Oh, the irony...

JWF III

New member
I don't care who's name is on the bottom, as long as mine is in the line that says "payable to".

I felt weird the first time. Like I should donate it to charity. Then I drove down the road and into town, circled past all the section 8 housing and realized I donate to charity every time I get paid. Again, when I was picking up groceries and the folks ahead of me were buying crab legs and cases of Coke with their EBT card. My relatively short guilt trip ended there.

Feel free to send more gun money.
My guilt ended when Pakistan got 12 billion for gender studies. After that, they could give me all my money back and I wouldn’t be happy. (Not to mention all the other pork. That was just what came to mind.)

Wyman
 
Uhhhh. Meaning what exactly?
Meaning Biden's name wasn't on the latest check. Also the formula for delivering these stimulus payments seems to result in a lot of people getting payments that didn't/don't need them. I suppose it's a good thing for those that do, but I wonder what a gallon of milk will cost in 10 years.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Meaning Biden's name wasn't on the latest check. Also the formula for delivering these stimulus payments seems to result in a lot of people getting payments that didn't/don't need them. I suppose it's a good thing for those that do, but I wonder what a gallon of milk will cost in 10 years.

I am aware that Biden's name wasn't on any checks. I am asking what you think the significance of that fact is.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
What is the significance of pointing this out? Is this not your post?

Sigh.

Yes, I posted that. The point was that the first two checks came under Trump, so any criticism of Biden automatically applied to Trump. Further, for the first time in history, a president (Trump) put his personal name on a relief check, to maximize political gain in a very obvious and coarse way. But then Trump is coarse and obvious.

Anyway, Biden is doing it in a bit more dignified way, as with every other administration previous to Trump's. Do politicians do things for political reasons? Well, duh.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
My guilt ended when Pakistan got 12 billion for gender studies. After that, they could give me all my money back and I wouldn’t be happy. (Not to mention all the other pork. That was just what came to mind.)

Wyman

Can you confirm the 12 billion? What part of the US budget paid that out? And which Pakistani organization received the 12 billion?

It sounds like you have been suckling at the Breitbart teat for too long.
 
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roscoe

Well-known member
This I agree with. On both sides of the aisle. My main issue is the continued handing out of stimulus payments is going to bankrupt a nation already in oppressive debt.
That is an empirical question. Maybe it will and maybe it won't. There isn't really anything a country does to declare 'bankruptcy'. It just defaults on its debts. But it is unlikely in the World's largest economy.

That has never happened to the US, even during the Great Depression. The US debt was much larger after WW2 and we paid it down. Then, during Reagan's years it cranked up again, and we paid it off under Clinton. This is not anything new. Once COVID ends, we will get back to business and pay it off. In the meantime, we have prevented economic catastrophe for millions of Americans.
 

theotherwaldo

Well-known member
So maybe it will end in 75 years?
That's the shortest estimate that I've heard.
Most say that it will never end and will probably only get worse... .
 

roscoe

Well-known member
So maybe it will end in 75 years?
That's the shortest estimate that I've heard.
Most say that it will never end and will probably only get worse... .
Why 75 years? Here is the past debt - today is bad but we have had worse:
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roscoe

Well-known member
Not the debt - the covid 'emergency'.
Oh. 6-12 months. I'm vaccinated as is everyone in my family. We are back going out, almost as before. School opens in fall. Masks are becoming optional. It will take the economy some time to recover, as in previous economic setbacks. We just gotta get back to it.
 

theotherwaldo

Well-known member
Yep.
6-12 months for the current iteration.
Problem is that the virus is continuing to evolve.
The likelihood of a new and more deadly version of the virus that is not stopped by the existing vaccinations is very high - just like all of the other viruses that tend to flow out of China and the rest of the Far East on an annual basis.
 

roscoe

Well-known member
Yep.
6-12 months for the current iteration.
Problem is that the virus is continuing to evolve.
The likelihood of a new and more deadly version of the virus that is not stopped by the existing vaccinations is very high - just like all of the other viruses that tend to flow out of China and the rest of the Far East on an annual basis.

We will get it in the neck some day, for sure, but given how fast we made the vaccines, I am just not convinced this is the one. The vaccine-makers will have to play whack-a-mole with variants for a while.

But, the human population has been due. A large-scale pandemic with high communicability and high mortality would clean the house pretty thoroughly, given how dense our population is and how much we travel. The natural selection process would behave as it has in the past, with smallpox, influenza, malaria, etc., where the remaining population would be more resistant. It would be a pretty unpleasant hundred or so years, but humans would, as a species persist. But imagine if a disease with a long incubation period, high communicability, and high mortality appeared. What if HIV had become airborne in the 1980s? The human population might have been reduced to the tens of millions.

There are lots of things that nature can throw at us for which there is no good answer - a Yellowstone Caldera volcanic event, major asteroid strike, etc. Humans have only been on this planet 7 million years as a lineage, 300,000 as a species, and 7,000 as 'civilization'-based societies. 99.99% of all species on Earth have gone extinct, so it will happen one way or another. And humans are not very good at doing the types of things that would mitigate disaster - long-term planning, self-sacrifice, cooperation across groups, etc. No, we largely want to make sure we get ours, right now (preferably without having it taxed), and to hell with everyone else.
 

theotherwaldo

Well-known member
I'm just glad that:

-The Chinese hadnt finished 'improving' the virus before it got loose. By the way, the type of bat that carries that particular virus is not native to the Wuhan area. It comes from several hundred miles away.

-No one came up with a patent medicine to treat this virus like they did the 1918 Spanish Flu. In that case, doctors stuffed their victims full of the new wonder drug called Aspirin, which drastically reduced the body's resistance to the effects of viruses.

-We live in a confederated republic that allows local resistance to centralized government dictates. The confused, contradictory statements coming from Washington, DC over the last couple of years has caused more harm than good... .
 

roscoe

Well-known member
I'm just glad that:

-The Chinese hadnt finished 'improving' the virus before it got loose. By the way, the type of bat that carries that particular virus is not native to the Wuhan area. It comes from several hundred miles away.

-No one came up with a patent medicine to treat this virus like they did the 1918 Spanish Flu. In that case, doctors stuffed their victims full of the new wonder drug called Aspirin, which drastically reduced the body's resistance to the effects of viruses.

-We live in a confederated republic that allows local resistance to centralized government dictates. The confused, contradictory statements coming from Washington, DC over the last couple of years has caused more harm than good... .

The idea that the PRC gov made this virus is conspiratorial speculation. Releasing a virus like that on purpose is crazily unpredictable. They were doing just fine taking over the world without it.

Yeah, the US Government screwed the pooch on their response, but I blame the venal carrot at the top for that. Other 1st world countries didn't suffer the same death rate or economic harm we suffered here in the US.
 

theotherwaldo

Well-known member
I don't think that the Chinese released the virus intentionally, rather that it escaped through inept handling.
Likewise, I feel that there's plenty of blame to go around amongst our politicians and medical advisors, as well... .
 

.44 Associate

Active member
Our most recent stimulus payment arrived on the same day as our property tax bill, and were nearly identical in size, so that is where the money went. So we paid the government with government money. Which is to say, money which was taken from us by the government and was then used to pay government workers to make decisions about how much of that money should be used to induce us to spend more money to help the economy survive the results of bad government.
 
Anyone else following along those lines?

I've dumped every penny on my big credit card. I was planning on having it paid off by end of next year, using all the overtime money I could get my hands on.

It'll be paid off in probably another couple months because of the stimmy checks.

Best thing I could think of to use it for... get our debt down to zero before the Democrats screw us over to much.
 
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