Max Power
Not Rod Carey
Posts: 10,865
Joined: Oct 2008
Reputation: 303
I Root For: NIU, Bradley
Location: Peoria |
RE: Nobody watched the State of the Union speech?
Quote:Only a partisan hack would actually either had actually paid back their loans. GM paid back their loan with another loan they took out from...wait for it.. the Government. It did not use earnings to pay back the loan, though you and Obama would love for people to believe they did. When you combine that with the fact that the government still owns a huge portion of both companies in the form of common stock, you realize that no such payback has actually occurred.
What the hell does it matter which account it was paid out of? GM posted a $6 billion profit in 2010, and you're complaining because the loan repayment was from an account held by the Treasury in escrow? So if they left that escrow account alone and paid it directly out of their profits that would have made a world of a difference to you? Who's the partisan hack here? Talk about a technicality.
Most of the rest of the government's TARP funds were converted into stock in the new company. So it's not a matter of "paying back" that money. It's a matter of the new company's performance being good enough to recoup the investment or even make a profit. That new company is seeing rising profits and market share, which obviously directly benefits the government now. The loans are paid back, and most of the rest is in the form of a government investment which by all accounts appears to be paying off, and then some. Where's the problem here again?
Quote:What's your basis for this? Of course, what happened was not a true Chapter 11. Obama cronyism allowed unions to jump in line in front of creditors.
What's my basis for what? And how is it not a "true Chapter 11?" Because there was an asset sale and most of the creditors voluntarily agreed to convert their debt into stock? Hey, if it weren't for Obama's "cronyism" there would have been Chapter 7 liquidation and by most estimates all the creditors would have been worse off. Chapter 7 liquidation very rarely gets even a nickel on the dollar. At least now they own shares of a profitable company.
Quote:...as if that were the only factor. Union and pension obligations (among other things) were a major part of their demise. From looking at their financial statements, that's indisputable.
It was pretty much far and away the main factor. Bush's decision to launch wars all over the Middle East helped skyrocket oil prices so Joe American couldn't afford his Hummers and Ford F150s and had to buy tiny fuel efficient cars from Japan. That's how you turn a net operating loss of $6 billion into a net operating loss of $80 billion. Not by the continuing trickle of factory workers retiring.
Quote:Given your hatred of religious people it's no shock you take issue with this.
The nerve of republicans. Believing that they should be able to decide what to do with the money they earn.
Perhaps you missed it, but that 16% Romney paid was in addition to his taxes. Democrats want to take more money from people because, as you have put it, people are selfish and need to be told who their money should go to.
Someone once said you give a liberal enough time they'll tell you who they really are. Thank you for having that ring true in your above post. People simply can't be trusted with what they earn. So the government must take care of it.
I don't care what Romney does with his money after taxes. If he didn't have to pay taxes though (as Newt is proposing by cutting capital gains to zero), you can bet he'd give more money to the Mormon church and little to poor minorities. This illustrates how we can't simply count on private giving to address the problems in society.
Yes, conservatives are selfish, as this Psychology Today article explains below. It's not that they're evil, but rather that they're less evolved (and about 12 IQ points less intelligent). The concept of liberalism and utilizing the resources of a vast society for the benefit of all, regardless of who they are or your relation to them, is a very novel one, while tribalism and selfishness is a tale as old as time. (cue the Beauty and the Beast music)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-...servatives
Quote:It is difficult to define a whole school of political ideology precisely, but one may reasonably define liberalism (as opposed to conservatism) in the contemporary United States as the genuine concern for the welfare of genetically unrelated others and the willingness to contribute larger proportions of private resources for the welfare of such others. In the modern political and economic context, this willingness usually translates into paying higher proportions of individual incomes in taxes toward the government and its social welfare programs. Liberals usually support such social welfare programs and higher taxes to finance them, and conservatives usually oppose them.
Defined as such, liberalism is evolutionarily novel. Humans (like other species) are evolutionarily designed to be altruistic toward their genetic kin, their friends and allies, and members of their deme (a group of intermarrying individuals) or ethnic group. They are not designed to be altruistic toward an indefinite number of complete strangers whom they are not likely ever to meet or interact with. This is largely because our ancestors lived in a small band of 50-150 genetically related individuals, and large cities and nations with thousands and millions of people are themselves evolutionarily novel.
The examination of the 10-volume compendium The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, which describes all human cultures known to anthropology (more than 1,500) in great detail, as well as extensive primary ethnographies of traditional societies, reveals that liberalism as defined above is absent in these traditional cultures. While sharing of resources, especially food, is quite common and often mandatory among hunter-gatherer tribes, and while trade with neighboring tribes often takes place, there is no evidence that people in contemporary hunter-gatherer bands freely share resources with members of other tribes.
Because all members of a hunter-gatherer tribe are genetic kin or at the very least friends and allies for life, sharing resources among them does not qualify as an expression of liberalism as defined above. Given its absence in the contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes, which are often used as modern-day analogs of our ancestral life, it may be reasonable to infer that sharing of resources with total strangers that one has never met or is not likely ever to meet – that is, liberalism – was not part of our ancestral life. Liberalism may therefore be evolutionarily novel, and the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely than less intelligent individuals to espouse liberalism as a value.
Analyses of large representative samples, from both the United States and the United Kingdom, confirm this prediction. In both countries, more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be liberals than less intelligent children. For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “very liberal” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 106.4, whereas those who identify themselves as “very conservative” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 94.8.
Even though past studies show that women are more liberal than men, and blacks are more liberal than whites, the effect of childhood intelligence on adult political ideology is twice as large as the effect of either sex or race. So it appears that, as the Hypothesis predicts, more intelligent individuals are more likely to espouse the value of liberalism than less intelligent individuals, possibly because liberalism is evolutionarily novel and conservatism is evolutionarily familiar.
The primary means that citizens of capitalist democracies contribute their private resources for the welfare of the genetically unrelated others is paying taxes to the government for its social welfare programs. The fact that conservatives have been shown to give more money to charities than liberals is not inconsistent with the prediction from the Hypothesis; in fact, it supports the prediction. Individuals can normally choose and select the beneficiaries of their charity donations. For example, they can choose to give money to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, because they want to help them, but not to give money to the victims of the earthquake in Chile, because they don’t want to help them. In contrast, citizens do not have any control over whom the money they pay in taxes benefit. They cannot individually choose to pay taxes to fund Medicare, because they want to help elderly white people, but not AFDC, because they don’t want to help poor black single mothers. This may precisely be why conservatives choose to give more money to individual charities of their choice while opposing higher taxes.
Incidentally, this finding substantiates one of the persistent complaints among conservatives. Conservatives often complain that liberals control the media or the show business or the academia or some other social institutions. The Hypothesis explains why conservatives are correct in their complaints. Liberals do control the media, or the show business, or the academia, among other institutions, because, apart from a few areas in life (such as business) where countervailing circumstances may prevail, liberals control all institutions. They control the institutions because liberals are on average more intelligent than conservatives and thus they are more likely to attain the highest status in any area of (evolutionarily novel) modern life.
![[Image: Political%20ideology.jpg]](http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/u15/Political%20ideology.jpg)
History proves people can't be trusted with what they earn. The welfare state was created because private sector voluntary contributions couldn't take care of all hunger, sickness and homelessness.
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