OT - Federal Spending has increased 45% since 2001

He graduated from his university MCL with a 4.0 after completing 25 years as a pilot in the USAF flying C5s, so I doubt that. ;)

mike hunt

Really? How are the feds are going to hire more border guards, set up surveillance equipment and built a wall without spending more money? Even if they the hire illegal Mexican workers it will cost a billion LOL

mike hunt

A change to the immigration laws may have spending implications but it is not a spending bill.

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Another classic mike hunt! I know whenever I ponder Federal spending, I go looking for ex C5 jockeys to bounce ideas off.

In a few words, tell us what the respective positions of the democrats and republicans pertaining to immigration and how to control it. I see hillary has mentioned something about a smart fence?? What is a "smart fence"?? She also is for bringing more jobs to Mexico, I presume she means American jobs, I wonder how well this will go over with the unions?

If we're working smarter, not necessarily harder, we can grow the economies of BOTH Mexico and the US.

Your very own President is on record as saying offshoring is a good thing. The trick is, we've got to be investing in leading edge manufacturing, tecnology and basic research, so that we have new industries to absorb the people displaced by offshoring.

The Administration certaainly isn't taking the lead on that.

And don't be dimissive of basic research and technology push as a jobs engine. I recently found a long list of spinoffs from the space program. Not only did we get to the moon, we created new industries and turbo-charged old ones. Look at what the Internet has done. There's more IT jobs than ever before. The thing people remember about the Internet's impact on the economy is the "dot-com" bubble. That was an unpleasant effect of the business types on Wall Street overheating.

When the dust settled, there were still a LOT more people employed in IT jobs than ever before.

I think if you will review Senator Clinton's position more carefully, you will find that she in favor of growing the Mexican economy, which, by the way, would then be purchasing more goods from us.

"I know how hard it is to put food on your family."

- Dubya

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Perhaps, but the school in which he attained his degree, and graduated MCL with a 4.0, was Economics ;)

mike hunt

I'm sure most people would agree that a guy like you, commenting in a NG, would know more than a guy with a degree in Economics. LOL

I was listening to Bloomberg radio on sattelite the other day and they had Hillary Clinton followed by some conservative economic professor who used to work for Bush White House. I don't agree with everything Clinton said but it was refreshing to hear someone talk in complete sentences for a change unlike Bush, Cheney and the departing White House spokesman. Then I listened to the professor and he was talking about what a great job they had done on the deficit reduction and tax relief. It sounded like bizarro world. He thought we needed more outsourcing of jobs overseas. He thought our greatest economic policy need right now was tort reform. A complete idiot in my opinion. Why don't we just let the big oil companies write the laws and let Bush sign them.

Not a bad idea, seeing as the oil companies have been doing very well. The value of my XOM and CVX stocks are very high. Only TM is doing as well as those two.

Fun to see Mike zing em, LOL. Ouch, bet that one hurt old fanjet.

Zinging most of these guys are like shooting fish in a barrel ;)

mike hunt

According our friend Little Richard, AKA Dick, that the way it is done. ;)

mike hunt

True on space exploration. Looks like that is what GWB has in mind too. He wants the U.S. to return to the moon and then go to Mars. So without making any personal attacks on Bush, wouldn't you be in favor of that and isn't GWB on the right track for the future?

The IT jobs are not jobs that employs masses of people. The internet created jobs yes, but as fast as they were created they went away. Look at google now with share price around $400, do you think they make a product that is worth $400 a share? In fact do they actually manufacture anything at all?

I don't think anyone would not agree with her on that. However she wants more jobs given to Mexico in order for the Mexican people to stay in Mexico. Those jobs will be jobs that we would have here in the U.S. Jobs such as assembly line work, small parts ect. That seems to be contradictory to what the unions want. Democrats have always been in the union pocket so it seems like a strange arrangement. We'll see if the unions buck her on that or if they are just as corrupt as I think they are, selling out their members for political gains.

You are entitled to your own opinion, but at least that is one academic understands, what most rational people have know for years. The lawyers in the Senate have been preventing federal tort reform. Litigation is the primary driver of increased cost of medical care and new drug development and prices, by billions every year. Litigation is killing many business, big and small, in this country. Thank goodness many state governments, like California, have the sense to enact tort reform that is starting to reverse the trend. Without nation tort reform the sharks can still surf for courts in states that have not yet enacted tort reform. A good example is NY where one of the sharks is suing Mickey D for a guy being fat. ;)

mike hunt

I

I'd like to go into space. Some would like to send me there. :-)

I think the proposal, however, is premature. We were able to have an effective, if limited, Moon race with technology that we could envision in

1961 that culminated in an a mission of about 8 days' duration. The mission to Mars is a two-year mission that's going to take an enormous amount of launch resource. We're still using basically the same 1961 technology for the lift vehicles that we did for the Moon race but we're going an extra couple of hundred million miles. I think we need a new power source for the mission, some new concepts for the life support systems and I'm willing to wait for additional advances before we start to commit men to the mission.

Have you read, "A Brief History of Everything" by Bill Bryson? I did and I noticed something; lots of discoveries and technological advances were serendipitous. Many discoveries occured when people were working on something else, people were working outside their field, developments in field A influenced Field B. The "Connections" column that used to appear in Scientific American often touched on this sort of thing.

I'd like to see the President take more of a shotgun approach to R&D; lots of smaller grants of ambitious projects, many of which will certainly fail. But some will succeed and lay the foundation for some very interesting future industries.

Right now, a good deal of the money in solar photovoltaic research is going into incremental improvements in creating silicon solar cells. That's useful investment and research but it's hardly going to be earth-shaking.

Suppose, for example, research into a couple of different things like conductivity and material reflectance opened up an understanding of materials that jump-started the development of a solar photo-voltaic cell that had nothing to do with silicon, was 50% efficient and relatively easy to make. What effect would that have on our economy? We'd become the 21st Century OPEC! Or we may just waste some money. But just about every R&D dollar pushes out the frontiers of knowledge just a little bit and, if we get nothing else useful from the a given research project, we end up with someone who knows something new and a little bit more about doing research.

Well, in the broad sense, they manufacture value. However, it does tend to make me queasy to consider the concept of "value of goods" in a service economy. It works but, in a certain sense, it's like running on air.

Of course, the IT jobs from the dot-com explosion, while limited, are like the jobs that the auto industry provides, they're high wage jobs that feed lots of people. That money starts to flow around the economy, supporting people who aren't IT workers (I have an IT job and now I can buy a house, so carpenters get busy... etc.).

Well, see, this is where we declare Senator Clinton to be a "visionary." :-)

Certainly, it can be argued that unions have sometimes worked against their own best long-term interests. However, the unions are eternally engaged in short-term struggles with industries that seek absolutely to minimize their compensation. And you must remember that unions emerged in a time of rampant wage-fixing.

Given a choice between workers having zero power (as before unions) and the current arrangement, imperfect as it may be...

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Tell me Mike. How many lawyers are in the senate?

Litigation is the

No... it is advertising. They spend more money on advertising and promotion than research.

Litigation is killing many business,

Name a few. Even tobacco is still alive. Too bad.

Thank goodness many state governments, like

And it was immediately dismissed. So what is your point.

What's wrong with tobacco that isn't wrong with eating fast food, drinking soft drinks, driving too fast, jumping off bridges with tether lines, drinking alcohol, gambling, riding motocycle, flying a private airplane just for personal pleasure, skiing, snowboarding, jet skis, ect. I could go on. All of these risky pleasurable personal activities affect other people too so don't use that excuse. We choose to be liberal for only special things that we personally endorse, right?

Mike is correct, there are too many frivolous lawsuits. We need somehow to distinguish between legitimate lawsuits and foolish lawsuits that people bring on just to make a fast buck, but again politics get in the way of meaningful legislation.

I tried but found nothing on how many senators are lawyers, but there is a good percent of them are. Anybody else have better? I'm interested to know.

Where's 'Economics'?