Via valued commenter Litlebritdifrnt, word of a study that shows who the REAL welfare queens are; summarized as follows at Gawker:
The ongoing movement to raise the wages of fast food workers got a boost today from two new reports that attempt to quantify just how much those low wages cost society as a whole. It’s a lot.
The first report, out of UC-Berkeley’s Labor Center, attempts to calculate the total amount of public benefits that taxpayers provide to low-wage fast food workers, who are not paid enough to cover their basic needs. The findings:
More than half (52 percent) of the families of front-line fast-food workers are enrolled in one or more public programs, compared to 25 percent of the workforce as a whole.
The cost of public assistance to families of workers in the fast-food industry is nearly $7 billion per year.
Even those lucky enough to get full time hours are not immune: “The families of more than half of the fast-food workers employed 40 or more hours per week are enrolled in public assistance programs.”
Shorter, more profane study: The greedy fucks who are reaping enormous profits by selling us diabetes-causing crap are too fucking stingy to pay their employees a living wage, so the rest of us have to pay the freight on the back end instead of shelling out a nickel more on a Happy Meal.
I say it’s time for those shiftless, Cadillac-driving, t-bone-steak-eating bucks in the board rooms to get their goddamn feedstraws outta our wallets.
MomSense
So much win in this post!!
Litlebritdifrnt
Thanks Betty! This needs to go viral, so that everyone knows who the real culprits are.
StringOnAStick
Tie this together with the recent estimates of how much each WalMart takes out of our wallets for the exact same reasons, and the true moochers are quite obviously revealed.
Trollhattan
“T-bones”?!? It’s porterhouse or nothing. Good day to you madam, good DAY!.
Twenty quatloos for “feedstraws.”
pseudonymous in nc
Funny how Micky Doodahs didn’t include lines for that on its comic-sans budget planner, alongside “second job” and “magic car that doesn’t need fuel”.
Punchy
I think fast foodies should pay their workers in freshly minted platinum coins.
David in NY
Listen, the news here ought not to be that 50% of fast-food workers need government assistance to get along — it should be that 25% of the entire workforce does. I guess that, if you’re making 25-30,000 a year or less, that only figures, and that’s where 25% of the workforce is stuck.
Wag
But, but, but…. Class warfare! Board members can’t be moochers! They’re the Gily Job Creators! Let them lead us to the Holy Gulch where honey flows like water for those who work and to hell with the moochers underclass.
Or something along those lines.
Debbie(aussie)
Too f*cking right!
Daughter, back in 2003 at the age of 16, working at maccas, was receiving $13 an hour. So they can pay decent(relative, I know) if needed.
Ash Can
And speaking of corporate welfare queens, it looks like Megan McArdle took a gander at her stock portfolio this afternoon too.
ETA: H/t once again to the commenters at LGF
Belafon
All we have to do is end snap and medicaid, and they’ll be out of your wallet.
// Wingnut
The proper phrasing is that we want all employees to make enough that they don’t need help.
Trollhattan
@David in NY: To every Republican I know: “welfare” (i.e., every gummint service, subsidy or cash support to anybody worth less than them) is the only reason we don’t have full, gainful employment in This Great Nation. The concept of the “working poor” either is a bad fairy tale or further evidence that folks who have shitty jobs simply lack the moxy to go get batter ones.
Villago Delenda Est
Adam Smith figured all this out over two centuries ago.
Time to deal with the parasite filth of the 1%.
schrodinger's cat
Profits before people!
chopper
$7.25 an hour. jesus, that’s 15k/yr working full time.
srv
I will has a sad whenever I has my Happy Meal.
celticdragonchick
@Trollhattan:
Failure or disobedience will not be tolerated.
It also bears noting that the head thrall working for the Gamesters of Triskelion is named “Galt”.
Villago Delenda Est
From Noisemax, Ann Coulter blasts “Liberal Republicans”:
Wow, that is some serious fucking shit Coulter smokes.
Trollhattan
O/T Now that the Aussies have elected their edition of George W Bush (only with hawter daughters) the ruination has begun.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-16/businesses-may-have-to-keep-paying-carbon-tax-if-repeal-fails/5025094
srv
This just proves that glibertarians are correct about this all being about regulatory capture. If government wasn’t there, all these businesses would be paying a living wage.
Think about it.
Kay
@David in NY:
What’s amazing is that there’s an entire business model that will not work without government assistance. The prices in fast food restaurants and Wal Mart? They are based off a federal food subsidy for their workers. Literally. Their workers would be going to work hungry. The companies themselves say this! This is their defense. They say they cannot raise wages and make money.
Botsplainer
@Wag:
Clearly, the expertise of those who manage an organization that sites, builds, equips and operates cheap roadside diners should be compensable at 7 and 8 figure levels, lest they get away.
Villago Delenda Est
@srv:
And srv here is smoking some of that shit that Coulter smokes…
Ben Franklin
OT; Anyone heard of concierge medicine, the fallback for the 1% as a leech-line for bleeding off the best and brightest medical professionals?
It’s why the NHS is failing, in part.
Yatsuno
@Villago Delenda Est: Nah. It’s just a tired schtick.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
They can’t be failed, they can only be failed.
And so the GOP continues its descent into CPSU-style absurdity, continuing to blame all of their failings on counterrevolutionary traitors and saboteurs that even after the last several dozen purges still somehow manage to be the unseen hand controlling the party and thwarting their wishes.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Public Dole is not amused.
piratedan
@Villago Delenda Est: I just went ahead and pied him a few weeks back, this site is ever so much more fun to read with Cleek’s assistance and the exile of “he who has no brain”
Debbie(aussie)
@Trollhattan: yep! And if they get their way my daughters wages from way back will look pretty good.(no penty rates, leave loading etc)
ETA: he might have trouble getting it through the senate, fingers crossed.
PopeRatzo
I’m still dealing with goosebumps from thinking about the House Republicans starting their meeting this morning by singing “Amazing Grace”.
We are in more fucking trouble than anyone cares to think about. What’s next? Are they gonna start stripping naked and covering themselves in ashes? Maybe they’ll just chew up coca leaves and dance around a fire for three straight days. They’re already making videos like the muslim suicide bombers. How the fuck can we not be defeating every one of these sick bastards in every election?
I hate this shit. Really, I hate this shit.
Mr. Longform
Look, (as Cokie Roberts says) if you pay these people decent money, they’re going to be able to crawl out of the holes created just for them in order to service our needs. Next will come good schools for their kids, adequate health care, decent housing — the hell never ends. It’s important to nip this in the bud — keep the money safely in the hands which already hold it, otherwise poor people will touch it. Gross.
Betty Cracker
@chopper: I made $16K per year at my first job (as a college graduate!), and I did just fine. Oh wait, that was 1989. Never mind!
Shakezula
And if the parasites’ lapdogs in Congress have their way a lot of employed people will be hungry (or hungrier). Bring on the Libertarians to tell us the job takers must tighten their belts so the job makers can continue to loosen theirs.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
So tired of Mall Street picking my pocket.
Spaghetti Lee
@Ash Can:
I’ve seen similarly-themed OK-guys-joke’s-over stuff from Peggy Noonan and Tom Friedman. If we do default, at least there’s the silver lining that those sorts of people will have to face their own irrelevance.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@PopeRatzo: You will know it’s serious when they start singing Nearer My God To Thee.
Spaghetti Lee
@PopeRatzo:
I like Amazing Grace. I’d hate to associate it with these guys.
The first thing that came to my mind was Greg Stillson yelling “Praise the Lord!” as he started WWIII. Stephen King probably thought he was writing fiction. Ha ha.
Botsplainer
@PopeRatzo:
Fitch has done their prenotice of pending downgrade.
Chris
@Kay:
They’re lying.
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
Doesn’t Big DriveThru already give these shiftless fast food workers 50% off their meals?
Trollhattan
@celticdragonchick:
Shahna
eyes so big and hair so blue
you have me in your thrall
yes you do.
Now let’s fight
Ronald D. Moore confessed to being smitten by her character, and I suspect she’s one reason we got Number 6.
Trollhattan
@Spaghetti Lee:
This would have been the better choice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woLQI8X2R6Y
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Kay: When ya got all those hungry shareholder mouths to feed, money can get a little tight.
Jebediah, RBG
When someone says “Who the hell needs more money than your whole family could spend in ten lifetimes” someone else invariably points out that for the uber-rich it’s just a competition. I was just amusing myself by imagining the society we would have if the very successful competed with one another by how well they treat their employees. “MY lowest-paid employees are able to purchase a brand-new motorcar every other year. And yours…?” It would be a mortal embarrassment if one’s employees required public assistance.
OK, time to return to the real world. Shit.
Frankensteinbeck
Hard to say how much this information will affect the mushy middle, but conservatives will see it as proof that the government pays too much to the kind of lazy and inferior people who can’t get better than a job in fast food. To them, someone with a full time menial job is inferior and deserves contempt, not help.
This offends me. I’ve had a wide variety of jobs, and my minimum wage blue collar jobs were much harder and required much more discipline and strength of character than my comfortable-paying white collar intellectual jobs. But you know, whatever you do, you deserve respect and security for doing it.
VidaLoca
@Kay:
What’s even more amazing than that is that it’s not just the private sector (fast-food and retail) that does this. Here in Milwaukee the County Government (via contracting out to low-wage goods and service providers) keeps workers in these types of near-minumum-wage hellhole jobs as well.
Patrick
@srv:
Please give us examples of businesses in Somalia that are paying a living wage. And as you know, Somalia is an utopia for people like you with no regulations.
Ash Can
Dave Weigel is tweeting that the new, improved House proposal contains the ban on the Treasury being able to take “extraordinary measures.”
The only thing that the House GOP is serious about is forcing a default and using it as an excuse, at long last, to impeach Obama.
dmbeaster
@srv:
Not sure what was actually intended by this remark, but think about it. The regulation you speak of is the minimum wage, which is currently not satisfactory to provide a living wage. If allegedly businesses would be paying a living wage if there was no “regulatory capture,” then it would already be happening. The minimum wage does not serve to enable businesses to pay so little, as they would pay even less if they could get away with it.
Think about it.
piratedan
OT: but important
within the GOP Bill for the CR passage is this nugget:
http://docs.house.gov/billsthisweek/20131014/BILLS-113hjres59-HAmdt2a.pdf
in short, you get a temporary CR, but for any future shutdowns, the Treasury is prevented from taking extraordinary measure to compensate for our future intransigence.
Betty Cracker
@Villago Delenda Est: I’m pretty sure he/she was kidding?
Chris
@Frankensteinbeck:
Also, since the only reason the company can’t pay fair wages is because of the burdensome levels of taxation, it’s all the government’s fault anyway.
If only the government didn’t interfere, a natural Equilibrium would be reached between supply and demand, and we could all have living wages. But government interference has unbalanced the Invisible Hand and angered the Laws of the Market-God, and that’s what causes [low wages, higher cost of living, etc]. We must all repent of our sinful ways and return all power to the Market-God, who will take care of us. (And if he doesn’t, it’s just because we don’t deserve it, we’re not working hard enough. Also there’ll still be socialists to blame, somehow, even in that world).
Ben Franklin
@srv:
Left libertarians are not anti-gubmint, they see social justice as on a par with civil liberties.
BGinCHI
I would like to take this post out for a nice steak dinner.
Spot the fuck on, Betty.
Interrobang
@Jebediah, RBG: I like your world better. Is it taking immigration applications? Can I get a red card*?
_______
* Obviously the flipside version of a green card, natch.
Hungry Joe
@Chris: Exactly, but exactly: They’re lying. Minimum wage should be around $14, give or take. Would McDonald’s buy up a dozen forests to supply the plywood it’d take to shutter their seventy million stores? (No.) Or would they pay their employees $14 and raise their prices? (Yes.) And would people stop going to McDonald’s? (Unfortunately, no.)
Midwest_Product
If fast food wages increase to $15 per hour, isn’t the end result going to be that most current fast-food employees lose their jobs? I don’t mean because the wages would cut into profitability – the take at an average McDonald’s is something like $1.5 or $2 million per year – I only mean because right now there are a LOT of college-educated people (and, bluntly speaking, white people) who are currently either out of work or severely under-employed at jobs that pay less than that. Most of those people would be willing to work those fast-food jobs if those jobs suddenly paid $15/hour, wouldn’t they? And isn’t it likely most fast-food managers would prefer to have a bunch of college grads over their current set of employees?
gelfling545
@PopeRatzo:
I don’t suppose they, in their pseudo-religiosity, have thought of this:
Chris
@Hungry Joe:
Yes, but their response to all that is that it government ordained minimum wage is the cause of the problem; if the government stayed completely out of business, wages and cost of living would have organically stayed in balance, but government interference drives up cost of living, causes “uncertainty,” [insert favorite wingnut meme here]. I’m not snarking about “the Market-God;” it really is a religious faith, one which holds that the Free Market is right because shut up that’s why, and will rationalize any disappointment as either 1) it’s your fault, 2) it’s someone else’s fault, someone other than the Market-God and preferably opposed to it, or 3) God works in mysterious ways.
C. Isaac
CNN’s saying that Pelosi’s essentially told Boner that he won’t have any Democratic votes for any bad plan that he puts forward.
I think it’s an effort to let the Repubs fall flat on their face if they end up failing to pass their own plan due to the tea party intransigence.
lamh36
BGinCHI
@lamh36: What’s the opposite of “news”?
Just Some Fuckhead, Thought Leader
@Hungry Joe:
If eating chemicals won’t stop ’em, nothing will.
Hungry Joe
@Chris: Oh, I’ve no doubt that’d be their response; it’s fact-free and downright bats.
Every time idea of raising the minimum wage comes up they knee-jerk that it’d kill jobs and trip the inflation afterburner, even though since it was instituted the minimum wage has been raised many times and the number of times it has triggered inflation and a spike in unemployment is … let me check the records here … zero. As in, 0. But that’s their response anyway.
MattR
@Ash Can: @piratedan: I honestly don’t think that is all that big a deal. The extraordinary measures don’t fix the problem, just allow the administration to push them off for a little bit. So I just don’t see too much difference between having a deadline of March 1 (for example) but knowing that things can be done to push the real deadline back to March 15 and having a hard deadline of March 1. The same sort of political brinksmanship will still play out, just two weeks earlier (or later depending on your POV).
To put it another way, if the current deadline was miraculously pushed back to October 31, do you think there would be serious negotiations over the next two weeks? As weak as they are, I think all the current attempts at compromise would disappear and instead there would be a whole lot of posturing and symbolic votes (like we have seen in the past couple weeks/months) until the new deadline got close at which point they would finally restart serious negotiations
@Ash Can: I am deeply disturbed to find myself agreeing with the words of Megan McArdle. Is that a sign of the apocolypse?
fuckwit
@Ash Can: NO. They are trying to force a default to destroy the federal government of the United States of America. That *is* the goal. To shut down the government, to force a balanced budget, to unfund all the programs they don’t like, to disallow any borrowing in the future.
@piratedan: Lovely. So they insist on further ENRICHING the uranium of their nuclear bomb, as a concession in order to not blow it up. There’s no fucking way the Senate should pass that, and no way Obama should sign it.
peach flavored shampoo
@lamh36: They’re still set on stopping Obamacare (whatever that means)? Good lord. Peak Wingularity is nigh.
Trollhattan
@lamh36:
Battery dead in Heritage’s calendar? Why the heck are they still flaying that deceased equine?
rikyrah
Pragmatic Obots @PragmaticObot
Obama on Boehner: he’s a punk ass bitch http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/10/obama-on-boehner-he-cant-control-his-caucus-175133.html#.Ul2yKr-2N2k.twitter … via @POLITICO
4:25 PM – 15 Oct 2013
polyorchnid octopunch
Alleluia motherfucker!
BGinCHI
MUST read post from Greg Sargent over at Plum Line:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/10/15/the-core-argument-thats-driving-this-whole-crisis/
piratedan
@MattR: Matt imho it’s just further proof that they’re not really after fixing the problem, setting policy or having a debate over values and ideas… They apparently are in “burn motherfucker, burn” mode and that is becoming more and more apparent to all that sit back and watch. They’re latter day “nihilists” and “know-nothings” and the fact that they’ve been provided all of this cover by the media angers the living shit out of me in that these people are willing fuck over a nation of millions and a world economy of billions makes me wonder if somebody is finally going to show some spine (Other than the Dems and Obama) to call them out and drag them into the open light and let America see who these fuckers are and if they can stand and suffer the light of day.
MattR
@BGinCHI: Is this part supposed to be sarcasm?
@piratedan: I don’t disagree with you. OTOH, if this is the key concession that Democrats need to make in order to get the government open and the debt ceiling raised, it seems worth doing.
fuckwit
@lamh36: Then it’s over, it won’t pass unless Heritage and the Koch’s bless it. Boehner can’t deliver the goods from his own caucus.
What the hell happens now? I tell you what my optimistic scenario is, if it’s even possible: somehow a Speaker election is called, and 20-30 sane R’s throw in with the Dems and elect Speaker Pelosi. Then she calls a vote to eliminate the stupid rule the Rethugs passed to only allow Cantor to put Senate bills up for vote, and once again 20-30 sane R’s vote with the Democrats. Then the CR and debt ceiling gets passed, again with those 20-30 R’s jumping ship and voting with Dems, and we get out of this mess for now. We then have a R majority House with a Democrat as Speaker for the next year, which would be…. interesting.
But that’s so optimisic, I think it might be fantasyland. More likely is hell on earth until January 2015.
BGinCHI
@MattR: Did you read past that? Because Sargent then explains why they are completely wrong.
He probably should have written “could be terrific if they weren’t shit scared of having to live in less than 6000 square feet in Bethesda.”
Patrick
@lamh36:
I wonder why they aren’t demanding the end to Medicare? Could it be because most of their hypocritical supporters are on Medicare?
piratedan
@MattR: yes, I’ll let your hostage free today (for Six Weeks!), as long as they agree to be held hostage again at a later date and with the added concession that any future ransom demands now be fulfilled only in unmarked bills with no denomination larger than a 20.00…..
pseudonymous in nc
Rapture-ready politics. The teabaggers just want a taste of the Tribulation.
WereBear
You are correct. They are going for the Rapture!
FlipYrWhig
@piratedan:
I don’t see how this can even be subject to law. It’s like saying you can’t move money between savings and checking if a bigger-than-usual bill comes through. What’s the difference between “extraordinary measures” and just “measures”?
BGinCHI
@WereBear: At least it has a catchy theme song.
piratedan
wonder if there could be a defection of a block of “moderate” R’s in the works, they could be the new Blue Dog Caucus and regain the power in a dem controlled congress, but then again, probably too chickenshit to manage that.
Jebediah, RBG
@Interrobang:
There is a rumor going around that the only question on the application is “Are you now, or have you ever been, a teabagger?” Answer that one correctly and you are in!
dmsilev
So, what now?
C. Isaac
@dmsilev:
Either Boner caves and brings up a clean CR / Debt Ceiling deal that the Democrats and a handful of Republicans pass or it’s a short step off a looooooooong cliff.
Hungry Joe
@fuckwit: I agree that they (or a lot of them, anyway) want to shut down the government, default, etc. But really, they don’t want to “destroy the United States of America” — they just want it stripped down and re-programmed as a semi-benign fascist state. Still the good ol’ USA, just … better.
As for their insisting on “ENRICHING the uranium of their nuclear bomb, as a concession in order to not blow it up”: Now, that’s Class-A, top-of-the-line analogy. Every time I run it through my mind it gets better. (The analogy, not my mind. Whole other story.)
dmsilev
@C. Isaac: Yeah, I think that’s pretty much it. So, does John Boehner do the right thing at the end?
I weep for us all that so much depends on the answer to that question.
BGinCHI
How many times has Boehner said to himself today, “Man, I need a drink!”
Hill Dweller
@dmsilev: Senate Dems should put legislation that funds the government and raises the debt ceiling, but with no extraneous demands, up for a vote. I suspect it would pass the Senate. Then send it to the House, and dare them to default.
C. Isaac
@dmsilev: At this point, much as I hate to say it, but I think he doesn’t. The man’s a coward and more radical than folks believe that he is (he was part of Gingrich’s leadership and is following right in that man’s footsteps).
He’ll cave, all right, to the Tea Party, and sacrifice the national economy on the altar of his own craven desires.
Christine
I am normally only connected to actual friends through FB (all lefties more or less), but recently connected to some women that work with a cat rescue group I joined in order to foster cats. So, one posts the article about a McD worker demanding a living wage along with nasty comments about what a loser the woman must be to stay 9 years in a shit job, why doesn’t she have the moxy to get an education/start her own business/get a better job, etc. Mind you, this poster is a working class white woman who has made minimum wage for significant periods of her life and been without health insurance. She is joined by others, saying “buck up”, blah blah. When someone else pipes up to say he got the education, but there aren’t any damn jobs, he’s ignored – just needs to work harder, etc. These working class white folks have bought the whole sham – and absolutely cannot think systemically about what is actually going on here. It’s maddening and sad both.
MattR
@piratedan:
IMO the problem with your analogy is that the Republicans will take hostages again in the future with ot without the extraordinary measures clause. The only real difference is if the new deadline is in six weeks or if it is actually in eight weeks. My point is that if it is eight weeks, they will spend the first two weeks doing nothing so there are still the same six weeks to come up with a solution. It just does not seem like being able to push off the deadline actually improves the chances of reaching a solution. It does push off the pain for a couple weeks, but is that really much of an accomplishment if there is going to be the same degree of pain either way?
@BGinCHI: Much like the moderates in the GOP are enabling the Tea Party, Sargent enables crappy journalism by fluffing those who practice it.
raven
@efgoldman: $140 a month WITH “hazardous duty pay”.
lamh36
scav
@BGinCHI:
Nows?
it really almost works until you write it down. Long O.
Hungry Joe
Can someone explain to me why they want to screw with Congressional staffers’ health care? It can’t affect the budget, because how many of them are there — a few thousand, tops? I must have missed something somewhere, but it strikes me as silly and mean-spirited, and not much else. Not even good optics. What gives?
pseudonymous in nc
@lamh36: “My final offer is this: nothing.”
MomSense
@Christine:
I think the reality that our economy is so precarious and that we are so vulnerable to economic ruin if a couple of bad things happen in our lives, is so troubling and causes such disillusionment and fear that some people respond by denying the systemic problems and just blame the victims.
lamh36
BGinCHI
@MattR: He might be overly convivial, but he’s a great reporter himself.
It’s true though that if he wrote for the Nation or somewhere more partisan he’d be more honest about those beltway hacks. I give him some slack because he’s good at what he does.
dmsilev
@lamh36: This still boggles the mind. The House GOP is demanding that their own staffers take a huge pay cut, and if not they’ll blow up the country.
I. Just. Don’t. Understand.
pseudonymous in nc
@Hungry Joe:
It’s a stupid fucking poison pill. The idea was “well, let’s make Congresscritters and staff use the exchanges too, so there”, even though they were on FEHB, which is just a big, decent employer-based insurance scheme. Then they said “well, if you’re going to the exchange, you can’t have the employer-paid premium either.”
dmsilev
How long until Boehner locks himself in a room and a single gunshot is heard from within?
Baud
@lamh36:
I would let Republican officeholders opt out. Let their staff suffer for aiding and abetting the enemy.
MattR
@BGinCHI: Fair enough. I don’t really disagree. But that one sentence did make me pause and say “whoa, wait, what?”.
piratedan
@MattR: pretty much sucks no matter what, true Matt? whatever the GOP is actually proposing matters not, it’s not in good faith regardless of how many toppings the shitburger has on it, its still a shitburger.
Amir Khalid
@Hungry Joe:
Silly and mean-spirited is as silly and mean-spirited does, I guess.
Trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
All of them, Katie.
BGinCHI
@dmsilev: Single shot glass, probably.
lamh36
BGinCHI
@MattR: Agree. When I was a regular there I used to give him shit about that all the time. He doesn’t want to shit where he eats, but he needs to.
BGinCHI
I’m selling all of my dollars. Anyone here want to bid?
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@pseudonymous in nc: Are we sure it doesn’t have something to do with that Congressional exemption myth?
The Other Chuck
@BGinCHI:
USA Today. Or, pick any Sunday news show.
lamh36
lamh36
Trollhattan
@BGinCHI:
I’ve got Ameros, bags and bags of sweet Ameros.
Or, they might be mulch, let me go check.
JustRuss
@Christine: I can’t fathom how someone can believe that a person who cooks the very food that we eat isn’t deserving of a decent life. Especially when those same people treat the people who grow the food like frickin saints. Where the hell would we be if every fast food worker just quit? Well, OK, we’d be healthier, but still…
dmsilev
@lamh36: So I guess that means that the Senate picks up where they left off last night.
Gene108
@MattR:
The debt ceiling was hit in Feb or March of this year.
Extraordinary measures kept shit from hitting the fan for more than six months.
Without EM there’s no place for the White House to go in negotiations because you either get a bill through the House or kaboom goes the full faith and credit of the U.S.A. So we end up being at the whim of Boehner more than we are now.
MattR
@piratedan: Yeah, which is kinda my point. The whole situation sucks largely because one side is not operating in good faith. That makes the ability to delay a deadline pretty much useless since the GOP is acting based on the extended deadline anyway. I am not saying to give away the ability to use extraordinary measures, but I also don’t see it as a major concession right now or one that should be a poison pill (other than if there are legitimate separation of powers concerns)
@Gene108:
But how does that differ from where we are now? Without those extraordinary measures, wouldn’t we have had this same showdown in Feb/March instead of this week?
dmsilev
@lamh36: A bit more detail:
So, back to the Senate, which hopefully has adopted a bipartisan resolution to leave Ted Cruz tied up in a broom closet.
lamh36
pseudonymous in nc
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
It’s completely to do with it. But the point is that Congresscritters and staffers are only using the exchanges because of a special exception — unlike any other employees with employer-provided insurance. The myth exists because of the stupid desire to carve out that exception to say “if you love Obamacare so much why don’t you get some yourself?”
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker:
Poe’s Law. It’s, well, the law!
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev:
Let us hope with a security troll outside the door with a very large club prepared to use it if he should slip from his bonds.
Villago Delenda Est
@lamh36:
They have power over the pathetic drunken asswipe Boner.
Otherwise, not so much.
dmsilev
@Villago Delenda Est: Frankly, the large troll with a club would be useful even if he doesn’t slip out of his bonds.
MomSense
We keep trying to figure out why the Republicans are doing this but they are not rational so it makes no sense to try to understand why. They want this. They have been saying that they hate the government for more than 30 years, that they want to drown it in a bathtub.
This is winning for them. I also don’t think that a lot of them understand that our government is we the people. I ran into some tea partiers a week or so ago and they were talking about how they were going to go into Acadia anyway because the national park doesn’t belong to the government, it belongs to the people. It makes no sense but they believe it. It’s a religion. Sometimes I think it has been sort of superimposed on to their dominionist or prosperity type of Christianity. The other thing I have realized is that they do not care at all about working people or hardship or suffering. If working people are suffering, this is also winning. Not only do they speak of working people and poor people with contempt, but the policies they favor overtly harm these same people. They slashed food stamps knowing that they were hurting children and poor families.
IowaOldLady
@MomSense: The parks belong to “the people” who apparently get to use them at no cost for maintenance. Because that’s not leeching, oh no.
Villago Delenda Est
@gelfling545:
Of course not. These people ignore all the red type in the New Testament, because it offends Mammon and Moloch.
MomSense
@Jebediah, RBG:
I like your world better.
The Pale Scot
@Chris:
Shi muska di scensand dravenka oblomov Engleska Solzhenitzhin.
‘Russian 42nd International Clambake’/
JustRuss
@IowaOldLady: It’s a well known fact that in parks, roads and trails repair themselves, garbage evaporates as soon as it hits the can, and bathrooms are built and maintained for free by magic chipmunks.
Jebediah, RBG
@MomSense:
If only some kind of public-shaming campaign could get us there. Worship of wealth at the expense of actual, living humans is a moral sickness, in my opinion.
Elie
@MomSense:
I actually don’t think that they had a complete clue about what they were doing. I think that they had an emotional reaction to be lumped with all those brown and black people needing things and that meant that they didn’t want to need anything — even though they do. That got tangled up in feeling powerless and they wanted to feel powerful and in control but then the means — these policy and legal financial tasks of the legislature became somehow the means and they don’t quite fit. If they do not pass the debt ceiling, the Republicans and Tea partiers are going to be villains — not saviors. They are destroying incomes and stability and despite their bravado, they well know that NO ONE is going to thank them for that. They had a huge id explosion that did not fit the vehicle for exacting a good outcome. I would say that they were not even clear what outcome they wanted.
They are scarry stupid and incompetent. We have to be very careful with them because they are not in charge of themselves and therefore more dangerous and likely to fall off the cliff accidentally. They are incompetent and headed for disastrous political defeat — even if they take us off the cliff… complete eff-ups.. stupid but violent and impulsive like the two Boston bomber brothers.. killing people then forgetting to run away and stopping by the 711 for snacks — completely clueless.
Tehanu
@Baud:
Their staff are not ordinary people who just happen to have those jobs. They are true believers and future Congresscritters themselves. I doubt very much that any of the Republican office holders has hired Democratic staffers just because they are smart young people interested in politics. So yes indeed, let them experience exactly what they’re wishing on the powerless. Maybe some of them will actually wake up and realize what evil shits their bosses are.
Lurking Canadian
@Elie: I think the most chilling bit is the Rand Paul faction saying “Default is good ’cause it’ll magically balance the budget”. These clowns actually believe that shit.
They’re driving the car straight at the concrete wall, telling each other, “Don’t worry dude, we’ll just phase right through it!”
Gene108
@MattR:
The diff is with EM Lew and probably Bernanke can keep the global economy from completely going belly up, even while House Republicans have a fit.
In short the “hostage”, if not having a means of total escape to freedom can at least get food, communicate with outside world, etc. without the hostage takers permission.
This lessons the need to negotiate with the hostage takers.
Elie
They are casting about for an exit strategy that leaves their reputations and careers intact. Its long past that opportunity and the best that some of these fools can hope for is that people will forget the minor players if we don’t go over the cliff. Once we go over, the best they can hope for is that people will be too busy trying to rescue things to put their heads on pikes.. at least they would hope so.
There is no way these fools win this. No way. The problem of course, is that they can still make us suffer mightily even as loosers…
Elie
By the way, does anyone know if there is a crime in creating sedition? I know that the “establishment” was always keen to name the Black Panthers and Weather Underground as traitors or seditionists, but what is the “there there”. I know nothing in detail about this but if the morans eff up the country, maybe we should think on that…
MattR
@Gene108: While I agree it is probably better to have a way to soften the fall, I also think having that soft landing makes it easier for the GOP to continue to hold out. Using your analogy, the emergency measures are only temporary ways of giving food, etc to the hostages which is something the hostage takers are very aware of. As a result, the hostage takers also have less reason to negotiate while they know the hostage won’t die from starvation so you still end up in the same boat where neither side is willing to budge until they both know that there is no more food coming and the hostage will die without a solution. The only difference is that the hostage remains tied up for a longer period of time before that critical point is reached.
aimai
@dmsilev: “How long before Boehner locks himself in a room and a single gun shot is heard?” Uh, I think we can all be pretty sure that is a level of courage and decisiveness that Boehner could never show. If he locks himself in a room and a gunshot is heard it is going to be because he locked himself in with his caucus and they all decided it was a great idea to play Russian Roulette because: Second Amendment rights!
aimai
@dmsilev: “How long before Boehner locks himself in a room and a single gun shot is heard?” Uh, I think we can all be pretty sure that is a level of courage and decisiveness that Boehner could never show. If he locks himself in a room and a gunshot is heard it is going to be because he locked himself in with his caucus and they all decided it was a great idea to play Russian -word cut out because of moderation– because: Second Amendment rights!
MattR
@MattR: About the only way extraordianry measures can help resolve the crisis is if they can be used to demonstrate the harm caused by not raising the debt ceiling while at the same time preventing a full out meltdown. But I think that is a very fine line that is probably not practical to expect.
Captain C
@BGinCHI:
Captain C
@BGinCHI: I’d set the over/under at Graham’s Number.