>> ^xxovercastxx:

I hope you know what you're in for. This will be one of the most misused channels on the site.


I'll try and make the short description as clear as possible, and the long one even more so... and hey, I'm up for some slashing and burning of RickRoll videos

Temporarily waving the requirement to have 20% equity to refinance at a lower rate will only put us back into the position we used to be in. If people can't pay a mortgage, it's still no use. It's likely better for the individual family to leave instead of paying for a property that had its value slashed.

That, and the loss will be put on the back of the taxpayer. The bank won't take it.

>> ^bareboards2:

What is kind of funny about this sift talk --
If the nemesis shows up to neme, Mr Sandwich won't know.
Which is delicious. It is like some sort of superpower -- being slashed at by a sword and you don't even hear the swish of the blade as it fails to connect.
I never used to use the Ignore feature -- I had a Calvinist streak that said I must suffer in payment for my pleasure.
Now I use it all the time, and my pleasure has just increased.
Fie on you, Calvin! Your hold on me is waning.


I have a bunch of people ignored, but I almost always click to read their comments anyway. I'm weak/a masochist.

There should be an achievement. Most Ignored Comments Read.

What is kind of funny about this sift talk --

If the nemesis shows up to neme, Mr Sandwich won't know.

Which is delicious. It is like some sort of superpower -- being slashed at by a sword and you don't even hear the swish of the blade as it fails to connect.

I never used to use the Ignore feature -- I had a Calvinist streak that said I must suffer in payment for my pleasure.

Now I use it all the time, and my pleasure has just increased.

Fie on you, Calvin! Your hold on me is waning.

>> ^Winstonfield_Pennypacker:

"On a superficial level, Obama is echoing Reagan’s anecdotes when he speaks of the Buffett Rule and tax fairness. But it is misleading for Obama to suggest that Reagan was “pushing for the same concept” — and to label the Buffett Rule the “Reagan Rule”-- when the former president actually barnstormed the country to argue on behalf of a broad-based tax cut that reduced taxes for the wealthy, the middle class and the poor while greatly simplifying the tax system."
If Democrats are counting on the STUPID vote, you guys are a lock.


Reagan's net effect was to raise taxes.

I have to agree, the two are nothing alike. Reagan instituted the payroll tax, one of the most regressive taxes we currently pay. Obama, on the other hand, slashed it.

Hurray! Canada gets rid of the penny!

- We also got rid of 19,200 jobs! (1)
- Increased the retirement age to 67 years old for eligibility to receive pensioners. (2)
- Slashed funding to the elections Canada (on the eve of investigations into election fraud!) /Source.
- Scaled back of youth programs including the elimination of the Katimavik work exchange program.
- The news organization most capable of reporting on government actions and fraud is severely cut. (3)

And, it spite of all the cuts due to overspending, we're still committed to purchasing several F-35 JSF "White Elephants" from war profiteers, Lockheed Martin. Link.
Canadians taxpayers are still paying 31 Billion to serve the INTEREST on outstanding debt to private banks. (4)
Universities continue to be so underfunded that 200,000 students protested in the streets of Montreal last month. (5)


(1) This would be equivalent of Obama suddenly eliminating about 180,000 public servant jobs in the United States if scaled for population.
(2) Except for politicians, who can still begin to receive their pension as early as 55 until after the next election. info!
(3) The CBC takes budget nosedive on the chin. Link.
(4) And who benefits from that interest payment? Surely not the same people who contribute to political campaigns!! Harper unwilling to actually cut spending.
(5) http://videosift.com/video/Montreal-Students-Protest-Timelapse-March-22-2012

But, hey, at least we got rid of the penny!!
Focus on the shiny coin!

Where's Quantum Mushhead? This is what happens when you slash taxes on the rich and corporations while cutting benefits and social programs.

Is that the country you want to live in?

Congratulations! Your comment has just received enough votes from the community to earn you 1 Power Point. Thank you for your quality contribution to VideoSift.

>> ^ant:

And then what happened?
2 years later that cat slashes the shit out of that dog's face.

The CBC provided most of what you just asked for (though they covered sports too) before their budgets were slashed a number of years ago. This forced them to cut back on the number of Canadian programs and air syndicated American reruns


Meh. I've watched 30 years of CBC - it was one of two channels we got when I was growing up, and often the only one that came in clearly. I don't see any big difference in quality over the years - they've always found a few hits and a lot of unambitious, uninteresting misses. Now that people have so many more options about what to watch, the value of that unambitious crap is really low.

We give them $1, and they make "Being Erica" and the "The Ron James Show". Why the hell would I want to give them another dollar? Why should we expect them to change philosophy if they had more budget? I mean, if it was unusual crap or an odd idea that didn't quite work out or a project that was too ambitious for its budget, then that would be one thing - that's the kind of problem you can solve with more money. But their lineup is full of cooking shows, generic sitcoms, and crap. There's no reason for public funding of any of that.

Public television is a great idea. There's all sorts of innovation, education, and general public interests that can be served that aren't served by a for-profit station. CBC needs to focus on those things. Also, hockey. I don't watch hockey - but it's undeniably important and the CBC should go way, way overboard covering things like the World Juniors. It makes people happy and brings the country together.

And I'll also agree with another poster above: CBC Radio is generally really good. It focuses on exactly the kind of stuff a public broadcaster should. It's hits and misses, but it's interesting, valuable hits and misses.

The CBC provided most of what you just asked for (though they covered sports too) before their budgets were slashed a number of years ago. This forced them to cut back on the number of Canadian programs and air syndicated American reruns. The CBC isn't better than it is because we don't give them enough funding to be better.>> ^jmzero:

I think the CBC needs changes. It should produce educational content, children's programming, news and nothing else. There's no reason it should compete to show sports and general entertainment.
Especially the latter.
It has demonstrated a tremendous lack of skill in making the kinds of entertainment programs Canadians want to watch, despite aiming pretty low. Why, as a taxpayer, should I be paying for sub-par sitcoms and reality shows?
A public, independent news network without ads? Good purchase. Rick Mercer? He's great, but I think he'd get the ratings to survive elsewhere.
A few more daytime cooking shows - and still pressure from advertisers? Doesn't sound like a good use of taxpayer money.

Yeeeeeah,

Except the link that you posted doesn't compare wages by "equivalents". It compares what public employees make with the entire private sector. Well, serving big macs and pumping gas are certainly important jobs, but the jobs in the public sector are more specialized, and so they mostly require educated people.

The "study" that you linked to was created by an organization of business people who's whole purpose is to show exactly what they wanted. That is: to imply that public sector employees make more money. When you compare for equivalent jobs, and add education into the mix, there's no study you can site that shows that public employees earn more. Except for maybe custodians, and good for them, they deserve it. Most private employers I know would rather bitch about immigration during the day, and pay people an illegal wage to clean up their shit at night when no one is looking.

And the second "study" you link to, also created by a partisan, republican think-tank to present their opinions as facts, is exactly the same. One of the most interesting things completely left out of the equation is that they're including the benefits of public employees who are already retired, and who accumulated those benefits on a scale that is drastically different from the one used for employees today. Here, in Oregon, those people with tier one P.E.R.S (public employee retirement system) benefits are retiring right now, or have already retired. The "public" have decided over the last decade or so, that since those people worked their entire lives on a promise of those benefits, it would be dishonest to take them away and treat those employees entire lives of service as garbage. Maybe you feel differently. Either way, employees are paid on, and accrue benefits on, a scale that offers much, much less than the old. That's what should be taken into account regarding current wages in any study of current pay, but it's not. And there are a million non-partisan peer responses out there that show that for all the education data they use, their conclusions are false. Look them up yourself if you're so interested in facts.

The thing that really amazes me about your fight to screw people out of their promised wages to make life easier for yourself without actually having to do hard work for it is this: In the AEI study, which looks more credible than the first (but should still be seen as inflated at best, considering the authors) the amount the taxpayers could save by screwing over fellow citizens is... :

77 Billion dollars?

Seriously? As you said above: "700 billion. Only HALF of just the deficit... anyone that thinks that the only place we need to cut is ‘defense’ and that’ll fix it all it living in a dream world."

So that's your big plan? Slash and burn our social programs, putting millions of people out of work, paying the essential workers minimum wage, and leaving all the people who rely on those programs in the dark, causing an unemployment crisis unseen in the history of our country, to save less money than we spent on the recent conflict in Libya that we didn't even fight in?

77 Billion dollars is what you're saying is going to bring this country to it's knees? That's your "silver plated budget?" What a crock of shit.

As an American, you should be ashamed of yourself. You're risking real people's lives by playing the game you're playing. And all for an insignificant fraction of the budget you're claiming. The attack on unions goes not only against your own interests, but against the first and most important amendment to our constitution. If people want to speak up for their rights, and negotiate their terms, well, get used to it. That's what we do here in America, public employees or not. Benjamin Franklin was a public employee, who you have limited his right to express his opinions and negotiate?

If you have a problem with the things people ask for, figure out a solution and deal with it yourself. Stop trying to get the ignorant and greedy to form a big enough group that you can legislate away the rights of your neighbors.

Jesus Christ, you wanna talk wage disparity? Why don't you try looking somewhere where the wage disparity, even with the biggest pile of evidence you can accumulate, amounts at a few thousand dollars per person at best. And spare us all your "search for the truth." Don't like the way unions work? Let them go on strike. Let them strike until they give up and are forced to accept the truth. Don't try to act like you still want everything to get done, but for less money by simply legislating people's rights away. When you do that, you'll see this country crumble before your eyes.

Stop attacking the little people to get what you want. Focus on the ones pulling your own strings.

I hate to wrap up, but my eleven-month-old is crying. I tried to tell him to go get a job if he wants some food, but all he does is whine when I do that. And if I keep typing anyway, pretty soon I'll be hearing from you about how I "might" be abandoning my children and sleeping with the guy in the next tent over.

subsidizing big business friends that don't need the subsidy or tax break may be the place to look for that

Places like Illinois, California, Wisconsin, and New Jersey are not facing fiscal black-holes because they are paying too much in subsidies to ‘big business friends’. The main problem is that they have promised government workers a gold-plated lifestyle when they only had a copper-plated budget. You could end every ‘big business’ tax break, subsidy, and kickback tomorrow and it would not even make a dent in the budget shortfalls of states like Illinois. The problem is government over-spending. Here it is in black and white. This isn’t ‘left or right’. This isn’t ‘liberal or conservative’. This is just the brutal, harsh, cold reality…

http://sunshinereview.org/index.php/Illinois_state_budget#Public_Employees

You will notice that Illinois’ budget is NOT dominated by a big line item of ‘subsidies to big business’. The budget is dominated by government spending on unions, union benefits, and entitlements. The only way to ‘fix’ such a budget is to cut the spending. Really. Because for every 12 people living in Illinois, there is one full-time salaried government worker pulling a higher wage, more benefits, and a better retirement than the people paying for him. Such a system is economically impossible to support. And there is plenty of evidence that such systems will ALWAYS collapse because of ineffiency. Greece, Italy, Portugal – entire nations are collapsing because of exactly the same problem. And that problem is the poison of Keynesian economics propping up an impossibly lavish public sector.

That's basically my point, this country has plenty of money, it just does it's that people are greedy as **** so they're going to say that only THIS slice of the pie is available for you guys

You are talking as if the public sector is NOT getting its ‘piece of the pie’…

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2011/09/14/study-finds-public-employee-compensation-better-than-private-sector.html

http://www.aei.org/docLib/AEI-Working-Paper-on-Federal-Pay-May-2011.pdf

It's just not true, public service unions have nothing to do with the crisis, when you look at the fact that we're in two Wars and spend double what the entire world spends on the armed forces

To say public unions have 'nothing' to do with the economic shortfalls is just factually incorrect. The links above prove it. Illinois has entire sections of its budget dominated by union issues, and union contracts repeatedly block any attempts at reform.

But regardless... Sure. Cut federal defense spending. And while we are at it, we should also cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and every other program. Cut them all. Slash them by 33% across the board. No exceptions. No mercy. But anyone that thinks that the only place we need to cut is ‘defense’ and that’ll fix it all it living in a dream world.

For example – how is cutting defense spending going to help Illinois? Or California? Or New Jersey? Or let’s take it national. Greece’s defense spending was a measley 3.4%. Explain how they would solve their massive budget shortfall by cutting defense. Or the US… Even if you cut US defense spending to zero, our current deficit is over 1.4 trillion. Defense to zero? 700 billion. Only HALF of just the deficit. It doesn’t even touch the 14 trillion in debt the nation already has. Or the further SEVENTY trillion in debt we have to cover all the 'unfunded liabilites' of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

At some point all the prog-libs out there are going to have to accept the facts. You can’t close the massive budget shortfalls that cities, states, and nations have with defense cuts. The problem is not defense. It is not ‘big business’. The problem is that governments are overspending on unsustainable public employee packages and entitlements that have no reasonable expecation of ever being paid for.

Oh, what utter BS. Medicare dismantled?! He freakin' provided the blueprint for the most recent health care reform! I'm not a Romney fan, but cut the crap. Getting really freaking tired of this kind of stuff. What ever happened in this country to even a sliver of honest discussion?

"Mitt Romney has a vision.

Wall Street... UNREGULATED
Main Street... ISOLATED
The Middle Class... DECIMATED
American jobs... RELOCATED
Supreme Court... STACKED
Social Security... PRIVATIZED
Medicare... DISMANTLED
Planned Parenthood... DEFUNDED
Global Warming... IGNORED
College Aid... SLASHED
Health Insurance Reform... REPEALED

Mitt Romney's America is not our America."

Slash sisters.