Obama wins reelection!

He did send try to send all those Mexicans back though, so that's cool. But he should have sent the children as well. There's too many exceptions.

 

Even though I'm not fond of him, he's our president and deserves a congratulations for reigning in office once again.

 

Yeah, he sent them with guns.

 

1) So your attacking me to prove a point? Real mature.

2) Local government is a part of the government so it counts based on the fact that is is a part of government. Secondly more than half of those 12 years were under a Republican using awful polices that Romney would have reinstated. And yes China is no longer the top owner of our debt. I fail to see how that is relevant. The Fed is also independent and Obama can not control them or stop them from doing QE (if I understand the relationship correctly).

3) Oh wow. More immaturity. I worked three jobs this summer and I have thousands in student loans. And you hoarding is different from the rich hoarding. They use every loophole they can find or just break the law to ship their money off so they don't have to pay taxes on it. They let it sit in assets so that they can gain more money from it but that doesn't help the economy as much as just spending it does. Consumer spending drives our economy. We like to buy shit. The average consumer uses most of their money to buy stuff and the rate of saving among Americans is falling. That's bad for when these people retire. The rich are also getting richer and richer. They are hoarding their money at the expense of everyone else. If we encourage the average American to save more then there will be plenty of money to put into investments and the like. There will always be a space for the super rich but if income inequality continues to rise the economy will not be able to survive.

4) This isn't news to me? He said it is bankrupt. That is false and he was either ignorant of the facts or purposely misrepresenting them for his own gain. At some point in the medium future (I don't recall the exact date... its far enough off) Social security will reach the point it will only be able to pay 99.99% of its obligations and that will continue to slowly go down. It will take years to even get to 75% (if I recall some article correctly). Its easy to fix. Just raise the retirement age some and you could also raise the amount of income subject to SS tax by some to account for inflation and it would be fine. It's really not a cliff. Its more of just a little step that no one wants to touch for fear of the pitchforks coming out.

5) I'm not watching it because I can't be bothered to use my little bit of free time to watch what is most likely going to be things I've already heard. You are again attacking me and not the issue and being very immature about it. Convince me yourself. Don't rely on videos. I hate videos.

6) The GOP is for the rich not the poor. There was nearly 100 million more spent FOR Romney if you include Super PACs (funding by billionaires). Something like 95% of Obama's donations were under $200 (or something like that). Romney got less donations that were bigger. The least educated states also voted for Romney and the most educated voted for Obama but apparently this misrepresents the facts or something. I didn't look into it very much but apparently these state figures can be misleading.

7) That leads me to the part that I was wrong. I'll admit that. In 2008 I wouldn't have been and if you have gone onto graduate work you will highly favor Obama.

8) Now your stretching and trying to change what I meant. Not every young person is a liberal. You are assuming that because over half are, they all are. He is a disillusioned young person that has no idea what he is talking about just like a lot of young people liberal or conservative or otherwise. There are also plenty of informed young people on both sides. I'm not alluding to anything.

9) Your mad about........ inflation? You don't want inflation so subway can have that catchy slogan for every and its scary that inflation happens? What?!?!?!?! Inflation is a very important part of the economy. If there was no inflation more people would just stuff their mattress with money. If there was deflation even more people would just sit (or sleep if they stuffed their mattress) on their money because who cares, its gaining value. I don't really see anything else of substance mentioned here so I'm moving on.

10) Gas prices?



They were higher under Bush and they will always be climbing. That's what inflation does. Obama also has very little control of gas prices and increasing drilling would do little to effect the world markets. We consume like 20% of the oil produced but only have like 2% of the world's oil to drill. Now let's talk about wages and productivity.



And



Even though we continue to be more productive our wages do not go up. Nearly all of our economic gains are going to the very top and when you get inflation up in here the poor and getting even poorer. That's the real issue here. If wages had kept pace with productivity increases or had at least continued to rise at a decent pace there would be far more people better off and far fewer people would need help. The economy would be stronger and more robust.

11) There was military support... they were just far away and it took them awhile to get there. Now we don't know all the facts for sure but Obama did order people in to go help. There was no gunship flying over the city like Fox reported. There was an unmanned drone that they managed to get into place because it was close by at the time. Reinforcements arrived at the airport but by that time the second round of fighting had stopped. He was not utterly convinced. You have no basis in fact for saying that. He called it an act of terror but not terrorism because he did not want to jump to conclusions and did not want to make a sweeping statement when all the facts had no been vetted. And I have no idea where you are getting the idea that he condemned them from. He can't stop mortar rounds with his mind. We also do not yet have hour strike time capabilities yet. It takes awhile to get forces in place. I'd also like to point out there were a lot more embassy attacks and deaths under Bush but no one seems to give half a shit about those.

If you were brought here at like age two and spoke much better English than Spanish and had never gone back to Mexico you would feel like America is your home. How fair is it to punish people for their parents crimes? How stupid is it to send smart kids that we paid to educate back to Mexico instead of giving them an opportunity here where they would help us and our economy instead of the Mexican economy? We need comprehensive and smart immigration reform that targets actual criminals first and foremost and that gives people legal ways to come here so that we can all benefit. Just saying "BUILD A WALL AND SHOOT EM DEAD" is just silly and a waste of money.

 

Very True. I don't support Obama but I think we should be proud of our president as he represents our country.

I am a little nervous though about some parts of his policy (not sure Mitt was a better choice).

The CBO has announced that we will go into a "super recession" due to Obama's lack of a budget in his first term (http://thehill.com/blogs/on-the-mone...-fiscal-cliff).

Also I am afraid of how Obama will raise the debt even more. Obama raised the debt more than Bush did in his four years than Bush in eight (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_1...n-under-bush/).

Plus the unemployment rate scares me since I am going to be old enough to need a real job (http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000).

And who isn't afraid of a nuclear Iran? Well I am afraid of how Obama doesn't care about a nuclear Iran and is just letting them get nuclear bombs. I didn't know we were supposed to leave our allies when they need us (http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/...-to-jerusalem).

I think Romney wasn't good, but he wasn't Obama. Chris Christie would have been a great President. Hopefully in 2016.
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1 - No, I'm not attacking you. The first comment was genuine intrigue. I want to know why the voting gap exists in young voters, and one of my personal hypotheses is that the young voters have never had to balance a check book during any part of their lives. The majority of young voters (especially from what I can tell about the young adults on Sythe) are either living off of scholarships, student loans, or their parents, and they do not realize the reality of economics. Rather than deflecting my question, please answer it.


2 - Wait, what? Twelve years of a Republican? Since when? Last I checked, we had eight years of a Democrat, then eight years of a Republican, and now we're going on eight years and counting of Democrats in the White House. As for Congress, starting with 2003 and in two-year increments, it goes Senate/House: R/R; R/R; tie/D; D/D; D/R. The longest streak I see there is 2003 to 2007, with Bush in the white house and a republican Congress. Where exactly is the twelve years? Get your facts straight, please.

Furthermore, please refer to the policies you are alluding Romney will instate before calling them awful. You are entitled to that opinion, but please at least explain to us why you think they are so bad. I personally think that the Cash For Clunkers was garbage; I think the bail-outs were harmful to Government General Motors and the majority of companies that accepted them; thank god the jobs bills did not pass; Obama is being too much of a bully with his medicine bill; he is harming the nation with his pride-fest with the Catholic church; and I think that Obama's general fiscal approach is badly tainted by unrealistic idealism. There's a short laundry list of policies that I think are garbage. You are free to refute them, if you wish.


3- Thank you for actually answering the question this time. I'm glad to see you work, and that your voting is based on real-world experience rather than the hyped-up youths who vote on a whim rather than any concrete experiences that we both agree exist in our class of voters. Again, however, I was not issuing any ad hominem attack; I legitimately do not know if you spend your money, save it, both, or how any of those happen.

Aside from this red herring in your discussion, the policy-based substance of your argument seems to be that you feel the rich are getting richer because they simply get taxed less. Let me address this, since politics should be based on this rather than any attacks and presumptuous playing of the victim. So you say you had voted for a president who admits his policy is simply to raise the tax on these people, and do nothing else (as far as I could tell in any of his or his running mate's debates). Now, on the other hand, Romney and Ryan both said ad nauseum that their plan was to cut these loopholes that bring the investments of the rich back to America. Obama is okay with the rich exploiting the taxes and "hoarding" their money by abusing loopholes and storing their cash in offshore accounts, as long as they just pay more; Romney wanted to bring this investment money back to the American stocks and bonds market by cutting the loopholes and incentivising American investment. I hope this was easy enough to understand, but the simple fact is that Romney and Ryan were trying to keep the rich from hoarding even further.

On that note, Obama tried attacking Romney during the first debate about Romney investing in foreign businesses. Romney responded that he uses a blind trust firm for his investing, and they simply invest in the most lucrative investments they can find. The fact that a large portion of these were non-American investments during the Obama term should tell you something.


4 - To reiterate: you think the tax code is harmfully flawed, but you voted for the candidate who has not announced any plans to significant change it. On this same note is argument 4: social security. In your own words, you said, "At some point in the medium future (I don't recall the exact date... its far enough off) Social security will reach the point it will only be able to pay 99.99% of its obligations and that will continue to slowly go down." Basically, you recognize that it will begin to crash and that there is an obvious need for reform. Again, however, Obama has no real plans of changing Social Security. Why exactly did he win this point for you?

Now, you say it may go down slowly; other economists say it may begin becoming bankrupt as early as next year. The numbers don't matter so much: we all agree that Social Security needs change. Again... Obama does not propose any changes for it. On the other hand, Romney and Ryan's plan was to actually try something to fix Social Security. Their idea was not even to issue any cuts or raise any retirement ages. Rather, they were going to turn this ordeal over to the place where it can be made best: out of the hands of bureaucrats. I can respect if you disagree with their approach, but how in the hell can someone who recognizes change is needed vote for someone who ignores that obvious truth with his policies? As far as I can tell, Obama's only stance on social security is that he is "trying" to talk to Congress about reform, blaming Congress for inaction when it is his job to be the leader. Oh, and what reform exactly will Obama propose if the dirty Congress does meet with him? ...Well, I just actually looked this up, because for the life of me, I cannot recall ever hearing what Obama wanted to do. In fact, Obama doesn't answer his solution to Social Security, so there's no surprise I didn't recall any. He only says it is an issue that is not urgent at the time being. (source)


5 - You are right, this point was not about policy. I was not intending an ad hominem attack, but I can see how it may be construed as that.


6 - Can I please see some sources for this? The actual statistic I've drawn from the Federal Election Commission (http://www.fec.gov) shows Obama's campaign was funded by actually 85% of votes worth $200 or less. On the subject of election campaign donations, Obama's website was crooked enough to allow an obviously fraudulent donation from a British citizen. I have not read further into it, but I recall reading an article on the NY Post where the man admitted he donated $10 to the Obama campaign with his real British street address, Arkansas as his state, and a New York zip code. Romney's website denied the address as fraudlent. Also from the article (which I read in October, well before the election), it mentioned over $2 million had so far been donated to Obama with no zip code provided at all. All of Romney's donations were legitimately trackable to real people in real addresses. Furthermore, half of the traffic to Obama.com's donation page was from foreign websites. Now I'm definitely not one for conspiracy theories, but this smells a little more than just accidental happenstance. It is at least an intriguing set of phenomena that could question the real legitimacy of the 85%.

Curiouslyl, in 2008, only 50% of Obama's fundraising were from $200 and less donations; and only 47% of the total Democratic donations were from this camp. How did this suddenly jump to 85%? Either the rich who backed Obama switched to Romney (an understandable switch), the Obama camp managed to almost double their poor base, or there was something going on.

Now, finally, the "least educated" states went for Romney because he was the candidate in support of farmers, in support of coal miners, in support of oil drillers. These people are not "uneducated;" they simply just do not need a degree to do their line of work. Here in Alaska, around 40% of the workforce making $60k a year or more has no college degree. If you live in urbanized areas, it's thoroughly scandalous to not have a degree; however, if you live in the rest of the country, degrees are in many cases useless pieces of paper. A friend of mine graduated high school with over a 4.0 GPA, spent the summer getting certifications for petroleum engineering, and took his first job at the ripe age of 18 making $80k a year. Now that he's in his early 20's he easily makes six figures. However, this is merely arguing exit-poll data, which I will admit I am tired of. See below...


7 - I found confirmation of your figure with graduate-degree voters, so I also concede my point. At some point, arguing exit poll data just has people racing in circles, and we stop talking about policy and more about interpreting statistics. I want to talk policy and not math. I'll give you your point, just as you gave me mine, but really I think we're both making moot points.


8 - I got sidebarred from your own ad hominem attack on Joey. Hopefully we can rest this point.


9 - You only showed Bush's second half of the term, so you can't even say anything about Bush with this truncated graph. Anyway, as you can see from 11/25/2007 to 1/1/2008 there was a gasoline bubble that bursted, which artificially inflates Bush's "price." This was a period of less than a few months that the gasoline trend was over $3 without spiking down quickly. However, since the inaugural speech of Obama, your graph does show us that gas has climbed from $1.81 to nearly $4.00 per gallon. Even removing the obvious anomaly trough, from august of 2008 until the present gas has climbed to be nearly Bush's all-time high, and stayed there. Finally, just going on average price and ignoring Bush's bubble and Obama's trough, it seems Bush's average price was around $2.40, and Obama's average price is around $3.11. That's a 30% increase over a four-year term, and from the economics I took, inflation should not be that fast.

Now, I live in Alaska so do you don't want to talk about how drilling oil is inconsequential to the markets. Opening ANWR and doing more to lift regulations on crude oil will help greatly because we could create our own market. Also, you're blatantly ignoring shale gas, coal, and other forms of energy to which we have a larger share of the world market. These are obviously alternative fuel sources to crude oil in many instances; lifting regulations on these would certainly lower the need for Americans to pay $100+ per barrel of oil, so we would be less dependent on this high market price.


10 - Firstly, your graph ignores all of Obama's terms, but I think you are taking it to make an ideological point rather than a political one. That's fine and I'll try to read your argument as such. Just bare with me if I read into it wrong.

You seem to be suggesting that, since the end of the second world war until about the mid 1970s, productivity was on-par with the wage people were making. Now, I wonder what had happened in the mid-1960s and 1970s that may have impacted this shift... Oh, that's right, the ballooning of the executive branch of the United States of America with the creation of the countless bureaus, agencies, and everything else designed to regulate the way that we live our lives. We left these lovely decades with the unfortunate reality that we are stuck with this state of excess waste and regulation. Only then did productivity continue to increase, but wages leveled off. As far as I can see it, the ballooning government regulations can certainly have played a hand in what started the increasing income gap. It's a compelling point, and certainly more interpretation that what I had been offered to start with.

Ignoring all that if you want, I agree with your intended point that the poor situation needs to be improved. You never said why the conservative agenda is harmful to the poor, and for that matter you never really said how the liberal one is, either. Me personally, I can't look at the facts and not see that the liberal agenda is the cause of it.


11 - I do give "half a shit" about embassy attacks of any kind, no matter what party is in the white house. Bush was fighting a full-fledged war on terror, so I can understand that he got retaliatory action. However, what Bush did is that he maintained America's strength, and made a message to the terrorists that we will do what we can to protect our flag. I do not agree with a lot of Bush's foreign policy, including invading Iraq, but at least he did not play the "let's pull back, and we will wait and see what happens" game that Churchill did in 1939 and Obama has been doing since 2008.

The thing Bush possessed that Obama completely lacks is the ability to make a decision without being crippled by a fear of the consequences. In my opinion, inaction is far worse than action that ends up being a mistake. I don't mean to be reckless; no president has the ability to be recklessly headstrong at all because of their saturation with aides and advisers. No, unlike Bush, Obama did the only option available to presidents that is the bad option: do nothing because you can't decide what to do. He is continually sitting on his hands, sucking on his lip, deciding his next move with the a pace slow enough to rival the pace of his voice when not reading a teleprompter or speech paper verbatim. He disastrously tripped over his own words, following the Benghazi attack, with the whole Youtube fiasco. I will reiterate: regardless of any agenda-tainted news stories on the issue, Obama is a president who is slow to react, and I fear the state this puts us in. If you really want to insist that Obama is working on the Benghazi issue with adequate haste, just realize that the embassy still isn't secured for an investigation yet.