For starters you’ve made your point and you have not been “ignored” by everyone.

What I was suggesting was finding solutions beyond business as usual.

Little forward progress is made by government because of politics in general. Something like Term limits might be a good place to start.

Maybe we’re so tired of fighting for our opinions that we don’t bother to look for answers.

I’ve taken a few on the phone, and it’s obvious the questions are gently “cooked” to get a certain response. If the pollster is a real person, I’m nice about it. They’re just doing this for a living, and the questions aren’t their fault. Sometimes we both have a laugh about them.

Usually I just hang up (politely, if it’s a real person). It’s good to remember that all polls reflect that population that doesn’t hang up the phone and say “Bug off, I’ve got a life.”

Good question.

Step one: If other people have done something and gotten miserable failure out of it every time it’s been tried, it might be time to give that particular solution a rest.

There has been one point I have tried to make more than once over the past couple of months. It has been ignored, and ignored hard. The only solution we are given by one party in this country – to every problem – is more powerful government, more taxes, and more spending. Leftists like Krugman and John Atchinson complain about how good things were years ago when government wasn’t “the problem.” How if we just got back to the Good Old Days of sufficient government spending, things would work again.

I did the research. I found out that in none of the categories mentioned in such articles were we spending less now (adjusting for inflation) than we were, say, in 1975. And in most categories, we are spending far more, and for fewer results. This is particularly obvious in public and higher education. To put it in a nutshell, in those “good old days” when things were “working,” the Federal budget was a third what it is now, and its role in everything was a hell of a lot less.

Typically, this would be considered an important piece of information as far as the basic theory goes. It wasn’t. At least not here.

So where is the real “compromise” point? The actual “middle ground?” If you look at all the information and history, an ironclad case could be made that we passed the “middle ground” in the wrong direction quite a while ago. We spent $3.6 trillion this year, of which $1.3 trillion was deficit. If government spending was the criteria for prosperity, champagne should be running in our streets. If European socialism was the answer, Europe wouldn’t be circling the drain.

In short, we’ve done “compromise” already. It didn’t work. I’m tired of people telling me there’s a healthy mix of milk and cyanide, if we just get the right percentages.

The Left is no longer playing with all its marbles, and the only real solution right now is defeating them in elections.

Still a flawed affair, it’s probably accurate enough for general purposes such as discussion here.

Arf

Most people I know are conservatives and over half of those are hard right.

If you don’t applaud the party incantations they turn up the volume while their faces turn red, finally throwing up their hands and changing the subject because they can’t handle anything counter to their views.

There are plenty of examples on this board of liberals doing the same thing

I posted the interview with the Communist because I thought that maybe, just maybe there might be something of value.

From healthcare to how we run the country, things are not working well. We get by but it looks like we’re going downhill. Could there be any ideas out there as to how we might do better?

Even if there are, both sides are not open to any discussion of changes that involve compromise.

The impetus for the ows movement was the fact that Obama didn’t deliver on campaign promises of reigning in WS.

Whenever the spotlight is on WS, conservatives swing it back on the deficit. Liberals then swing it back again.

I think most Americans have stepped far enough back from the lightshow they can see it for what its worth.

Next November we will again be forced to choose the lessor of two evils.

here.

The way liberals are rewriting history, the politicians were all just sitting around kissing babies while Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and others were dodging new regulations, issuing crap loans to people who would never pay them back, and inflating those crap loans into assets that never existed.

We’ve had financial “reforms.” One of the latest has Barney Frank’s name on it, one of the politicians who left bloody fingerprints all over the mortgage collapse. If you want I could dig up his old speeches about why Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae didn’t need any new regulations or investigation. I already pointed out that the investment companies that did the most damage weren’t even covered by Glass-Steagall.

Call me when there are as many protestors outside the Capitol building and White House as there are on Wall Street. We’re sitting here with a $1.3 trillion Federal deficit for one year. The entire global hedge fund industry is currently worth about $1.9 trillion. You tell me which one is screwing up the economy.

The protests are a last, desperate gasp of America’s Left, playing the only card they’ve ever really had: Eat the Rich. Good God, don’t people know a political diversion when they see one?

Needless to say I’m heartened you’re taking a nondenominational populist position. Wanted to point out, on the side, that you are the prime target of the corporate lapdogs who are desperately trying to make this a left versus right thing. They want you to feel reluctant to “betray your side” by thinking independently; basically they’re trying to bully you into going along with the party (aka corporate) line.

Keep resisting. The dangerous and subversive truth is that populist conservatives and the OWS protestors have a huge amount in common. They’re natural allies.

I like dangerous and subversive truths.

They started out wanting wall street to be accountable for their role in the collapse. ‘Somebody’ needed to start pointing fingers because once again, we got screwed by wall street and no one went to jail. They did the same thing to us (US taxpayers) with the savings and loan crisis which cost over 200 billion in today’s dollars.

I get fed up with conservatives acting like “corporate lapdogs”, blindly refusing to admit we have a problem. I keep hearing this line- ’if we don’t let them do business as usual, there will be no more business’.

It’s funny that most conservatives are enthusiastic to the point of psychosis when wielding budget axes (I’m guilty myself at times) but become catatonic when it comes to talking about any kind of reform for the financial sector

I think the occupiers had the right message in the beginning. It’s a shame that almost immediately the “down with capitalism” crowd swooped in.

“Crime is defined as price rather than punishment,” Greenfield notes. In the new normal, “corporations can say, ‘Well, is the crime worth the price, discounted by the probability of getting caught?’ Because you can’t make a corporation go to prison. They have no morality, no human personality or sense of morals, other than the morality of the market that reduces everything to money. If the only way to punish companies is with money, then the fine sets the price for crime.”

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Like I said, there was a legitimate bitch.