2016 - The End Of An Error

[joan1984]

  What does having low taxes do with the decision not to squander money on hare brained ideas to do with public schools? Or doing road repairs within the budget of the highway department in State roads.

  Are local jurisdictions fixing local (non-state) roads sufficiently? If not, look to elected officials of those local jurisdictions. Are State Roads that the State agrees upon being in need of repair not being budgeted for upkeep, and repair? Or is his a question of who does the repairs, and at what price? Sounds like a political issue to me.

  Are there not textbooks available for public school children? What is the nature of schools that more taxes would fix? Local schools are often a local property tax funded item, and if the local government has decided to attract a more vibrant employed population by keeping Property Taxes more reasonable, where is the problem?

  More details please. Help me to understand.

  As i mentioned before, thank your lucky stars you are in a low tax state, or you would still have lousy schools, and pay higher taxes as well. I went to parochial school, from Nursery through Georgetown University, and our education was excellent, paid for by the parents of the students, or by the Parish in the case of hardship cases. I had no scholarships or grants, and got excellent grades, lots of homework, active in sports and social activities.

  Not one school was taught by Union Teachers that I attended, and we suffered not for lack of funding, had quality teachers and classes.
Why can some places not make a budget of in excess of $20,000 per student annually work to graduate high achievers? What possible would spending more taxpayer dollars per student achieve, other then Michelle's awful inedible unwanted free lunches, soy milk and kale chips for dessert? Not what the Obama children eat, of course.

  If you must live in a leftist environment, move. Bet you would not need to go very far outside of Texas to find higher taxation, Katie, if you just gotta have it, and squandering school boards abound. Vote with your feet.

[Katiebee]

Low taxes. Massive cuts in school budgets. Standardized testing in schools that produce no improvements. No budget to maintain roads, bridges etc, much less build the new ones that we need for the population in the area. No infrastructure construction for energy production. Lots of sweetheart deals for companies to move here, not pay taxes, and use that infrastructure that they aren't paying for.

Basically the Republican party here (conservatives) believe in and institute policies of getting something for nothing. When Bush was Governor here he ran a previously balanced budget (inherited from a Democratic Govenor) into the second largest state deficit next to California's. Gov. Perry then ran that budget deficit into THE largest state deficit, before suddenly getting all holier than thou and cutting the fuck out of every infrastructure and education budget that the state had.

Texas conservatives can't do math, can't plan, and can't execute. They can insist on fixing things that aren't broken (voter picture ID), put curriculum at risk with Intelligent Design in Science, and screw with History so that reality isn't a part of it. They are more concerned with controlling my body than keeping their own dicks in their own pants. Which on the face of it is very strange for a group that trumpets individual responsibility and individual freedoms.

They think we will have water forever, even though we are in the 10th year of a drought with global warming (something they deny is happening) continues to make it worse.

Yes, tell me that conservatives are not blinkered, ignorant, and willfully greedy to the detriment of the general population, and I will tell you that you are not living in reality.

[Lois]

Is the Affordable Care Act Working?

After a year fully in place, the Affordable Care Act has largely succeeded in delivering on President Obama’s main promises, an analysis by a team of reporters and data researchers shows. But it has also fallen short in some ways and given rise to a powerful conservative backlash.

1 Has the percentage of uninsured people been reduced?
Yes, the number of uninsured has fallen significantly.

2 Has insurance under the law been affordable?
For many, yes, but not for all.

3 Did the Affordable Care Act improve health outcomes?
Data remains sparse except for one group, the young.

4 Will the online exchanges work better this year than last?
Most experts expect they will, but they will be tested by new challenges.

5 Has the health care industry been helped or hurt by the law?
The law mostly helped, by providing new paying patients and insurance customers.

6 How has the expansion of Medicaid fared?
Twenty-three states have opposed expansion, though several of them are reconsidering.

7 Has the law contributed to a slowdown in health care spending?
Perhaps, but mainly around the edges.

More here from America's newspaper of record:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/27/us/is-the-affordable-care-act-working.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article&_r=0#/

[joan1984]

  Seems like you need to get out of there. Of course, you are no longer in school, and likely were not harmed personally in your education there. If I were you, I would move to where you could be happy for a change.

  Find a Democrat liberal managed State with great schools, higher taxes, and great roads, where politicians do exactly what they claim, and poor people all have ID already, or no one requests ID to get State services, or enter public buildings.

  Maryland, maybe? You will love it... even get a chance to vote for Anthony Brown if you move quickly, and he needs you. They tax the rain in Maryland... a new experience I am sure. Just a plane ticket away to Baltimore Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, ya know...

Low taxes. Massive cuts in school budgets. Standardized testing in schools that produce no improvements. No budget to maintain roads, bridges etc, much less build the new ones that we need for the population in the area. No infrastructure construction for energy production. Lots of sweetheart deals for companies to move here, not pay taxes, and use that infrastructure that they aren't paying for.

Basically the Republican party here (conservatives) believe in and institute policies of getting something for nothing. When Bush was Governor here he ran a previously balanced budget (inherited from a Democratic Governor) into the second largest state deficit next to California's. Gov. Perry then ran that budget deficit into THE largest state deficit, before suddenly getting all holier than thou and cutting the fuck out of every infrastructure and education budget that the state had.

Texas conservatives can't do math, can't plan, and can't execute. They can insist on fixing things that aren't broken (voter picture ID), put curriculum at risk with Intelligent Design in Science, and screw with History so that reality isn't a part of it. They are more concerned with controlling my body than keeping their own dicks in their own pants. Which on the face of it is very strange for a group that trumpets individual responsibility and individual freedoms.

They think we will have water forever, even though we are in the 10Th year of a drought with global warming (something they deny is happening) continues to make it worse.

Yes, tell me that conservatives are not blinkered, ignorant, and willfully greedy to the detriment of the general population, and I will tell you that you are not living in reality.

[staci]

lol, good thing that Katie don't boo

[joan1984]

Lol... kisses, stace

lol, good thing that Katie don't boo

[watcher1]

 
  Find a Democrat liberal managed State with great schools, higher taxes, and great roads, where politicians do exactly what they claim, and poor people all have ID already, or no one requests ID to get State services, or enter public buildings.

It sure isn't Illinois, a blue-controlled state for years.

[joan1984]

  Maybe this is the time to begin to fix that, Watcher1... Just listening to some of the results, or should say the 'results as we know them now' from yesterdays election nationwide, and some affirmation of the wave the polls predicted recently.

  Will be a while before a few races are settled, to the satisaction of the Candidates and their constituents anyway, and one thing is for sure:

“I am not on the ballot this fall. . . . But make no mistake — these policies are on the ballot, every single one of them.”

  The 2016, post-Obama campaign is under way, and there is much to do, lots of work to hammer out more than tweak what we will be dealing with going forward. The President has not changed one wit, as expected, and he has made that very clear.

  The "Clinton Touch" is evident in the results of yesterday's election, whether it was just too late when some weasels asked Billary to help, or whether voter remorse was simply too strong to overcome with the particular weasels who lost their positions with the Clintons' backing is too soon to tell.

  The crowd coming in needs lots of work. Some spine adjustments for the 'new' leaders have long been overdue, and it should be very interesting to watch, and participate. I am afraid the Lame Duck has already been cooked, with some quiet agreements between our 'leaders' and the current Administration.

  Amnesty is only one of the issues they will attempt to accomplish, likely NOW while they have the weasels they know in power, but we also have no illusions about our own weasels, and only some hope to spark them into meaningful action.

  Let us savor the results today and the next few, anyway, then get back into the trenches to drag the best out of them all.

Maryland, you go, girl!
Illinois, same, go Rick!

  As the sun rises we may know more, but at the moment it seems the Democrat 'thrill' is gone, and something else is crawling up the legs at MSNBC right now...

[Katiebee]

Be careful of what you wish for.

[joan1984]

  Gasoline price when President George W. Bush left office: $1.78 Gallon. Drill baby drill! Lots more ways to go from where we are.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gas-when-bush-left-office-178-gas-today-364-highest-average-price-calif-420

[Katiebee]

An article from 2012 isn't germane in this instance. With the increase in fracking over the last two years we have seen a statistically significant decline in gas prices this year. Even though demand has risen.

And since demand has risen steadily through all of the years you are mentioning, why are you insistent that market supply and demand couldn't raise prices? Are you advocating for price controls?

[joan1984]

Thank Dog for fracking, and in spite of the Administration and its non stop efforts to raise energy prices, and to destroy entire industries who are related to energy production, I just wanted to see where Gas had been when this clown and his supporters took control.

Before 6,000 to 15,000 deductibles for individual Health Care was routine; before out of pocket just for insurance was quintupled and more for healthy young people, after a promise of a annual savings of at least $2500 annually, haha, and people believed them...; we had $1.78 per gallon gas prices... of course gas prices fluctuate, and they had jumped considerably under his predecessor, was $1.45 when Clinton left office, who would have thunk it, that then was the 'good old days'... and, while things beyond the control of this President, at least as of yet, have despite his efforts allowed better prices for gas to present for us, it is worth remembering he will work harder to 'correct' the current situation, and is not out promoting the sale of Ford trucks.

Just a reminder of where we still are, and the direction we need to go.

[Lois]

 Gasoline price when President George W. Bush left office: $1.78 Gallon. Drill baby drill! Lots more ways to go from where we are.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gas-when-bush-left-office-178-gas-today-364-highest-average-price-calif-420

?? ?? ?  I have never seen gasoline below $2 per gallon since the 1980's.

And I've heard it said that it is not worth drilling here at home if gas prices are too low.  (Wasn't everyone suddenly angry at the Saudi's for dropping the price of oil and pumping more - LOL!)

Gas prices are controlled by global forces beyond the USA.  I don't think Obama had anything to do with the recent increases.  Do you?  Do you really?

CNS News is not a reliable news source, and they clearly don't care to tell the whole story.  From their own sources:

[Athos_131]

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=EMM_EPM0_PTE_NUS_DPG&f=W

5/10/2004 $1.97 per gallon

7/21/2008 $4.11 per gallon

Who was the president then? 

[Lois]

Good post Athos. Petroleum is a limited resource with increasing demand.  Prices are sure to continue to rise.  That is until we go green and kick our fossil fuel habit.

Globally, we are burning more fossil fuels today than we ever have, and demand continues to increase.

The dust bowl was a man-made ecological disaster. The drought-resistant buffalo grass/sod, that held the soil in place through drought and high winds was torn out and replaced with wheat. Then when drought came and the wheat died, there was nothing left to hold the soil in place. Winds carried dust far and wide, and it even enveloped the cities of New York and Chicago. Both animals and humans sickened and died when their lungs became choked with dust.

Both federal and local governments solved the problem via soil reclamation projects that emphasized restoring the natural prairie and planting trees for windbreaks. Experts that said the land would become a desert, (as barren as the Sahara), forever were proven wrong, and government projects restored the lands and stopped the dust bowl phenomena in about 10 years time.

Now we are facing another man-made ecological disaster. The root of this disaster is the burning of fossil fuels that is unlocking tons of carbon and releasing it from deposits deep within the earth and pumping it into our atmosphere. At this point, serious reductions in the burning of fossil fuels won't be enough. We will also have to find a way to pull the carbon out of the atmosphere and lock it back up. Of course the easiest way to do this might be found in plants. That is growing tons of green matter and harvesting it and locking it up in vast piles of green manure. In essence it means making all that atmospheric carbon soil-bound.

[Katiebee]

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=EMM_EPM0_PTE_NUS_DPG&f=W

5/10/2004 $1.97 per gallon

7/21/2008 $4.11 per gallon

Who was the president then? 

It was Obama, of course!

[Lois]

Much of the oil market is based on speculation.  So when Bush first invaded Iraq prices began to climb.  Then when Obama was elected, the oil prices plummeted with the speculation that Obama would end the war in Iraq and stability would return to the region.  In other words, Obama's election was the reason that oil prices were so low when Bush left office.

[joan1984]

So, when people believed Barack Obama, prices went lower, then when they understood what they were dealing with, and lost their jobs, then lost their homes, then lost their families, then restarted the Afghan War in spades, then "traded in their clunkers", then it did not get any better for them for years and years, the price of Gas went back up? Then Private Land fracking  brought the price of Gas back down again, and the President was forced into doing what he should have done on the first day of his Presidency, approving the completion of the Keystone Pipe Line segments, in a vain attempt to get a Dem reelected who runs against his policies if she ever goes to her State, in which she no longer lives?

Got it.

So when the economy tanked following the 2008 November election, do you give equal credit to President Elect Obama as the catalyst for that as well, the crashing of the markets, and the end of life as many in the U.S. knew it? In for a penny, in for a pound... Good thing he ran as the guy who knew what to do about it... had it all under control and lied about each of his stages along the way... yep, just what we were looking for... "we are the ones we've been waiting for"...

Much of the oil market is based on speculation.  So when Bush first invaded Iraq prices began to climb.  Then when Obama was elected, the oil prices plummeted with the speculation that Obama would end the war in Iraq and stability would return to the region.  In other words, Obama's election was the reason that oil prices were so low when Bush left office.

[Katiebee]

The economy tanked in 2006, the continuing effects were being felt from then on.

The Great Depression was not alleviated by the policies of the republican administrations Coolidge and Hoover. Bush's economic policies were the same type. The Obama administration policies were in line with FDR's though of a markedly reduced nature and impact. Do not attempt to rewrite history. You can't get to all of the sources.

[watcher1]

Reason gasoline prices have fallen is because demand has.  Newer cars get better mileage plus there is a softness in the economies of Europe and Asia.  I doubt any president has ever been able to control gasoline prices.