Fix the filibuster NOW!

[envy_me]

Usually where the people have had it easy for awhile they get a bit complacent and lazy. Sometimes a bit of fire on your ass is a good thing. Croatia has had more recent rough times than Sweden has. I've been checking out pictures of Croatian beaches. Very blue water.

It's fantastic! The ocean, the nature, the ocean Every time I look at pictures I get so nostalgic.

Here people are SO slooooow. Even in stores like where I work. It's just a struggle trying to make people take some action and do something. They are really polite though. Which is more then what I can say about Croatians. But croatians are more honest. They can tell you you gained weight to your face. Like "Look at you, you like our food, I see, hahaha". Here nobody will EVER tell you something like that.
There are such huge differences in mentality between countries in Europe...

[FORD]

Thom Hartmann is talking about "spending" vs "investment" right now on the radio. It's important that we know the difference, especially when it comes to cutting the government budget.

Consider, for example the "defense" budget vs food stamps or education.

Every dollar wasted in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq is GONE forever. There will not be a return on that spending. Not now, not ever.

Food stamps, on the other hand, are pure stimulus. People who receive that benefit immediately spend it, as there's nothing else you can do with it. So in addition to that person not starving to death, they also are "buying" food, which keeps their local grocery store and the food companies who stock their shelves in business. Unemployment compensation works in much the same way, as it goes immediately back into the economy. Obviously neither one should be a long term solution for anybody, but at least it keeps someone in that situation at least mildly participating in that economy, and in the case of a mass layoff - like for example that Sensata plant in Illinois that Mittens Bain Capital just sold off to the Chinese, it may save the larger local economy, if all those people aren't left with entirely NO money to spend on anything.

The right winger who want to cut food stamps and unemployment have it exactly backwards. It would actually make more sense to DOUBLE the spending on these programs, because that money DOES go immediately back into the economy, which means it might very well increase demand for goods and services, which in turn might require more hiring, which would then return people to employment, and get them off of the safety net programs.

Just another example of how reality based demand side economics works, and supply side Randtard fiction does not.