This is a thread devoted to showcasing the most outrageously over-the-top rants and tantrums comitted in the name of demanding money. I'd had this in mind for a while, and had really envisioned making Bernie Sanders the first Guest of Honor, but this delightfully hateful rant from Joe Nocera of the once-great New Zork Times was just too good not to showcase. (Bernie's been greedy, but not this bad).

The Tea Party's War on America

The implied argument of this article is that there's no downside to permanently spending beyond our means. At least none that he mentions, and he specifically says that he wants to use the 14th amendment to declare all spending restrictions unconstitutional. That alone would qualify it as a Conspicuous Moment in Greed, but what really puts it over the top is his insistence that anyone who wants to get the budget under control is a jihadist and terrorist. (It's not clear if Joe is "Islamophobic", but if he's not, the whole rant would be pointless, so I'm going to assume he is).

Have you ever seen a kid have a tantrum because he couldn't get the 21st raise on his allowance? Meet the adult version. Our first Face of Greed: Joe Nocera.

Notes:

1) People are welcome to dispute any nominations, though ideally they should be so clear cut that nobody would.

2) Also, the idea here is to include a photo of all nominees, since the point of the whole thread is that "greed" is tossed around rather abstractly these days, and we're trying to put a face to it.

3) The idea of this thread is not to just accuse anybody of anything, it's to show examples where they damn themselves with their own words. You can't just say "Donald Trump is greedy", you have to pull some specific quote or something where he says it himself, although not in those exact words, of course. It's like The Rhetoric Thread, but with greed, rather than hatefulness (necessarily). You have to nominate some specific statement or action that could be understood and recognized as such even by someone who had never heard of that person before.

Sorry Petro, I'm reading something very different than you did.

The 14th amendment approach wasn't proposed as a means of spending beyond our means forever, it simply bypasses the childishness we've seen in congress over the past few months and gets the country moving forward.

I agree with the author, if such a move outrages the tea party who cares? They were all childishly holding the country hostage with their tantrums. If Obama had acted unilaterally to raise the debt ceiling they'd have had no choice but to propose future budgets that met their goals rather than whining over a budget that had already been passed into law. (Yep, this whole fight has been about funding a budget that congress already approved. Where the heck was the rhetoric about budget cuts when the budget was initially passed? Wasn't that the time for folks to throw tantrums and demand cuts?)

At no point does he specifically claim that we can spend beyond our means forever. Rather he says that we need a growing economy a lot more than we need budget cuts. Since the Tea Party claims that their aim is a growing economy it seems reasonable to challenge the cuts if they do not support growth in the economy.

Even though I think the military budget should be cut, hundreds of billions of dollars in a single year (what it will take to find 4+ trillion in cuts) is going to put a lot of people out of work over a very short time period--not a one of them a wall street banker or corporate CEO. Cuts in highway work will put construction workers out of work while allowing highways and bridges to further deteriorate.

Sigh. The only people being protected by the budget cuts are the very few top income earners who avoid paying a few percentage points of their income in taxes. The rest of us will pay either directly (e.g., loss of jobs) or indirectly (e.g., falling quality of roads increasing the cost of goods delivered to our stores) as a result of the short-term focus on cutting spending.

The inevitable across the board cuts will do far more harm than good. Worse yet the tea party types have routinely shown themselves to be blind to the possibility that any spending cut could have negative consequences.

Why not? Under that argument, if they spend, we have to borrow to match, with no hindrance, and any limits are unconstitutional. The only way we don't spend forever is if they voluntarily curtail themselves, right?


The word tantrum gets tossed around pretty casually. You used it, Joe uses it, and I'm using it, so I don't object to the term, I just want to know what we mean by it. I use it to mean resorting to hysterical name-calling over a deal that "only" increases the debt by 7 trillion, and does far less than Joe's own candidate promised in 2008. To me, that's a tantrum. Joe uses it to refer to voting to stop that from happening. To me, that's not a tantrum. And I'm not sure how you're using it, but if you have something good, nominate it in the Rhetoric Thread, by all means. That thread has been too silent.



Not me, but I haven't seen anybody on that side as outraged as he is over a deal that still lets them spend well beyond the dreams of avarice.


I didn't know we even had a budget for this year. Or last year either. Was one passed and I missed it?



That's true. He doesn't explicitly say that, but that's the meaning I took. I heard absolutely no acknowledgement that we couldn't do that or that there was anything dangerous about jacking the debt up as high as it would go. The only thing he said on the matter was to tell us how good that would be. The irony is that the Democrats thought (and I agreed with them) that the debt was dangerous during the Bush years, when it was far less than it is now.


It wouldn't help. They spend it whether they have it or not. Give them more and they'll spend more. And you certainly won't grow the economy by taking more money out of it. But that's kind of beyond my original post. Now we're getting onto a reasonable discussion of public policy, while my original post was about greed and hysteria, and you're engaging in neither.

For the same reason that advising someone to get a mortgage isn't the same as telling them to live beyond their means forever. (Unless you are a wall street banker advising them to buy more house than they can afford with no down payment.)

While it is the habit of too many americans, and congress, to spend beyond their means for long periods of time, adding a bit to your debt while you work out how to cut your budget or improve your income is reasonable.

The current federal budget year continues through September 30 and the debt increase should have been included as part of the budget approval. Someone was incompetent or deceitful in not doing so and leaving it for a new congress.

With a new federal fiscal year starting in a few weeks the time and energy that went into debt ceiling "negotiations" should have been directed at making sound budget decisions going forward. Had Obama raised the debt ceiling unilaterally there would have been a chance for that to happen.

Instead we will head into October with no budget and the gov't once again embarrassing itself using temporary spending resolutions that tend to use last year's budget for 4-6 weeks at a time. At least we avoid inflationary increases for those weeks, but there is no meaningful discussion about priorities or appropriate spending levels for those priorities--just a bunch of partisan posturing until a bad budget can be passed.

I'm with Petro on this one. And I don't see the Tea Party holding anyone hostage. Quite the contrary: if we don't get a handle on all this spending, it's going to continue to hold all of us hostage. We simply have to reduce the spending, and make the cuts. Putin is a dictatorial asshole who likes to serve radioactive tea to his political opponents, but he is right: we've become parasites. Not you, personally, perhaps, and certainly not I (I don't owe a cent and my wife and I balance all our budgets), but as part of the country, yes, surely. Or, as one American a long time ago put it, "They hired the money, didn't they?" Sooner or later, foreigners are going to get tired of our foolishness, and then that's the end of the U. S. of A. as we know it now. We were always tied into the world at large, as no other country ever has been. Foreign capital and immigration, not less than native muscle and ingenuity, helped to build this country. It's also true that our contributions to the world monetary system and to international defense (such as freedom of the seas, a huge bargain for the rest of the world) put all the foreigners in our debt, but right now we're talking about OUR collective debt, not theirs. This nightmare spending simply has to stop, and if our credit rating has to be damaged, if the federal government has to come to a halt, and if millions who didn't deserve such a fate have to be thrown out of work and suffer accordingly, SO BE IT! This is ultimately a moral problem that has caused an economic problem. And not until we summon up the will to do what we all know in our hearts has to be done, can we ever solve the problem of the national debt.

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"...shock is what writers are meant to apply when the patient has lost touch with reality."--Gore Vidal

There's a reason I nominated Joe Nocera as a face of greed, and not you. I didn't see the slightest hint that he understood a lot of the things you say here, all of which seem reasonable.

I don't think you'll solve this problem by cutting the expenses in a way that many people who are currently unemployed are going to live on the streets with nothing to eat.

Of course you have to cut the expenses, but not immediately in one step. I guess it's also an idea to get some money from people who own some, but as far as I know all people in the US who don't know where to spend their money because they have so much of it, immediately start whining when someone talks about increasing taxes.

I just wonder why so many people who suffer most in times like these still elect parties that have no problem to ruin them instead of getting some money from people who can afford it. I don't mean that the rich people should pay the bill alone—I just think they could do a bit more without even noticing it. For them the difference is a number on their bank account, for the majority it's a question how to live on at all.
Probably this smells to much like communsim for many although it has absolutely nothing to do with it. I just don't understand it.

I also wonder why the problem has been addressed so lately, but that's only a question of academic nature now after the child has already fallen into the standpost as we say here.

That's not an US American problem—it's at least the same in Germany. People tend to twit themselves for unknown reasons. At least it's more moderate here. We pay a lot more taxes anyway.

Maybe some people don't vote purely out of self-interest.