Bill Maher on Teabaggers... Priceless

[d.mcc]

It's been awhile since I bothered to read this site, which is sad, because I like about 95% of the people here. Watching Bill Maher on HBO on Friday night, I found this to be refreshing:

Now here’s an amazing statistic. In a recent poll almost ninety percent of Tea Baggers said that they thought taxes had either gone up or stayed the same under Obama. Only two percent thought they went down. But the reality is taxes have gone down for ninety five percent of working families taxes went down.

Think about that. Only two percent of the people in a “movement� about taxes named after a tax revolt have the slightest idea what’s going on…with taxes.

[oladub]

President Obama saved millions of jobs and ended the war too!

Bill Maher might be a good comedian but is not such a good economist. President Obama has quadrupled Bush's worst deficit in his first year in office. Maybe Bill Maher thinks we are stupid enough to not consider that the debt is deferred taxes, much like buying things on credit, and will only consider the down payment as tax.

Many of the items I purchase have also gone up in price in the last year and the sales taxes go up with them not to mention the unofficial inflation tax eating away at the value of our dollars. I realize that the government says there is no inflation but maybe chauffered Wasnington DC politicians don't get out to the grocery store much.

Maybe Maher thinks that tea party activists are so stupid that they won't notice.

[Hermod]

To stimulate the economy, withholding has been cut back. the workers will find out what that means when income taxes come due.

If they eliminated withholding and every single taxpayer had to compute and make quarterly estimated payments for income taxes, the income tax would not survive the next election.

[ghettopalmetto]

To stimulate the economy, withholding has been cut back. the workers will find out what that means when income taxes come due.

Uh, yeah. And if you've looked at the 1040 form for 2009, you'll notice that you get up to a $400 credit if that money hasn't been withheld already = tax cut.

[gnome]

How do you poll a group that isn't a group? Do you call them on their non-listed phones? Gather the various divergent peoples in a corral and make them talk?

Part of the weirdness of the so-called tea party people is they have no center, no leader, no structure ... this was especially apparent during their first non-convention convention. The media in general terms, has had difficulty pigeon-holing this movement because it seeming has sprung from the air. It is amorphous.

So how do you capture a cloud? If Bill Maher's polling organization was able to wrangle a bunch of them in one setting, is by definition a flawed poll. To be valid a poll has to be random, diverse and unstructured. Getting 10 or 100 people in a room and then drawing conclusions makes Mr. Bill's conclusions dubious....because no one knows how many US citizens self-describe themselves as Tea Partiers... 10 thousand? A Hundred thousand, 6 Million?

That said, I wish the TP people would slink back to their respective trailers as I see them nothing more than another version of BAMN or ACORN ... folks who just like to feel important by screaming; and a far as Bill maher goes,... isn't he the male version of Madana's attention-whore complex? He was funny and insightful for a hot minute in 1999. Since then he has been a shanker on the lip of political discourse.

[jiminnm]

Uh, yeah. And if you've looked at the 1040 form for 2009, you'll notice that you get up to a $400 credit if that money hasn't been withheld already = tax cut.

That applies only if you have earned income in 2009 or received a government pension. If you're otherwise retired, with no earned income, you get zip. If you're too young for social security, you didn't get the one time $250 payment either.

[barnesfoto]

Part of the weirdness of the so-called tea party people is they have no center, no leader, no structure

The Tea Party has a few leaders, one of them is Dick Armey, who previously was involved in efforts to privatize social security, and is now helping to lead the fight against government health care while at the same time refusing to give up his government health care.

Others are Eric Odom, Allen Fuller and Judson Philips, the man behind the 549.00 cover charge to the "Tea Party Convention"

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/02/02/...ty-profiteers/

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/...as_cup_of_tea/

[gnome]

BF, I love the Armey crack-sniffing logic. wtf is that guy on?

What you are pointing to are still more pot-stirrers, not leaders. from the my seat, far outside their kookville community, I see no leaders at all. I see a few pot-stirrers, a few who are trying to wrestle to beast into a cohesive movement, but thus far I don't see anything that would be considered an organization. Just factions from fractions.

regardless, how do you conduct a poll of nothing and expect your findings to be taken seriously? Any numbers could have been devised and it sounds like that is what Mr. Maher did by quoting a unreliable poll for the shear sake of painting himself an intellectual jokester.

Maher's act is tired. Predictable. Flaccid.

[Sstashmoo]

I could never stomach Maher, even when I agreed with what he was saying. His snide, uncouth manner is very unappealing. He just seems like a very condescending miserable little man.

[ejames01]

That isn't true. My taxes were less, my refund was more and I also received a tax credit related to a new car that I purchased in December.

To stimulate the economy, withholding has been cut back. the workers will find out what that means when income taxes come due.

If they eliminated withholding and every single taxpayer had to compute and make quarterly estimated payments for income taxes, the income tax would not survive the next election.

[rb336]

I just knew this would bring in the mindless "did not" crap from the right-wing minions and semi-literatti on here. hell, even conservative economists have admitted that we would be in much worse shape now than if Obama's stimulus plan hadn't been enacted [[while at the same time saying it would have been better to offer even more tax cuts to the wealthy, a practice that can not be shown to have ever created much in the way of jobs)

[oladub]

I just knew this would bring in the mindless "did not" crap from the right-wing minions and semi-literatti on here. hell, even conservative economists have admitted that we would be in much worse shape now than if Obama's stimulus plan hadn't been enacted [[while at the same time saying it would have been better to offer even more tax cuts to the wealthy, a practice that can not be shown to have ever created much in the way of jobs)

Most 'conservatives' also go along with Keynesian economists and vote for the same bankers' bailouts. The real argument is between the Keynesian and Austrian economists. The Austiran economists would never have allowed a Fed to create bubbles which burst and/or would have let the crooked Wall Street banks declare bankruptcy instead of rewarding them. Rolling Stone just published a good article about the Keynesian solutions that the Bush and Obama administrations have administered.
Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash

As for Obama's stimulus plan, it is a total disaster. It was supposed to deliver 3.5M new jobs and prevent unemployment from exceeding 8.5%. Instead, the administration is trying to put a happy face on 10% unemployment and an additional 3M lost jobs. It was good though for Korean car manufacturers, overspending municipal governments [["2M saved jobs"), and Chinese wind generation manufacturers.

[jiminnm]

C'mon oladub, don't you know how bad it would have been without the massive debt accumulation necessary to fund the porkulus?

[Papasito]

How much do you want to bet that come election time Obama tries to court the Tea Party folks? He will claim that his stances are solid toward gun rights, protecting freedom, and blah blah blah. "I am the candidate devoted more to thier causes than XYZ" - B.O. 2012
Don't rag on the Tea Party folks too much, guys. They are Americans, too. And they vote.




Re~ Health Care:
It's NOT HEALTH CARE! Hasn't the public realized by now that the plan madates people buy Insurance policies or be faced with fines and potentially prison if they refuse to purchase plans? It's not "Health Care" per say, it's more like FORCED HEALTH INSURANCE.

Re~ Privatizing Social Security:
There will be no Social Security after the baby boomers. If there is a way we can get our money back now while it's potentially available, we should all be leaping at the opportunity! Otherwise, it's money we've given to Uncle Sam that we will never see again in our lifetimes.

[ghettopalmetto]

Re~ Health Care:
It's NOT HEALTH CARE! Hasn't the public realized by now that the plan madates people buy Insurance policies or be faced with fines and potentially prison if they refuse to purchase plans? It's not "Health Care" per say, it's more like FORCED HEALTH INSURANCE.

Are you familiar with the concept of "pooled risk"? Right now, private-sector insurers in California are raising their premiums 39% on average, because "healthy" folks not insured by their employers have ceased purchasing coverage. Thus, the same [[or increased) costs are passed on to fewer and fewer people. It's a death spiral that no Republican has proposed how to solve.

There are areas of the nation, like Florida and other coastal areas, where property insurance providers have stopped writing policies. This often leaves people to purchase from an "insurer of last resort", which is usually a quasi-public plan, sometimes underwritten by a collective of insurance carriers. Why couldn't health care adopt a similar approach? Oh, that's right, because taking care of the poor and sick amounts to "socialism", and Lord knows we can't have any of that shit getting in the way of our money grubbing! By golly, I need that money so's I can buy a new gun rack and stripper silhouette mudflaps for my truck!

It's obvious our health insurance "system" is a disaster. Why we think keeping the status quo is going to fix things is simply a suspension of belief in logic.

[ghettopalmetto]

Re~ Privatizing Social Security:
There will be no Social Security after the baby boomers. If there is a way we can get our money back now while it's potentially available, we should all be leaping at the opportunity! Otherwise, it's money we've given to Uncle Sam that we will never see again in our lifetimes.

Yeah, that's a stellar fix. Let's just all panic and completely undermine the system that we pretend to care so much about. That'll show those old people for depending on socialism!

[gnome]

boy, you guys are like monkeys who get distracted by shinny objects. Wasn't this thread about Bill Maher?

[ejames01]

Bill Maher might be an asshole, but at least he discusses things that others do not.

[gnome]

you're right, no one discusses Taxes or the Tea Party movement. Spot on.

[Jimaz]

The video.

[oladub]

In post #2, just off the top of my head, I came up with three examples of how taxes have been increased or deferred under President Obama. Bill Maher made himself, not the tea party activists, sound like a fool. I liked that he was as snotty and demeaning as he could be toward these people because they know that things they buy are getting more expensive and their deferred tax tab is growing exponentially. They know about his proposed middle class cap and traden tax. Bill's snottiness will only fire them up for the next election. Then Bill's so cool crowd laughed at the concerns of working people. Nice touch.

I was thinking that in some parts of the country, so-called Reagan Democrats are probably attracted to the tea parties. These are swing voters. Bill is saying that Democrats won't miss them and don't want their association anyway.

Reagan Democrat is an American political term used by political analysts to denote traditionally Democratic voters, especially white working-class Northerners, who defected from their party to support RepublicanPresidentRonald Reagan in both the 1980 and 1984 elections. It is also used to refer to the smaller but still substantial number of Democrats who voted for George H. W. Bush in the 1988 election. The term can also be used to describe moderate Democrats who are more conservative than liberal on certain issues like national security and immigration.
The work of Democratic pollsterStan Greenberg is a classic study of Reagan Democrats. Greenberg analyzed white ethnic voters [[largely unionized auto workers) in Macomb County, Michigan, just north of Detroit. The county voted 63 percent for John F. Kennedy in 1960, but 66 percent for Reagan in 1980. He concluded that "Reagan Democrats" no longer saw Democrats as champions of their working class aspirations, but instead saw them as working primarily for the benefit of others: the very poor, the unemployed, African Americans, and other groups. In addition, Reagan Democrats enjoyed gains during the period of economic prosperity that coincided with the Reagan administration following the "malaise" of the Carter administration. They also supported Reagan's strong stance on national security and opposed the 1980s Democratic Party on such issues as pornography, crime, and taxes. -wikipedia

[ejames01]

Stop being a smartass. I wasn't talking about Taxes or the Tea Party movement.

you're right, no one discusses Taxes or the Tea Party movement. Spot on.

[gnome]

Stop being a smartass. I wasn't talking about Taxes or the Tea Party movement.

jeeze pal, you set yourself up for being made fun of and you want to blame me? Look in the mirror for someone to scream at.

On the subject of Bill Maher discussing subjects not covered in the mainstream press; I'm not aware of any. I am most familar with his mild tuorette's thing going on where he can't self-edit. In the olden days he'd be called a bubblegum machine head ... an idea just drops down from his brain to his tongue and it just rolls out.

Bill Maher is a worthless bore. Not too different from Bill O'Reiley. Wonder if it's an Irish thing, or a loopha thing, or a Bill thing.

[d.mcc]

Here is where Billy boy got his info apparently:

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/02...y6201911.shtml

[ghettopalmetto]

I liked that he was as snotty and demeaning as he could be toward these people because they know that things they buy are getting more expensive and their deferred tax tab is growing exponentially.

You'll be hearing from my intellectual property attorney, for stealing my thoughts from 2001.

2001- $300 tax "rebate" checks in effort to eliminate budget surplus: HOORAY!

2009- cut taxes in effort to pump liquidity into economy: DEFICITS BAD!