Greg Phipps and Alvin “Al” Austin won their respective City Council primaries last night. Come November, Phipps will face unaffiliated candidate Michael Zytkow, and Austin will face Republican Darryl Broome.
Also in local politics: The state GOP has stepped into the Charlotte mayoral race for the first time, providing field organizers to Republican candidate Edwin Peacock.
Yet another reason to fear fracking: A new study has “found elevated levels of radioactivity, along with other pollutants, at a site where treated wastewater from fracking processes was discharged into a creek.”
Why are women attracted to burlesque?
The good news: Even if Congress doesn’t raise the government’s borrowing limit, the U.S. Treasury still has a way to avoid debt default. The bad news: We might not avoid a recession.
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2013.
Regarding the last point: There is not going to be a “debt default”. The federal government is taking in record revenue ($2.48 trillion for the past 12 months) which is more than enough to keep payments on its debts current.
Garth:
Since you don’t seem to understand the difference between “default” and “bankruptcy”, let me help you out.
The US government has essential people working who are not getting paid on schedule. They have already defaulted on that obligation. They are not paying some veterans’ benefits. They have already defaulted on that obligation. They have suspended WIC payments that are required by law. They have defaulted on that obligation. The warning now is that if this spending and borrowing authority is not passed before the 17th, they will be forced to default on even more obligations. Default is not confined to the repayment of loans. It includes ALL obligations.
Your bizarre logic that since the monthly income exceeds the interest payments of the borrowed money then no default will occur is equivalent to claiming that a family with $500 in income and a $495 mortgage payment has no reason to default on the mortgage. You are not taking into consideration their other expenses like food, utilities, and gas for the car so they can get to work.
As long as we continue to give the military and it’s huge network of civilian suppliers a virtual blank check, we will NEVER balance the budget. A great start on deficit reduction would be to close some of the 700 military bases we have in other countries. Then we could stop buying things for the military that they don’t even want but that are manufactured in some powerful congressman’s district. Then we can put the tax rates back to where they were during the Eisenhower administration before Republicans bought into that delusional “trickle down” theorem.
Or, like you, we can just keep claiming that the poor people are sucking the life out of us.
Ahem.
In a memo dated Oct. 7, Moody’s Rating Service said: “We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact. The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt. There is no direct connection between the debt limit (actually the exhaustion of the Treasury’s extraordinary measures to raise funds) and a default.”
I take Moody’s word regarding “default” vs. yours, DumbLiberalPrick
PS DLP – If you had any genuine concern at all about the size of the military budget, you wouldn’t have voted for the DroneBomber In Chief, whose Pentagon budgets EXCEED those of George W. Bush.
FY 2009 (Last Bush) 794.91 billion
FY 2010 (First Obama) 847.87
FY 2011 879.37
FY 2012 850.73
FY 2013 857.74
FY 2014 832.15
Numbers don’t lie.
Garth:
I did not assign blame to any party when I suggested cutting the military budget. I said the military budget should not be a sacred cow in budget negotiations. Our paranoia is going to bankrupt us, just as it did the Soviet Union. Or are you one of those party faithful who believe that propaganda about President Reagan winning the cold war? We should not be cutting help for our poor people to finance the cancerous growth that our military has become. We spend more on our military than the next 10 largest militaries combined. It is spread all over the world. We cannot afford it.
I am not a Democrat. I am, and always have been, an independent. You think I am a Democrat because at this particular moment in time I keep speaking loudly against the Republican party that clearly has been taken over by crazy people. In this particular budget fight, I believe that the Republicans bear primary responsibility. When the budget had a small surplus in the last three years of the Clinton administration, the Democrats wanted to use the surplus for more social programs and the Republicans wanted to use it for tax cuts. I didn’t hear a single voice propose using it to pay down the debt.
In your black and white world, anyone who is not “one of us”, is defacto “one of them”.
I voted for President Reagan. I voted for President Bush (41) both the time he won and the time he lost. I did not vote for his spoiled child. Then the party fell under the control of some very evil people. If they ever find their way back, I will consider their candidates again. But not at this time. At this moment in time I would not vote for a Republican if he was running unopposed. Sadly, the Democrats are the only other viable choice. The lesser of two evils.