The Bush tax cuts increased government revenue. The problem was that Bush increased spending even faster.

Going deeper into debt doesn’t prevent suffering, it delays it. You will be hit with all the suffering later on, plus interest, when you have to pay it back. For the past twenty years you’ve been putting it off, spending more than you can earn, and thinking that borrowing to cover it makes the problem magically go away. You can’t spend more wealth than you create, and taxes create no wealth, they redistribute it – mostly away from the bits that are creating that wealth towards the bits that are not. It’s unsustainable.

Every day that it continues, the more suffering there will be. The faster you shut it down, the less suffering you will eventually have to face. I’m not sure if you realise just how big a future debt your welfare laws have already committed you to – but it’s big enough to make a couple of wars look trivial, and the whole Ponzi scheme will eventually collapse. Why would you want to incur more suffering by delaying the inevitable?

The reason we *must* borrow to continue to operate is because the Bush tax cuts and the corporate tax loopholes are unsustainable; if you are really concerned about unsustainable debt, the issue of tax cuts for the highest income earners must be addressed.

We put up with all sorts of stuff that is not sustainable because it lets us operate in the short term. Refusing to increase the debt ceiling would cause an immediate collapse of the system. I agree that the system of money being made out of debt is unsustainable, as is our fossil fuel economy, but forcing its immediate collapse at the cost of great suffering is stupid. Any transition away from our debt-based system must be done in an orderly fashion. The Republicans hijacked this issue to gut social spending; they are not interested in sustainability, or we would not have gone to two wars while massively cutting taxes, which forced us to borrow money to fund the wars. All this happened under the watch of many of the same Republicans who raised hell over the debt ceiling.

according to the GOP and the right, reality itself has a liberal bias (!)

the only kind of information they can parse or understand is that which is spoon fed to them by fox news and their propaganda lackeys.

and taking it down to the common man, the most honest answer to most of the really big problems of the world is “i don’t know”. the sanest thing to possibly do for the layman is to DEFER to the opinions of ACADEMICS on complex and technical issues.

and yet, the right consistently GETS INTO A SHOUTING MATCH with THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO CAN KNOW!

sure, experts have disagreements among themselves but they generally aren’t foundational and there is the CONSENSUS OPINION OF EXPERTS!

sure! they COULD be wrong… but if things work out such that you were right and they were wrong, it would only be INCIDENTALLY SO! not to mention HIGHLY UNLIKELY IN THE FIRST PLACE.

i believe that it is psychological.

i believe that it is epistemological.

i believe that it is even biological.

the benighted right are wrong and they will never ever have the scales fall from their eyes.

The problem is that none of those assertions is true.

* There was never a consensus that an ice age was imminent. The American Meteorological Society investigated; they found that 7 papers considered global cooling, versus 44 that supported warming. Time magazine and other media may have hyped the story, but that’s not scientific sources.

* There has been no global cooling trend in the past few years. Some local areas may have cooled.

* The scientific consensus is still that the globe is warming, and that we are causing it.

It is true that the Milankovich cycles would have us in a slow cooling trend, if greenhouse gases had not overpowered it.

So for you to ask for a real and open discussion based on those facts is like me inviting you to have a real and open discussion about why you’re still beating your wife.

Your advocacy of geothermal and solar, however, is right on the money.

Is the climate changing? Of course it is. Are we contributing to it, probably. But when we do things like subsidize ethanol production from our corn stocks (which people need to eat) and even Al Gore admits he was wrong about it, we need to rethink what we’re doing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/23/al-gore-corn-ethanol-subsidies_n_787776.html

All most of us are asking for is some common sense. I hate pollution, I hate to see the countryside get trashed by idiots, but there’s a balance, and we’re not going to find it by being reactionary and having the mantra, “oh no, there’s a problem, do something, anything!”

On the other hand, I’m not too proud of what the right does in many cases. We can’t rely on our leaders to do right by us on either side. All they are really concerned with is getting reelected.

Let’s stop being so polarized and pressure the government to do some things that make sense, like geothermal (where is makes sense), solar (where it makes sense) and converting government fleet vehicles and public transportation to natural gas which is cleaner, and which we have an almost unlimited supply of.

Can you imagine what we could do TOGETHER if the entire voting base of the country could make some sense of this?

blt

Yes, and in the process, smart but cynical and ruthless republicans (Rove, Koch Brothers) are pushing out so much misinformation that they have undermined the public trust in our scientific institutions. So while Rove might know better, his followers no longer do. Look no further than Perry and Bachmann for evidence. It is the “get a short term win, no matter what the long term impact” mentality that is destroying our government and our planet.