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ProVobis
Guest
I think they mentioned today that this year’s deficit will be less than the $1 trillion-plus deficit of last year’s.
But the debt will continue to grow as it has done for decades.
Will voting for Liberals lower poverty, unemployment and the deficit?
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But the debt will continue to grow as it has done for decades.
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ProVobis
Guest
Not that I condone the actions of the Supreme Court, but there had been abortions going all the way back before Christ. In fact, as far back as in 1930, there had been an estimated 800,000 abortions per year. (And who reports abortions when they’re illegal?)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States
I could believe that the the number of abortions reported after Roe vs Wade increased, however.
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Al_Moritz
Guest
Yawn.WOW! Pot, Kettle anyone.
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pete_29
Guest
Like I tell my kids, go to bed if you’re tired.
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estesbob
Guest
Archbishop Chaput refuted this nonsense here:
catholic.org/politics/story.php?id=30135&page=2
BTW-The National Catholic reporters NOT a Catholic source, nor for that matter is the National Catholic Register. They are private publications and the Reporter especially is often heterodox in their views. Their latest crusade is to lobby for Female Ordination. And unlike the Register the Reporter has, in the past, been publicly condemned by the Archbishop of Kansas city, where they publish
catholickey.org/2013/01/25/the-bishops-role-in-fostering-the-mission-of-the-catholic-media/
Bishop Finn makes the clear point that the National Catholic Reporter is responsible for, “officially condemning Church teaching on the ordination of women, insistent undermining of Church teaching on artificial contraception and sexual morality in general, lionizing dissident theologies while rejecting established Magisterial teaching, and a litany of other issues.”
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estesbob
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Went from 400,000 per year to 1.5 million a year in the two years after Roe was imposed.
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estesbob
Guest
The Romney profits from abortion nonsense is refuted here:
nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/309400/obama-attack-coming-down-road-stericycle
To see which candidates profit from the abortion industry go here:
opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=Q15
opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2012&ind=Q15
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ProVobis
Guest
What are your sources for this? Are they actual or what was reported?
johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-unitedstates.html
Also:
guttmacher.org/pubs/journals/3502503.html
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estesbob
Guest
Abortion - Statistics/Demographics/Maternal Deaths from Abortion 1940-1972, Part 2
Incidence of Induced Abortion in the United States
Raymond J. Adamek, Ph.D.
How many legal abortions are there in the USA now, and how many induced abortions (legal and illegal) took place prior to the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, which permitted abortion for virtually any reason throughout the nine months of pregnancy?
One thing is certain. The number of legal abortions has increased dramatically since legalization, as we see in Table 1.
physiciansforlife.org/content/view/885/26/
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Zosimus41
Guest
youtube.com/watch?v=ijIpN6IcJUc Mark LevinTrue but microeconomics is a different subject from macroeconomics.
Savings is calculated differently for one thing.
Businesses can’t determine the value of the currency.
Businesses can’t print money to finance the debt, although they can borrow before they spend. Federal balance sheets and the accounting however are smoke and mirrors.
As you’ve pointed out, businesses don’t tax but then even municipalities can tax.
And don’t forget the big difference, deficits don’t matter.
As far as I’m concerned Nixon declared us essentially broke when we didn’t have enough gold to pay our debts. Volcker strengthened the dollar but it’s been declining since. Between the current Fed chairman and the projected next Fed chairperson, it won’t be strengthening soon even if Congress cuts spending by a couple of trillion.
ProVobis Pax et bonum
What ever calculation stratigies you wish to use there is no doubt this great country of ours
is in deep financial debt $16,475,048,398,166 dollars and counting.
All printing money does is cause inflation i.e. we the people have to pay more for goods.
My point is even if the government has access to print more money it causes other issues that are detrimental to our economiy.
Like corparations you actually have to have a higher profit than debt to stay alive.
CHeck out the video Let me know what you think.
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ProVobis
Guest
No comparison. Besides the deregulated airline and trucking industries, Carter left Reagan with a powerful Fed chairman (Volcker) who was most instrumental in raising the interest rates to quell the Nixon inflation then slowly lowering them to stimulate the economy. Reagan did okay but then blew it by appointing Greenspan, whom the market tested immediately by dropping the Dow by over 30%, 22% in one day.
Contrast that with what Obama inherited. Zero-percent interest rate economy after a complete banking and housing collapse. What are your options when you can’t drop interest rates any further? At least the stock market recovered.
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TimothyIgnatius
Guest
Um, yeah, no. The information in those links refutes nothing, and its assertions are tentative at best; it is laden with red flags. There are official government documents that reveal Romney’s profiteering of abortion, including documents signed by him.
mediaite.com/online/mitt-romney-medical-waste-deal-undercuts-fact-checks-of-obama-ads/
motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/romney-bain-abortion-stericycle-sec
From the above link:
"Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded, tamped down the controversy. The company said Romney left the firm in February 1999 to run the troubled 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and likely had nothing to with the deal. The matter never became a campaign issue. But documents filed by Bain and Stericycle with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and obtained by Mother Jones—list Romney as an active participant in the investment. And this deal helped Stericycle, a company with a poor safety record, grow, while yielding tens of millions of dollars in profits for Romney and his partners. The documents—one of which was signed by Romney—also contradict the official account of Romney’s exit from Bain.
The Stericycle deal—the abortion connection aside—is relevant because of questions regarding the timing of Romney’s departure from the private equity firm he founded. Responding to a recent Washington Post story reporting that Bain-acquired companies outsourced jobs, the Romney campaign insisted that Romney exited Bain in February 1999, a month or more before Bain took over two of the companies named in the Post’s article. The SEC documents undercut that defense, indicating that Romney still played a role in Bain investments until at least the end of 1999.
Here’s what happened with Stericycle. In November 1999, Bain Capital and Madison Dearborn Partners, a Chicago-based private equity firm, filed with the SEC a Schedule 13D, which lists owners of publicly traded companies, noting that they had jointly purchased $75 million worth of shares in Stericycle, a fast-growing player in the medical-waste industry. (That April, Stericycle had announced plans to buy the medical-waste businesses of Browning Ferris Industries and Allied Waste Industries.) The SEC filing lists assorted Bain-related entities that were part of the deal, including Bain Capital (BCI), Bain Capital Partners VI (BCP VI), Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors (a Bermuda-based Bain affiliate), and Brookside Capital Investors (a Bain offshoot). And it notes that Romney was the “sole shareholder, Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President of BCI, BCP VI Inc., Brookside Inc. and Sankaty Ltd.”
The document also states that Romney “may be deemed to share voting and dispositive power with respect to” 2,116,588 shares of common stock in Stericycle “in his capacity as sole shareholder” of the Bain entities that invested in the company. That was about 11 percent of the outstanding shares of common stock. (The whole $75 million investment won Bain, Romney, and their partners 22.64 percent of the firm’s stock—the largest bloc among the firm’s owners.) The original copy of the filing was signed by Romney.
Another SEC document filed November 30, 1999, by Stericycle also names Romney as an individual who holds “voting and dispositive power” with respect to the stock owned by Bain. If Romney had fully retired from the private equity firm he founded, why would he be the only Bain executive named as the person in control of this large amount of Stericycle stock?"
There you have it. Irrefutable evidence. What are you going to tell me next, that the SEC documents were forged?
Can you explain your adherence to what Archbishop Chaput says? You’ve used him as a source multiple times. Do you believe him incorruptible? He’s not the Pope making a dogmatic proclamation, so why to you cling to what he says as if he can’t possibly be wrong? The article you provided that he wrote does not provide any sources. More red flags.
meltzerboy
New member
Is Rachel Maddow lying or misinterpreting information when she presents charts on her program that clearly show the deficit under Obama has actually declined? This is an honest question. (I’m not talking about the debt, but the deficit.)
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TimothyIgnatius
Guest
Perhaps you misread your own sources? There is nothing of regarding the profiteering of the abortion industry in the information provided. It lists funds received from lobbyists representing groups like Planned Parenthood. The money went into the campaign, not in President Obama’s bank account. And I guess you missed the part where it said “But pro-choice groups also support measures to prevent the need for an abortion in the first place”
Pro-choice is not pro-abortion. Voting Republican will do nothing to curb the rates of abortion, in fact there is evidence to the contrary.
patheos.com/blogs/faithfuldemocrats/2012/09/if-you-are-truly-pro-life-youd-vote-democrat/
From that article:
“Even if the GOP Holy Grail was achieved and Roe was overturned, all that would do is kick the decision on whether abortion is legal back to the states. And if you look at states that might outlaw abortion—states where their legislatures have tried to limit abortion in some way or where 50%+ of the population IDs as pro-life—as one might imagine those 18 states account for only a small portion of all abortions performed in this country: only around 10%.
So if Roe was over turned and all 18 of those states completely outlawed abortion and none of the women in those states went across the border to get an abortion, the most we could hope to see is a 10% reduction in abortion. Now compare that to the fact that decades of demographic data show that if we cut the number of women living near poverty in half, we would see a 30% reduction in abortion. If you really care about protecting the unborn, which of those goals should you pursue?”
Link to the demographic data mentioned in the above paragraph:
guttmacher.org/pubs/US-Abortion-Patients.pdf
But the issue at hand here is liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican. So consider Church teachings on gun control. The church supports measures that limit the access of guns to the general public, a very contradictory stance to the Republican platform’s view on the matter.
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Elizabeth502
Guest
First of all, the article you cited is an opinion piece from a blog which features a variety of contributors, some faithful to the teachings of the Holy Roman Catholic Church (the institution on earth designated by our founder, Jesus, to provide singular moral guidance to its members); and others who voice heterodox views and post artifical “either/or” arguments. The contributor in question did precisely that, as pointed out by one of the commenters below the article.
The Church has never stood for Unborn Life versus Born Life (or versus The Poor), but that’s precisely what your fave contributor espouses. The Church supports both as essential, yet has proclaimed through Pop John Paul II that the importance of protecting pre-natal life supersedes, in urgency, policies regarding later life, due partly to the vulnerability of the former and due also to its logical priority (a priori)
The contributor argues from a number of false premises to cherry-pick and cobble together an “argument” fabricated from cloth with all kinds of holes in it.
He cites poverty as a “cause” of abortion. No it isn’t. Statistically speaking, using compiled data from Guttmacher, the single greatest predictor of abortion is fornication. (It is not, by the way, lack of access to contraception.) Poor women who get pregnant by a spouse have abortions far less frequently than poor women who get pregnant by an irresponsible, immature boy (yes, boy). Rich women who have an “unwanted” or unplanned pregnancy by a spouse similarly have far fewer abortions than unmarried rich women whose partner is uncommitted and irresponsible.
Second, the contributor assumes that if “we” could “cut poverty in half,” the number of abortions would decrease by 30%. Again, that is a manipulation of the statistics, which merely show correlation, not causation, and not consistency of correlation. It is matrimony that is the greater anti-abortion factor ever. And it is not poverty which “causes” abortion. We live in a fornicating culture, which celebrates fornication regularly, considers it not only a right but something to be institutionalized via legislated access by the unmarried and even underage to unlimited contraception to aid in the illusion that fornication will never result in pregnancy.
For the record, I will say several things:
(1) I’m not a big fan of rigorous battles against Roe, not because I support Roe, but because I think (a) the battle will be lost & not worth the fight if that’s what the sum total of the pro-life effort is, or even the main focus. (b) it distracts from the actual behavior of people, which is the cause of high abortion statistics. Behavior, not laws. I think cultural licence is far more powerful than legal licence, and unfortunately this country turned the corner on that many decades ago. I recently read an article discussing how the late '60’s and early '70’s marked a genuine cultural revolution in this country unlike any other we have ever experienced & perhaps ever will again. It was a depressing article that confirmed everything I had felt for some time. No one had put it quite so bluntly and deifnitively before.
(2) That said, I absolutely believe in radical changes to abortion availability on many levels. I think those changes (restrictions and other measures) also have a far greater chance of succeeding than “overturning” it. If there’s not something in its place, the country will never go for it in the majority. IOW, it may succeed in the SC but then cause a backlash, which will give Democrats an even greater hold on the White House.
(3) The most permanent and effective changes in behavior are brought about by internal changes in attitude. Nothing demonstrates this better than the public campaign against smoking which has had dramatic results in far shorter a time period than anyone expected. Smoking is seen now as both hazardous and unpopular.
(4) “Liberals” and “conservative” are somewhat misleading and also inflammatory terms. I like neither term, because of the associations they conjure up.
(5) People like the contributor to the patheos article enjoy rationalizing their not-very-well-thought-out decisions to support a party or a platform that they have contorted into the equivalency of the Gospel in a way that I find despicable. Look, if you’re going to support a party that is no-holds-barred against all of the moral doctrines of the Church in the realm of sexuality, the family, reproduction, and birth itself, just tell us (because that’s what your behavior & decisions show) that you actually have little respect for those aforementioned moral doctrines which are in fact absolute and do not change and have not changed. Just tell us that you either have little regard for those doctrines, or that you think the core Life issues of the Church are less important than what you privately deifne as “social justice.” Because that’s in effect exactly what you are doing. Just don’t desecrate the word of God by pretending that giving poor unmarried teenagers more money will get them to fornicate less.
Please. As Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, “Only don’t tell me you’re innocent, because it insults my intelligence and makes me very angry.”
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TimothyIgnatius
Guest
They did not cite poverty as a cause of abortion, they cited it as a reason for it. IE, someone who can’t financially support a child chooses instead to end its life before it begins.
Also you clearly haven’t read all of my posts in my thread because I have renounced both the Democratic and Republican parties for being against Church teachings. My main point is that neither is worthy of a Catholic’s vote, whereas others have made the assertion that voting Republican is the correct choice for Catholic voters (which is what I’m contesting). I also promoted the idea that the real means to curb abortion is education and counseling - or as you put it, a change in internal attitude. You can adequately make the claim that the Democratic party is at odds with the moral teachings of the Church when it comes to sexuality, but I can do the same to the Republican party when it comes to the Churches moral teachings on social justice. I’ve also made the claim (and provided sources as a base for them) that the Republican party is pro-life in name only and not in practice. I have used sources for my “private definition of social justice,” which included the catechism and direct quotes from the Pope. I can see that you probably picked up late in the conversation and misinterpreted my stance.
As the single largest religious denomination in the country (unless you group all protestants together) we have the power to bring another party to prominence, one that would properly reflect Church teachings on both issues of sexuality and of social justice. There are much, much, MUCH smaller minorities that manage to get the laws adjusted the way they want them to be. Why can’t Catholics do the same?
In a nutshell, I’m saying that it isn’t just a choice between Democratic and Republican. There are many other parties to consider. The idea that you’re wasting your vote is inherently asinine; two-party politics is by its nature a dubious thing. Those in power want people to believe that they only have two viable choices, and that’s simply not the case.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli.
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estesbob
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I quote the Magestrium, of the catholic Church, you quote a heterodox independent newspaper that just happens to have “Catholic in their name” Ill let people draw their own conclusion on the validity of our sources.
Let us look again at what Archbishop Chaput says about those who make the specious claim that Obama is somehow pro-life:
To portray the 2008 Democratic Party presidential ticket as the preferred ‘‘prolife’’ option is to subvert what the word ‘‘prolife’’ means. Anyone interested in Senator Obama’s record on abortion and related issues should simply read Prof. Robert P. George’s Public Discourse essay from earlier this week, ‘‘Obama’s Abortion Extremism,’’ and his follow-up article, ‘‘Obama and Infanticide.’’ They say everything that needs to be said.
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LisaA
Guest
First thank you Elizabeth for doing the hard work of bringing facts and Scripture and the Church’s teaching into this argument. Your post was as usual clear and based on facts not opinion pieces.As the single largest religious denomination in the country (unless you group all protestants together) we have the power to bring another party to prominence, one that would properly reflect Church teachings on both issues of sexuality and of social justice. There are much, much, MUCH smaller minorities that manage to get the laws adjusted the way they want them to be. Why can’t Catholics do the same?
In a nutshell, I’m saying that it isn’t just a choice between Democratic and Republican. There are many other parties to consider. The idea that you’re wasting your vote is inherently asinine; two-party politics is by its nature a dubious thing. Those in power want people to believe that they only have two viable choices, and that’s simply not the case.
Leave the gun, take the cannoli.
TI, you are surely a man of strong opinions but I just shake my head at your belief that “Catholics” can either create a new and perfect political party, get Roe reversed (as Elizabeth and others have said this will NOT ban abortion) or that voting for some obscure purist (in your opinion) political candidate that you can actually impact the culture of this country.
Sadly I think that ship sailed LONG ago, back in the 60s (I get the impression you are young and idealistic instead of old and cynical like me). Abortion a feature of people having sex in situations that the Church would have prohibited not by poverty, not by lack of access to contraception, or ignorance of how babies are made. BECAUSE it is easy to obtain, relatively inexpensive or free and because of popular media nearly guilt free, there is a lot of it.
As to “Catholics” being a force for this movement you propose, I have to wonder at the members of your Parish, your Archdiocese or your state, much less your country. The members of my Parish can’t even agree on what kind of music is appropriate for Mass much less some kind of national political movement. Further the number of Catholics who are willing to vote for the most RADICAL PRO ABORTION PRESIDENT IN HISTORY tells me your ideas are not going to get much traction. The sad truth is TI, your fellow Catholics have inflicted Obama on us for another four years and I suspect Catholics also elected Sebelius, Biden, Pelosi and Cuomo another bunch of abortion advocates. We can’t even seem to get Catholics to vote for pro life candidates in LOCAL elections.
Sorry to burst your bubble (although I suspect you think it’s still intact) but I don’t think your theories are based on the real world.
Lisa
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Erich
Guest
The federal government ran up deficits of $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2010, $1.3 trillion in fiscal 2011, and about $1.2 trillion in fiscal 2012 — for a total of nearly $5.2 trillion in deficit spending — so I’d say misinterpreting. Unless and until Social Security is removed from the “unified budget,” we can safely assume the politicos never intend to repay the trust fund.
Remember, too, that this is the same administration which claims that unemployment is “only” 7.9% (U3) — instead of the 14.4% (U6) that it really is.
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estesbob
Guest
Maddow comes up with her number by including the stimulus spending in Obamas first year as actually belonging to Bushs last year
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