Democrats versus Republicans

[knothead]

Originally Posted by sck5

Well if you think Obama is too left of common sense to make it, answer me this

How many houses does John McCain have?

Some say 4 (his campaign)
Some say 7 (Obama)
Some say 8 or 9 (his wife Cindy)

Some are approaching senility and cant remember (or are they are lying about not remembering?)

Hey great idea to vote for yet another rich pampered out of touch trigger happy Republican into the White House. I would be extremely bummed because if McCain is right I have to make $5 million a year before I can consider myself rich! And here I thought a mere 380k would do the trick since that would put you into the top 1% of the country. Silly me.

sck,
My only reaction to that is that it seems below you somehow.

[camaraderie]

SCK... I'll bet McCain didn't have Tony Resko help with a sweetheart deal on any of the 8 houses!

People who live in graft houses shouldn't throw stones!!

[SailKing1]

Obama doesn't have any stones to throw. He's already proved that. Can't stand up for anything.

[sailaway21]

Originally Posted by US27inKS

I'll tell you what caused all of the foreclosures. Alan Greenspan (I'm sure with the encouragement of Bill Clinton) told all of the banks to give away money as cheaply as possible to anyone who can fog a mirror. At the same time Bill Clinton, at the request of Wal Mart, gave away half of our good paying jobs to china.

The mentality then becomes: Buy a big house on a adjustable mortgage, then fill it full of expensive furniture on the credit card. When the credit card gets out of control, we'll just re-fi and clear off the cards so we can do it again.

Eventually someone has to lose when you play those games. I don't think I should be held financially responsible for other people being idiots. I still have MY house because I DIDN'T upgrade when all of my neighbors were.

The "bad" economy and foreclosure "crisis" are caused by stupid people. As Ron White would say - "You can't fix stupid" but apparently you can bail it out.

While agreeing with all of the sentiment and a goodly portion of the statements above I'm just a bit curious as to what "good-paying jobs" have gone to China via the pernicious influence of Wal-Mart on the unlamented Bill Clinton. I'm thinking about those thermos assembler and Tickle Me Elmo battery installer jobs or maybe those high paying jobs in the sneaker industry.

[US27inKS]

Originally Posted by sailaway21

While agreeing with all of the sentiment and a goodly portion of the statements above I'm just a bit curious as to what "good-paying jobs" have gone to China via the pernicious influence of Wal-Mart on the unlamented Bill Clinton. I'm thinking about those thermos assembler and Tickle Me Elmo battery installer jobs or maybe those high paying jobs in the sneaker industry.

Do you realize that there is exactly one television manufacturer in the US today? They only make high end big screen TVs because they can't compete with the smaller sets. With the television plant goes the design, R&D, and management positions as well as the manufacturing floor. With the manufacturing floor goes the assembly line design and manufacturing, equipment maintenence workers, and it goes on and on forever. Even making toys and tennis shoes on the factory floor paid better than Wal Mart pays. So we traded $15.00 an hour jobs making things for minimum wage jobs stocking those things made by $1.00 an hour or less foriegn workers.

I don't blame the foreign workers or even the foriegn companies for taking advantage of the situation. I blame the Wal Mart profit at all costs mentality and Billy Bob for hooking them up with a sweet deal.

BTW, Wal Mart doesn't sell cheap crap in their chinese stores. They are more of a high end department store, where the rich people shop.

[SailorMitch]

Originally Posted by camaraderie

SCK... I'll bet McCain didn't have Tony Resko help with a sweetheart deal on any of the 8 houses!

People who live in graft houses shouldn't throw stones!!

McCain has his Keating skeleton to drag with him. Is John McCain a Crook? - Chris Suellentrop - Slate Magazine Remember the Keating Five, gang????

McSame had his second wife's $100 million to buy his 9 houses, after unceremoniously dumping wife #1, who had become fat and disabled upon his return home.

Yes, McSame is the epitome of class and virtue-- you betcha!!

[camaraderie]

OBAMA's Latest! THE USA and RUSSIA are equally immoral....

"Democrat Barack Obama scolded Russia again on Wednesday for invading another country’s sovereign territory while adding a new twist: the United States, he said, should set a better example on that front, too.

The Illinois senator’s opposition to the Iraq war, which his comment clearly referenced, is well known. But this was the first time the Democratic presidential candidate has made a comparison between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and Russia’s recent military activity in Georgia.

“We’ve got to send a clear message to Russia and unify our allies,” Obama told a crowd of supporters in Virginia. “They can’t charge into other countries. Of course it helps if we are leading by example on that point.”

It means nothing to the big O that the US is building a democracy in Iraq while Russia is destroying one in Georgia.
Johnny Macks gang should have a fun time with this one!

[wind_magic]

Jobs are not finite commodities that are "moved" from one place to another - that static model can only exist in the mind of someone who hasn't really thought it through, someone who doesn't understand the expansive nature of human activity and the true magic of wealth creation.

If there were 100 of us crashed on an island we might just sit there for a few hours trying to figure out what had happened, but it wouldn't take long for us to create "jobs". Jobs are created where ever there is a need to do something, to produce a product, deliver a service, etc, it is human beings at work - we'd quickly start building shelter, trying to find food, etc, we'd build an entire economy out of nothing but thin air in no time at all. All it takes to create "jobs" is to get people off of their ass and get them to do something. You can get another "job" just by standing up right now and going to get something accomplished, by being productive. It's not magic, "jobs" don't fall from the sky, they aren't created by big companies (or the government), or "shipped overseas", it's just people doing stuff.

The number of "jobs" expands as human activity expands. The "jobless rate" is simply the number of people sitting on their ass not doing anything productive. The only reason jobs look like such a commodity is because there are people who go around counting how many people are sitting on their ass not doing anything ... but the ability to count and record numbers doesn't actually change the nature of what human activity is. Your whole family could give themselves "jobs" by picking up a shovel and going outside to plant produce, or by learning to use fiberglass to make small sailboats, or getting a book and learning to program computers, or whatever.

Groups of people sometimes come together to form ad hoc kinds of teams to do activities together that could create products or services that others might pay money for. Sometimes we call these teams "companies". The people who bring the teams together are called the "owners", they kind of run the show, but it's really their customers who create the potential for work to be done on an ongoing basis. Companies can disband the team if they want, go somewhere else and play, or whatever they want to do. They can't, however, "take your job". They can kick you off of the team, or they can form a new team overseas, or whatever ... but so what ? Are we all such lemmings that we can't get off our ass and do something productive unless there's somebody around to call the shots for us ? The increase in big companies and the corresponding belief by people that they are "given jobs" and that jobs are "moved" is all a testament to how brain dead most of us have become that we can't imagine doing anything without being told by some greater power to do it.

There is no shortage of "jobs" in America. All these "jobs being shipped overseas" are just a recognition that American labor is needed to do things other than manufacturing. Yes, we do have some lower paying service sector jobs, so what, we've always had low paying service sector jobs, and even the lowest paid can afford cars, a place to live, etc, which wasn't always the case with low paying service jobs. But more than that, most of the things we need Americans to do now are simply more important than making widgets. Widget making isn't always high art, many people who make widgets are reduced to being bolt turners, package sealers, metal stampers, etc, it's not exactly stimulating work. Isn't it better if we can let people who are really excited about those opportunities do that work so we can focus on more important stuff in this country ? I don't mean to sound like manufacturing isn't honorable work, it is, of course, we need manufacturing to create almost everything we use, but it's also very hard to pay people a working wage in America to do that kind of work because it is often such unskilled labor that it can be done anywhere and that means it's easy to out-compete American workers by using foreign workers who are just beginning to be involved in manufacturing.

When a "job moves overseas", it doesn't actually move. For a single worker in the United States you can pay 10 workers in a lot of countries, and then essentially use a single worker in the United States to "manage". That management might be moving the goods by long haul trucking, or it might be working a telephone to take customer orders, or it might be designing product that eventually gets built by those 10 workers overseas, etc ... but the point is that the job doesn't "move" overseas - jobs don't just "move". It's human activity, it's getting 10 people off their ass in India to do something, and retasking the 1 person in the United States to do something else. That's why despite all these "jobs moving overseas" America still has a historically low 5.7% unemployment rate. Yes, approximately 1 out of every 20 people are sitting on their ass not doing anything, but the other 19 out of 20 are hard at work, that wouldn't be true if all these jobs had "moved overseas".

Ideally I think it'd be great if everyone in America worked. Why not stop sitting on your butt, design a new kind of bicycle, fly overseas, and get some people in the Sudan to start building them ? See, that's what it's all about, getting people up and moving, doing something. It isn't some evil plot to destroy America, it's just trying to get the whole world involved for everyone's benefit. It's Capitalism, baby. It's unleashing the expansive capacity of the human animal to create wealth.

Originally Posted by The Richest Man in Babylon

"Wealth grows wherever men exert energy," Arkad replied. "If a rich man builds him a new palace, is the gold he pays out gone ? No, the brickmaker has part of it and the laborer has part of it, and the artist has part of it. And everyone who labors upon the house has part of it. Yet when the palace is completed, is it not worth all it cost ? And is the ground upon which it stands not worth more because it is there ? Wealth grows in magic ways. No man can prophesy the limit of it. Have not the Phoenicians built great cities on barren coasts with the wealth that comes from their ships and commerce on the seas ?"

[PBzeer]

Great post windy. From my observations over the years, it seems to me that it isn't the "job" that people don't want to lose, as it is the benefits that accrue from it.

That though, is a whole other issue.

[PBzeer]

You have to wonder when, if at all, that the modern Democrat party will ever learn how to connect with middle class voters outside of the east and west coasts. The attempt to paint McCain as elitist, is but the latest example.

The reason the Obama ad about houses won't work, outside of Obama supporters, is really quite simple. McCain doesn't have a history of acting elitist. That's why the McCain ads about Obama are effective. It's more than one instance, it's a parade of them. Whether it's talking down to voters who cling to their guns, or the high price of argula, or the flowing rhetoric of lofty ideals, it's easy to paint Obama as elitist.

Not so with McCain. One can easily imagine him in cowboy boots and a flannel shirt, standing next to a pickup truck. Rather than looking debonair in a suit, it looks more like something he has to wear.

You have Obama trotting around the world, trying to show he's a "citizen of the world". While McCain acts more like the guy next door.

No, the Dems made the mistake they continually make, by letting the Reps define Obama before they tried to define McCain. And if they don't find a way to reverse it, then they may well have blown yet another "cinch" election.