I agree with most of this. I thought O'Rielly made himself look like an idiot with his explanation for why the military should stay in the public sector as 'tradition'. There's clearly more to it that that, the main one being that it the military needs to be accountable to the entire electorate and it being controlled by politicians is the best way to do that. Also I don't see where the profit incentive is for running a military so I can't see how the private sector could do it.
The military is probably the second oldest employer in history, if prostitution is the oldest profession in history. Why congress decided to give MORE money to defense (meanwhile, the right is claiming that Obama reduced the military's budget, which is 100% certified flimflam).
Military industrial complex. Eisenhower warned against it, yet we have a giant private economy dedicated to researching and developing new weapons and technologies for our military.
I just felt O'Reilly was better prepared coming in to the debate. I understand it was intended for entertainment but it irritates me in debates when people constantly turn to cracking jokes or sarcasm instead of arguing the point head on which I felt Stewart was guilty of.
Stewart is a comedian, he's good at making people laugh. You say he was a comedian first, debater second. Of course, I think O'Reilly is a comedian, just not a funny one at all. Not really going to change your mind on this one...
An example of something he did that irritated me was when O'Reilly made the point about small government and disbanding NPR and Stewart said 'well if you want your money back for NPR, I want my money back for the Iraq war' which got a big round of applause. The reality is that the Iraq war has cost the US $800bn in 9 years, an admittedly hefty amount, but in that time debt has gone from $7tn to $16tn. Iraq war was part of the problem, but hardly the sole cause.
:ross:
So let's cut NPR's millions received annually to chip away at that?
Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security and Defense. That's basically 2/3 of our spending right there. Cutting funding to PBS and NPR won't do brick. I'd rather we focus on making the bigger programs more efficient, or simply scaling down our defense spending.
Iraq & Afghanistan will cost us $2.4 trillion, $1.9 trillion being attributed to Iraq (according to CBO estimates, cost in 2017 when it's paid off). This is including the interest paid on the war due to the fact that it was financed and not paid for up front.
Meanwhile...
We can have a conversation about cutting programs, but we can't mention raising revenue? How can we expect to reduce our deficit just by cutting spending alone? Skinhead alluded to this already, but the answer here is Grover fudging Norquist and his no-new-taxes pledge.
Despite the corporate tax rate being so high, why are corporate taxes received so low? If the Supreme Court is going to decide that they're people, they should pay taxes like fudging people too. Whoever is president needs to close all the loopholes that only large corporations can afford to use. Read up on Bain's tax dodging. I'm not suggesting they're the only ones to do it, but it's indicative of the larger problem at hand.
Also it annoyed me that Stewart kept attacking Bush when O'Reilly wasn't even defending him. The previous republican government is in a large part to blame for the crisis, but O'Reilly was arguing about what Obama has done (or rather, has not done) in his full term and Stewart kept blaming Bush.
Here is where I thought O'Reilly was very clever. He used that statement to remove Obama from context and to criticize him despite the argument that Stewart was trying to make, which was that Obama started off in a deep hole and his presidency is essentially one of someone trying to fix a badly burnt house while someone throws buckets of gasoline into it. Also, you need to factor in the Republican-controlled house, which has tried to repeal Obamacare no less than 34 times. You want to cut our spending? Fire those fudging clowns. They get better vacations, pensions, healthcare etc. etc. than the rest of the citizens.
By contrast the conservatives in this country are still blaming Labour for the mess, and rightly so. Just as the Democrats should be blaming the Republicans. But at least the conservatives have been trying to tackle the deficit whereas Obama inherited a $1tn deficit and four years later it's still there. O'Reilly also made the great point that further tax increases on the rich would raise $90bn, a start perhaps but you'd still have to make $900bn worth of cuts, something which Obama hasn't been willing to do.
Conservatives are self-proclaimed deficit hawks, but in practice, nothing could be further from the truth.
But the notion that Obama should have halved the deficit in 4 years was a mistake on his part. He theoretically could have done that had he had support from Congress, but the partisan gamesmanship has hampered us as a whole, from the economy to the middle-class. $95 billion a year extra revenue isn't exactly a small amount. I won't say that this will create jobs, but at the very least it should help create some government jobs that we do need in our country, namely in teachers and repairing infrastructure. But instead, let's cut little programs that barely dent the budget. 0.0012% of the budget isn't really progress for me. But again, we need to make government more efficient.
The other problem here is that we're facing both an energy crisis and a global climate crisis. The right-wing shunning of climate change science speaks for itself.
If Obama wins another term, I'd be shocked if the deficit goes down. I believe he may not add to it, but a Democrat isn't going to cut things like welfare which a right wing government would.
That is the scary thing, because you might be right there. My opinion here is that we're increasing the burden on future generations. I shouldn't even care since I don't have kids, but I think the moral obligation of a citizen of any country is to ensure not just success in the present, but to take a
LONG-TERM view and ensure success in the future. I believe that many citizens are far too selfish and narcissistic (narcissism has been found to be increasing in the past decades), and far too concerned with their own well-being without having to indulge in all the minutiae of governance and policy. We can't expect the politicians to keep their hands clean if the citizens don't show a vested interest in the outcome of their choices/votes.
This is where all the problems basically are, on a single web site. Basically, if this web site were to be fact-checked top to bottom, most of it would simply turn up as glaringly false, yet this is what many Republicans truly believe.
A fudging MAJORITY of Republicans still think Obama was born outside the US, and many Republicans believe that Romney deserves more credit that Obama for taking out Osama. I hate to generalize, but this isn't a party whose main strength is rationalization, or reality for that matter. I have my own theories as to why so many seem to think Obama is a Muslim and other nonsense, but when large swaths of the right believe this tripe, I really see no hope of them ever coming back to reason or reality.