Senate Approves the ______Act Of____ 571
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently the Senate was in such a rush to get out of town that it forgot to name an 'important' bill that it passed, so the bill goes to the House as The ______Act of____. That's how it appears in the Congressional Record, though the Library of Congress has it listed as The XXXXXXAct ofXXXX. As for what's in the bill, well that appears to be as mysterious as the name. It was officially announced as a bill to tax bonuses to execs who received TARP money. But then someone simply deleted the entire bill and replaced it with text about aviation security. And then it was deleted again, and replaced with something having to do with education. However, because of these constant changes, many of the services that track the bill have the old details listed. On top of that, Nancy Pelosi called the House back for an emergency vote on this unnamed bill, and anyone trying to find out what it's about might be misled into thinking its about aviation security or something entirely unrelated to the actual bill. And people wonder why no one trusts Congress." It appears that the government's new martial law plans are being passed after all.
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Caturday (Score:0, Interesting)
A century or two from now, no one will remember how "Saturday" became "Caturday".
Re:Any objections? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm all in favor of a "Recall them All" option every election. Which if it wins, all INCOMBENTS are summarily fired and forbidden from holding any elected office (everywhere) or position in any firm that Lobbies Congress.
It is high time the elites in DC learn that we're sick to death of the crap they feed us, but refuse to eat themselves. If it is so good for me and mine, why the hell are you exempted? HUH?
By the way, when was the last time you read the entire Declaration of Independence? THE WHOLE THING? I challenge each and every US citizen to go and read the whole thing and see what we went to war for back then. I think you'll be surprised that it is the very same thing many of us are unhappy about with our current Federal and even State governments.
Here's what I'd like to see. (Score:5, Interesting)
All bills should be written on a wiki-like system that is publicly viewable, along with all previous versions of the bill and which member of Congress made which changes.
Re:Bureaucracy (Score:5, Interesting)
When the system for legislation gets so confusing that not even the people passing the bills can keep it straight, I think it shows that there is some fundamental flaw in the system, or it didn't scale well or something.
Do we have to go back to Schoolhouse Rock?
There's an easy fix for this. Make the following change to the Constitution:
Each year, before any new law can be created or any existing law modified, the Speaker of the House must first read aloud every last federal law on the books while all other members of Congress listen. If that takes more than one year (and the federal tax code alone would easily do so) then Congress is allowed only to repeal existing laws the following year. The next year after that, the reading aloud begins again and only if completed within one year can a new law be passed or an old law modified.
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Re:Well (Score:4, Interesting)
new taxes for foreigners doing business in the US, foreign companies doing business in the US, and US citizens previously entitled to tax credits from living abroad, and well over $1 trillion worth of rescinded spending (presumably to get money to give to the State governments). There are other details, obviously.
And you should be thrilled about this. The House is now operating under PAYGO rules, which means that any new spending has to be offset by budget cuts or tax increases elsewhere.
According to the CBO, if we manage to stick with PAYGO discipline, our debt will stabilize (i.e., the country will not fucking die). During the 2001-2008 we did not have PAYGO in force. As a result, we did horrendous, possibly permanent damage to the nation's finances.
Let's pray that we don't go back to those days.
Re:o rly? (Score:4, Interesting)
Congress cannot constrain its own future actions (at least, not without a constitutional amendment). That's a general principle of all legislative bodies. Otherwise Republicans would pass laws making universal health care illegal, and Democrats would pass laws making unions untouchable.
So no, strictly speaking congress doesn't have to read their own laws. They can pass as many conflicting laws as they want. It's the executive and judicial branches that are responsible for reading and interpreting.
Re:o rly? (Score:1, Interesting)
really care about banning gay marriage
I care about retaining the meaning of the word marriage. I really could care less about gays living together, and quite honestly I think that the tax/medical/whatever benefits available to married couples should be extended to any two cohabitating people. Including the 60-year-old widow taking care of her 80-year-old mother. As I see it, marriage is a socio-religious concept anyway and has no place in the legal system. Let churches deal with marriages, eliminate marriage from the legal code altogether, and institute the civil union as the only legal contract between two people that gives them the legal benefits that you'd normally obtain from marriage. Then different churches can bicker amongst each other about whether or not they can marry gays, and whether or not each other's marriages are valid, and it will mean fuck-all from a legal point of view because whether you want a marriage or not, whether your church will marry gays or not, you're all going to have to go down to the courthouse after the wedding and sign up the papers for a civil union anyway.
abortion
Ah, the concept that a human isn't human because it's still in inside its mother. Tell me, are there other places a human can be where they aren't human? Maybe we could re-define Gitmo as a womb, from a legal standpoint, so that the prisoners held there don't have to be treated humanely.
stem cell research
Same old FUD. I must admit, I'm not surprised. I'm not against stem cell research. I'm against killing unborn children to harvest their stem cells, but first of all that isn't necessary and secondly those stem cells have been spectacularly ineffective anyway. ADULT stem cells are easy to harvest, don't require killing anyone, and have been just as spectacularly effective as embryonic stem cells have been ineffective. Hell, adult stem cell treatments have been around ever since bone marrow transplants, at least - yes, bone marrow transplants are basically just adult stem cell infusions.
Re:o rly? (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps, in your opinion, Bush wasn't held all that accountable for the crap he pulled was because he was really trying to cater to the left with his domestic policies.
Nah.
I didn't like Bush's politics. I thought a lot of what he did was counter-productive. I'm generally of a more liberal bent. But that wasn't my problem with him.
I can accept that this is a democracy, and folks get out-voted. And, despite the fact that the 2000 election looked a little fishy... I'm not even one of those bitter folks who think it was all a conspiracy.
My problem was with the outright lies, blatant misinformation, and straight-up illegal things done by that administration.
Which isn't to say that he was the first president to lie... Or that his administration was the first one to do anything underhanded... Or that I think Obama is some infallible paragon of virtue...
But things seem to be going downhill.
There was a time when good, solid, investigative journalism went a long way towards keeping our politicians honest.
These days there doesn't seem to be anything even remotely resembling good, solid, investigative journalism. It's all just entertainment. Warring pundits with shiny infographics and scripted diatribes screaming about how one side or the other is going to ruin the nation.
And the few little stories here and there that actually dig in to what is really going on are completely ignored in favor of the louder and shinier opinion pieces.
Re:What is the Community Reinvestment Act? (Score:4, Interesting)
"The idea that Clinton somehow brought on the mortgage crisis by forcing banks to lend to poor people is simply ludicrous."
You are correct, strictly speaking. However, it was done with the blessing of top leaders of the Democratic party. Here is a transcript of Barney Frank's speech before an assembly to amend the regulation of the Fannie and Freddie funds, this measure was rammed through Congress with the objections of the Bush Administration The measure went through the Democratically-controlled house regardless: Frank Speech [taxfoundation.org].
Re:Sorry, What?? (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't speak for the original poster. But I disagree with pretty much everything you said so strongly that I couldn't resist putting in my $0.02.
If you accept that the massive influx of government spending is the proper response to a dead economy (I do),
I don't. Massive government spending turned a minor little recession into the Great Depression. It's never helped, and it never will. Central planning the Keynesians love so much has failed time and again.
If something doesn't work, the answer is not to do more of the same thing. Get the government out of the way and let the free market work. (And, no, we have not had anything vaguely resembling a free market since the Depression).
Nothing except a free market economy will ever be able to cope with black swans.
and that it is temporary (god I hope so),
Social Security was a "temporary emergency measure." And it will end, when the Ponzi scheme (which it is) collapses under its own weight. Government never voluntarily gives up any of its power. But go on hoping for change you can believe in.
what specifically are you referring to? The healthcare bill got watered down to the point where all it did was set up a competitive price exchange for healthcare... sort of the Amazon.com of getting sick.
Actually, it got turned into a giant gimme to the insurance companies (who are crying all the way to the bank) and yet another giant bureaucracy that will destroy the quality of health care in this country. Along with tons of extra police-state tidbits like extra taxes on gold.
They passed a toothless wall-street reform act.
That's kind of the point. The people were screaming against the bailouts. The more we learned, the louder we screamed. So they passed this to placate us and promise "This will keep it from ever happening again." And people fell for it. Most Americans are still so brainwashed that they actually trust the "government" to protect them from the "evil corporations."
Regulations like that are just a security blanket. For all intents and purposes, those "evil corporations" have become "the government."
And saying this is as bad as Bush II is going too far. We're not stuck in any new intractable wars,
He's following Bush II's policies pretty much point for point. Along with his handling of accused "enemy combatants"...at least Bush II never sentenced an American citizen to death without any sort of trial. And the war machine's trying really hard to find an excuse to open up another front in Iran. Give it time.
we haven't lost all of our allies,
I suspect that's mainly because they're still buying into the belief that "absolutely anyone would have to be better than Bush" (which I thought, too, until I started to actually listen to what he was--and wasn't--actually saying.
He has managed to insult most of our allies and kiss most of our enemy's asses. Not quite as bad as Bush II, but I think he more than makes up for it elsewhere.
and we haven't had any new worldwide economic collapses.
Not really fair to blame that one totally on Bush (though he definitely deserves a share of the blame). The roots for this one go back to at least Carter's days. And we're pretty much still in the middle of it. (Throwing money at it makes it look like things are improving, but you have to fix the actual problems before you can expect them to go away).
Much as I despise Bush, this collapse is more the fault of the boom-bust cycle that's guaranteed by the Federal Reserve and government interference in the market (in this case, encouraging, and sometimes requiring, banks to take extra risks while promising to protect them when the risks backfire).
Mainstream economists are starting to admit that we're still in serious trouble, and won't be in the clear for a long time. I almost suspect they're finally coming around to the idea that the double-dip the Austrians are predicting just might be possible after all.
Re:Here's what I'd like to see. (Score:1, Interesting)
Screw Wiki - Git is better suited to this purpose. The body of law would be one giant tree (like in wiki) - instead of tacking laws on left and right we could consistently edit so that it would (theoretically) always be readable, but this way each candidate could maintain their own tree, which could be examined by the public prior to voting on them. Close to base=="You're hiding something" | "You don't want to change much", many commits=="You're a Radical of some sort, but at least we know which way". Plus, each citizen could make their own patches, which would speed the whole Democracy thing.
The only problem is that will have to refer to laws as 'Commit 92b05ba' or something.
Re:What is the Community Reinvestment Act? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Partisan politics is immature bigotry. (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow, look at the ignorance shine.
Clinton has so much hate by this time in office that he completely lost control of the congress to the republicans. And no, the hate wasn';t directed at clinton as much as it was at his policies.
Also, Clinton wasn't elected with a majority populare vote. In all essence, about 3/5s of the people in the US elected Clinton as the popular vote was split between three dominant candidates (with Ross Pero in the mix.)
Also, the tea party movement existed long before a black man was in office as the president. The tea party movement is essentially the rational Ron Paul supporters who got off the Ron Paul Idol kicks and started making sense with their political ramblings.
And to your parent, if the democrats had not put Turd sandwiches up for election, some of the 89% voted for republicans, would probably have vote democrat or more likely independent.
The last three elections were literally the lesser of two evils elections on the republican/conservative outlook. Obama was able to get the "lets make history and you will be part of it so you are important" message out better though.
What this ends up with is a growing number of people dissatisfied with the government no matter how you look at it.
Re:Sorry, What?? (Score:2, Interesting)
I was under the impression that monetary contraction is widely regarded as one of the factors that contributed to the Great Depression, and that Roosevelt's New Deal (which certainly increased government spending), as the Wikipedia article on the Great Depression [wikipedia.org] so neatly puts it, "either caused or accelerated the recovery".
That's the general wisdom accepted by the mainstream economists who were telling us "don't worry, everything's fine!" right up until the world's economy collapsed.
The fed contracting the money supply (central control) was a huge mistake, and definitely a factor. But the main reason it was a problem was that shop keepers couldn't afford to immediately drop prices, and workers couldn't deal with the inevitable wage cuts. Not to mention that all those bank loans didn't magically deflate at the same time.
If you're really curious, check out Murray Rothbard [mises.org]. There's a link on that page to a PDF of _America's Great Depression_ (really, Slashdot? No <u> tags?). Mainstream economists don't have much respect for the Austrian school, but they're the ones who warned us what was coming. (Full Disclaimer: I haven't found the time to read it yet. It's just one on the subject that my friends keep telling me I absolutely must read Immediately...well, right after Hayek's _The Road to Serfdom_).
Many current economists are saying that the currently biggest threat we face, economically, is deflation.
Those are the mainstream economists again. The ones who are telling us heavy inflation (which they consider a good thing) isn't happening, when one of the biggest risks we're really running (according to the Austrians) is hyperinflation. The academic types who sit around on college campuses, pulling new formula out of thin air because, hey, that makes economics look like a hard science. The ones who don't suffer any real consequences when they inevitably blow it.
So it would seem to me that if there is anything we should do to control economic development at this point, it is actually increasing the amount of money in circulation,
As I understand it, we've pretty much doubled it in the past year. Admittedly, the different ways economists have of describing how much money's in circulation make my head spin.
and even printing more money is currently a viable way of doing that.
I think that probably depends on your definition of viable. From many points of view, that's pretty much the definition of "inflation."
The good news is that it looks like we will all soon know how different policies work out: as far as I can tell, current US policy is to keep stimulating the economy by pumping money into it, whereas many countries in the European Union are introducing budget cuts to reduce government debt. We'll see how these opposite policies effect their respective economies.
That really is the way to find out. Except that the EU's tied all their wagons together. Ours is the biggest one, leading the train. If any of us go off the cliff, we're pretty much all going.
Then again, economics really isn't a hard science (no matter what most economists try to pretend). So we should get analysts from all the different schools who'll look back after the dust settles and rationalize whatever happens in a way that "proves" they were right all along.
<shrug> (For anyone who's curious about other "alternative" economists who have a history of making correct predictions, check out Gary North. He's a bit of a religious nut, but he has an excellent track record).
Re:Sorry, What?? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think it's a little more involved than that. The Federal Reserve drops interest rates to get banks to borrow more. Theoretically, they're supposed to turn around and invest it in loans so they can earn more than it's costing them. Then the greedy businessmen get their nefarious hands on it (probably through doing something unscrupulous like building something people want to buy and then selling it to them) and it winds up getting invested in some hot new stock/commodity/whatever.
Speculators jump on that trend and drive the price artificially higher, until the bubble bursts and we start blowing up another.
The problem isn't really that greed's just part of human nature. It's that the central planners are manipulating the system by injecting more money (aka inflation) at an interest rate so low that people can't resist.
As a side note, we'd probably be in the middle of hyper-inflation right now if the banks were holding up their end of the bargain. They're borrowing like hot cakes at the current ridiculously low interest rates. But then they're just sitting on that cash (i.e. losing money). Most people seem to think that's to bolster their cash reserve for some unfathomable reason. I suspect it's some sort of shady way for the Fed to keep juggling its smoke and mirrors.
Booms and busts have probably always been with us (not that pretty much anyone has ever tried true free market capitalism, so who knows? It might be the silver bullet for them too). They've just gotten much worse since the Federal Reserve kicked in and the Keynsians got prominent.
But I wasn't talking about booms and busts. I was talking about Black Swan Events (wikipedia has a pretty good explanation). The basic idea is that the market is just too complex for central planners to deal with. Sooner or later, something they can't possibly foresee will come along and collapse their house of cards.
Gary North explains Black Swan Events [lewrockwell.com] much better than I can.