June 19, 2012

This is how the GOP are going to try and win the election IMHO. They'll run on the pension crisis:

Why We Need Pension Reform

By Fareed Zakaria at Time

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2117244-1,00.html

"SNIP.............................................

A day after Governor Scott Walker won his recall election, the New York Times wrote, "The biggest political lesson from Wisconsin may be that the overwhelming dominance of money on the Republican side will continue to haunt Democrats." Democrats have drawn much the same conclusion. "You've got a handful of self-interested billionaires who are trying to leverage their money across the country," said David Axelrod, Barack Obama's senior campaign strategist. "Does that concern me? Of course that concerns me."

But then how to explain the landslide victories in San Jose and San Diego of ballot measures meant to cut public-sector retirees' benefits? What should concern Axelrod far more is that on the central issue of the recall--the costs of public-sector employees--the Democratic Party is wrong on the substance, clinging to its constituents rather than doing the right thing.

Warren Buffett calls the costs of public-sector retirees a "time bomb." They are the single biggest threat to the U.S.'s fiscal health. If the U.S. is going to face a Greek-style crisis, it will not be at the federal level but rather with state and local governments. The numbers are staggering. In California, total pension liabilities--the money the state is legally required to pay its public-sector retirees--are 30 times its annual budget deficit. Annual pension costs rose by 2,000% from 1999 to 2009. In Illinois, they are already 15% of general revenue and growing. Ohio's pension liabilities are now 35% of the state's entire GDP.

The accounting at the heart of government pension plans is fraudulent, so much so that it should be illegal. Here's how it works. For a plan to be deemed solvent, employees and the government must finance it with regular monthly contributions. The size of those contributions is determined by assumptions about the investment returns of the plan. The better the investment returns, the less the state has to put in. So states everywhere made magical assumptions about investment returns. David Crane, an economic adviser to former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, points out that state pension funds have assumed that the stock market will grow 40% faster in the 21st century than it did in the 20th century. In other words, while the market has grown 175 times during the past 100 years, state governments are assuming that it will grow 1,750 times its size over the next hundred years.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2117244,00.html#ixzz1yCWa0uUY

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June 16, 2012

That reporter interrupting Obama is a dog whistle to the GOP base: scapegoat here, attack, attack,

attack. Nothing Obama does can be left to stand as a clear bit of policy. Everything he tries has to be destroyed. The GOP are d e s p e r a t e!

June 12, 2012

Middle class people make just one nest egg in their lives. If they are lucky they have a little bit

more. Rich people make and remake many, many nest eggs over their lives. The bubble economy is only good for the richest Americans. It is not good for the middle class. Romney glosses over this fact when he talks about his ability to conduct business and steer the economy.

"Fed Says U.S. Wealth Fell 38.8% in 2007-2010 on Housing"http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-11/fed-says-family-wealth-plunged-38-8-in-2007-2010-on-home-values.html

June 11, 2012

You know McCain and Liz Cheney were called out to cast aspersions on the White House re: the leak.

Why did the GOP go to two people who were popular on the right the last major election season 4 years ago? Are their own current politicians, like Boehner, held in contempt by most independents? I just think it strange that when they want to set up a nasty narrative that they have to reach into the past to find the people with enough gravitas to accuse the Obama White House of the leak. Perhaps their own internal polls tell them Americans do not trust the current crop of Republicans as far as they can throw them. The current crop of the GOP have done nothing to help Americans in the last 4 years. Makes sense nobody will take them seriously.

June 6, 2012

"Shy Elephant Factor" at Ballot Pedia

Shy Elephant Factor

at Ballot Pedia


http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Shy_Elephant_Factor

"SNIP...........................................................

The Shy Elephant Factor, is a term used to demonstrate a party bias in polling results, more specifically exit polls in major United States Elections. The term indicates that statisitcs prove that conservatives are not likely to particpate in exit polls or other types of opinion polls over liberals. Because of these statistics, there tend to be a significantly higher liberal bias in exit polls which may result in a false positive result. In other countries, the term can be closely aligned with the British Shy Tory Factor.
Elephant

The elephant in the term is used to align conservative voters with the closest related U.S. Republican Party. The official symbol of the Republican party is the Elephant.[1]

Statistics

Following the 2004 election, the National Election Pool (NEP) discovered a discrepency in exit poll results vs. the actual popular vote results. The national sample showed Kerry ahead 51% to 48%, but Bush won the national popular vote by a 2.5% margin (50.7% for Bush and 48.3% for Kerry). On average, the statewide exit polls showed a similar overstatement.

Warren Mistofsky, who headed the 2004 exit polls, appeared following the election and offered a theory: "We suspect that the main reason was that the Kerry voters were more anxious to participate in our exit polls than the Bush voters." Three months later, the report issued by Mitofsky and his partner Joe Lenski again argued that the discrepancy occurred because "Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters." They also offered "hypothetical completion rates of 56% among Kerry voters and 50% among Bush voters" that would have accounted for the entire discrepancy. This theory was unofficially coined the "reluctant Bush responder" hypothesis.[2]

..................................................................SNIP"


Rove/GOP must have known this and exit polls were released showing kerry was winning by 2PM on election day in 2004. It lit a fire under republican voters and made democrats more relaxed. Was why the MSM, feeling so burned, no longer report exit polls until the polls are closed.

June 3, 2012

With corporate profits soaring in the last three years it proves that the 1% have decoupled

from the rest of us. While we were forced into a crash because of a bubble, corporations lost for a few months and then did great financially. A tight money policy was used in the 1980s and 1990s to slow down an overheated economy and keeps things on an even keel and everyone shared the suffering during those short shallow depressions. Not anymore. Now the middle class fights inflation for the rich by being unemployed or losing their homes long term because of bubbles. The rich like bubbles. Alot of money can be made betting for it or against it. They don't lose their nest eggs when there is a crash like the middle class does. It is unfair for the economy to reflect only the needs of that one percent.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/125142228