According to Gallup, favorability ratings for both parties are down. The GOP is down to 28% and the Dems are down to 43%. It kind of reminds me of the "purity" drive under the last Pope. Those 28% will always vote and give $ so the real question is will the 43% vote because Dem support is always softer in the polls. Neither party is winning friends right now so which will keep enough base and can either get an independent voter?

The best headline about the shutdown, so far...

CNBC
10/10/13
Baah! Gov't goats laid off in shutdown, no kidding

Our parties need to do what's RIGHT for our country, and find agreement. Find ways to come to a compromise with each other. Both parties get something, and both give up something. This "my way or the highway", "glad to negotiate AFTER I get everything I want" stuff, is old, tired, and just plain dumb, before it even starts.

Likewise, the over the top rhetoric where one party bashes the other. I suppose some of that is necessary to appease the base of their constituents, but over the top name calling and closing the open air war memorials and cemeteries, does not reflect well on any political party, or any political leader.

Wrong. Both the Treasury dept and Moody's have stated that there will be NO default of any US debt.

Some programs will be cut back, but NOBODY will be defaulted on.

No. Congress needs to do its job, which is passing bills to fund the allocations it's already made. Doing your basic job is not negotiable.

Negotiating about legislation you don't like has to be done in the proper setting, not through holding the country hostage.

'Everything I want' is for these people, who work for WE, THE PEOPLE, to DO THEIR JOBS and fund the government. No other issues should be addressed until they stop holding a gun to everyone's head.

Only the Republicans are doing that.

The Democrats are making no demands. Republicans are adding all sorts of crap they want, and claiming that they will "negotiate" only getting some of their demands, as long as they can repeat the process and get everything else next time round.

Both parties... long ago... negotiated, compromised, and signed off on legislative agreements.
Both parties got something and both gave up something.

In this time of the government's calendar of proceedings,
your proposal to "negotiate" and/or "compromise" is just another way of echoing the GOP antecedent: "my way or the highway".

It's probably moot now because the GOP is desperately looking
for a face-saving way out of the mess they created at the end of September.

I suspect that Obama will be gracious enough to give it to them. :rolleyes:

Yes, you have to excuse the Republicans. They are getting desperate. I don't have the links to it yet, but it's being reported that if Obama and the Democrats get their projected debt ceiling increase and funding, Obama's 8 years in office, will have increased our national debt:

drum roll please.....

More than all the other Presidents in our nations history, put together. :mad:

Don't worry about a compromise however. Harry Reid is in charge of the Obama negotiating team, and he told the Republicans meeting with Obama, before they came in, that there would be no negotiating until they had their debt ceiling lifted and all their funding.

I'm not sure WHY they even bothered to meet with the Republicans, if that was their rigid position. Trying to get good media coverage, I guess.

Try to make Reid and Obama look like sane men. :p: A full time job, right there, I'm sure.

I'm not saying the Republicans have had a coherent strategy. It's been odd, to put it mildly. But at least they are trying to keep those green bills in your wallet, worth something.

Having another 50,000 people working for the feds, and another 100,000 Americans on food stamps and welfare - doesn't sound good to me.

One good plan, supported by many Conservatives, is the One Cent Solution. Where every program or department's budget is cut by 1% until the budget is balanced. (Projected to be 5 or 6 years).

All new programs would need to be fully funded upon their start, for this to work, of course.

All the details here:
http://www.onecentsolution.org/the-one-cent-solution/

To me, this is far more important than railing against Obamacare.

Adjusted for inflation?

Wow, that would really be dishonest if this number was not adjusted for inflation.

Uh oh guess what. Oh you'll never guess.

I remember when Reagan was in office and Time magazine ran a whole issue on the debt, and in his first term, he had increased the debt more than all the previous presidents combined. I don't remember if those dollars were adjusted for inflation. I think they were. Reagan really increased military spending and also cut taxes, which resulted in a huge increase in the deficit and ultimately the debt. It only got worse in his second term. (Or better, if you credit his deficit spending with winning the cold war.)

I'd expect FDR to be the all-time winner on this one

This is in percent of GDP, not in real dollars, but it's something.

Attachment 45654

Deficit and debt are not the same thing

Cheney said (and wacko extremists therefore believed) that Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We now suffer pain from that Cheney lie.

It did not matter to him because he prospered by spending money then. We are now stuck with the resulting bills.

Notice what happened when Reagan/Bush ran the debt up big time. In the Cellar, so many in 1990/2 were complaining about how bad things had become. Then Clinton addressed the problem. As a result, the economy prospered and deficit dropped to zero. What did Clinton do? He raised taxes. That (in part) caused the economy to prosper.

Extremist do not want to admit something. Obama is successfully curing the destruction of the American economy created (in part) by tax cuts, welfare to the rich, and other fiscal mismanagement - including Mission Accomplished.

Yeah, well, the debt graph is boring. It just keeps going up exponentially. The deficit graph is where the real data is, because you can see how government policy and economic factors work together to increase the debt slightly or rapidly.

One interesting thing is that the debt was much worse in the 80s because interest rates were higher then, so a bigger slice of the federal budget pie had to be spent paying interest back then than it does now. So we have a much bigger debt now, but it doesn't matter as much as it did during the Reagan years.

Look at the green in this chart. That's what the federal government has to pay in interest.
Attachment 45655

edit: Actually, I misspoke. That's the interest the federal government has to pay, expressed as a percentage of GDP.