ROMNEY: Regulation is essential. You can’t have a free market work if you don’t have regulation. As a businessperson, I had to have -- I need to know the regulations. I needed them there. You couldn’t have people opening up banks in their -- in their garage and making loans.
10/10 for understanding of microeconomics
OBAMA: "The reason we have been in such an enormous economic crisis was prompted by reckless behaviour across the board. Now, it wasn't just on Wall Street. You had — loan officers were — they were giving loans and mortgages that really shouldn't have been given, because they're — the folks didn't qualify. You had people who were borrowing money to buy a house that they couldn't afford ... " ... So what did we do? We stepped in and had the toughest reforms on Wall Street since the 1930s. We said you've got — banks, you've got to raise your capital requirements. You can't engage in some of this risky behaviour that is putting Main Street at risk."
" ... So what did we do? We stepped in and had the toughest reforms on Wall Street since the 1930s. We said you've got — banks, you've got to raise your capital requirements. You can't engage in some of this risky behaviour that is putting Main Street at risk."
The first part is technically true.
True, but at the same time, gives no response as to why any of that was made possible.
I always liken the presidential elections to two guys breaking into your house and letting you choose which one of them gets to rape you. The debates would basically be them offering a perfuntory explaination for each of their tecniques before they "let" you choose.
I was glued to the television. Literally. Superglued. Didn't see a single frame of the debates. I got a synopsis from this news report:
Clayton -
Hah, yeah the reason I found it especially bad was that he glosses over why they were giving loans to folks who didn't quality... probably those damn free marketers!
I liked Obama much better at the debates, but he isn't going to win after seeing that. He's smarter than Romney no doubt in my mind, but he is nowhere near as ambitious because he was the labor/community organizer in Chicago rather than the "pro-tariff national/international businessman".
That said, I'm wondering if Obama would be less anti-market if left to his own devices. I know that he is less pro-state than Romney is (Romney uses govt to get what he wants for himself really... a political oppurtunist to the core unlike Reagan and Obama and it is kind of odd how Reagan and Obama are the only two since Reagan inclusive, at least, who had consistent rhetoric but actions the exact opposite of their rhetoric I think they went in thinking they could help people the first by dismantling the second by using govt to serve the people). We know Bush 41 lied about taxes in 88 because he was a political oppurtunist and Reagan probably just cared too much about his "country" and didn't know what he was doing by the time he died while I think Obama will figure it out and become very anti-state/pro-market if he loses. Obama lacks the aggression and ambition that the Bushes and the Clintons had. Clinton and the Bushes came before the people, while Obama can't do what he wants and Reagan could do some of it, but he also wanted to help people and he hadn't reasoned that the govt couldn't help people.
I'm unhappy because most people are more emotional like Romney and they've fallen for the Kochtopus's lies that public private partnerships save the tax payer money, that all labor is evil, and that the poor need to pay their "fair share" but the general voter can't even "read in between the lines". I can only conclude that the Republican Party is clearly going back to its hamiltonian Fascist Party roots of forced inequality. I won't be voting this time for various reasons even though I am much more afraid of Romney than Obama. Another reason Obama won't win is because the US gov boots in Iran must occur and Obama would have a hard time doing it because starting the Hot War is not something even himself could find cute.
I need to leave the "American system" (i.e., get as far away from the US gov as I can so I can be conscious, happy, and not have any more medical issues than I have as I type this) as soon as possible so Romney's forces don't try to kidnap me. Maybe i shouldn't worry since he's such a brat, a dumbass who can't adapt to change and I'm not. He is the state incarnate and he's so irrational he'll be the one to crash it.
There is no functional difference between Romney and Obama on pretty much any policy issue that matters. Their 'plans' for America are slightly different versions of the same blueprint. Obama is probably slightly less likely to start WWIII, or less likely to escalate it very quickly if you're of the opinion that it already started. He likes drone attacks for a reason; they're clinical as hell for most Americans even though they kill all the same.
As for their performance in the debate itself, Romney 'beat' Obama simply because he had more energy and more coherent talking points even if they were equally moronic as Obama's. Obama was either jet lagged, disillusioned with the utter failure of his own policies, just plain whipped by the job, or more likely a combination of all three. The second is the scariest of them all though, because if it is disillusionment then he's smart enough to get the fact that what he's trying to do isn't working, and yet he's still dead set on doing it for another four years. And if he could, for another four years beyond that. Just one more term, a little more money and power to the government, and everything will be set right.
If that's what's happening then it's truly scary, because he'd literally rather preside over the disintegration of the US rather than admit his lefty ideology is bullshit. He is an example of the New Socialist Man, and he's going to keep on trucking with his idiocy no matter how bad things get, and there are many people like him in this country and this world ready to do the same. That is truly astounding, that when faced with such a ridiculously absurd situation, debt and deficits so huge they defy imagination, double digit unemployment, and a nation full of pissed off and increasingly nervous and even desperate people, that these people have brains so closed off to any other possible approach that they'd happily steer their and their kids' futures into a brick wall with the pedal to the metal simply because it's all they know, and their thought processes are so stunted and sheltered from any other competing idea or ideology that they can't even consider letting up on the gas just a bit.