Detroit: A Mixture of Water and Socialism

[GreenBean]

For those of us who don't read Forbes, the 1980's were a pretty miserable time.

Sorry.

I know this breaks your heart, but Reagan probably damaged this country beyond repair by being wrong about everything.

For folks like you - it's allways a pretty miserable time isn't it ? You're just miserable little people who can't make it in the real world .

I know it breaks your heart , but Clinton and Bush Sr. rode the wave of prosperity created by Reaganomics - Obama is working overtime [When he's not on vacation] to detroy it beyond repair.

 

[GHook93]

Them Poor People Don't deserve Water!

If you didn't pay your water bill, would the city still provide it to you?

You realize that if no one pays their bills, then the utility goes bust. If the utility goes bust then no one gets their water including the ones that pay. Also do you really think the 150K are going to continue paying if they find out the other 150K aren't paying? Nope remember these are socialist Democrats we are talking about!

Or you can just fund the utility through taxes as a public service.

You know, like Police, Fire Departments, Street Lights... all that commie shit.

Putting the screws to poor people so a few of Snyder's rich buddies can make money off the looting of Detroit isn't the answer.

Great half don't pay their property tax either!

Half of Detroit property owners don't pay taxes | The Detroit News

But you aren't saying to not have them pay you are saying have them pay through taxes. So more or less a middle man pays the utility? You do realize that when you toss in the government middle man most of the money will be lost to waste the utility will get underfunded. A utility as important as water shouldn't be underfunded. On top of that when you have the government as the middle man the costs some how skyrocket. A $30 water bill now become a $300 water bill.

Few people are getting rich off Detroit and the ones that are Democrats. The Unions, which are in the pocket of Democrats, got rich, fat and lazy off at the expense Detroit!

Welcome to Forbes

Facts are important you should embrace them!

 

[Meathead]

No one has ever made socialism work. Capitalism simply pays for social programs in Europe and the US. The only difference is degree.

You've got to keep fighting off those demons and the voices in your head before you can make coherent arguments.

And working people make Capitalism work. So it all balances out.

But seriously, the Germans need to wipe their feet on your country again.

Now see, if you had a job you could help pay for social programs.

Little Joe, the US and Greece are my countries and I will not apologize for either, although frankly Chicago is embarrassing.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Reaganomics did nothing other than usher in the era of triple digit peacetime deficits,

and the political acceptability of them. Reagan killed the idea that politicians had to be fiscally responsible in Washington in order to survive.

Reagan made it possible for Dick Cheney to say, years later, that deficits didn't matter.

Cheney was saying that deficits didn't matter politically. That's the Reagan legacy.

Posts #80 and #93 are facts.

You....simply a joke.

And a bad one at that.

If you want to claim that Reagan CAUSED the economic expansion of the eighties,

which thus would not have otherwise occurred,

you have to show facts of causation. You show none.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Sorry, no dice . . . or actually, you've come up with snake eyes again.

PC may not be old enough to have lived through those years at an age of understanding, but I am. I'm nearly 60, so don't think you can sell that unsupported historical revisionism around here. Forbes has got it exactly right, and I don't listen to radio or watch TV, not even cable anymore. Our entertainment room is strictly for sound and film.

Further, the unemployment rate, after hovering on average around 7% for years began to creep back up during Carter's last year in office, reaching nearly 8% and climbing. It peaked at 9.7% or just over 10%, depending on your source, during the first two years of Reagan's first term. Once the effects of his policies kicked in everything changed. The staggering inflation and interest rates plummeted and, consequently, unemployment dropped too. By the end of Reagan's first term, the seemingly implacable disease of unemployment that plagued the '70s was all the way back down to roughly 7.3% and was at 5.5%, near full employment, by the end of his second term.

Imagine where our economy would have been by 1978 had Reagan won the Republican nomination and beat Carter in 1976. Too bad. A missed opportunity.

The nearly twelve-year economic crisis was clearly over by the end of 1983 and the American economy came roaring back like never before. That was the meat that Reagan brought to the presidential election of 1984 as he shoved the bun down Mondale's throat in a landslide reelection. Recall?

A brief history of U.S. unemployment - The Washington Post

As for Europe. Yeah. I've been there too. But I don't have time to school you on that anymore today.

Inflation was brought under control by Fed policy, by Carter's appointee Paul Volcker,

not by Reagan.

You're a joke....but you've got those Liberal credentials burnished!

That's exactly the kind of answer I'd expect from someone who knows nothing about Federal reserve policy and its effects on the economy.

 

[M.D. Rawlings]

Um, no. First, the economic crisis wasn't 12 years. You had a small recession in 1975 that probably doomed Jerry Ford, (although the fact he pardoned Nixon didn't help). and another small one in 1980 that doomed Carter. Then your Boy Reagan had the biggest one in decades, gutted the middle class, and we were grateful with less.

Um, hogwash.

The economy was burdened by high inflation, interest and unemployment rates for more than a decade. Historically, economic growth was abysmal. Recall Nixon's ridiculous price-freeze policy? That was before Ford and the dip of 1975. The Stagflation era was the worst economy since the Great Depression, worse than the so-called great recession that Obama prolonged. Your understanding of that period and the dramatic, long-term results of Reagan's policies is abysmal too.

Gutted the middleclass?! You're outside you mind. Look, put down the crack pipe and step away from the implement.

Where did you get the 11.3% number for unemployment and why do you foolishly pretend not to understand that the peak of unemployment during the second year of Reagan's term had nothing to do with his policies? He inherited Stagflation and the rising unemployment that bleed over into his first term. He was elected to fix the economy, and he did, starting with his dramatic reduction of the staggeringly high KEYNESIAN, DEMAND-SIDE income tax rates! By the end of 1983, the more than decade-long period of the Nixon-Ford-Carter malaise was over.

All three of them were Keynesians. Both the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment were clueless.

Demand-side government spending is just one side of the Keynesian equation, and the historical record of demand-side spending with its exorbitant rates of taxation is abysmal. Demand-side economics only works at significantly high rates of across-the-board spending such as that of WWII or that of the Eisenhower interstate highway system. It was the war that got America out of the Great Depression, not anything FDR ever did before it. The isolated and sporadic infrastructure projects and especially the artificial inflation of wages and prices of the FDR Administration's command economics were destructive, unnecessarily prolonging the Depression for more than a decade.

Who in their right mind wants the government to spend like crazy as if the nation were at war all the time?

Oh, wait, that would be you leftists.

Earlier you claimed that FDR's artificial hikes in wages helped the working man. They did no such thing. Not surprisingly, unemployment remained at 17% to 20% throughout that period before the war. Those artificial hikes kept the rest jobless, and FDR's artificial hikes in prices cancelled out the artificial hikes in wages . . . and so the economy remained stagnant as demand could not afford supply. The price of my grandfather's services were not artificially inflated, so he made ends meet by way of his economic model within the larger model. He never took a handout from government either, and he despised FDR, particularly because of the latter's association with "those godless Marxists!", the Wilsonian progressives of eugenics and his interment of Japanese Americans.

My grandparents were devout Christians utterly appalled by the depravity of the Hegelian historical dialectic, and, yes, they knew what that was.

Supply-side economics always works as it did under the Harding, Coolidge, Kennedy and Reagan Administrations. Reagan could have done even better for the economy had he been able to dramatically slash spending alongside his tax cuts. As it was, he did cut domestic spending as much as the Democratically controlled Congress would allow, but he was also busy rebuilding the military neglected by Ford and Carter as he beefed up NATO's nuclear arsenal to defeat the Soviet Union. That's right. He put an end to the cowardly and defeatist Détente of Nixon-Ford-Carter. We conservatives of that time were done with propping up that paper tiger, albeit, one of great evil and suffering. We elected to defeat it instead. Who'd a thunk it? Not any of them. Not any of you leftists who whined about how Reagan was out of his mind, a cowboy destabilizing the balance of mutually assured destruction.

Wrong again!

Lefty will never forgive Reagan for defeating the Soviet Union.

The highest I've ever seen the peak of Stagflation's unemployment rate marked at is 10.2%. But make it as high as you want, for it wasn't Reagan's unemployment rate, but that of the ninnies of Keynesianism. Yeah. Sure. Jack it up all you want. That only makes the triumph of Reagan's economic policies all that more impressive, you silly man. Only idiots fail to understand that presidential terms and economic cycles do not neatly coincide, that the impact of economic reforms occur at the very moment of their passage.

"Alright, you interest, inflation and unemployment rates, the president signed it into law. Now drop to your knees and put your hands behind your backs immediately or else."



The history of the American economy is this: supply-side economics works. Keep taxes and spending low and the economy will bloom. The only kind of federal government spending that makes any sense is that for national defense and that which benefits the infrastructural needs of the economy across the board. And the history of the American economy since the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment is this: supply-side economics works and then in the face of what would ordinarily be the relatively mild and short-lived corrections of the economic cycle, America, rather than staying the course and riding them out, stupidly puts progressives in charge so the latter can artificially prolong them.

 

[JoeB131]

For folks like you - it's allways a pretty miserable time isn't it ? You're just miserable little people who can't make it in the real world .

I know it breaks your heart , but Clinton and Bush Sr. rode the wave of prosperity created by Reaganomics - Obama is working overtime [When he's not on vacation] to detroy it beyond repair.

I do fine, probably better than you do. That's not hte point, and I've always notice when you can't answer an argument, you want to make it about the other guy.

For the vast majority of us, the 1980's and 1990's were when working class wages went flat when adjusted for inflation. they only really picked up when Clinton go there.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Or you can just fund the utility through taxes as a public service.

You know, like Police, Fire Departments, Street Lights... all that commie shit.

Putting the screws to poor people so a few of Snyder's rich buddies can make money off the looting of Detroit isn't the answer.

"Or you can just fund the utility through taxes as a public service."

How about we 'fund' all grocery stores and restaurants through taxes as a public service?

Certainly you don't want to deprive folks of food any more than you do of water....



Or....how about government simply doing only those things listed in Article 1, section 8.

 

[JoeB131]

"Or you can just fund the utility through taxes as a public service."

How about we 'fund' all grocery stores and restaurants through taxes as a public service?

Certainly you don't want to deprive folks of food any more than you do of water....

Or....how about government simply doing only those things listed in Article 1, section 8.

We are already doing that. Food Stamps is the biggest Corporate Welfare program out there.

You think anyone could afford to run a farm if only the people who could afford food bought it?

Why do you think they run SNAP out of the Department of Agriculture?

Seriously, you need to turn off hte Hate Radio and get into the real world.

 

[GreenBean]

"Or you can just fund the utility through taxes as a public service."

How about we 'fund' all grocery stores and restaurants through taxes as a public service?

Certainly you don't want to deprive folks of food any more than you do of water....



Or....how about government simply doing only those things listed in Article 1, section 8.

How about we 'fund' all grocery stores and restaurants through taxes as a public service?
​

I Think that's already being done - it's called EBT /Food Stamps

 

[PoliticalChic]

We are already doing that. Food Stamps is the biggest Corporate Welfare program out there.

You think anyone could afford to run a farm if only the people who could afford food bought it?

Why do you think they run SNAP out of the Department of Agriculture?

Seriously, you need to turn off hte Hate Radio and get into the real world.

"You think anyone could afford to run a farm if only the people who could afford food bought it?"

Only those burdened with the most abysmal stupidity could post such a sentence...suggesting that without food stamps folks could not afford food.

In this very thread I gave evidence that only 11 percent of those not paying their water bill, can't pay.

No doubt, the same is true for food stamps and other forms of welfare.



Liberalism only succeeds when folks buy their nonsense like it was on sale.....
....you are a case in point.

 

[PoliticalChic]

How about we 'fund' all grocery stores and restaurants through taxes as a public service?
​

I Think that's already being done - it's called EBT /Food Stamps

For the Leftists, and the morons,....is that redundant?....all the money belongs to government....taxation has no limits.....so any half-wit scheme, no matter if it is detrimental (LBJ's War on Poverty) or proven as a failure (Head Start) will be funded forever.

 

[gipper]

Um, hogwash.

The economy was burdened by high inflation, interest and unemployment rates for more than a decade. Historically, economic growth was abysmal. Recall Nixon's ridiculous price-freeze policy? That was before Ford and the dip of 1975. The Stagflation era was the worst economy since the Great Depression, worse than the so-called great recession that Obama prolonged. Your understanding of that period and the dramatic, long-term results of Reagan's policies is abysmal too.

Gutted the middleclass?! You're outside you mind. Look, put down the crack pipe and step away from the implement.

Where did you get the 11.3% number for unemployment and why do you foolishly pretend not to understand that the peak of unemployment during the second year of Reagan's term had nothing to do with his policies? He inherited Stagflation and the rising unemployment that bleed over into his first term. He was elected to fix the economy, and he did, starting with his dramatic reduction of the staggeringly high KEYNESIAN, DEMAND-SIDE income tax rates! By the end of 1983, the more than decade-long period of the Nixon-Ford-Carter malaise was over.

All three of them were Keynesians. Both the Republican establishment and the Democratic establishment were clueless.

Demand-side government spending is just one side of the Keynesian equation, and the historical record of demand-side spending with its exorbitant rates of taxation is abysmal. Demand-side economics only works at significantly high rates of across-the-board spending such as that of WWII or that of the Eisenhower interstate highway system. It was the war that got America out of the Great Depression, not anything FDR ever did before it. The isolated and sporadic infrastructure projects and especially the artificial inflation of wages and prices of the FDR Administration's command economics were destructive, unnecessarily prolonging the Depression for more than a decade.

Who in their right mind wants the government to spend like crazy as if the nation were at war all the time?

Oh, wait, that would be you leftists.

Earlier you claimed that FDR's artificial hikes in wages helped the working man. They did no such thing. Not surprisingly, unemployment remained at 17% to 20% throughout that period before the war. Those artificial hikes kept the rest jobless, and FDR's artificial hikes in prices cancelled out the artificial hikes in wages . . . and so the economy remained stagnant as demand could not afford supply. The price of my grandfather's services were not artificially inflated, so he made ends meet by way of his economic model within the larger model. He never took a handout from government either, and he despised FDR, particularly because of the latter's association with "those godless Marxists!", the Wilsonian progressives of eugenics and his interment of Japanese Americans.

My grandparents were devout Christians utterly appalled by the depravity of the Hegelian historical dialectic, and, yes, they knew what that was.

Supply-side economics always works as it did under the Harding, Coolidge, Kennedy and Reagan Administrations. Reagan could have done even better for the economy had he been able to dramatically slash spending alongside his tax cuts. As it was, he did cut domestic spending as much as the Democratically controlled Congress would allow, but he was also busy rebuilding the military neglected by Ford and Carter as he beefed up NATO's nuclear arsenal to defeat the Soviet Union. That's right. He put an end to the cowardly and defeatist Détente of Nixon-Ford-Carter. We conservatives of that time were done with propping up that paper tiger, albeit, one of great evil and suffering. We elected to defeat it instead. Who'd a thunk it? Not any of them. Not any of you leftists who whined about how Reagan was out of his mind, a cowboy destabilizing the balance of mutually assured destruction.

Wrong again!

Lefty will never forgive Reagan for defeating the Soviet Union.

The highest I've ever seen the peak of Stagflation's unemployment rate marked at is 10.2%. But make it as high as you want, for it wasn't Reagan's unemployment rate, but that of the ninnies of Keynesianism. Yeah. Sure. Jack it up all you want. That only makes the triumph of Reagan's economic policies all that more impressive, you silly man. Only idiots fail to understand that presidential terms and economic cycles do not neatly coincide, that the impact of economic reforms occur at the very moment of their passage.

"Alright, you interest, inflation and unemployment rates, the president signed it into law. Now drop to your knees and put your hands behind your backs immediately or else."



The history of the American economy is this: supply-side economics works. Keep taxes and spending low and the economy will bloom. The only kind of federal government spending that makes any sense is that for national defense and that which benefits the infrastructural needs of the economy across the board. And the history of the American economy since the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment is this: supply-side economics works and then in the face of what would ordinarily be the relatively mild and short-lived corrections of the economic cycle, America, rather than staying the course and riding them out, stupidly puts progressives in charge so the latter can artificially prolong them.

Agree on all points.

Limited government, low taxation, and free markets works every time it is implemented, which sadly is very few times in all of human history. Is it any wonder the statist loving Left demonizes all who support these things?

Sadly, Leftists have been brainwashed by the State in believing state control of EVERYTHING is the best economic and political system.

 

[GreenBean]

How about we 'fund' all grocery stores and restaurants through taxes as a public service?
​

I Think that's already being done - it's called EBT /Food Stamps

Unfortunately -Most of the Lefties on this board are simply hopeless, clueless and uneducable, just as most lefties in the real world are just useful idiots - basically one and the same

 

[thereisnospoon]

Municipal water supplies should be taxpayer funded, like police and fire departments, and street maintenance, and waste disposal/treatment.

ALL municipal utilities are taxpayer funded...And STILL charge the customers for use.
Are you suggesting that ONLY taxpayers should pay for municipally owned utilities?
And those who own no property? They get theirs free of charge?
And those who do not work but could work? No charge for them either?
It's bad enough when property owners are told they must fund the rest of government while renters pay nothing.
Time for you to head back to the drawing board.

 

[thereisnospoon]

If it's in the property tax, with a suitable usage level for basic service, then you pay for it as part of those taxes if you're a property owner, or it's built into your rent if don't own.

By your reasoning, public school should be a per student user fee where the ones who can't pay the fee don't get to send their kids to school.

Why would that be better?

The two are mutually exclusive. Schools and public safety are services. Utilities are "products"....Tangible goods.
BTW, it is widely accepted that the typical rental unit DOES NOT contribute an equal amount of revenue to the services consumed by the people residing in the unit.
In other words, the usage fees public services required by each rental unit exceed the return. Simply put, not it is NO included in the rent.
Nice try.

They aren't "refusing to pay". they can't.

What is happening in Detroit is that they are letting some big corporations pick the last few bits of meat off the bone.

Frankly, what's in store for all of us if we don't get this stuff under control.

"They can't".....And of course that DO pay have to pick up the difference.
And of course that is not included in your idea of "fairness" is it?
"Can't pay"....That's what public assistance is for. Regardless, the rule is "if you use it, you pay for it"...Period.
If they cannot pay, they are free to find housing where the landlord includes utilities in the rent.
Otherwise, non payers are DEADBEATS.
BTW....Who is "they"....
What you and your fellow libs fail to realize is that Detroit is going to continue to circle the bowl until someone is that incredibly fucked up dysfunctional city govt finds a way to get a few of those EEEEEEVIL corporations and equally EEEEEVIL wealthy people to INVEST in the city. Failing that, it's possible the existing city charter may be dissolved.

 

[thereisnospoon]

Detroit is right on one of the Great Lakes. They aren't about to run out of water.

Hey genius. Technically, Detroit DOES NOT have a shoreline on any of the great lakes. Detroit is bound on the4 East by Lake St Clair.
There are things such as infrastructure and the labor to operate and maintain said infrastructure for which revenue is REQUIRED to fund it....
Unless of course you are implying that the residents of Detroit can simply head to the lake and dip five gallon buckets into Lake St Clair and carry it home

 

[thereisnospoon]

And what's the alternative you have to offer?

Work hard all your life to make the 1% richer? And if you get old, get sick, bust up your knee on some ice, well, seriously, tough on you?

This is the "alternative"? And you wonder why Obama wins elections?

No one is forced to work to "make the 1% ( dead talking point) richer.
And please, tell us how much longer are you going to piss and moan and make every thread about YOU?
Is it any wonder to you why you are so fucking miserable? You have convinced yourself that you've been screwed by the system"..You've found a safe haven in scapegoating others for things that are YOUR fault.
Quite frankly, your ever present whining has become the equivalent of the wailing car alarm in the mall parking lot. It's annoying. And nobody cares.

 

[JoeB131]

"You think anyone could afford to run a farm if only the people who could afford food bought it?"

Only those burdened with the most abysmal stupidity could post such a sentence...suggesting that without food stamps folks could not afford food.

In this very thread I gave evidence that only 11 percent of those not paying their water bill, can't pay.

No doubt, the same is true for food stamps and other forms of welfare.

Liberalism only succeeds when folks buy their nonsense like it was on sale.....
....you are a case in point.

The people who benefit from SNAP are WalMart and Archer-Daniels. Come on, I know you are a gullible tool of Hate Radio, but let's be honest what SNAP is. SNAP Keeps people happy with paying higher prices for food and keeps rich companies making a killing off of it.

 

[JoeB131]

No one is forced to work to "make the 1% ( dead talking point) richer.
And please, tell us how much longer are you going to piss and moan and make every thread about YOU?
Is it any wonder to you why you are so fucking miserable? You have convinced yourself that you've been screwed by the system"..You've found a safe haven in scapegoating others for things that are YOUR fault.
Quite frankly, your ever present whining has become the equivalent of the wailing car alarm in the mall parking lot. It's annoying. And nobody cares.

But here you are whining about my plight.

Seriously, fuck the 1%ers. Their going to be fine. It's time we looked out for everyone else.

A big company screwed me over. Now I support single payer so they can't do that to anyone else.

Sounds fair to me.

If some rich asshole has to share a hospital room with a poor person, tough shit.