Florida State Seminoles

[TheBigMook]

Can't wait till I get fax machines all over my house!

[Bklyn]

I told y'all bitches the equity markets were going to shit in the 3rd quarter (although I didn't expect it to happen so soon)...

[Bklyn]

High unemployment, corporations with strong earnings but still sitting on dry powder, banks doing well but not losening credit and government shrinkage (plus the dumb ass way the GOP held things hostage w/this debt ceiling) is a recipe for where we are now...

[AlabamAlum]

The repubs sitting on the debt ceiling was brilliant politically. Harmful to the country? Probable. It's what's called 'strateegery'.

[aTm]

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/met ... 83839.html

So basically, my understanding of this newspaper "post" is to troll democrats and generate hits by people too dumb to understand the difference between embryonic and adult stem cells? Its definitely not actual news. Judging by the comments, I'd say well done, AP. Nice trolling.

[aTm]

[Bklyn]

Isn't that CMAC?

[Jungle Rat]

Yes. The shoes give it away.

[Bklyn]

The US Credit Rating has been downgraded for the first time in US history.

Thank you Tea Party. You do get to claim that we've been downgraded under Obama's watch, which is technically true & may be simplistic enough to satisfy the mouthbreathers who will lap up the factoid. However, this is largely due (maybe a little erroneously by S&P...or extremely may be a better term) to idiotic posturing by elected officials in Washington making statements about how a default is fine if spending cuts are not enacted.


Sometimes words have consequences, you idiotic pricks.

[aTm]

Mutiny is the captain's fault.

[TheBigMook]

And the American people are the Captain.

[Owlman]

Mutiny is the captain's fault.

Not in Treasure Island

[eCat]

its easy to blame the tea party but the GOP wanted to play games on the budget so they'd have to address it again before the election in order to put Obama in a bad light - that wasn't a tea party objective, and Obama and the Democrats wouldn't agree to serious cuts

Here is what the S&P said

"To avoid a downgrade, S&P said the United States needed to not only raise the debt ceiling, but also develop a "credible" plan to tackle the nation's long-term debt."

this hasn't been an issue of raising the debt ceiling, its an issue of both parties not being able to agree on a plan to get in line with what the S&P needed which was 4 trillion in spending cuts (or revenue increase) over the next decade.

In an economy with 9% unemployment and only 58.1% of American working - think about that for a moment - less than 60% of Americans in this country are working (and yes, that includes the retired) - how realistic is it that they are going to accept tax increases to support addressing the debt of this nation? The nation has elected republicans over and over again on a single promise of reduced taxes, and now those people are just supposed to stand up and say to a democratic president and senate that they'll accept "revenue" increases to cover their Washington agenda? That isn't going to happen.

While I've accepted that its going to take tax increases to pay off the debt, people in general will not unless there are serious, serious cuts - and cutting $900 billion in 10 years while raising the debt ceiling by over $1 Trillion isn't a serious cut, its a joke. We gave the S&P (even though they admit to a $2 trillion budgeting mistake) no choice when they floated the idea months ago that America had to get their financial house in order. We called their bluff.

We got a credit rating drop because our politicians - GOP and Democrats together can't resolve paying for the big 3 programs without revenue increases.

The tea party did what they were elected to do and it was arrogance on the part of senior politicians to believe they'd just fall in line with status quo politics that have led to the financial predicament we are in now.

[Owlman]

Obama and the Democrats wouldn't agree to serious cuts

Bullshit. They'd agree to even bigger cuts including some cuts to medicare, medicaid if the Republicans would agree to increase in revenue. But primarily due to the tea-party, revenue increases in any form is off the table. Yes, I definitely blame the tea-party. This you should come off of your treasured beliefs but we can't bend on any of ours prevented getting a much bigger dent in the deficit.

[Owlman]

how realistic is it that they are going to accept tax increases to support addressing the debt of this nation?

the polls were supportive of a tax increase, in fact they were more supportive of a tax increase than they were of cutting medicare and social security. For whoever wrote this to suggest they would not support one is just reading the data wrong to reach a predetermined conclusion.

[AlabamAlum]

The blame doesn't matter at this point to me. Everyone knew that the repubs would use this to get what they wanted. It is what it is. Politics as usual. We've raised the debt ceiling 75 times since 1962, and a number of thoise times, the vote became a political football.

Obama wanted the debt ceiling raised, but did not want to have to deal with a short term increase (that is, before the next election) and that was of bigger importance than tax increases to him.

Repubs wanted to bring this whole circus to town again 3 months before the next election and were going to use the specter of another debt ceiling crisis to leverage big cuts in spending with no tax raises. Further, the repubs were emboldened by polling data that showed that the majority of Americans did not want the ceiling raised.

That said, cuts to medicare and medicaid aren't the best of ideas, IMO. Right now my hospital only gets around 6% on the dollar from CMS AND CMS is planning a 'Value Based Purchase' plan where they hold 1% of the case and refund it at the end of the year if we meet certain quality and patient satisfaction targets. We're getting close to the point where providers and hospitals will start to refuse medicare/aid as a form of payment - and maybe that's the plan, anyway.

[Bklyn]

Here is what the S&P said

"To avoid a downgrade, S&P said the United States needed to not only raise the debt ceiling, but also develop a "credible" plan to tackle the nation's long-term debt."

eCat

You are consistently one of the more honorable and reasoned posters on this board, with things you agree with and those you don't. However, that was the biggest selective bias quoting I've seen from you.

THIS is what the S&P said:

– The downgrade reflects our opinion that the fiscal consolidation plan that Congress and the Administration recently agreed to falls short of what, in our view, would be necessary to stabilize the government’s medium-term debt dynamics.

– More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.

– Since then, we have changed our view of the difficulties in bridging the gulf between the political parties over fiscal policy, which makes us pessimistic about the capacity of Congress and the Administration to be able to leverage their agreement this week into a broader fiscal consolidation plan that stabilizes the government’s debt dynamics any time soon

I don't know how you can NOT say that the S&P was taking a direct shot at those pols who find no problem with defaulting on debt responsibilities, all in the name of "no tax increases." These Tea Party politicians (not the constituents, who may not know better, but the pols themselves) have gone on record time and time again saying "go ahead and default. We are fine with that, if that means we will stop the US Government from taxing us into oblivion."

That mindset makes Ratings Agencies (or at least S&P) leery of anything being accomplished long-term that will truly impact our fiscal situation.

The idiocy (signs of Obama as Joker/Hitler, guns to Town Halls) used to be blamed on a few random people using the Tea Party as convenient cover. Now, I see elected officials acting reckless and dispensing with rhetoric that has serious consequences on the financial psyche of the public and the forward-looking opinions of the Ratings Agencies (or at least S&P) and the markets, overall.

You have to take a step back and acknowledge that the attribution of this problem to the Tea Party is larger than you're conveying.

[Bklyn]

On June 21, 2007, Mitt Romney delivered a speech at the annual summer retreat of the American Enterprise Institute in Beaver Creek, Colorado. To coincide with the address, his campaign released a statement explaining the candidate’s vision for fighting the war on terrorism. Re-reading that statement today, it is impossible not to be struck by one of the items on Romney’s agenda: “Launch A New Type Of Marshall Plan Unifying Non-Military Sources Of Power To Support Moderate Muslims.” This initiative, the campaign explained, “will assemble the resources of all developed nations to assure that threatened Islamic states have public schools, micro-credit and banking, the rule of law, human rights, basic health care, and competitive economic policies. Resources would be drawn from public and private institutions, and from volunteers and NGOs.”

It seems safe to say that Romney will not be spending a lot of time on the campaign trail this year talking about improving public education for Muslim children or ensuring that Muslim societies provide good health care for their citizens. That’s because the GOP foreign policy debate has changed profoundly since the last campaign. To understand why, you have to back up to the 1970s, when neoconservatives launched an insurgent campaign against the Republican foreign policy establishment, which at the time was largely composed of realists. For a generation, the two groups tussled; but, by 2008, the neocons had more or less won control of the party. Many realists, from Colin Powell to Brent Scowcroft, began openly distancing themselves from the Bush administration. The neocons were now the establishment. And, within the party, they had no obvious challengers.

As a result, with the cantankerous exception of Ron Paul, most of the 2008 candidates didn’t deviate much from the hawkish, democracy-promoting, nation-building foreign policy vision of George W. Bush. John McCain stood squarely with the president. Rudy Giuliani, too, made clear that he hoped to remake the world in America’s image. Of all the major candidates, Romney’s views were probably the least well-defined and the most complicated. But, to the extent that he had misgivings about Bush’s foreign policy, he mostly kept it behind closed doors—and, in public, largely toed the Bush line.

In the last few years, however, new insurgents began to emerge within the party, and new ideas moved to the center of the debate. The result is not simply that Republican candidates are, on the whole, less inclined to support democratization and nation-building this time around. It’s that the very terms of the GOP foreign policy discussion have changed—or rather imploded entirely, leaving in their wake a difficult-to-parse ideological brew of policy disagreements and competing instincts.

Making sense of this situation is especially complicated because most of the candidates, with the exception of Romney, are just beginning to form foreign policy teams. Still, that doesn’t mean their ideas about the world remain a blank slate. If you spend enough time talking to their official and unofficial advisers, it is possible to develop a sense of where Romney and Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty and Rick Perry fit within the newly fractious world of Republican foreign policy—and what they might do if they win.

http://www.tnr.com/print/article/world/ ... ign-policy

[Owlman]

That said, cuts to medicare and medicaid aren't the best of ideas, IMO. Right now my hospital only gets around 6% on the dollar from CMS AND CMS is planning a 'Value Based Purchase' plan where they hold 1% of the case and refund it at the end of the year if we meet certain quality and patient satisfaction targets. We're getting close to the point where providers and hospitals will start to refuse medicare/aid as a form of payment - and maybe that's the plan, anyway.

There will have to be changes to the program, at least some age adjustments over the next 20 years with medicare. Medicaid improves with the economy. Age adjustments to social security, but again raise it one year for every 10 years and none for people over 55. The military budget will need large cuts as well. Investment in alternative energy (not just oil), no capital gains for second homes, but for business investments etc.

[AlabamAlum]

I'm okay with age adjustments.

My issue is strictly from the hospital finance side. We're at a point where we will be losing money on Medicare patients - and a hospital will go belly up if too much of their mix is from CMS and you lose money on those patients.

We have many doctors in the US who will not accept medicare patients. We're going to get to the point where we won't have hospitals who will (or can) accept them either.


But the answer on cuts seems to be to reduce medicare dollars with many pols. If it keeps up, hospitals will have some hard choices to make.