Are we off the cliff yet ...... or are we still hanging on?

I've had to cut short my holiday just to get online and make a comment about a topic that politicians have had a year to sort out but left it to the last minute, it reminds me of my A-Level revision......

Since this is a Diplomacy page, I would retort by saying that you can seldom say with any certainty whether a negotiatior is a stupid hack or a cunning trickster. Especially when you observe the negotiation from the outside and get only information that has to keep his pokerface intact, lest his strategy would be screwed. I'm sure you also saw examples where politicians said they would never agree to a deal only to make that deal the day after. Of course the problem of a fiscal cliff uncertainty is that screws over the nation. But hey, sometimes a cunning trickster is even worse than a stupid hack if his wishes differ from yours. That is amplified in politics, where your wishes differ from your neighbour's wishes. If Dems and Reps think their voters would perceive a compromise as a win, the win-win deal will be there today. If any party leaderships don't think so, then not.

Are we off the cliff yet? We're $16 TRILLION + in f*ing debt! We wen't over the f*ing cliff YEARS ago, but the American public is too dim-witted to comprehend that!!! Good god...

http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

:-)

I'm astounded (not really...) that all of the sudden the idea of raising taxes (a Democrat *constant*...they *always* want to raise taxes...they say it'll be "on the rich"...it always ends up being *everyone*...) is the "over the cliff" idea that has gotten the media's undies in a bunch. Is it because this tax hike will impact *their* salaries so directly? Or did the White House instruct them to start using this rhetoric to help demonize their political opponents and push through their agenda?

And please...*every* single media outlet is using this asinine term "fiscal cliff" as if you would find it in the dictionary. Uh...it's a god damned tax hike, no different than any other tax hike in history. There is no "cliff"...there is nothing special about this tax hike compared to any other.

And the impact of this tax hike on the debt? NIL. NADDA. NOTHING. They could raise *everyone's* taxes by 50% and the debt would still grow...so cut, don't cut, stay the same...big f*ing deal...we fell off the cliff YEARS ago!

You can't stare at that debt clock too long, it's so depressing

I'll gouge my eyes out if I look more than once per day.

Hmmm....maybe we should gouge the politician's eyes out...

BREAKING NEWS: Senate Upset That They Must Work Weekend To Solve Fiscal Cliff

Obama to make an announcement at 18.30 GMT, it's all been sorted out, unless he's filed for Chapter 11 and called in the Receivers .....

Anyway..."not doing what they're supposed to be experts at"???

Sadly, there isn't a single politician that I can think of that is an expert at governing. They are experts at political rhetoric. They are experts at fund raising. They are experts at lying with a straight face. Obama is a *supreme* and masterful politician - his community organizing background served him extremely well at turning out the vote...sadly, he knows next to nothing about the economy or foreign diplomacy or much of anything, which is why (I assume) he spends so much time campaigning and vacationing as opposed to, you know, actually working with Congress to solve our nation's problems.

Bheonher...I don't what the fuck that pussy knows, other than how to bluster and (eventually...wait for it...) cave. Oh...wait...he's quite an expert at public crying, I believe.

Harry Reid hasn't passed a budget in over 4 years.

95% Politicians are morons that you wouldn't let near your household budget, let alone your daughters or sons. So...actually, they are probably doing the best job they are capable of doing at this point, because the dim-witted American public keeps sending the same jackasses back to office!!!

It's the AMERICAN PEOPLE that are at fault...

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and that they deserve to get it, good and hard." --H.L. Mencken

Truer statement than you know, I suspect. The American people of the modern age want hand-outs...and with 50%+ on the government dole in some form or another, the "wealth generating" classes of this country are no longer able to support the excessive waste of government and greed of the under-performing members of society who rely on wealth re-distribution instead of their own labor to support themselves.

krellin apparently thinks that one of the most free, efficient and liquid markets in the world, the US bond market, is full of retards that believe the US government will not go under since the bond yields are at amazingly levels, signalling great confidence in the solvency of the USA.

krellin, don't be one of those you so utterly despise, don't be a hypocrite and put your money where your mouth is. Don't just sit and enjoy the luxury of not having to pay your country's debt, go and actively fight this practice by making the debt service more costly and therefore less sustainable. Invest all your savings into shorting US bonds and earn obscene amounts of money once their prices plummet as the yields rise when all those investors that earn their living from security trading realize you were a prophet all along.

ulytau -- If you would like to restate that without double negatives and nonsense, in straight forward language, I may grace you with a reply. But you seem to be accusing me of doing something...but I don't care to read it a second time to figure out what it is....

Regardless...what your diatribe has to do with US *POLITICIANS* is beyond me.

If you want to talk about the US market being a safe haven for cash over, say, Europe or communist China, let's talk. That would be the US market that is on the verge of being downgraded (again), versus the worse-off Europe and, again, Communist China...

Perhaps the US market is just the least bad choice...

But you go ahead and stick your head in the sand. Yeah...the economy is jut peachy! Everything is fine...no problem here. Nothing to see...move along...move along...