Is this where we get to find out which farkers actually give a fark about anything this woman says?

sounds like a brilliant plan

Will never happen...that D in front of her name causes weakness of the spine. As much as I would love for it to actually happen

sounds like there must be an election soon? all words and action time!
Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading! And look at how bad the other guys are!!

Anything to distract from Nancy's Visa IPO windfall...

We got HCR Pelosi back. Not a fan, but love her style and knows she gets it done.

Yey soundbites!

Seriously, it's Pelosi. She never takes a position publicly unless she knows that the backroom stuff isn't gonna work. She's just trying to get out to the microphones first.

Regardless of the fact I agree with her, she doesn't say this kind of stuff to the press unless she has no other options.

So, I need to make sure I have this time-line correct:

Republicans demand Democrats cut Medicare in 2009
Republicans blast Democrats for cutting Medicare in 2010
Republicans demand Medicare be cut for permanent tax cuts for the rich in 2011

Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!

Is this the latest AM talking point?

Fart_Machine: Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!
Is this the latest AM talking point?

Its nice to see the Nancy boys are comfortable with Congressional leaders using their power to collude with the Credit Card industry for personal profit.

The Princess is on a roll!

Fart_Machine: Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!

Is this the latest AM talking point?

Yep. Abramoff's both sides are bad interview apparently translates to "so blame Pelosi."

Tor_Eckman: soy_bomb: Fart_Machine: Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!
Is this the latest AM talking point?
Its nice to see the Nancy boys are comfortable with Congressional leaders using their power to collude with the Credit Card industry for personal profit.

Thread jacking is against Fark's TOS.
You have been reported.

CONSEQUENCES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!!!

soy_bomb: Tor_Eckman: soy_bomb: Fart_Machine: Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!
Is this the latest AM talking point?
Its nice to see the Nancy boys are comfortable with Congressional leaders using their power to collude with the Credit Card industry for personal profit.

Thread jacking is against Fark's TOS.
You have been reported.

CONSEQUENCES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME!!!

OH NO!
LOL.

Fart_Machine Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!

Is this the latest AM talking point?

Nah, it's more of a widely reported news story. People might be interested to see how it pans out. It's not every day that a former Speaker of the House appears to have been caught messing with legislation for direct personal financial gain.

And I'm not really impressed by this sudden concern for Medicare. She already participated in damaging the program by making cuts and raising taxes to pay for the health care "reform" bill that the insurance industry demanded. Instead of expanding medicare, she cut away at it. And she's probably a total crook on top of that. Seriously, if the Visa thing is true, she's just another corrupt member of Congress. You don't fiddle with legislation because it's really good for your portfolio. There's no defense for that.

The Bush tax cuts are crystal clear evidence that the Laffer Curve and trickle down economics are total BS. They took us from a Federal surplus to a massive deficit AND at the same time there have been around zero net jobs created in the last 10 years.

Anyone who would want them extended is just blatantly ignoring real world evidence that these tax cuts were horrible for the economy. We gave the Job Creators extra money and a full freaking decade to use that money to boost the economy, and we ended up with a lost decade. Now we need the grown ups to step in and make things right.

//Graduated college in 2003. Has never known a truly healthy economy while I've been in the workforce. fark "Job Creators" and their tax cuts.

mrshowrules: When you are worth $60 Million, $50K is not exactly a windfall.

So it's okay because, to her, 50 thousand is no big deal? Come on.

Because supporting a system growing at 3x gdp growth is a winning plan. Who needs reform, that's for after the usa goes bankrupt.

And yet, when the Republicans push it, Democrats will cave.

Botkin of the Yard: And I'm not really impressed by this sudden concern for Medicare. She already participated in damaging the program by making cuts and raising taxes to pay for the health care "reform" bill that the insurance industry demanded. Instead of expanding medicare, she cut away at it.

On one hand, they might not be considered cuts because nowhere in the bill are benefits actually eliminated, experts said. And other parts of the bill expand coverage for seniors and ultimately make some components of Medicare less expensive for patients. (More on this in a bit.)

Still, changes could be in store for Medicare Advantage participants, especially the extra benefits that people receive under Advantage, experts said. But basic benefits that mirror regular Medicare will stay the same.


Not so much...

MyRandomName: Because supporting a system growing at 3x gdp growth is a winning plan. Who needs reform, that's for after the usa goes bankrupt.

We obviously need more tax cuts for the wealthy. That will fix everything.

soy_bomb: Fart_Machine: Bartman66: Quick people stop talking about my insider stock trading!
Is this the latest AM talking point?

Its nice to see the Nancy boys are comfortable with Congressional leaders using their power to collude with the Credit Card industry for personal profit.

Thank god we have the GOP to protect us from that sort of behavior.

Let's just put it on the Visa card. Nancy will approve that.

Man up, Nancy!

/Atta girl

I have a solution to medicare spending that takes care of demand rather than just making cuts.

No, we're not going to kill grandpa. We're just going to centralize distribution for his long term prescriptions, and one pill in a million will be poison.

Now, you can choose to use your medicare benefits and possibly receive a poison pill, or you can do without, or you can spend your own money for a perfectly safe supply from a local pharmacist.

/Or implement means testing across the board.
//Don't even need poison, just the myth should work.

The republicans have fallen into Obama's trap. They will soon find that it's far easier to send out Social Security checks a month late than it is to restart a cancelled military procurement program in their district. Of course they can choose to ignore the across the board cuts mandated if the Super Committee fails to reach a compromise--which might actually be the best course of action for the nation--but it will all be grist for the Democrats' mill in the 2012 election.

I used to think the Democrats were the party of incompetence and the republicans the party of corruption, but this kind of thing makes it clear. The republicans are the party of incompetence and corruption. The republicans: the little party that couldn't.

Nancy hate. I see it here.

soy_bomb: Anything to distract from Nancy's Visa IPO windfall...

Did her husband immediately sell those shares? 5000 shares at 44 dollars added to the 5 MILLION he already had invested in the company?

I'm having a hard time seeing how this is a "scandal", especially next to the same story about another member of Congress shorting just before the crash he was told was coming. Seems like you should be pretty upset about that as well, if this stock purchase has you upset.

I guess when you are stuck in "my team" mode, it doesn't really matter?

mrshowrules: It just isn't a windfall. If the investment was based on inside information, it is at minimum unethical. I don't know the details of this particular charge but I am curious. A month ago the Right tried to link her to a solar company scandal through her brother-in-law and that one was a complete farking joke.

Okay, first of all, unethical behavior is not acceptable once you get past childhood. Even when it's somebody of your political persuasion. And it was a lot more than 50,000. Double that on the first stock purchase. If this is even half true, she manipulated the legislative process to make money. No defense available.

Her husband and her invest in alot of shiat all the time and they are heavy hitter. A 20% increase on a 5,000 share investment doesn't impress me much but I'm willing to entertain that this was unethical if someone makes a solid case. I have a problem with politicians being able to trade at all because of their access to information and would favour rules against this.

I'm glad you have a problem with this. We all should. I would only argue that it's not the amounts (and 100,000 is considerable when you cheat to get it). It's the manipulation of a process for personal enrichment.

Obama extended the "Bush tax cuts", so they are now the "Obama tax cuts" as it is Obama's signature that now permits them to continue.

Obama is the biggest tax cutting President, right Nancy?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/11/obama-tax-cutter-he- h as-slashed-more-than-bush-did-in-first-term.html

"Obama has cut taxes to lower levels than Bush did, says Linden. This is because, of course, Obama thus far has extended all of the Bush tax cuts and then cut taxes on top of that."

Fart_Machine: Not so much...

Yeah, but you're wrong and the article you cite is unconvincing as well as rather laughably dishonest. This sentence sticks out:

It's important to note that the law does not take $500 billion out of the current Medicare budget. Rather, the bill attempts to slow the program's future growth, curtailing just over $500 billion in future spending over the next 10 years.

I see. We're not taking $500 billion out. We're just taking $500 billion out. More slowly. You look at a sentence like the one in your article and have to come to the realization that a fully conscious person of adult age typed it. We really need education reform in this country.

Did I indicate in my post that I couldn't differentiate between the current medicare budget and the future medicare budgets that Pelosi and her colleagues, in their effort to rescue Obama's ass, decided to damage? I said there were cuts (which is correct) and that the program should have been expanded. The article you cited also dishonestly glosses over the tax increases to medicare recipients. Let's see if you can find the paragraph where they do that. It also doesn't mention future cuts and tax increases that must occur if the law is to be financed properly.

The claims that these cuts will enhance medicare's performance are not provable, as well as not credible, given what we know so far about the PPACA. Obamacare involves tax increases on medicare recipients and owners of more expensive health insurance, medicare cuts, and an unsupportable guess at revenue amounts that will be obtained from people who fail to purchase coverage from a private company.

Pelosi supported the Affordable Care Act. She is an idiot.

Tax increases are not going to save MEDICARE as is now. Even doing something to stop the $50-$80 billion it loses a year to waste fraud and abuse will not save it in its current form. Simple economics and demographics say it needs to be reformed.


Add up the numbers if you taxed the "evil" rich at 100% it would not solve our problems.

Lack of revenue is not our problem. All levels of government combined take in about $5 trillion in revenue. What needs to be looked at is how we spend it.

No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as U.S. (new window)

"Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries," Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2008. p. 112.

"the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. pays 45.1 percent of all income taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) in the country. Italy is the only other country in which the top 10 percent of households pays more than 40 percent of the income tax burden (42.2%). Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top decile of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent."

"the richest decile in America earned 33.5 percent of the market income in the country in 2005 - the year in which this snapshot was taken, but little has changed since then. But, a few other countries do have a greater or similar concentration of income as does the U.S. For example, the OECD table shows that the wealthiest decile of households in Italy and Poland earn a greater share of their country's market income than do our "rich" - 35.8 percent and 33.9 percent respectively - while the share of income earned by the top decile of households in the U.K. is about on par with those in the U.S. at 32.3 percent."

"by showing the ratio of income taxes paid to the share of income earned by the top decile in each country. The ratio for U.S. households is 1.35, far greater than the ratio of taxes to income in any other country. Even in the three countries with a comparable distribution of income, the ratio of taxes to income was less, 1.18 in Italy, 0.84 in Poland, and 1.20 in the U.K.

Interestingly, countries with top personal income tax rates that are higher than in the U.S., such as Germany, France, or Sweden, have ratios that are closer to 1 to 1. Meaning, the share of the tax burden paid by the richest decile in those countries is roughly equal to their share of the nation's income. By contrast, we prefer to have the wealthiest households in this country pay a share of the tax burden that is one-third greater than their share of the nation's income."

mrshowrules: hasty ambush: Tax increases are not going to save MEDICARE as is now. Even doing something to stop the $50-$80 billion it loses a year to waste fraud and abuse will not save it in its current form. Simple economics and demographics say it needs to be reformed.


Add up the numbers if you taxed the "evil" rich at 100% it would not solve our problems.

Lack of revenue is not our problem. All levels of government combined take in about $5 trillion in revenue. What needs to be looked at is how we spend it.

Taxing the rich will at least protect medicare for the people on it today. To keep Medicare for future generations you need to either expand eligibility or adopt single payer. Not only would it contain costs, you could save hundreds of Billions overall.

No. Not unless you're going to force surgeons to take a pay cut from their $300k/year jobs and force the pill industry to forgo it's billions in profits. The problem with the health care industry is the same problem our government is having right now. There's no incentive to do the right thing, only to make absurd profits. Increasing taxes is never going to solve that problem.

mrshowrules: hasty ambush: No Country Leans on Upper-Income Households as Much as U.S. (new window)

"Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries," Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2008. p. 112.

"the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. pays 45.1 percent of all income taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) in the country. Italy is the only other country in which the top 10 percent of households pays more than 40 percent of the income tax burden (42.2%). Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top decile of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent."

"the richest decile in America earned 33.5 percent of the market income in the country in 2005 - the year in which this snapshot was taken, but little has changed since then. But, a few other countries do have a greater or similar concentration of income as does the U.S. For example, the OECD table shows that the wealthiest decile of households in Italy and Poland earn a greater share of their country's market income than do our "rich" - 35.8 percent and 33.9 percent respectively - while the share of income earned by the top decile of households in the U.K. is about on par with those in the U.S. at 32.3 percent."

"by showing the ratio of income taxes paid to the share of income earned by the top decile in each country. The ratio for U.S. households is 1.35, far greater than the ratio of taxes to income in any other country. Even in the three countries with a comparable distribution of income, the ratio of taxes to income was less, 1.18 in Italy, 0.84 in Poland, and 1.20 in the U.K.

Interestingly, countries with top personal income tax rates that are higher than in the U.S., such as Germany, France, or Sweden, have ratios that are closer to 1 to 1. Meaning, the share of the tax burden paid by the richest decile in those countries is roughly equal to their share of the nation's income. By contrast, we prefer to have the wealthiest households in this country pay a share of the tax burden that is one-third greater than their share of the nation's income."

Why would a corporately funded think tank be against tax increases? How does that work?

The OECD data is corporately funded? Is it the facts you have a problem with or the source?

Mearen: mrshowrules: hasty ambush: Tax increases are not going to save MEDICARE as is now. Even doing something to stop the $50-$80 billion it loses a year to waste fraud and abuse will not save it in its current form. Simple economics and demographics say it needs to be reformed.


Add up the numbers if you taxed the "evil" rich at 100% it would not solve our problems.

Lack of revenue is not our problem. All levels of government combined take in about $5 trillion in revenue. What needs to be looked at is how we spend it.

Taxing the rich will at least protect medicare for the people on it today. To keep Medicare for future generations you need to either expand eligibility or adopt single payer. Not only would it contain costs, you could save hundreds of Billions overall.

No. Not unless you're going to force surgeons to take a pay cut from their $300k/year jobs and force the pill industry to forgo it's billions in profits. The problem with the health care industry is the same problem our government is having right now. There's no incentive to do the right thing, only to make absurd profits. Increasing taxes is never going to solve that problem.

The only problem with you argument is that even those countries with heavily regulated health care industry and socialized m medicine have found themselves having to introduce austerity measures to include at least some privatization because increasing costs , driven in large part by an aging population have driven cots up. We face that same problem Everybody wants to ignore the demographics. It is not 1963 anymore and the current system is unsustainable.

By 2050, the United States is likely to have 9 million people 90 and older (new window)

"A growing elderly population has put pressure on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, and as more Americans live longer, the pressure is likely to increase."

hasty ambush: Is it the facts you have a problem with or the source?

The facts.

hasty ambush: "the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. pays 45.1 percent of all income taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) in the country.

Does it take into account capital gains taxes? Because if it's just talking about income and payroll taxes, it's not really taking into account where the truly wealthy get all their money, it's just saying working stiffs earning a $250K paycheck are taxed too much.

hasty ambush: The OECD data is corporately funded? Is it the facts you have a problem with or the source?

Well, I have a problem with the data. They are tossing out percentages and that is awesome, except that does not make any damn thing equal. We'll look at just some of the problem statistics:

"the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. pays 45.1 percent of all income taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) in the country. Italy is the only other country in which the top 10 percent of households pays more than 40 percent of the income tax burden (42.2%). Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top decile of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent."

This means nothing. This has no meaning. I don't care what the percentages are. I care what the amount is. What is the total dollar amount (or conversion there of) that these people are paying?

"the richest decile in America earned 33.5 percent of the market income in the country in 2005

How much is this? What is 33.5% of the market income? How much in total dollars?

But, a few other countries do have a greater or similar concentration of income as does the U.S. For example, the OECD table shows that the wealthiest decile of households in Italy and Poland earn a greater share of their country's market income than do our "rich" - 35.8 percent and 33.9 percent respectively - while the share of income earned by the top decile of households in the U.K. is about on par with those in the U.S. at 32.3 percent."

Once again, look at the bold section. How much money is the market income for POLAND?! Or what about Italy that is just about to declare bankruptcy? I don't care what the % is. That doesn't, nor will it ever, matter.

How about I explain it this way. I could tell you that I eat 99% of the American cookies and you can eat 99% of the Italian cookies. That doesn't mean we eat the same NUMBER of cookies. If there are 100 American cookies, I get 99 cookies. There are 10 Italian cookies. You get 9.9 of them. I have 99, you have 9.9 and yet we both have 99%.

Do you see why their info is bad? It doesn't say a damn thing. It just tells you what you want it to say. Give me the real numbers and if those back up your theory, great; I will agree with you that the American Rich pay too much (actual math indicates that they don't). I will go with my Econ and Stat background rather than trust a bunch of %, thanks.