Citing two soc-pol issues as your reason for wanting a democrat in the office is a mindblank.
lolreplyingtoanoldpost

America is becoming more and more communist. I can't wait until there's a huge revolution/Civil War.
Honestly though, pro-life. Take responsibility
inb4rape-abortion-scenario.

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I bet he gets re-elected. I meet so many people that hate Obama now yet still wouldn't want a
Republican in charge just because they're not a Democrat. I hate political parties.



Should have stayed home and played video games.

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The "responsible" choice would, in many situations, to have an abortion. It's not responsible to try and support a child on an income that can't handle an additional person or in a family that has yet to become stable enough to raise a child.
I think Obama should get reelected, but I have to admit that I am quite liberal...and Obama is even a bit too moderate for my liking. I wish he'd push harder on the Republicans to work with him on the important issues that need solving. Really, I find the Republicans straight-up wrong on several issues, and the Tea Party just scares me as to how people could be that ignorant. I'm not a fan of ad hominem, but someone can defy hard data only so many times before I start calling them an idiot.
As for the actual issues: Healthcare was a bit of a flop; socialized healthcare would be much better, though I admit that we'd lose quite a few jobs, and our economy really can't take that right now. However, I don't see what's wrong with forcing everyone to have health insurance; it's something basically everyone should have anyway, with hospital bills as high as they are. Interesting note: the average US citizen's healtcare costs $4,900 a year (including costs for running those big insurance giants), while the average Canadian has costs of only $3,200 (primarily in taxes for socialized healthcare). Those statistics are a few years old, but are pretty clear, and European countries with socialized healthcare also spend less on healthcare.
I don't see where the rich get off asking for tax cuts. They have savings; if they want something, they can go and buy it. The working class, however, are much more likely to spend their tax cuts on stuff they need. I know statistics to this effect are floating around somewhere, but it's mostly just common sense.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

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I'll bet he doesn't get re-elected, and I also bet that November doesn't turn out well for the
congressman that supported his ideas. Even with the healthcare bill that did pass insurance
premiums have already gone upo 2-5% because now in many states everyone is required by penalty
to get insurance as well as insurance required to keep older children on plans longer.

The direct result of this is that the even low side at 2% adds up for companies who pay that for full timers.
Already the result is less new hires coming on, because the money that would go toward new hires
is now going instead to covering increased insurance cost.

I really don't get the whole "ignorance of information" thing on the part of the tea-party people...
That just seems a bit poisonous to me for not liking the other's view. When somebody claims that
somehow spending almost a trillion dollars will stop the unemployment from going over 8% and... it goes to 10%
or when overspending obviously doesn't work eg. California with 13% unemployment and
the highest taxes on energy in the nation even though the state has rolling blackouts all the time.
How is saying "we want smaller government" ignorant.

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Health care premiums are going up because the insurance companies are losing some of the dirty, underhanded tricks they used to use to not pay people who need care. I'll bet if they stopped paying their executives such high wages and got used to a lower profit margin, premiums would go down.
As for the Tea Party, I admit I'm probably stereotyping, but I know that there are several of their candidates who have gone on record as saying things that are factually untrue.
On the issue of smaller government, I think it was a lack of regulation that lead to the huge market crashes. Asking for smaller government seems counter-intuitive. Also, it's a lot easier to criticize what was done than to come up with a viable alternative. How would you propose to lower unemployment? Really not an easy question.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

Medicare is massively failing because it won't pay doctors enough and many doctors are refusing it as payment for services due to all the red tape and paperwork and lack of money in the system. How is expanding that going to help make things better when it's a failing system in the first place?

It's fairly simple economics to explain why the insurance rates are increasing due to the Obamacare law. The things going into place immediately are the provisions such as:
•Children 19 or younger cannot be denied insurance coverage due to a pre-existing condition.
•Offspring up to age 26 can stay on their parents’ health insurance plans.
• Insurers no longer can set lifetime caps on health benefits.
• New insurance plans will cover preventive services without a deductible or co-pay.
• Health insurance cannot be terminated if a client gets sick.

And what.... did you expect the insurance companies would sit back and say
"Well nuts, guess this is coming out of MY paycheck."
Because increasing their required pay-out by that much is plainly going to increase their costs.

And this is an example of how larger government mandates directly cause higher unemployment
due to the cost increase being thrown at everyone down the line.
More expenses be it taxes or insurance hikes mean less jobs for everyone else.

This is just like the carbon-tax they keep talking about.
If you raise the cost per gallon of gas, people have to start making choices about how far they can go from home to buy things, travel, or where they can work. That on top of the fact that since 80% of the power generation is from coal, their electric bill will eat into what else they can afford.

The further impact of that is that since the majority of power generation is in industry, that the price of manufactured goods in all sectors will also increase. And before any know-it-all tries to point out a slippery slope fallacy falsely, just try to think of something that doesn't require any form of carbon to manufacture or obtain... and no, solar panels and wind turbines don't grow naturally on trees if they did... I imagine they'd provide more than 1% of our power generation.

These are both good examples of government over-stepping its bounds and deciding that crippling the job market is the means worthwhile in order to obtain some ends of a "better life" for the ones that manage to keep their jobs. I don't think that's much consolation to the 2% of the nation that was promised that the President's stimulus would keep their jobs...

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But speaking from a humane point of view, rather than an economic point of view, insurance companies cutting clients because they got sick is pretty cruel-hearted... Especially considering those companies were built around helping people that get sick. Hence the whole health insurance.

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Is irritated that calling a moron a moron is grounds for post deletion.

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Are people better off having jobs cut from higher insurance rates or from keeping their jobs but have to buy higher rate insurance?

Should one lose their job or not be able to find one because habitual smokers, obese, and
reckless people drive up insurance rates to the point employers need to choose?

Or should the minority of need simply have to pay for their own insurance.
That's why some insurance plans have higher rates, is that the individual has a higher risk.

It sucks for the people who need it more, but you can see that many cases of increased need
are due often to their own choices. So the single pay system simply forces the pressure
on everyone else regardless of each persons need or ability to pay it.

So where is the incentive for people to stop terrible decisions when they know their insurance won't be effected?

Sure it's unfortunate that some people have just lifelong conditions and debilitation
that force them to buy at higher rates, but it's the way things go, not everyone is just perfect.
I certainly don't feel like I am owed glasses because my eyes are terrible,
again it sucks that it's an expense I have to deal with.

I can agree with very little from the bill and almost nothing with socialized healthcare.
Insurance in some ways needed some reform such as the pre-existing conditions thing.
It's wrong to have coverage cut simply from suddenly needing a service you're paying for.
To me that's bad business practice, and you should probably be looking for a better insurer anyway.

I really don't agree with the other parts though.,...such as
criminalizing "not having health insurance"
keeping people on insurance longer
or adding some "catch all government plan" which thankfully never happened

So I can agree that insurance and healthcare needed some reform, but it needed more
of a nudge than a blood letting.

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Running away from an issue isn't being responsible. The least someone can do is have the child and give it up for adoption. I don't want to hear any "They'll be miserable" lines, either. If they're miserable let them kill themselves. Better for them to have a chance at happiness than be slain without being able to try.

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"Slain"? Strong wording, considering that most experts don't consider the fetus a separate living organism until the pregnancy is far enough along that abortion is already illegal. It's not running away from the issue; that would be abandoning the child on the street. It's fixing a mistake.

I'm not going to have this topic continue into a full blown abortion debate so I'll just edit my response into this post and leave it at that. Saying a fetus isn't alive is just like when people claim animals don't have souls. It's just a way for people to feel better about what they're doing. A fetus is a living organism that becomes a human. There's no point in time where it just magically starts being alive. It's alive from the start. I find it interesting that people think killing it is better than leaving it. Either action is just someone running away from their actions. ~Leanan Sidhe

On the issue of health insurance, I agree with Discrimin8 that many insurance companies use downright scam-worthy tactics. Come down with a disease that's expensive to treat? Oh, well, look at this: you had early symptoms before you signed up for our plan. No money for you! I admit that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you yourself agree that the first thing insurance companies worry about is profit. Just try telling me that those big executives need even a fraction the money they make. I admit that the Obamacare bill may cause some troubles like the ones you mentioned, but socialized healthcare would fix those. The government doesn't need to make a profit off the healthcare they would provide (heck, the US government hasn't made a net profit since the Clinton years). I'm aware that bureaucracy is notoriously slow, but Canada seems to have things working quite well with their socialized healthcare.
As for health costs incurred do to smoking or other, voluntary health problems, you can tax cigarettes or junk food (I believe Pennsylvania has a soda tax) to cover those costs. I'm aware it's not really possible to tax recklessness.
Oh, and best of all, the healthcare tax could work like income tax, so the rich pay more and the poor pay less. I know that "the rich paying for the poor" is a bit of a controversial issue, but again, try and tell me that poor people are all poor because of bad choices.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

"To each according to his need, from each according to his ability." Carl Marx

The medical breakthroughs in the US medical system come from the fact there's a free market allowing them to be competitive. Different hospitals and medical related companies working to find cures and treatments faster than the other guys. The competitive nature of the system allows faster and better treatment of patients rather than a socialized system which progress stagnates and treatment times get longer with no incentive to move faster. So if you need some operation that isn't entirely necessary but is expensive or difficult, you could be waiting a long time in Canada.

On top of all that, it really isn't the Federal Government's place to interfere with the operations of the states like this and impose a system like this in the first place. The constitution even plainly states that it's the states which pick up which is not directly mentioned in the constitution itself. So if your state wants a socialized system like Canada, the state should decide that on their own and manage it on their own.

And even if his healthcare policy is to your liking. His energy policy will easily bankrupt the nation for decades. The whole "punish carbon producers" is an irresponsible reckless approach to dealing with the nation's energy production crisis. If you want to cripple an economy, control the energy resources. And his administration and the EPA under his control have, in the past years, tried numerous times to pass legislation that would cripple the nations economy with stringent taxes on any carbon producer.

It's these policies and more that the public is finding they like less and less. If you look at where Obama stands in the polls, he's losing support even with democrats. When he entered office he had around 65% approval 15% disapproval. Since then that has crossed to a negative net-approval almost all the time currently at 45+ 48-. This stark change in approval over the course of the past years is plainly due to people discovering what his policies really are and not liking them.

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He actually has a pretty good approval rating, all things considered. It's normal for a President's approval rating to drop in the middle of his first term, the same way it's normal for the President's party to lose seats in Congress in the first midterm.
As for the energy policy, it's an indisputable fact that we're screwing over the environment. International talks aren't going anywhere, but if the United States makes big steps towards reducing carbon emissions, other countries will follow suit. It'll cost the economy some, but the economy will also suffer when global warming hits hard and we run out of oil. It's just bad luck that this has to be done while we're facing an economic crisis, but putting it off any longer is just irresponsible. According to the IPCC, we're on the brink of causing irreversible damage to the environment. A few degrees C may not seem like much, but they can have a big difference.
Now, you seem to like criticizing Obama's policies, but that's easy to do; he's in the tough position of leading a country stuck between a rock, a hard place, a few pointy things, and a nice, deep pit. How would you fix any of these problems? For example, what's your plan to cut carbon emissions?

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

There is absolutely no "indisputable proof"
that carbon emissions are causing the global impacts that are being portrayed about global warming. It's being disputed constantly and finally people are starting to turn the other way realizing that the Global Warming problem isn't as much of a problem as people would have you believe.



The IPCC is a self fulfilling prophecy. They fund scientists specifically to prove global warming exists and that we're causing it rather than follow an actual scientific approach and see if any changes are happening and attempt to find the cause. The 'climate change' policies are not only based on shaky evidence, but self destructive and will cause more harm to both the environment AND the world economy as a whole than the emissions and attempted predictions ever would.

It is estimated that a cap and trade system would do over trillions of dollars in damage to the economy. And if you really think that the US passing this will change anything, it won't. China is growing rapidly and in a desperate search for more energy as cheap as possible. The main source of that increase right now is, of course, coal. And whether the USA uses its coal or not SOMEBODY will. And the thing is that nobody in the entire world burns coal as cleanly in the USA. In countries like China they really don't care about things like our Clean Air Act which requires that we scrub out things like nitrates and sulfides and particulates.

China just burns it straight, and worse yet, when they "improve" one of their coal plants which just raw burns the coal without any emissions standards... they get carbon credits for that! They actually get money from cap and trade countries for improving their coal plants to BELOW what standards we have in the USA to burn coal with emissions which are little more than CO2 and Steam.

From the department of energy website even electricity demand alone rose 8 percent at 17,483 megawatts in the past year alone. To put that into perspective, wind and solar combined provide under 1%. From that increase Coal's share of the power supply increased by 11% of what it had before. The nuclear reactor in my state powers about 1200MW. For electricity alone coal provides close to half of that, and that isn't including things like steel production which heavily uses coal and other industrial applications.

It's for this reason that enacting any form of carbon taxing system would result in losing years if not an entire decade's worth of economic progress. The energy demands are only going to increase as the nation and economy grows and minor supplemental energy such as wind and solar simply can not ever supply the increase let alone become majority. Taxing the carbon emissions won't "cause an incentive for cleaner energy" it will simply make everything cost more since everything relies on energy from a carbon emitting source in some way.

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I'd like to ask what qualifications you have to dispute the IPCC's reports, or if you've actually read them in the first place. For reference, they can be found here: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_dat ... eports.htm
Anyway, you're mostly just restating points and avoided my concluding question: what's your solution to reducing carbon emissions? As for other countries, the United States is very much a global leader, and we've been seen as hypocritical by developing countries when we ask them to try and lower their carbon emissions when we still pump loads of it into the air. However, were we to enact stricter carbon regulations in concert with government subsidies for renewable energy technology, that technology would become cheaper, more efficient, and more widely produced, quite possibly to the point where we could export it to developing countries to help their economic growth in environmentally-friendly ways.
Lastly, I don't like your "someone will, so why not us?" view on the coal issue. There is such a thing as setting a good example, and, as mentioned above, it also makes us more credible when we ask other countries to do the same. Plus, looking at some statistics (primarily from EETimes.com, but also some other sources), China actually has a faster-growing renewable energy production than the United States.

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Tahu 1000 - Former Member

I'm an engineer? I have plenty of qualifications to question the legitimacy of an organization that funds research to support its thesis rather than form a thesis around the research which does not prove a human effect on global climate. I've done plenty of reading on energy production and about 30 graduate credit hours about the process of mining coal and other minerals.

the faster growth in China is in all sectors. But the primary fuel powering that growth is the dirtiest coal in the world, high in sulfur, methane, and other impurities. Already since China offers more for coal than US companies do, they're importing quite a large amount as well. I even applied for a company mining coal in Alabama who's major income is from exporting coal to China. So quoting the statistic "china is expanding faster in X than any nation" is because before they had none, now they have some. That's why they built the 3 gorges dam is their desperate search to industrialize.

My point about the US using the coal is the fact we use it most efficiently, cleanly, and have lots of it locally. So in using it here, it saves a large number of high paying jobs as well as providing energy at half the cost of even natural gas which is the next cheapest source of energy. If you tax that source of energy, everyone suffers... for that matter even the price of alternative energies would skyrocket because their bills would increase as well.

On top of that there is no renewable energy resource other than burning wood in a coal plant that can supply enough power to make any difference. Solar and wind are not energy sources. they're merely supplemental power supplies which can help, but they can never provide the level of energy US industry (main user of energy in the US) needs.

Humans aren't even the leading producer of greenhouse gasses. Swamps and wetlands produce literally tons of co2 and methane constantly released into the atmosphere, but we not only preserve these, but we're encouraged to make more.

I also want to add that no I'm not attacking you personally in case anyone gets under that impression. I'm just countering with what I've seen and believe to be true in these cases.

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