So many what ifs, so few fucks to give.

So many what ifs, so few fucks to give.

How's that gone over the last 30 years?

So many what ifs, so few fucks to give.

So many what ifs, so few fucks to give.

Honestly Bryce, what is it with you and your reliance on the most extremely skewed research and news sites? This is horrible analysis. Have you ever conducted an independent look at basic data out there?

Okay... When you look at this "breakdown" done by McCann, he appears to be trying to make the case that government spending somehow has played a significant effect on manufacturing in America.

It is not just the astronomical increase in government spending that has impacted incomes and the standard of living. The American left was determined also to rein in and control the private sector -- the left's designated villain.
To that end, the regulatory regime and the tax code have become a tool to bludgeon business and transform the economy. In 1947, the tax code was less than 9,000 pages; today, it is over 72,000 pages. In 1960, the Code of Federal Regulations totaled 22,800 pages; today, it is over 160,000 and expanding rapidly under the Obama regime. It is estimated that the cost of compliance relative to the tax code and other regulations (which do not include state and local) exceeds $1,750 billion ($1.75 trillion), which further drains capital for the formation of jobs and businesses

Basically Bryce, we are exiting the industrial age and entering the information age. The time of Taylorism and Fordism is long gone where you could plug in someone to just screw in the same part a thousand times a day for 30 years. The emerging markets can take a great number of these jobs, we need to find a way to rectify the employment situation in the US. Technology has helped workers be more efficient and to perform better than ever, and US firms are about as profitable, even in these hard times, as they ever were.

What I'd suggest is a dropping of the overtime level to 32-35 hours. It's worked in other places. There needs to be an investment in training if we want to bring H*** swaths of these jobs back to the US. Your guy here makes no cogent points that government spending has a significant effect on stagnant wages or unemployment. I think a greater case can be made for the correlation between union membership dropping and wage stagnation. Stronger unions in this country could have helped us greatly in avoiding this shit over the last 4 years.

Going to school to learn for finance or accounting for 4-6 years does not prepare you to be a CNC operator, but we have told all our kids that being a janitor, plumber or factory worker is shameful and that they can all be lawyers, doctors and CPAs.

The case he makes isn't confined to manufacturing and isn't just a spending issue. One part of the case he lays out is that over spending and over regulation has sucked trillions of dollars out of the private sector that could have been used to create growth.

PLEASE explain to me how he makes that case. I read this thing backwards and forwards and I will be honest, I see no substantive case made for anything. I am not trying to be an asshole, I am dead set honest. This article makes a case for dick. If dollars could have been used for growth, then the record $2T sitting in the books of major corporations would have done it.



Well, what is much of the tax code? Ways to distribute tax expenditures in the most inefficient ways possible. This sounds like an argument for more tax inflows. Further, are we really going to look at what happened with our financial markets and say there is too much regulation? Really? Okay... When inflows are at what, 15% now as opposed to an average around 20%, where is the "Taxed Enough Already"? I want to see how the cost of compliance to the tax code and other regulations has touched $1.75T in a year. He's saying 12% of our GDP is tax code and regulation compliance. I need to see a break down of this. IT sounds like one of those numbers where when you dig into it you see it's bullshit.

Which, in my mind, is much of the reason for the income growth disparity between the wealthiest and the poorest.

Agreed. I can find few other reasons.

I wont argue the 32-35 hour suggestion.

Investment in training? The government has already "trained" our citizens from K-12. That's not working out so well. Maybe we should fix what is already in place so that when someone graduates from high school they are proficient enough to preform at an entry level basis in the new economy.

As far as union strength, if that was indeed the answer, the industry in which they were the most powerful wouldn't have needed to be bailed out.
How else can we get to the point where we rectify that income disparity or come to a new understanding of the work week? You want less government intervention, it is fundamentally against the nature of a business to move in this direction, the union seems like the only answer. The individual, now more than any time in recent memory, is so expendable, the bargaining power isn't there unless they are bound together. As for the shot at the UAW, I think if you talk to most people who have studied what has happened with the Big 3, they will tell you it's a mix of bad contracts with the workers, but management not preparing for globalization, completely ignoring quality for decades and poor engineering were what broke them. Management is at the table negotiating these contracts too you know. The AAUP, Teamsters, they're all a-ok. Let's be honest about this stuff...

What you suggest about K-12 I have always advocated for.

Most likely why many manual labor jobs go wanting and instead are filled by people that shouldn't be here.

Very true... See Bryce, we can agree on some things.

So many what ifs, so few fucks to give.

Kathleen Parker

A gay marriage proclamation? Bullying? Much ado about the wrong things.

By Kathleen Parker, Published: May 11

This past week’s news cycle has produced two narratives:

One, Barack Obama is an evolutionary, 21st-century hero who supports equality for all.

Two, Mitt Romney is a gay-bashing bully mired in the previous century who also supports a war on women and, oh yeah, hates dogs.

Let’s parse, shall we?

Obama’s Big Announcement that he supports gay marriage came about for the following reasons: (a) He had no choice after Vice President Biden said on “Meet the Press” that he was fine with same-sex marriage; (b) one in six of Obama’s campaign bundlers, those who raise big bucks, is openly gay; (c) Obama risks nothing except the votes of those who wouldn’t have voted for him anyway.

And last, but certainly not least, because supporting equal treatment of all Americans under all legal contracts, including marriage with all its attendant rights and responsibilities, is the right thing to do. In this respect, Obama may have evolved in his thinking, as millions of other Americans have, including yours truly. Indeed, polls show that the country is about evenly divided on the question, with younger Americans overwhelmingly supportive of same-sex marriage. In another generation, this conversation likely will be irrelevant.

Meanwhile. Can we stop hyperventilating long enough to not be ridiculous?

Yes, Obama’s statement carries symbolic weight, but it changes nothing. In fact, by also saying he thinks the issue should remain with the states, he is both taking a conservative, states’-rights position and passing the constitutional buck. As commentator Joe Scarborough pointed out, if the president believes that equal marriage rights are constitutionally protected, then he has a duty to fight for those rights rather than hand off the issue to the states. Gay men and lesbians won’t fare well on that frontier given that 30 states already have passed prohibitive amendments to their state constitutions.

Thus, Obama’s announcement, while political and pragmatic, was fundamentally meaningless. You’d never know it by the media’s response, of course. As Tim Stanley wrote in Britain’s Telegraph, everything the first African American president says or does is breathtakingly historic:

“The Prez could go seal-clubbing and much of the media would see it as a new epoch for winter sports. ‘Barack Obama Becomes the First President to Kill Six Seals in Under One Minute,’ The New York Times would proudly report, while Twitter would be all abuzz with how hot he looks in snow shoes.”

Not so much poor Mitt. While Obama was being feted at a $40,000-a-plate din-din at George Clooney’s house, Romney was being roasted for a high school bullying “prank” nearly 50 years ago. A prank that made the top half of The Washington Post’s front page Friday — and the details of which are in much dispute, especially from the family of the alleged victim, who, alas, isn’t alive to defend his version of events.

Briefly, as told by a handful of boarding-school classmates, Romney led a group of boys who tackled and held down John Lauber and cut his longish, blond hair. Romney allegedly didn’t like Lauber’s look and decided to fix it. The subtext is that since Lauber later came out as gay, Romney is a not-so-closeted gay-hater.

For those to the premises more recently arrived, a quick primer on 1965, when this occurred. Nobody knew who was or wasn’t “gay,” a word that wasn’t yet in popular circulation as a noun and generally meant “merry.” Homosexuality wasn’t on most high school kids’ radar, period. If anything, Romney may not have liked Lauber’s “hippie” locks, which is the more likely case given the era.

Whatever. Lauber obviously was a nonconformist in an environment that valued conformity, and Romney and his crew were indeed bullies. They shouldn’t have done it, but boarding schools until recently were not widely known as incubators of sensitivity. Today, of course, prep schools feature weekly diversity seminars and offer staff psychiatrists for the noncompliant.

But five decades later, this is a campaign issue in a presidential election? Lauber’s family doesn’t think it should be — and they may be the only people who count in this particular debate.

The real story, meanwhile, is the one that keeps getting pushed aside, which is that the country is going bankrupt and that 32 percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) are underemployed. But as long as we’re talking about things like gay marriage and contraception — all forced to the fore by Democrats, by the way — Americans can avert their gaze from the evolving economic collapse, which will be anything but gay.

How come the Democratic Senate hasn't passed a budget in over 1,000 (ONE THOUSAND) days? How come the budgets Obama has put forth have been voted down nearly unanimously.