Poll-Based System Predicts U.S. Election Results For President, Senate 519
An anonymous reader writes "Election Analytics is a website developed by Dr. Sheldon Jacobson at the University of Illinois designed to predict the outcomes of the U.S. presidential and senatorial elections, based on reported polling data. From the site: 'The mathematical model employs Bayesian estimators that use available state poll results (at present, this is being taken from Rasmussen, Survey USA, and Quinnipiac, among others) to determine the probability that each presidential candidate will win each of the states (or the probability that each political party will win the Senate race in each state). These state-by-state probabilities are then used in a dynamic programming algorithm to determine a probability distribution for the number of Electoral College votes that each candidate will win in the 2012 presidential election. In the case of the Senate races, the individual state probabilities are used to determine the number of seats that each party will control.'" You can tweak the site by selecting a skew toward the Republican or Democratic tickets, and whether it's mild or strong. Right now, this tool shows the odds favor another four years for Obama, even with a strong swing for the Republicans.
Re:Not possible! (Score:1, Insightful)
Fox news tells me that Romney will win 59 states
That was Obama [youtube.com]. I mean, Down With Romney!
Rasmussen isn't a polling agency (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well thats a relief. (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, consider "wasting" your vote in a different way: By voting for someone who isn't running on a major party ticket.
Maybe if enough people realize that their vote in their state isn't actually important when it comes to choosing the next president, they can cast a vote that says "the next next president shouldn't be a Republicrat". Only 6 states in the country aren't 90% in favor of one party or the other, and with the exception of florida, none of them really have much in the way of population. If you live in a 90% state, and were going to vote for the "lesser of two evils", why note vote for "neither of two evils". It'll make no more difference, but a much stronger statement.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:2, Insightful)
Is there a strong republican candidate? I know there's a lot of nut jobs that the vocal minority loves, but none of them have a better chance than Nader ever has.
Re:Not possible! (Score:4, Insightful)
Funny.
BTW., Romney already lost because he is now trying to out-Obama Obama, out-Democrat the Democrats. How is that going to work at all? Clearly he is not a Democrat, if somebody wants to vote for Democrats they will vote for Obama.
My point is that the entire 'intellectual' debate of the Right is now: we are going to do a better job PROTECTING Medicare (and SS I guess) than Obama would.
That's a lost fight right there.
not really new (Score:5, Insightful)
It's an interesting model, but feeding a poll aggregate into a statistical prediction algorithm has been standard practice for years now. On the internet, fivethirtyeight [nytimes.com] is probably the first prominent site to have done so (originally as an independent site, before the NYTimes bought them).
How is this different from fivethirtyeight? (Score:5, Insightful)
So aside from being a visual disaster and not providing all of the background numbers, how is this different from what Nate Silver has been doing for the last four years? Okay, it allows you to assign a swing, but it's a lot more opaque and seems a lot less robust than what Silver has been doing over at fivethirtyeight.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:2, Insightful)
Relative to what?
I think Romney/Ryan is a ticket better than anything they have fielded since Reagan was President.
And if Obama wins it will be a re-election of a President with the highest unemployment rate since FDR.
It seems to me Republicans have two big issues - demographics; that is Caucasian people are a decreasing percentage of voters, and they have a social platform that is becoming increasingly unpopular with women. You can't win with so much of the electorate unhappy with your policies.
Re:Well thats a relief. (Score:5, Insightful)
You may not be able to vote if you live in a Republican state and your photo ID is older than 9 months or if your voter registration shows a middle initial but your ID card doesn't or your photo ID happened to expire yesterday, or you have the same name or a similarly spelled name or your photo ID is issued by one of the state universities or is a Veteran's Administration ID or if you're darker than a paper bag.
They take democracy seriously in those states and they want to protect it at all costs, even if it means several million legitimate citizens are unintentionally deprived of the right to vote.
Re:If you want accuracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Using intrade properly looks like it would take bookie skills. I never have bothered to learn those.
I like the electoral vote predictor [electoral-vote.com]. Its comments show a definite blue bias, but there is no bias in its handling of poll data. It uses the last polls taken in each state for data.
At the moment what it shows is not necessarily representative of the country, since there have been very few polls done in the last week. But now that the conventions are over, I expect that there will be a lot of polling done, and electoral-vote.com will be as accurate as anyone can get.
Re:Unemployment is at 14%.. (Score:4, Insightful)
While you may be 100% confident, you are not 100% correct.
Unemployment is at 14.6% for the US for August 2012.
It's called U6 and is a much more telling number than the U3, which is the oft-manipulated rate used by the press which is at about 8.1% for August, 2012.
Re:Well thats a relief. (Score:3, Insightful)
waiting every 4 years to express your outrage at the system by voting for a zero-chance third party candidate for president is kinda retarded.
I completely agree with your sentiment ... but if you want to build a viable third party you can't start at the top. This person will need a network of other party members spread throughout the rest of the system to effectively govern.
If you don't believe me, just look at the damn near unbelievable opposition that Obama has faced ... and HE HAS ALLIES ... just not as many as the other guys. Now imagine your third party candidate SOMEHOW manages to get into office, and now faces bipartisan unified brick-wall of opposition.
A real 3rd (or 4th or 5th) party is desperately needed in America, but it can ONLY happen when people who agree with that statement start paying attention to other elections than just the Presidential one ... right down to your school boards and city councils.
There is a substantive difference between the Democratic & Republican party .. even if you fall for this "two sides of the same coin" philosophy of apathy, you simply cannot deny that even if actual policy is somewhat similar, the tactics each side is willing to use to win are NOT EQUIVALENT. This election is as much a referendum on what we find acceptable in public political discourse, as it is a referendum on policy.
Do you want to live in a country run by wealthy elite willing to co-opt religion and twist it for their own gain? who have no problem outright buying elections? who have no problem with fear mongering and propagandizing in ways that would make the originators of the term blush? People who, in spite of their own incredibly expensive and exclusive educations, have no problem bashing any form of perceived intellectualism as "gay" ... oh and while they're at it, also scapegoating gays, and immigrants and non-christians as "the problem with this country?"
Even if somehow you honestly believe (R) & (D) are the same when it comes to policy, you simply cannot claim they are the same when it comes to that crap.
you have a choice. Do not throw it away on a third party candidate. Do that crap in elections where it could actually matter, and take this opportunity to make a stand.
Re:What's amazing about Romney (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:3, Insightful)
Several polls showed Dr Paul would do better against Obama than Romney (or any of the other names that were thrown around in the primaries.) He has pretty good appeal with independents and swing voters and Romney, obviously, doesnt..
Romney was the pick of the RNC and they got worried enough about the convention to show their hand and openly coronate him in Tampa. They went way over anything needed to ensure the nomination and openly wrote the state parties and the activist base out of having any real role in the nominating process from now on, an interesting strategic decision to be sure. It's plainly suicidal for the party in conventional terms. The grass roots are critical to electoral success. But these guys seem to only see the affect of money. Money certainly has an effect, yes, but trying to pay people to do the work that grass roots activists used to do, after running them all out of the party, may not work out as well as these guys think.
Romney is a candidate that seems to be hand picked for his inelectability - he alienates potential swing voters with one hand and hardcore republican faithful with the other. All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
Re:What's amazing about Romney (Score:5, Insightful)
Romney: "When you give a speech you don't go through a laundry list, you talk about the things you think are important"
Not the best phrasing, but it's clear even to me as an Obama supporter that he means the speech was crafted to highlight points that would be advantageous to his campaign. The game of pretending your opponent meant something he clearly did not is not very persuasive to people not already on your side.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rasmussen isn't a polling agency (Score:4, Insightful)
It's renown among serious pollsters as a paid-for propaganda site.
Oh please. Rasmussen is just another pollster that uses a different methodology, so it thus ends up with different results. In 2006, Republicans thought Rasmussen was biased because it said Republicans would lose. Later, democrats thought it was biased because it said they would lose. It's not biased, it's just different. Sometimes it's more right than other polls, sometimes less right.
Re:Not possible! (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Romney is pretending to be more right-wing than he really is in order to appease core republican voters. The only reason he's the republican nominee is that many people in the GOP thought they needed a more moderate guy in order to beat Obama. Now that they have the guy it seems they are worried about their voter base, which is why Romney has drifted to the right and they nominated Tea Party darling Ryan as vice president.
Re:Well thats a relief. (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead, consider "wasting" your vote in a different way: By voting for someone who isn't running on a major party ticket.
Maybe if enough people ... were going to vote for the "lesser of two evils"...
I think I see where you're going with this.
C'thulhu 2012 - Why vote for the lesser evil?
Prediction or postdiction? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did they predict all of those elections ahead of time? I'm guessing not, otherwise we would have heard about it sometime around 1992. If not, the fact that it produced the correct output for every election is actually a huge red flag. Elections are complicated things with many factors that are unique to a given election. You'd expect any model that can be written down on paper to be wrong at least some of the time because there's no way to account for everything.
Likely they just went data-dredging until they found a set of variables that correlate with the election winner. Problem is, there's usually *some* set of variables that correlate with the outcome for spurious reasons. The meal preferences of an octopus, for example. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:2, Insightful)
Romney and Ryan only looks good if you're a corporate asshole or a Fox-watching bah bah sheep.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:5, Insightful)
A quote from Ronald Reagan: "I want you to know that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience."
Just because someone is elderly does not mean that they are senile or ready to kick the bucket. Listen to Ron Paul speak about monetary policy sometime and just try to keep up with him. He's also physically very fit, going on long bike rides in the heat of Texas. Whether you otherwise think about a candidate and their positions, ignoring or laughing at them because of their age is just silly.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:5, Insightful)
All in all it's very hard not to think that the RNC must *really* want Obama to win his second term.
I've seen plausible arguments from serious (mostly liberal) commentators suggesting that a number of Republicans - especially the possible 2016 candidates - would prefer that Obama win, because they know that the economy is going to continue limping for the next four years, and continuing to blame Obama is much easier (and puts them in a much better position for 2016) than actually governing.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps, but he'll go down in flames should Hillary run. He wouldn't stand a chance.
There is only one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
How is cutting anything being a Democrat? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see how you can claim Obama is a clear winner. Look between the conventions - Obama gave a re-run, with no plan at all on how he plans to help anyone do anything. Just a lot of vague numbers like he has always given.
Romney meanwhile, actually laid out a five point plan:
(1) Aggressively promote domestic energy development, especially fossil fuels (Obama has delayed this at every turn, instead propping up failed green energy companies run by big donors).
(2) Expand the market for U.S. goods overseas by negotiating new trade agreements and standing up to China on intellectual-property and currency issues.
(3) Improve workforce skills by transferring job-training programs to the states and going after teachers' unions, which, he says, stand in the way of school choice and better instruction. (When has Obama gone after ANY union?)
(4) Attack the deficit through budget cuts, not tax increases. (Obama clearly has the opposite idea here).
(5), reshape the regulatory climate to "encourage and promote small business" rather than swamp it. (We have a metric ton more regulations now than when Obama entered office).
You may not like some of Romney's plans but at least HE HAS ONE. At this point I'll be happy to vote for someone who just picks a direction and goes there. Democrats had four years, two of which they could have clearly driven direction with zero intervention by anyone and instead they just sat, apparently befuddled. Well screw that, the debt is too high to keep playing around.
Realistically we'll need to raise some taxes AND reduce spending heavily. I have a lot more faith we'll see some tax increases under a Republican administration than we'll see anything like the massive cuts required to keep the U.S. solvent under the Democrats. After all, we've just had four years of Democrats trying to fix things and are four trillion in the hole for the effort.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:2, Insightful)
"Romney has been skyrocketing in terms of female popularity lately..."
Did you check out the responses of the ladies relative to the men on ladies issues of late? The gender gap has grown in each of the past couple of months since the Sandra Fluke/Limbaugh flare up. It doesn't look as if having Ann carry him around on her shoulders is doing much good with this demographic.
"You can't win with so much of the electorate unhappy with your policies."
Unless of course you live in a nursing home in Florida and begin to recognize that the Ryan/Romney plan will do away with that part of Medicaide that directly funds about 70% of all nursing home stays and you will soon be living on the street if it passes.
or
Unless of course you have a mortgage for which you will no longer be able to get a deduction or a college tuition credit or a deduction for dependent children, all of which will soon be gone under Ryan/Romney. No wonder Romney doesn't want to say, where his cuts will be made.
or
Unless of course you are have a student loan, which will see a 9-21% increase in interest rate almost immediately upon implementation of the Ryan/Romney plan.
or
Unless you are a public sector worker, who will see the probability that they will be laid off rise dramatically. Did you check the recent jobs number. Private sector jobs up 126,000; public sector jobs down 7,000 for August.
or
Unless you are on Medicare, which will immediately reinstate the doughnut hole for all seniors now receiving drug benefits.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:4, Insightful)
A quote from Reagan: "I....I....I where am I?"
A quote from the Secret Service Men right after: "the Oval Office Sir"
Re:How is cutting anything being a Democrat? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see how you can claim Obama is a clear winner. Look between the conventions - Obama gave a re-run, with no plan at all on how he plans to help anyone do anything. Just a lot of vague numbers like he has always given.
Romney meanwhile, actually laid out a five point plan:
Do you understand the irony of your own post?
You start by saying Obama has no plan, then list Romney's plan and write in brackets how Obama's plan sucks in comparison.
THEN, you turn around and point out that folks here may not like Romney's plan but at least he has a plan. However, you don't apply the same standard to yourself.
Bravo.
Re:Not possible! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How is cutting anything being a Democrat? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think a bad plan is necessarily better than no plan. Furthermore, I think it's better that Obama has plans rather than a simplistic list of bullet points that can be reduced to the size of a /. comment. Also, the more specific things a candidate insists they will do the less I believe them: the president rarely has the power to do the things most candidates claim they will do and their agenda should be fluid and open to compromise. So a presidential candidate with an impractical five point plan strikes me as a fool, a liar, or both.
Just for the sake of argument, since you accuse Obama of being vague:
1) What does promoting domestic energy entail? Giving large subsidies to oil companies so they can 'research' domestic energy opportunities? That's what it sounds like to me. Nice and vague.
2) Standing up to China . . . oh dear, he must be a fool. How does he intend on doing this? Very vague.
3a) What job training programs? Are they actually even worth a damn? Even if, is this something the government should be subsidizing?
3b) Stand up to teacher unions? Because those damn teachers are leaching all our tax money by making as much as factory workers. I guess they stand in the way of 'student choice' by politically opposing government subsidizing private and charter schools. Why, for a conservative, does Romney want to subsidize so many things? Also, how exactly does one blame teachers for the country's educational woes when statistics clearly show that the biggest deterrent one can have from receiving a quality education is simply being poor? In the same classroom, with the same teacher, the wealthier children will consistently outperform the poor children. But let's not look at 'vague numbers' - let's make vague accusations that imply that teachers in general are incompetent and greedy (make sure you ignore that unlike the majority of Americans, they're college educated and most could make more doing something else).
4) The deficit is hardly the scary monster everyone pretends it is. It's like college loans. You can't make them go away, they're a big scary negative number, but even if your wages get garnished they'll never really drive you to being destitute. So, even though on paper you really have less money (a large negative number) than the bum you pass everyday walking into the office (probably a smaller negative number - or maybe a positive one consisting of the sum of his change cup), you never envy the bum and you never consider him better off than you. In this case, Greece is the bum. Our debt is an inconvenience, their debt ruined them. That's because the number on paper is pretty irrelevant - it doesn't account for one's resources, it's not the be all, end all of one's worth. But it's easy to be vague and scary and behave like the graduate who's freaking out b/c they're a hundred grand in debt.
5) This is a vague way of saying: dog-eat-dog. Washington's regulatory climate does little to stifle small businesses. It's local regulation that stifles small businesses. Hell, the economy in general stifles small business. National regulation prevents banks from doing things like fraud. It prevents dirty industries from polluting the way Chinese factories do. Want more small businesses? Provide universal healthcare so people can afford to take the risk of starting a small business: As it stands, once a person gets a decent job with good benefits, he becomes scared to quit for the sake of a risk. Healthcare's like taxes: The middle class pays for most of it and it takes a huge chunk of their income. The rich pay more than anyone else, but a smaller percentage of their income than the middle class (basically, it's an inconvenience, the house isn't being put up for mortgage). The poor pay nothing. So, economically, it makes more sense to be a bartender that doesn't report most of his tips and receives welfare than to be a teacher. Make too much money, and all of a sudden you have to pay for health insurance (and co-pays) and now you technically
Re:Not possible! (Score:5, Insightful)
I really don't know what Romney gives a damn about. It seems like he's been on both sides of every issue so who can tell what he believes?
I do know that he is surrounding himself with neocons and that is disconcerting. Without his own convictions he will just go along with whatever his advisers tell him. We are already hearing them beat the drums of war with regards to Iran.
I predict that if Romney gets elected we will see a repeat of the Bush years. There will be more unfunded wars. We'll see a loosening of regulations that are already too watered down. After the next banking bubble forms and bursts due to the lack of regulations, we will enter into another gilded age. We are already seeing the beginning of a gilded age now with the massive corruption in our government. The common people are no longer being represented. Only a few very rich individuals and powerful corporate powers control our government.
Re:Interesting Algorithm (Score:4, Insightful)
By which you mean he wasn't willing to pander to the "jesus jesus tax cuts for the rich" base and actually tried to be an intelligent adult.
I don't agree with the man's positions and would still vote for Obama over him, but his problem was that he's too honorable and rational to fit in with the Republican Party.
Re:Well thats a relief. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have any problem with requiring an ID, but if you're going to create a new requirement, you better have the infrastructure in place and do it in an orderly enough fashion that it doesn't disenfranchise millions of voters.
The case in Pennsylvania showed evidence of the better part of a million disenfranchised voters just in one state.
If they care about election fraud, why does it matter if the photo ID is expired? If it's my picture and my name and one doesn't have a period after the middle initial, should that disqualify me? If my ID is over 9 months old, why would that disqualify me if all they're trying to do is verify identity? And if the states that are putting these laws in place are serious, why the massive purging of voter lists? Why the closing of state offices where IDs can be obtained in poor neighborhoods? Why the limiting of hours of operation for those offices just before the election?
Sorry, pal, but this is going to be one big black mark on the political soul of the Republican Party. We have blatant voter suppression for the expressed purpose of keeping Democrats from voting (a state's atty in Pennsylvania actually admitted it on camera). You think that's OK?
Look at reality (Score:2, Insightful)
Nice spin, but in the end what you cannot spin are real unemployment numbers, which suck (8.3% with a ton of people out of the labor force as they gave up looking).
It doesn't do you any good to create jobs if they are destroyed at a far greater rate. It really doesn't do you any good to create jobs that have no hope of growing the economy (government jobs only pull from the economy).
The sad thing is the worst hit are the young, it is a bitch now to find a job out of college and they stupidly piled on a massive amount of debt to finish. Well it wasn't really stupid OF them as they were told it was a good idea. Instead they are trapped in the middle, and will now be paying for student loans for so long social security will be garnished (as is happening today for some people).
Re:How is cutting anything being a Democrat? (Score:5, Insightful)
Allow me to translate:
1. Screw job-creating clean energy technologies and drill, baby, drill.
2. Gut what little worker protection we have; outsource to the lowest bidder.
3a. Save $$ by shifting responsibility to states that we all know can't pay.
3b. Turn education over to private companies who are only interested in
increasing profits.
4. Cut the programs that aid people in need but don't touch defense that
fund megacorps and generate kick-backs.
5. Screw clean water, clean air, safe food, safe medicine, safe work
environments, safe vehicles, safe bridges, protection of civil rights,
a free and open internet, private property rights* or anything else
that might reduce profits.
The entire plan can be summarized: Maximise profits by socializing the risks
and costs. It's the Bush III plan.
* like granting unsupervised emminent domain power to a foreign corp
(TransCanada) to take land so they can move highly toxic sludge that no
one knows how to clean up (see "Enbridge") through the entire middle of our
country so they can ship it to other, foreign companies.
Re:Not possible! (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's why he'd never make it as the Republican presidential candidate.
Re:Look at reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Some people consider that the employment issue might be larger than the United States and the President. Europe is in recession, China's economy is slowing, and the U.S. is muddling along. Some economists even blame the Republicans in congress for a large portion of the United States specific problem. The theory is that their intransigence is undermining business confidence in the United States and delaying economic investments. A cynical man might conclude that Republicans have a policy of defeating Obama no matter what and are perfectly willing to sacrifice average Americans if they think it might get them an inch closer to the White House. There's plenty of evidence to support such accusations, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's true.
It doesn't do you any good to create jobs if they are destroyed at a far greater rate. It really doesn't do you any good to create jobs that have no hope of growing the economy (government jobs only pull from the economy).
That's demonstrably false. Government jobs are jobs like any other. There's no difference between a government employee at a power plant and a private sector employee at a power plant. For example, Greece's economy ticked along quite well with far too many government employees.
The real problem with government jobs isn't that they don't grow the economy, it's that they are dependent on tax revenues and thus they can become an amplifying feedback into the system. Keynesian economics advocate running counter to the business cycles to minimize the troughs, however, Greece (and a number of other countries, including the U.S. under Bush) ended up running in synch with the business cycles, amplifying both the highs and the lows. This recovery is dragging along because foolish countries (like the U.S. and Greece) allowed themselves to accumulate so much debt during the good times, that they can't afford to spend to ameliorate the bad times.
For example, the stimulus spending tried to jump start a 14 trillion dollar economy with around $300 million in spending (plus $300 million in ineffective tax cuts (Republican) and $300 million in mandatory spending (Unemployment Insurance). Frankly, 2% of GDP is a probably a bit low to trigger a big economic recovery. I think the recommended amount is closer to 10%.
Was your post an audition for the Onion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the whole thing is a farce.
Are you being ignorant or dishonest here? Obama's energy policy is indistinguishable from Bush/Cheney's: "all of the above". Record new amounts of land and sea opened for drilling. Billions for nuclear power and perpetual motion machines, I mean, "clean coal". The eastern seaboard and coast near ANWR have been opened for drilling, something not even Bush tried to do.
I ask again: are you speaking out of ignorance or dishonesty? Obama has approved the bottom half of the pipeline, which means he approves of the top half of the pipeline. The only "blocking" was a slight of hand for his liberal base, which of course was eaten up at DailySheep. They pointed to Obama's action as if he was blocking the pipeline, when his only disagreement was with the route. Same as when they hailed his veto thread of the NDAA and pretended that Obama was against military detention of American citizens, when he was of course demanding that power.
Obama has signed three new trade agreements just like NAFTA.
What the fuck is increasing supply (qualified workers) going to do to solve the actual problem (a lack of demand)?
Sure, he says that. And he's lying. Where's your "school choice" going to be when Kaplan owns every charter school within a hundred miles of you? Do you conservative geniuses think about what killing teachers unions and public schools is going to do to quality affordable education?
You guys like to whine about lazy students being coddled, but what happens when said lazy student happens to be the son of Upstanding Business Owner and Member of the Community who happens to own a 15% stake in your charter school system and can get his teacher fired at the drop of his hat? How about when that rich kid turns into bully starts kicking the shit out of your kid?
You mean "austerity" which has been a fucking disaster for every country that has tried it? The only entity capable of jump-starting demand in a depression is the government. Slashing government spending is only going to make that depression worse, far more so when your cuts target social social spending before the military-industrial-congressional-contractor-survellance complex.
Slashing spending results in a death spiral of a collapsing economy, which results in less tax revenues, which results in more demands from fools and tools to slash more spending. A vicious cycle that took Grover Norquist decades to perfect.
For the third time: are you speaking out of ignorance or dishonesty? Obama has cut or forestalled regulations, not brought new ones. Oh, and the lie about "small bushiness" don't hunt no more. We know perfectly well that when Republicans talk about "small businesses", what they really mean is a small number of shareholders. Which means Koch Industries is a "small business" because it is owned by the Koch family. Which means when Republ
Re:How is cutting anything being a Democrat? (Score:0, Insightful)
4) The deficit is hardly the scary monster everyone pretends it is. It's like college loans. You can't make them go away, they're a big scary negative number, but even if your wages get garnished they'll never really drive you to being destitute. So, even though on paper you really have less money (a large negative number) than the bum you pass everyday walking into the office (probably a smaller negative number - or maybe a positive one consisting of the sum of his change cup), you never envy the bum and you never consider him better off than you. In this case, Greece is the bum. Our debt is an inconvenience, their debt ruined them. That's because the number on paper is pretty irrelevant - it doesn't account for one's resources, it's not the be all, end all of one's worth. But it's easy to be vague and scary and behave like the graduate who's freaking out b/c they're a hundred grand in debt.
This may be the dumbest thing I've read on /. in quite a while. Congratulations!
The fact is, the United States is not immune to the consequences of having a large, and seemingly out-of-control, national debt. Your head-in-the-sand prescription is a recipe for disaster. You can see the consequences of carrying such a large national debt by the increasing share of the budget that paying interest is swallowing up each year (which was a whopping $251 billion in 2011, not counting an additional $203 billion in "intra-governmental debt, which is largely interest paid on the bonds that took the place of the money Congress has already spent from the Social Security "Trust Fund"). As the share of the budget consumed by interest payments increase, there will be less and less money available for everything else, including defense and entitlements. And let's not forget that the debt increased 5 trillion in the last 4 years and that interest rates are at HISTORICAL LOWS. Once they return to normal levels, the interest paid on the debt will explode.
But sure, go ahead and pretend that there is no problem. "What, me worry?" could be your mantra. Good luck with that and for anyone who follows your advice.