US Fiscal cliff explained

Did we? I don't think so.

You either miss or ignore the other side of the equation. The Senate can modify the bill and send it back to the House. Why can they not compromise sufficiently to return a bill, changed in such a manner as to be acceptable to the House and the Senate?

That's already happened in the last four years and on more than one occasion. When it happened in 2011, my younger son had no more than gotten off the plane, back from Afghanistan when they were declared non-essential and would not be paid. I'd just spent $900.dollars on a plane ticket home for his post deployment leave, which had been approved but all leaves were cancelled because the DoD was afraid the troops wouldn't come back. Never mind he had just done a seven month deployment and a year workup for his $19,000 dollar a year salary. The civilians that make the decisions in the DoD don't understand that they don't do it for the money. He was and we were the lucky ones, I just had to eat a $900. plane ticket, his friends that were married, had kids and a house payment were really placed in a bind. Then they decided to cut out tuition assistance for active duty military personnel, well not totally, they cut it to $100. a month, forcing many to drop out of school, or to ETS so they could use their GI Bill. They did decide to continue the monthly and combat pay for those deployed, but cut out their BHA and BAS, so they were getting money but had to worry that their families were going hungry at home and that they'd lose their houses. Yeah, all so they (House and Senate) can protect their other pet spending projects.

 

I have cats, no dogs. From time to time I feed and walk the dog next door when the neighbors are out of town much to the chagrin of my cats. Plenty of firearms though, with only one assault rifle if you count an M1A1 Carbine w/folding stock as one. Does that count as support KTK?

 

And vote themselves raises.

 

Your good, but tell me what an assault rifle is? Is it like a stick that you can whack someone with real fast and a whole bunch of times? Is that an assault stick? Or is it only a stick if you just whack'em slow? How about if you don't whack anybody at all? At least I know what a cat or a dog is.

KTK

 

Assault rife, I dunno. It's got a bayonet lug, two 10 round clips taped together, with two more in a carrying pouch on the folding stock so I guess that is what they call an assault rifle. I just called them rifles when I was in the army as opposed to crew served weapons. Never heard the term before they banned them in the 90s. I guess a hunting rifle can be classified as an assault rife since you assault deer with them. I don't go hunting but I like to shoot beer cans from time to time.

 

Back to the topic please!

 

Okey dokey.......if the Senate has 51 votes it can pass a bill.....unless some of the objectors decide to phillibuster.....then they need 60 votes....so any legislation coming from the House must meet this threshold to be considered.....if the Senate re-writes it has to do so with that majority and then must be re-submitted to the House since it has been changed. Either way things happen, it needs that much strength in the Senate to be successful. I would say at any given moment compromise legislation may exist in a preliminary written form but will be rejected in the committees if it does not stand a chance at mustering the 51-60 needed votes as those committees normally know what modifications to a bill the house is likely to go for. I guess I have been wrong and admit it......... that not everyone does understand how our government works. I am no different....I need to learn more myself as I am only vaguely familiar with how the committees function. And I do realize how much reduction in benefits our military and their families have already experienced as it has already began as we have not even reached the end of the two wars that are bringing things down....yes our troops do not measure their sacrifice by the pay and benefits they receive which is reason for me to be more so in favor of them being fairly supported by our people and our government. How quietly in the media these things were handled in reducing their benefits while we see those who loudly conclude there should be no increase in our spending, such is how they really get supported.

 

Posessing niether cats nor dogs, my attitude to the current crisis revolves around a wall......cliff to be precise.

Preisely why did this "cliff" not exist before I went on holiday?

Has there been some major new economic discovery in the past 28 days or so since I got on the plane for New Zealand?

To be a precise as posiible.....what the fook is going on?

 

Well the chairmanships of the committees are appointed and are normally the most senior member of that particular committee from the majority party. The "Ranking member" is normally the most senior Senator of the minority party. The committee chairmanship is a very powerful position and there are many times they do not allow bills out of committee for partisan reasons, not because they think there are not enough votes to get them passed. They can also prevent votes from going to the floor if the majority of committee members favor the legislation, only rarely will the committee push a bill through over the chairmans objections. Even if the committees pass a bill through to go to the floor for a vote, the Senate Majority leader who controls the Senates agenda can prevent the legislation from coming to the floor for a vote. This tactic is most often used when there is legislation that has sufficient support to pass, most often because the more moderate members of both parties have compromised, but the controlling party does not wish for it to be passed for political reasons. Our current Senate majority leader, Harry Reid has used this tactic a number of times. There are enough obstructionists, on both sides, that use arcane rules, and political tricks, to press their ideological agendas and grind the whole system to a halt. Now, I really don't much care what Washington does, most of the time. The Constitution was very carefully written by some very smart fellows, and there were a number of safeguards built in so the damage the politicians could do to the country as a whole would be minimized. The Bill of Rights, the first ten ammendments were placed there to insure individual liberties and the rights of the states were protected. The Tenth Ammendment is particularly important because the powers of the Federal Government were spelled out rather specifically, all other powers were to be retained by the people and the individual States. The reason for this is that the people have more control over the actions of their local and state governments. I have lived all over the country because my father was a career military officer. The three states I am most closely associated with are Louisiana, the state of my birth and a state where many of my relatives on one side of the family still live. Tennessee where my parents were born and where we lived once my father retired, where I went to High School and college, where I first voted and still work. And Georgia where the other side of my family is from and has lived since the 1840's, and where I currently reside. Each of these states has done fairly well despite of the recent depression, which Washington still calls a recession. Where individual rights are, by and large still respected. They have passed balanced budgets and are in decent shape fiscally, even if Washington has/is not.
Defense spending is really not the issue that some people would like to make it. it is however one of the things the US Government is supposed to spend money on Constitutionally. Many of the other things we spend money on, can be argued as not really within the realm of what the Federal Government should be involved in. It is one of the larger individual items in the budget but in terms of the overall budget and as a percentage of the GDP it has remained relatively flat, in some case actually decreasing. Our spending problems lie elsewhere. Here is a chart that shows defense spending in relation to the overall budget since 2007 and projected through 2017:

View attachment 18253
chart
This chart is from a US Government source.

 

To make a long story short, when there was the budget fight in 2011 over increasing the debt ceiling, the Senate was supposed to come up with cuts in spending. They have not. They put a mechanism in place to trigger automatic cuts if they failed to act. They have failed to act on the cut side, now we've reached the point where we need to increase the authorized debt ceiling again. Do you go ahead and increase the debt ceiling again, even though they have failed to make the cuts they agreed to make in 2011? Or do you refuse to raise the ceiling until the cuts are made? Since, they didn't act as they promised to act two years ago, what makes us think they will now? The other issue before you went on holiday was the administration refusing to make cuts alone, arguing that it needed to be a combination of cuts and new revenues. A tax increase was passed.