Tuesday, August 9, 2011
(Is there anything more dangerous?)
“To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.”(Alcott) “There is nothing more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity” When Martin Luther King Jr. said this it was in the context of explaining the rationalization of the enslavement, mistreatment, and vilification of African Americans by the white community. African American slaves were thought to be an inferior species and thus deserving of their fate. Written in our Constitution is the formula for representation of the states where every man gets a single vote and the slaves were considered three fifths of a person and not considered to have rights (women – none at all). We now recognize the pure folly of that way of thinking. Those who did think …
Monday, August 8, 2011
Helping people should be the focus, not the economy. Why? Because our policy of not caring for people is what costs us the most.
So, there I was typing the word Fidelity, which is where my company has our 401k, into my URL. I landed on their website and immediately noticed the headline at the top of their page: “Panic is not a strategy.” This headline intrigued me – how in the world can a company say panic is not a strategy when so many people had already decided that was a strategy? Here’s an excerpt from the statement: “To sum it up, I would say, for the moment, investors appear to have lost confidence. Investors are ‘checking out.’ There is a growing sense now that the U.S. economy is not strong enough to stand on its own two feet, and that unlike 2009 we will get neither the fiscal response from Congress, nor the monetary response from the Fed to bring it back …
Sunday, July 31, 2011
And while details are still coming out, one of the provisions is that the Republicans and the Democrats have to continue to work together.
President Barack Obama announced in a press conference Sunday night that a deal over the debt ceiling has been brokered. The agreement calls for increasing the debt ceiling and cutting spending in domestic and defense spending. If the deal is passed, increasing the debt ceiling will remove the "uncertainty to support the American economy." The deal included increasing the debt ceiling to $2.1 trillion and shrinking by $1 trillion. Of that amount, $350 billion will come from defense spending, according to a document provided to the White House to reporters. According to a story by the Huffington Post, Debt Ceiling Deal Reached To Avert Default (LATEST UPDATES), program cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and “low-income” programs will be …
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Economists say standoff on the debt ceiling will hurt anyone with investments - government, businesses or individuals.
Citing "a hundred variables," local economists say it's too soon to tell just what the local effects of a default on the federal debt would be – but without doubt, there will be dire effects felt at every level of society if Congress fails to raise the debt ceiling in a timely fashion. Interestingly, under one scenario, the damage ultimately could hit as hard or harder in the suburbs - which tend to be more Republican - than it would in city centers. "It all depends on what bills the federal government would choose to pay, and on what the markets do," said Scott Drewianka, associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "In the first place," he said, "I don't think there's necessarily a disaster that happens if …
Sunday, July 17, 2011
And that's not a good thing.
- GOVERNMENT
- Dan Bell
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Sunday, July 17, 2011
Busy lives. We all have them. July is probably busier than most of the months of the year. Why? There is vacation. There is the planning of the vacation, the getting everything done before the vacation. Then, there is the recovering from the vacation. The doing what didn’t get done at work while we were gone on vacation. With all of this busy-ness, how much do we really know about the month of July? July is the seventh month in what is called the “Gregorian calendar.” It is said that his friend Marc Anthony named the month after Julius Caesar. Within three days in July 1863, Over 50,000 men perished at the battle of Gettysburg; a pivotal battle in the Civil War. In July 1879, Parisians stormed the Bastille prison marking the beginning of …
patchreader 123
10:42 am on Wednesday, August 10, 2011
"Those representing the old-school way of thinking were sincere and conscientious (in their ignorance and stupidity)." ".....something [rasing the debt ceiling] that since the 1960’s has been raised over sixty times without much fanfare (and how many times under Bush the lesser?)...." Dan, please justify the dichotomy of your above statements. Raising the debt ceiling over sixty times is the very… more ›