Obama's Financial Cliff---Who Will He Blame Now?

http://www.campfema.com/

Welcome to the Obama Administration!

Land of the free and home of the brave---and enslaved:)

Mrs. Lauric, for one who claims to enjoy free speech as long as it is factual, your statement above is skewed. Your amount that each average citizen will possibly pay is correct however, there will be a lot of debating about what to keep in the tax policies and what to let go of. The title of your blog appears to be a direct attack on Obama and not on others that had just as much blame as what you are trying to direct to Obama. The republicans attempted an outright challenge to the first term of Obama's presidency from the start. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's infamous 2010 quote, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." The American people have voted and the president is listening but government is not ran by one person, it is a collection of individuals. The problem most Americans jump to is that if it is wrong or if it is bad, then it is the President's fault. John Boehner has come out and said that he would be willing to work with the president now that he has won reelection. Where was his leadership in the first place? Why is it just the President's fault and no one else's? Today, Boehner speaks to reporters before the President does and says he wants to extend to Bush era tax cuts for one more year then tackle the problem. Why can't he just come out and make a plan to work together so that it becomes a solution instead of a deferred problem again? These senators make an extremely large salary compared to most individuals and they do little to justify why they need it. The last "fiscal cliff" was averted because the compromise was to keep the Bush era tax cuts to appease the republicans. Now the President wants to end those tax cuts and increase the amount of taxes paid by the wealthy. The 14% paid by most individuals is not the same as the 14% paid by the wealthy. Granted their 14% is higher but is not comparable when looking at it from a fair perspective.

I truly hope that all parties can work together for an equitable solution and stop the blame game. I do not think it was, or is, a matter of who Obama is going to blame rather, I think it is who is going to step up to the plate to find a solution rather than blame. That comes from both sides.

I agree with your last line Twil. But there are ways to cut spending without anyone losing a job. It is just that everyone wants to keep holding on to the security blanket until there is only a thread or two in each of our hands.

Maybe we should have a savings bond drive for the National Debt. Like they did in WWII. The only thing is that we would not let the elected officials get their dirty little mits on the money, but pay each bill off as the money comes in.

Hold each official accountable for their personal budgets. Even asking them to take an across the board paycut. We have had to ourselves.

Absolutely nothing extra on the taxpayer dime, which would include entertainment, seminars or other such foolishness.

And if someone who is falling under the "Dream" act wants to stay in this country. they will need to pay a tax that should cover what expenses that they have incurred during their stay. This would include medical and education expenses.

Tons of e-mails and letters & phone calls to our elected officials offices each and every day, until they get the message that we aren't going to take it any more.

If every department and the agencies under them were forced to trim their budgets, there would be job losses. One reason is that employees do not take paycuts.

I worked at the Eddy's bread factory in Boise and that was the final straw. Management told the union/employees that either we take a paycut or our jobs evaporate. Pride won out and the employees refused to take the paycut from $15 to $12.50. I am leaving a lot of details out but the story will be the same. Asking federal employees with their sense of entitlement to take a paycut or lose their precious benefits would be sacriligious and they would rather quit. Hence, job loss. So whether you lay them off or ask them to take a pay cut the result is the same.

I wonder what would happen if we marched to Washington like all the other protesters and occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Ave until the budget was balanced.

Or maybe shower the entire area with our suggestions for the debt reduction. Thats a lot of toilet paper!

Lets take a breath and then start holding everyone's feet to the fire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWrCRPldV...

TWILL........you know your going to get hammederd ,but you can handle it........smile........later

Back to the topic,

Regardless of whether this fiscal cliff happens or not, we should care more about the fact that we are up against it. We have had years and years to prevent. Politicians from both sides of the aisle have contributed to the mess. There have been many poor choices made and now the rain check has to be cashed. It goes beyond Bush and Obama. The hundreds of Senators and Congressmen who traded personal gain/celebrity for the long term health of the nation are to blame even more so.

I agree twilcox. It's a culture of fault and blame rather than lessons learned and issues solved.

BS61,

I understand it quite well. I am simply trying to keep my posts short and succinct. If I broke it all down, you and everybody else would stop reading by the second sentence and would be sawing logs before too long.

Twinkies to lay off 18000. This is getting serious.

It will be interesting to follow the Hostess bankruptcy story.

I wonder if any of the employees' retirement funds will remain in the fund when it's all over.

Food for thought: http://mobile2.wsj.com/device/article.ph...

Most Liberal economic ideals and policies are well intentioned. They sound so good on the surface. However, intentions do not equal results. This latest dilemma is just the amalgamation of that reality.

I worked for Interstate Brands Corporation in Boise from 2000 to 2003. Interstate Brands owned Hostess at that time. At that time, long before Obama, there were signs of trouble. Trouble that politicians could not take no blame nor credit for. Lower demand and unions jacking up the prices of labor. Another factor was the union's disdain for technology. No one will ever admit to that one but I saw it first hand. They had the chance to save labor and back trouble on a few machines and the union threw a fit saying it would cost them jobs.

JYD, glad to see there is no difference, in your eyes, between a veteran who earned his/her pay and a welfare queen with five different baby daddy's.

Hypocrisy. How are you able to use that word without giggling?

I see the Union boss is saying Romney is the reason Hostess failed. Glad I have 40 boxes of twinkies in the storage room. See some are selling for 100 dollars on ebay.

Junkyard Dog, you're right, a lot of people receive some kind of benefit from the government. Like KT said, it is troubling that you don't see a difference between veteran's benefits and welfare, but that's your problem. When people have a lot of their income forcibly taken away from them through taxes, I guess they think they should get some of it back through all the myriad of government assistance programs out there. So if these programs are available and taxpayers can qualify for them, why not? I think the difference is that Republicans and conservatives wanted to cut or drastically reduce these welfare programs so they would NOT be available.

BS61,

You really need to relax. You are so bent on being confrontational that you can not see the forest for the trees. If you have not picked up on it yet, I dislike unions more so than anyone on here. How is what you said about Hostess any different than what I said? I have told the story about the union being the reason that the Boise location shut down many times? Your lack of memory and recall is not my problem.

Demand for Hostess products started slipping in the late 90's. The Eddy's bread factory on Five Mile in Boise served as a distribution point for the cakes and pies made by Hostess. Slackening demand showed itself in many ways. First, raw numbers. Two, fewer retail outlets. The lower demand is mostly owed to public perception. Most of the cakes and pies made by them are some of the most unhealthy food products on the market. There is more saturated fat in a Hostess fruit pie than in six pieces of bacon. Americans are slowly moving away from items like this. Unions simply pushed them out the door faster than expected.

My point is you are lumping everyone who gets money from the government into one pot. There are those who deserve it, and those who don't.

" Every one of you who receives a single dime from the U.S. Government...please shut up. Hypocrisy is boring."

-- Posted by junkyard dog on Fri, Nov 16, 2012, at 5:42 PM

Quick Story about Hostess,

It was February 2003. The union and corporate were having a meeting concerning the future of the bread factory and distribution center. It had been known for a decade that this plant was not profitable. It was being buoyed by other production plants. The reasons for its lack of profitability were inflated wages (thanks to the union) and the falling demand for sickeningly sweet items like Twinkies.

Anyways, corporate told them that either the employees took a pay cut from $15.16 per hour to something in the high 12.00 range or everybody would be laid off effective May 31. The union balked. They were outraged. What an insult.

Two weeks later, the union took a vote to not take the pay cut and on May 31 the doors closed never to open again.

The union was hypocrisy defined. However, all the cliches and stereotypes did not apply. The union was made up of young and old, Conservative and Liberal, male and female, urban and rural. The indoctrination was complete. They had everybody believing that if they were not unionized that they would be making minimum wage before too long and that their benefits would go up in thin air. The inflated wages were the reason that our work was so hard. They could not afford to invest in better equipment. This made for some tasks being very labor-intensive and inefficient. This led to the long timers having back and knee problems. The union created all this. So much for the workers utopia that being in a union is supposed to create.

Dave,

Interesting stuff.

In my situation, the union leaders would put on a front. When around us, they talked a big game. They were not going to bow to the evil Corporation. They were not going to allow us workers to be mistreated. However, in reality the two ended up being in bed with one another. The two really worked in kahoots on most issues. The union was the reason for the long hours, inconsistent schedule, and labor-intensive setting.

Starting in the mid-90's, they started closing plants. The first two were in Minot, North Dakota and in the St. Louis, Missouri area. The primary reason behind those two was high labor costs. If demand had stayed at it's 1980's level, those union-induced wages would have been tolerable. However, unions are not ones to be reasonable and let wages fall even if demand has been slipping for a long time. Boise followed in 2003 and Billings, MT followed soon thereafter. The reasons were much the same.

The corporation ended up sending the production to non-Union locations like Henderson, Nevada and Ogden, UT. However, a large portion of the production still came out of union-heavy Midwestern America. The net result from this is that Unions pushed those plant closures and hastened the death of Hostess.

Make no mistake, its days were numbered starting in the 1990's when the public campaign against saturated fats began. Some of the products made by Hostess are some of the worst foods on the market for a person. They are ever so fattening. Their unwillingness to move towards a more healthy form of it was their undoing. The market has been moving away from fat-heavy, pre-packaged items like this for awhile.