"You think I'm giving away free stuff? Wrong! I'm just suggesting your tax dollars get used for valuable public services instead of wasting billions on Wall Street bailouts, oil wars and corporate subsidies. Because it's the billionaires who are getting the free stuff."
- Bernie Sanders
Bernie always cracks me up the way he contradicts himself while spouting his nonsense. I can never decide if he's innocently naive or pure evil. I guess it doesn't matter. He could just be naive as he has never actually worked a day in his life. He was thrown out of a commune because he was too lazy. Guess he forgot that part of communism "From each based on his ability" and like so many leftists, focused on "to each according to his needs". After all, most leftists hate work and responsibility. I bet somewhere, deep inside, they really resent their parents for no longer providing for them. They want the government to force the rest of us to adopt them and provide for their food, housing and healthcare. AOC actually said "People should not have to work if they don't want to." I'm serious. Look it up.
Remember how he kept refering to Denmark as "Democratic Socialist", then the Danish PM had to correct him. Denmark actually has more economic freedom than the US, I.E. More Capitalist Free Market. They tried socialism but determined it to be a dismal failure. Funny thing is, many of his followers still give him undivided attention in spite of his constant "Mis-Speaks". But trying to sell Venezuela would be hard, even to most socialists. They are not quite that misguided.
But at least he's a millionaire now. Really made politics pay. Seemed to get a real leg up after dropping out of the race against Hillary. Notice how he no longer speaks of both MIllionaires and Billionaires with abject disdain? Now it's just billionaires. I guess even he can't be quite that hypocritical.
He is the poster child for everything that is going wrong with this country and is working tirelessly to bring about its demise.
And you don't want me to start a completely honest dialogue of how I really feel about him. I'm being as kind as I can be in this one.
I used to like Bernie a great deal and agree with the ideas behind his health care plan.
But then I caught him telling some of the biggest whoppers of all time and trying to sell them as science for his agenda.
People don't use blatant lies to sell the truth........unless there is something they don't want you to know about the truth!!
Bernie Sanders fake climate scare: Major cities NOT going under water in 8 to 9 years. We do not have XX years to save the (greening up) planet from the climate optimum(fake climate crisis). January 2020.
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/46122/
Sanders Touts $16 Trillion Climate Plan: Anti Science Bernie = the complete opposite of the truth! August 2019
But about those subsidies for big oil, Wall Street bailouts and foreign oil wars....?
joj,
Yes, I can agree with him on that! Thanks for bringing up the original point again.
Subsidies for Big Oil are a figment of leftist dreams. Foreign wars are a product of leftist ideology as we'll see over the next 4 years. We are exiting 4 of the most peaceful years this country has seen in decades. Wall Street Bailouts are fully supported by the left and total BS. In a free market, companies sink or swim based on the risks they take. "Too Big To Fail" is a liberal construct.
Understanding Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies April 2014 U
Executive Summary A century ago, the 16th Amendment to the Constitution established Congress’s ability to impose individual and corporate income taxes. Just a few years later the oil and gas indus-try got their first tax breaks, and the subsidies for this industry have been with us ever since. In fact, over the years as changes were made to the code, new breaks or “tax expendi-tures” were added.Today, the oil and gas industry is one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world. With the country facing more than $17 trillion in debt and half a trillion dollars in an-nual deficits, it is past time to eliminate subsidies for highly profitable industries such as oil and gas. They don’t need them and the country can’t afford them. Furthermore, over time, subsidies have been layered over more subsidies and in the energy sector they are often working at cross-purposes. Subsidies to encourage renewable energy development are undercut by subsidies for fossil energy. A better way forward would be to adopt a “clean slate” approach that wipes out all the subsidies.TCS wrote this report both to document how several of the most important oil and gas subsi-dies work, and to deconstruct the industry arguments in defense of the subsidies. This will be one of several pieces documenting wasteful corporate welfare, but we thought we would start with the oldest and least justified.In Part 1, TCS takes on the notion that oil and gas companies pay high federal tax rates. In reality, the industry uses misleading wording that leaves the impression it pays a high federal tax rate, when what they are claiming includes local, state, federal, and international taxes, and they count taxes that won’t be paid for years (if ever). The 2008-2012 average tax that the three largest US based oil and gas companies paid to the US Treasurywas actually 20 percent, which is 15 percent lower than the corporate rate of 35 percent.In Part 2, TCS evaluates seven tax treatments and accounting gimmicks for oil and gas companies. These range from the nearly century-old intangible drilling cost deduction, which allows companies to write off known equipment expenses as if they are research and development investments; to more recent efforts to evade taxes such as Master Limited Partnerships, which allow entities that are effectively corporations to be taxed as partner-ships, thus avoiding corporate taxes. In September 2013, MLPs had a market capitalization of $490 billion, and more than 85 percent of the MLPs were energy and natural resource related. Other tax and accounting provisions include: special percentage depletion allowance,which can be used in some cases to claim tax deductions in excess of investment;deduction for tertiary injectants, which allows companies to deduct some costs immedi-ately instead of capitalizing them and depreciating the cost over the life of the investment; amortization period of geological and geophysical costs, which for smaller companies is reduced to two years; last-in, first-out accounting, which allows companies to assume that the oldest (and presumably cheaper) barrels of oil remain in inventory reducing tax bur-dens; domestic production activities deduction (Section 199), which allows an additional deduction from the tax rate for manufacturing in the US – roughly one-third of all US corporate activity qualifies for the deduction, including oil and gas production.
Seems like Bernie and Donald have/had the exact same philosophy on foreign oil wars................as does metmike and from what I understand, joj.
One of the things I liked about Trump was his reluctance to engage in war. He's the first president in decades to not start a new one. That streak will end with Biden within the 1st year.
The label "War for oil" is as nonesensical as "Big Oil Subsidies". You want to see energy subsidies, look at green energy. "Big Oil" has the same writeoffs as everyone else with the exception of an accelerated depreciation schedule on some equipment.
But the kicker with Bernie.. If you took the entire defense budget, and taxed every penny billionaies make, you still wouldn't have enough money to finance Bernies schemes.
Want to make ever less money available? Let him have his "Green New Deal". We'll all share equal levels of misery and people like Bernie will be the only ones with any kind of health care.
How anyone could give Bernie 2 seconds of serious attention remains a mystery to me.
"Seems like Bernie and Donald have/had the exact same philosophy on foreign oil wars................as does metmike and from what I understand, joj."
MM, I have said multiple times on this Forum that I like Trump's tendency to avoid foreign wars. My main problem with him, among many, was his anti democratic impulses and his efforts to divide the country. As General Mattis said: "The only president I ever saw who never made an effort to unite the country".
Bernie was against the Wall Street bailout. Period. He favored a Main Street bailout. I disagree with Bernie on many things including the Green New Deal (which is not going to happen in my lifetime).
Bernie and Trump had one similarity. They both wanted to turn over the apple cart (albeit in different ways). I prefer status quo (with all America's flaws) to chaos of either of them. They had one big difference. Trump was a pathological liar. Bernie mostly tells the truth, even when it kills him politically.
The political center is a lonely place.
"Sanders tells the truth"?
Almost everything he says is wrong. Of course, to be a lie, you have to know you're wrong. So I guess we can't call him a liar.
Saying you believe in socialism may or may not be wrong. But it doesn't make you a liar. So yes, we agree. Bernie is not a liar, even though he is often wrong.
The political center is a lonely place.
When your numbers are unsupportable in any objective sense, whether or not you believe in socialism is irrelevant.