"This is a great great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades,”
Seriously, in 2008 we elected a community organizer, state senator, college instructor first term senator over a guy who spent five years in a Vietnamese prison. And now he’s lecturing us about how America’s gone “soft”? Really?
Ford has pulled a TV ad that took shots at companies that benefited from federal government's auto bailout "in response to White House questions," reports Daniel Howes at the Detroit News
This is not just about how big the deficit should be; it is about whether the international financial system will survive the next six months in the form we now know it. It is about whether the foundations of the postwar order are cracking in Europe. It is about whether a global financial crash will further destabilize the Middle East and, if so, what we and the Europeans are going to do about it. It is about whether the incipient signs of a bubble burst in China signal the start of an extended economic and perhaps even political crisis there. It is about whether the American middle class is about to be knocked off its feet once again and indeed whether the middle class as we’ve known it will survive. It is about whether sovereign governments can still underwrite economic performance and financial stability in the leading economies of the world.
"I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
Nobel laureate Paul Samuelson as perhaps the earliest use of the Social Security/Ponzi-scheme comparison in public argument. Samuelson was actually drawing on the Ponzi analogy to defend Social Security. His claim was that the perpetual succession of human generations establishes the conditions for a sustainable Ponzi scheme. Regardless of whether Samuelson was the first commentator to use the Ponzi analogy, he has clearly been the most influential. Policy briefs and books churned out by conservative think tanks such as Heritage and Cato have cited Samuelson’s Ponzi column for years.
the 1987 publication of Ben Wattenberg’s book The Birth Dearth. Wattenberg, who once worked for Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey, was by the late 1980s a centrist Democrat, hawkish on defense and otherwise alternately allied with the right or left, depending on the issue. Although many rejected Wattenberg’s claim in The Birth Dearth that a crisis of population decline loomed, time has vindicated his warning.
In a U.S. News & World Report cover story excerpting The Birth Dearth, Wattenberg sums up his argument by saying: “In short, Social Security is a Ponzi game, a pyramid scheme, a chain letter.”
In December of 1988, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, James C. Miller III, made news when he called Social Security a Ponzi scheme before an audience at the National Press Club
Shapiro was also a senior economic adviser to the presidential campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry, and advised the presidential campaign and transition of Barack Obama as well...
The first section-heading in Shapiro’s piece reads “National Ponzi Scheme.” There Shapiro recalls Samuelson’s 1967 Ponzi comparison and suggests that, given today’s demographics, Social Security is“fiscally unsustainable” without major restructuring.
Lamm is praised as a “truthteller” by Alter for being willing to say, among other things, that Social Security is a “well-meaning Ponzi scheme.” Today, of course, the very liberal Alter is a sympathetic biographer of Obama and one of the president’s most supportive media cheerleaders.Michael Kinsley
Kinsley published a piece at Slate titled, “Social Security: From Ponzi Scheme to Shell Game.”
“For more than 30 years, Presidents and Congresses have pretended that the Social Security Ponzi scheming between the generations will never explode in their lifetimes.” Argued Frankel, “ . . . the majority of voters have been misled.”To read the entire Kurtz column click on the title for a link.
You all knew already that all the stuff out of the White House about working with Republicans and respecting others’ views was garbage, didn’t you?.....
this White House is serious only about ramming its agenda through Congress and getting Obama reelected, not restoring comity to Washington and the nation via hope and change.
Cranking up the anti-Tea Party rhetoric, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa called on workers to
"take these sons of bitches out"
as he warmed up a crowd Monday in Detroit ahead of President Obama's Labor Day speech.
"Obama is still suffering from the Speech Illusion, the idea that he can come down from the mountain, read from a Teleprompter, cast a magic spell with his words and climb back up the mountain, while we scurry around and do what he proclaimed"
