GOP Failure Watch Part III

$18 billion here, $18 billion there, and before you know it, it starts to add up to real money.

C'mon, you aren't seriously defending Robert Byrd on this, are you? I get that it's not a BIG problem, but it's not exactly a tiny problem, either.

 

Careful, American D*ckhead will start calling you names, too.

 

Eh. Everyone has their period once in a while.

 

It's been what, 5 years for him?

 

I think the point is we hear 100x about every $1.8 billion blown on a wasted pork project for every time that we hear about $1.8 billion blown on a battleship. The GOP gets too much bandwidth.

As Krugman points out, look at ACA. Not only does Fox get to blast it all day and night, but then MSNBC has Morning Joe making up nonsense (quite literally, no stats, just fakery) about how ACA's numbers are bogus. It doesn't work in reverse, does it? You don't see Fox and The WSJ making up stuff to help out Democrats in elections.

So really, yeah, I don't to hear about it any more. This story has been overtold. The authors have been overindulged.

 

The point should be that all waste is bad. We already have a whole generation of little sh*ts like Brummie that think it's perfectly ok because it's such a small portion of the budget.

 

Not buying. It's a GOP trick. Complain about foreign aid and stuff for blacks and things the GOP doesn't like, then say nothing about massive military spending, farm aid, etc.

It's not reciprocal because if Dems don't complain about military spending and farm aid in the same way.

Yeah I am against waste but I am against being manipulated by deceptive political narratives even more.

 

I agree to a point. When we are at war I don't think the spending is waste. Now that everything appears to be winding down, cut the expenditures. Problem is, government is like your kids. Up the allowance and you can never go back coupled with a complete inability to manage the money they have.

 

Since you have proven unable to show that $18 billion is relatable to $1.7 trillion in any way shape or form, let's take this argument to another tack. Let's again assume that $18 billion is pork barrel spending. Unless Robert Byrd was setting the money on fire in a vacuum chamber, the money wasn't wasted.

By definition, IT CANNOT BE WASTED. This is important, because when people discuss waste they do so without much or any knowledge of the word "waste" or why we have it as a distinct word, separate from the word "inefficient." So to repeat, PORK BARREL SPENDING CANNOT BE WASTED.

It was given to construction firms to build the project, or to researchers to conduct the research, or to citizens through the disbursement of benefits. In no way was this money wasted. What we do not know conclusively is the economic multiplier of the pork-barrel spending, but we do know that government infrastructure projects similar to the stimulus bill have net benefit multiplier effects.

Let's take the most extreme example. Robert Byrd gets a statue of himself built along the Robert Byrd Highway. To build the statue, he hires one sculptor and tells the sculptor that she is alone responsible for purchasing the marble and other materials, freeing him of any other expenditures. Let's also assume that she charges him six times what it will cost. She will use the payment from the pork barrel bill to pay:

1) her salary, which will have downstream economic effects when she spends the money on groceries, rent, car payments, etc.;
2) purchasing the cost of materials, marble, tools, and additional help, which will have downstream economic effects as the quarry, the hired help, and the sculptor's suppliers will also spend money on groceries, rent, gas, cable bills, etc.;
3) invest the profits into expanding her business or investments into the stock market or a bank, which will free lending ever-so-slightly or give others capital to invest in their own businesses.

If you vaguely recognize this extreme example, it's because it's the theory of trickle-down economics. Yes, in order to support the economic theory behind something conservatives love (tax cuts), they must also support the economic theory behind something they hate (pork barrel spending). This is called cognitive dissonance. I'd ask you to tell me if you still support trickle-down, or if you now have more support for pork-barrel spending, but alas, confirmation bias will have already kicked in by now. Your brain will rack itself for a reason to ignore the connection between trickle-down and pork barrel spending, or go find some op/ed or personal anecdote that invalidates the claim, but only just enough information to satiate an uncurious mind.

On a more severe note, I think that it's depressing when a liberal has to explain how trickle-down economics works to a conservative. I think it's a sign that the political positions of the GOP are about to become less and less coherent.

Who are you to tell me that a person cannot be treated in some way and in the same breath defend policies that are deliberately designed to treat some people differently based on the color of their skin? How dare you! You think it's unacceptable to be treated in some way when you're not able to contemplate basic mathematics? Consider it from my point of view: I am treated to your inane babbling time and again, and when I present evidence to show that your point of view is not only subjectively but objectively false, you ignore it or more firmly retrench upon those empirically, demonstrably untrue beliefs. I hold nothing but contempt for the complete lack of curiosity you demonstrate toward the world, but what really befuddles me is that your interest in politics is just enough that you bear forth opinions at will, but you are not interested enough in politics to find out if your beliefs are actually rooted in anything substantial. Go ask your chemist friend if chemists make predictions about chemical reactions based off of their gut and nothing more. Go ask that friend if those chemists get published anywhere. Go ask a lawyer if they'd rather have a hunch or DNA evidence. And that's not even what angers me. What angers me is that you take this complete lack of curiosity mixed with this insanely overinflated sense of self-knowledge about politics and then go vote. How dare you. Don't try getting angry with me; you're destroying the country and you don't even know why you think the way you do. My anger is sufficient for the both of us.

 

You are not having a good day today. Go to bed early and try to open your mind..

https://www.bigsoccer.com/community/threads/waste-at-the-pentagon.1996967/page-3#post-29159106

 

What did the Democrats add to the ACA?

 

He has a decent point, you know. The US government typically works a lot better when there's things at stake other than ideology. Due to the elimination of earmarks a few years ago, all Congressmen have to distinguish themselves from opponents is ideological issues, which has driven some of the Republicans into flights of near insanity. (There's really no Democratic corollary here.) Look at the recent debt ceiling and government funding standoff - the hard right freshmen/sophomore Congressmen were blocking a solution because that's the only thing they're in Washington to do. You can't "give and take" with them - there's nothing the Democrats can give. All they want is ideological. That may be a "pure" way of running the country, but it's not necessarily a very good one. As Cicero once reputedly said to Cato, "without grease, the wheels of the republic seize up".

 

All those cuts to Medicare... and that ACORN thingy, don't forget it...

 

That the first figure is an estimate? That would be my guess as it seems unlikely they had EXACTLY 6M on that day.

In any event I'd imagine the system might handle it's throughput in batches so there would typically be many thousands 'in the pipeline', with data coming in all the time and being collated at various points. The 31st March being a significant point I'm guessing and the 27th March... er... not so much.

 

Thanks for a history lesson d*ckhead. The money is wasted if you aren't getting a return. The sculptor pocketing a bunch of cash isn't exactly getting your money's worth. You know that, and could have said it in a concise way, but you seem to think these boards can be submitted for credit as long as you hit a certain word count.

As for your second part, I stand by my assertion that you are a d*ckhead. To insinuate my mathematical abilities without taking into consideration that a billion dollars is an absolutely huge amount of money shows one of two things. Either you are trying to simply win the internets by throwing out as many insults per post as possible in the hopes your opponent simply stops replying or you really have no concept of how much money one billion dollars actually is.

Since you really can't win the internets, I'll assume #2. Why can you not comprehend the value of one billion dollars? To simply write that amount off as insignificant considering the whole, you may have truly become a candidate for political office. Who else can simply discard one billion dollars without as much as a thought? Or to even chastise someone for thinking that it's a significant number? Who really cares about one billion dollars? It's a drop in the bucket!

I am done with you Brummie. It's a little disappointing that you can't get over your habit of insulting people because you really do bring different thought to the table. There is no way you can be like this in real life, someone would have beat the living sh*t out of you already, so I think you are the typical internet bully. Because of that, on ignore.

Here's to hoping I never live in a district you have anything to do with!


Cheers!

 

It's not the numbers, it's the setup.

 

stanger can't see this since he put me on ignore, but I never intend to become a politician. Nor do the overwhelming majority of political science PhD students. Much like how most biologists do not plan on becoming tree frogs, and most chemists do not plan on becoming noble gases, I do not plan on pursuing a career in politics.

 

I'm not sure what that means, tbh???

Wasn't the 31st March a significant day for the ACA? Some sort of deadline or something. Isn't it quite common for the run-up to deadline days for there to be a sudden rush and people try and squeak in 'under the wire'?

I know the figures for tax returns over here go up MASSIVELY in the few days immediately before the last day. Why would this be any different?

In any event, aren't we talking about an enrolment program handled by a complex computer system which draws data from many different sources including private companies? I'd imagine they were under pressure from their customers to pass data across in a timely manner and that accounted for an element in the apparent rush at the end.

As I say, it looks like the 6M figure is an estimate because the chances of there being PRECISELY that number on the 27th March is pretty bloody unlikely

 

Exactly. The money could have gone into the food stamps program. Or housing for the poor. Or a hundred other, more productive uses.

I would add something that conservatives like, but they don't like spending money on anything that's productive.

 

The scale is off intentionally.

 

American D*ckhead doesn't care about that. He only cares about insulting people and winning the argument.

 

Can someone photoshop a "Fox News style" graph with today's 8m enrolled number?

 

While I'm loathe to defend anything American D*ckhead* has to say, everything is possible to put into context. In the context of a much larger number, $1 billion may actually not be that much. I also have him on ignore, so am not entirely sure what he's referring to, but given the size of our economy, $1 billion may not actually be especially relevant.
As an example - I have a good friend who comes from money and once bought a chandelier for 15K to hang in her rental apartment. When she moved out, she didn't feel like taking it with her, because she was on such a tight timetable. To me, that was nuts. She shrugged - it's just a chandelier - why sweat the small stuff?

*Not a bad monicker, actually. I wouldn't mind the arrogance so much if it wasn't married to such an entitled (yet stupid) sense of ability to prove anything by referencing completely unrelated material, because you know - academia!

 

Context is important in any conversation but wasting a billion dollars is a problem regardless of the larger amount.