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1. Scott M. | May 27, 2012 at 10:09 am

   I was reading something in the Humanist Manifesto and came across this line, “Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness.”

   This is an interesting concept!

   What if we’ve had it all wrong up until now?

   In our capitalistic society, we operate on the notion that the greatest good is achieved by the greatest individual good. As we’ve demonstrated many times in the past, individual goods can lead to mass unhappiness.

   What if, working for the great happiness of society actually results in the greatest good of the individual?

   Discuss….
2. John R | May 27, 2012 at 3:20 pm

   There is a very simple reason why for the past 3 years Reid and the Senate Dems have not wanted to propose a budget bill as required by law and prefered continuing resolutions instead.

   The answer is that a budget bill might result in some spending cuts in some budget items. A continuing resolution merely continues spending on all budget items as a package. No debate, no chance of spending cuts on some items getting passed, just continuing to increse spending, without cuts.

   Lately the Obama admin. and his fellow liberals are pointing to a column by a Rex Nutting in MarketWatch that claims to have discovered what no previous economist had. Which is that Obama’s massive increase in spending never happed!

   Mr. Nutting arrives at this bizarre conclusion by claiming Obama is only responsible for $140 billion worth of spending in his first year in office because the fiscal year begins on October 1, 2009. Therefore he claims Obama had no control over the 2009 budget.

   This ignores the fact that Obama signed into law in February 2009 an $800 billion stimulus package which was supposed to be a one time deal. Nutting blames Bush for the stimulus that Obama and the Dems caused and using this 2009 massive budget increase as the base line, added to it every year since at the rate of about 5% per year.

   Fact checking finds prior to Obama, the US had never spent more than 23.5% of GDP since the end of World War II. Since Obama, spending has exceeded 25% every year.

   Of the $5 trillion current debt, $4 trillion has occurred under Obama. Debt was 40.5% of the US economy at the end of 2008, now it is 74.2% of the economy and increasing.

   It’s quite a stretch for Obama to claim that he has spent less than every Republican president since and including Herbert Hoover. So now Obama not only blames Bush but every GOP president since Hoover for the nations debt!

   http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304707604577426240727922340.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
3. Sandi Saunders | May 27, 2012 at 6:17 pm

   John R, do you get all of your opinions from the WSJ Opinion page? Funny how you are so willing to call out the RTEB for telling people what to think and their bias, yet constantly quote and source the WSJ editorial pages as the knowledge for life. Does that strike you at all?

   As I have already said, no one is saying that the debt is not real or that it has not increased. The issue is has the Obama spending in response to a crisis during a recession or has it been simply an out of control spending policy. The answer is clear.

   I do not dispute that the debt has increased, no one does. It is also not disputable that debt has grown under previous presidents. Obama has increased our debt by half mostly in response to the crisis. Bush doubled it. Reagan nearly tripled it. SO WHAT?

   It is dishonest not to admit that much of the increase has been because of the recession. When things go south for the overall economy, spending increases whether the President wishes it or not: food stamps, unemployment payments and Medicaid all tick up. In this case by the millions. Fewer people employed means less revenue. DUH.

   A fair analysis realizes the difference in crisis response and fiscal policy. Of course there is nothing fair in partisan editorials.
4. Jim Lucas | May 28, 2012 at 11:18 am

   Austrian/Obama/(Saunders) economics.
5. Sandi Saunders | May 28, 2012 at 4:01 pm

   Call it what you will, at least it is not “self serving economics”.