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Just another 390 million we gotta pay

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Wow, this has gone to two pages without a peep from those who would scream the loudest if this were done by a Republican.
 
Well I dont have time to look into this right now but its been great fun watching you all slobber on each others cocks.
 
DucatiMonster696 said:
Which is why the largest US producer of solar panels closed up shop and moved operations to China. Gotta love "Global Free Trade" aka "Global Wealth Redistribution" at the expense of US citizens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environment/15solar.html?pagewanted=all
Click to expand...

Didn't you get the memo? We will be just fine and moving to the next stage of our advanced country with service jobs. Manufacturing is a sign of a developing country and we don't need it. Heh.

/sarcasm
 
Great. The american worker gets shafted by a higher tax burden due to more progressive ideology that firmly estabilishes itself as needing an army of crutches when trying to walk the walk.

I'm sure it was very easy for liberals to stand behind this 535 billion adventure without any idea of how that money is made and therefore no desire to spend it with any sense of business. What are a few wasted dollars (billions) in their eyes?... the money liberals spend and recieve all falls from the sky anways. Why not finance a few more of there escapades?
 
Attic said:
Great. The american worker gets shafted by a higher tax burden due to more progressive ideology that firmly estabilishes itself as needing an army of crutches when trying to walk the walk.

I'm sure it was very easy for liberals to stand behind this 535 billion adventure without any idea of how that money is made and therefore no desire to spend it with any sense of business. What are a few wasted dollars (billions) in their eyes?... the money liberals spend and recieve all falls from the sky anways. Why not finance a few more of there escapades?
Click to expand...

What a fine example of a tea-party type post - full of ignorant acrimony - carelessness (535 billion) - and 'there escapades' misspelling.

Anyway, to answer Fern, yes, the new factory was built. The company is having problems it seems; things like Chinese competition changing the marketplace.

This was closing their older facility where it's more expensive to manufacture.

This is embarrassing for Obama, because he selected it for a press event about US manufacturing - and then it went quite badly, and even the Chinese being a big issue.

Two months after Obama's visit, they changed CEO.

The company being owned by a big Obama fundraiser looks suspicious, but I haven't seen any evidence there was any real problem there.

It hasn't been shown Obama did this to 'help a contributor', that the company's problems were clear but Obama did a favor - and it makes little sense he would do that.

The negative publicity of doing that would seen to be a lot more harmful than any benefit from the favor.

I also haven't seen any facts about the loan repayment status. It's not like the company went bankrupt.

I think there should be independant congressional oversight checking on the loan being appropriate, and not any political favor giving taxpayers' money to a big donor. But the Republicans now in charge show no skill at doing that right, only at attacking for politics, hyping, misrepresenting. (Of course, the right who scream for that here were quite silent at the actual massive corruption in the Bush administration).
 
DucatiMonster696 said:
Which is why the largest US producer of solar panels closed up shop and moved operations to China. Gotta love "Global Free Trade" aka "Global Wealth Redistribution" at the expense of US citizens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/business/energy-environment/15solar.html?pagewanted=all
Click to expand...

From the link:
Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States. Michael El-Hillow, chief executive of Evergreen, said falling prices for panels led to the closing.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.
Click to expand...
So they sucked on the American teat for awhile, now they're going to suck on the Chinese teat. Idiots, a Chinese company will be using their own technology to put them out of business within five years.

As Zebo says, cheaper is more expensive. If we embrace protectionism, our standard of living will fall. If we do not embrace protectionism, our country will fall.
 
werepossum said:
If we embrace protectionism, our standard of living will fall. If we do not embrace protectionism, our country will fall.
Click to expand...

You've got that backwards. Protectionism and isolationism will kill the country. Returning our manufacturing industry back to global competitiveness will necessarily impact our standard of living.

We cannot operate in a closed system. We must embrace foreign commerce. That does not mean that we need free trade. But it does mean that we cannot expect to pay a worker $10/hr when someone else will do it for $4/hr. Minimum wages cause inflation, nothing else. They do not increase buying power and they do not increase standard of living. In fact, the argument could be made that they decrease standard of living.

Combine a minimum wage with forced protectionism and isolationism and you have a recipe for hyper inflation and the ultimate destruction of our currency, followed closely by our country.

Protectionism is not the answer. Less regulation and limitations on collective bargaining are the answer. Also, higher interest rates for the purposes of spurring foreign investment into American businesses.

An economy grows only when money flows in to it. Protectionism and isolationism cannot create wealth in a nation.
 
TheDoc9 said:
When will people accept that this is all just a game to those who label themselves 'elite'.
Click to expand...

Very few people label themselves elite... The whole "elite" thing is becoming a boogieman of both the left and right. The right get bent out of shape about hollywood liberal elites and the left cries about caricatures of fat cats. Both sides are lame.
 
GeezerMan said:
Who's fooling who with this stuff? Quantative easing, green jobs, free trade, jobless recovery, banker bailouts. Just wait until the dust settles , and see who has all of the money, and go from there..


http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2011/02/solyndra-obama-biden-stimulus-waste.html

May 2010, Obama said high-tech facilities like Solyndra would help "lay a new foundation for lasting growth."

November 2010, Solyndra announced then that not only was it not going to create those 1,000 full-time jobs so eagerly hailed by Obama and Biden, but it also was going to close an older factory and actually lay off 175 full- or part-time workers.
That left U.S. taxpayers holding the financial bag for nearly three-quarters of that loan guarantee, about $390 million.

But now Fred Upton and Cliff Stearns, chairmen of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Oversight Subcommittee, have been examining the company's financials and the possibility of waste and fraud.

Since its 2005 founding, it seems that Solyndra has never made a profit and its own auditor had raised serious questions that did not slow or stop the immense guarantee's approval by the Obama administration. Last week Upton and Stearns wrote Energy Secretary Steven Chu. The Republicans said:
While we understand the purpose of the Loan Guarantee Program is to help private companies engaging in clean energy products to obtain financing by providing loan guarantees, subsequent events raise questions if Solyndra was the right candidate to receive a loan guarantee in excess of half a billion dollars.​
Oh, one other thing: The majority owner of Solyndra is George Kaiser. He's an Oklahoma billionaire. He was also a bundler, a major fundraiser, for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Click to expand...

Where were the Republicans from 2005 till now on this?

Oh that's right pushing for their Billionaire buddy to get this money.

This is squarely a continuation of Bush and his cronies fault.

Too bad Obama got taken for the ride too.

Just another case of the rich getting richer while raping the citizens of America.

Rich Republicans in here have to be rejoicing and I wouldn't be surprised if many of them personally profited from this especially the ones that live in Oklahoma.
 
dmcowen674 said:
Where were the Republicans from 2005 till now on this?

Oh that's right pushing for their Billionaire buddy to get this money.

This is squarely a continuation of Bush and his cronies fault.

Too bad Obama got taken for the ride too.

Just another case of the rich getting richer while raping the citizens of America.

Rich Republicans in here have to be rejoicing and I wouldn't be surprised if many of them personally profited from this especially the ones that live in Oklahoma.
Click to expand...

I have no problem with your post, except the "Obama taken for a ride".
Too funny. Innocent Obama. Ha. The problem with Washington is all of them in Washington, Obama too.
 
hey, think of it this way, it's only an additional $5 per person or so? we already owe, what? 40k each on the public debt?
 
drebo said:
You've got that backwards. Protectionism and isolationism will kill the country. Returning our manufacturing industry back to global competitiveness will necessarily impact our standard of living.

We cannot operate in a closed system. We must embrace foreign commerce. That does not mean that we need free trade. But it does mean that we cannot expect to pay a worker $10/hr when someone else will do it for $4/hr. Minimum wages cause inflation, nothing else. They do not increase buying power and they do not increase standard of living. In fact, the argument could be made that they decrease standard of living.

Combine a minimum wage with forced protectionism and isolationism and you have a recipe for hyper inflation and the ultimate destruction of our currency, followed closely by our country.

Protectionism is not the answer. Less regulation and limitations on collective bargaining are the answer. Also, higher interest rates for the purposes of spurring foreign investment into American businesses.

An economy grows only when money flows in to it. Protectionism and isolationism cannot create wealth in a nation.
Click to expand...

An economy grows from wealth production, not when money flows into it. Right now our money is increasingly worth less and less because we consume so much more than we produce. Either we fix this, or we die as a nation.

There are two ways to fix this. One is by decreasing our wages relative to the rest of the world. Since much of the world is willing to work for less than a dollar an hour, it should be pretty apparent that this is a solution for disaster which can only lead to a very poor large majority and a very wealthy tiny minority. In a democracy or democratic republic, that will always give way to the poor majority voting themselves wealth from the minority, with the government consuming a lot of the wealth during the transfer. And unless we are willing to abandon safety laws, building codes, and environmental protections, we're still going to be out-competed by nations willing to forgo those things. We've been trying free trade for decades and becoming less and less competitive and more and more in debt. And with the almost complete abolition of technology transfer barriers and import tariffs, the one chance we had - American ingenuity and technology - is gone for good. Any idea an America has can be just as easily and much more cheaply implemented in China.

The other way to fix this is by protectionism, putting up significant barriers to artificially inflate the price of goods from cheap labor nations. This still results in lowered buying power and therefore less consumption, but domestic production is less disadvantaged, government is less empowered, and safety laws, building codes, and environmental protections can be retained.
 
When all this finally reaches bottom, I wonder if the Average American will actually be any better off than the Average Soviet Citizen was?
 
werepossum said:
One is by decreasing our wages relative to the rest of the world.

Since much of the world is willing to work for less than a dollar an hour, it should be pretty apparent that this is a solution for disaster which can only lead to a very poor large majority and a very wealthy tiny minority.
Click to expand...

This is the Republican plan all along as I have been saying for ten years now.

It is working flawlessly.

2-23-2011

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelo...but-unequal-charts-show-growing-rich-poor-gap

The gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm

The Great Recession and the slump that followed have triggered a jobs crisis that's been making headlines since before President Obama was in office, and that will likely be with us for years. But the American economy is also plagued by a less-noted, but just as serious, problem: Simply put, over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm.


Gradual developments like this don't typically lend themselves to news coverage. But Mother Jones magazine has crunched the data on inequality, and put together a group of stunning new charts.



Taken together, they offer a dramatic visual illustration of who's doing well and who's doing badly in modern America.

This chart shows that the poorest 90 percent of Americans make an average of $31,244 a year, while the top 1 percent make over $1.1 million
 
dmcowen674 said:
This is squarely a continuation of Bush and his cronies fault.

Too bad Obama got taken for the ride too.
Click to expand...

Eh? Thats your defense? That the President of the United States just got taken for the ride too?

So lets see what we end up with here:
At best: He is an idiot who got taken for a ride
At worst: Collusion to rip Americans off

I hope for more out of our presidents (and have been dissapointed for as long as I have been paying attention to politics)

dmcowen674 said:
This is the Republican plan all along as I have been saying for ten years now.
Click to expand...

Haven't seen any change from the Democrats

(FWIW - I voted primarily democratic in the last election)
 
dmcowen674 said:
Gradual developments like this don't typically lend themselves to news coverage. But Mother Jones magazine has crunched the data on inequality, and put together a group of stunning new charts.

Taken together, they offer a dramatic visual illustration of who's doing well and who's doing badly in modern America.

This chart shows that the poorest 90 percent of Americans make an average of $31,244 a year, while the top 1 percent make over $1.1 million
Click to expand...

Well, Sophos thinks your link links to a high risk website and won't let me go there but $31,244 doesn't seem to be that far off from the 'average world wide salary of rich countries' which is around $35,000 (As reported by Boston.com and includes all income levels)
 
Last edited:
sandorski said:
When all this finally reaches bottom, I wonder if the Average American will actually be any better off than the Average Soviet Citizen was?
Click to expand...

Our poor are better off by a long shot than the avg Soviet citizen. Your hope of communism proving to be as good as open market capitalism is wishful thinking.
 
TheDoc9 said:
Best part of the article:

"Oh, one other thing: The majority owner of Solyndra is George Kaiser. He's an Oklahoma billionaire. He was also a bundler, a major fundraiser, for the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

But that's probably coincidence."

When will people accept that this is all just a game to those who label themselves 'elite'.
Click to expand...


OMG, you don't say. Oh, well, it doesn't matter as along as his last name isnt' Koch. Right Craig, et al?
 
Genx87 said:
Our poor are better off by a long shot than the avg Soviet citizen. Your hope of communism proving to be as good as open market capitalism is wishful thinking.
Click to expand...


That's not my point at all. Your Poor are better off now, but that's meaningless. Especially when there are so many efforts directed on undermining the Programs that are propping them up.
 
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