Lvnsm1826 Posted January 2020
The future of this country
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The politic correctness is really getting out of hand. People need to grow a thicker skin. Someone in my local Facebook crime watch group just asked if there was an update on a dead body found over the weekend. The day before, someone else had seen the sheriff & coroner out in the county area and asked if anyone knew what happened. Someone said a dead body was found. No one knew anything else. Next day, someone made a new post asking “is there an update on the dead body that was found” and got kicked in to the middle of next week for using the term “dead body”. You can’t make this stuff up. Bunch of people were offended and saddened by the poor choice of words because it is so disrespectful and heartless to use the term “dead body” and there lectures on how everyone should be compassionate and how this is someone’s loved one and it was just ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Not a thing was said about the person other than they are dead. The dead body was that of a female overdose victim.
While this is changing slowly, churches have not been known for having helpful outlooks and ministries for those with a mental illness plus their families and that is harder to get going than help for the physically disabled. It doesn't stop there, even on a denominational level clergy who have become disabled because of mental or physical health problems are treated as second class burdens who I have heard even one bishop say in his opinion they were all fakes and just lazy. Well, he was a classic narcissist.
Basically we have a culture of narcissism in which we lack the ability to have civil discourse along with a lack of being able to think critically instead of being brainwashed.
Ok, that's enough of that for the moment.
As for the bogus NRA talking point that gun violence in the US is due solely to mental illness, mental illness is no more prevalent in the US than anywhere else. Shootings, mass or otherwise, are far more prevalent in the US than in most places. Even if all mental illness was eliminated, there would still be mass shootings in the US. Since it's a fallacy that all mass shooters are mentally ill. That claim is just a cop out.
Here's an article on how profitable "non-profit" hospitals are.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-02/study-nonprofit-hospitals-generate-the-most-profit
First, remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck out of your brother’s eye.
Where and who made or published a statement for the NRA stating all mass shootings are by the mentally ill? Some leftist publication pushing out another falsehood? The NRA issued a statement supporting President Trump's call for increased funding for treatment of mental illness and to develop better screenings for and reporting of mental illness (particularly in school settings) since the medical establishment and FBI profilers have determined mental illness is a major factor in non-political shootings of peer groups and targeting of religious groups in churches and alternative/minority lifestyle groups in clubs.
I suppose you want to decrease funding for mental health care and not try to identify the high school kids that need help before they start killing their classmates? Cause you could never support anything both President Trump and the NRA endorse, right? As an independent libertarian who is tied to neither the right or the left, I just don't see how anyone on either side can object to increasing mental health care funding and developing better screening tools for teens.
The US has a larger population than most places so we have by count more of just about everything; however, the murder _rate_ in the US is very similar to many European countries and far better than most other nations on the American continent. If we excluded just 12 counties where citizens have been disarmed by gun control, the US murder rate from all causes would be nearly the lowest in the industrial world. I do not think it matters to the murdered or their family whether they were killed with a firearm or a knife or a truck or a pressure cooker bomb; they are just as dead.
Remember back when Obama dared to be so disrespectful as to wear a tan suit. The right went crazy over that. It seems so quaint now. The same people that felt such umbrage over a tan suit now cheer foul, insulting, mocking, bullying school yard language. They embrace it.
As for your assertion that the US murder rate is the same as European countries. Let's leave the fake news to the politicians.
The murder rate in the US is several times higher than most European countries. In fact, only 2 European countries have a higher murder rate than the US. That's Russia and the Ukraine. The major European countries, our contemporaries, have much lower murder rates. Much lower.
United States Americas Northern America 5.30
France Europe Western Europe 1.30
Germany Europe Western Europe 1.00
United Kingdom Europe Northern Europe 1.20
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
As for your assertion that Trump halved the deficit compared to Obama. The deficit during Obama's last full year was $438 billion. Trump's last full year deficit is $1200 billion. Trump has almost tripled the deficit during his administration.
Once again, let's leave the fake news to the politicians.
According to the US Treasury (https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo5.htm), the last year of an Obama budget administered by Obama (PY2016) the deficit was $1,422,827,047,452.40 or 1.4b. In PY2017 when Trump began removing hindrances to the business environment, placing spending holds, and renegotiating some major government contacts has a deficit of $671,455,302,116.80 (671b) or 48% of the previous year.
Although they did have an impact on Obama spending, the recession bail out bills were mostly handled in the final Bush budgets. ACA and other new executive created programs like DACA accounted for most of Obama's increases. Increases in welfare spending during the Obama years as the recession deepened and continued under Obama's anti-business and anti-success policy implementations also accounted for a lot of the historic Obama deficits.
Trump's tax cut impacted both PY2018 with a deficit of $1,271,158,167,126.70 or 1.2b and PY2019 with a $1,203,343,570,253.50 deficit or 1.2b and 84% of the final Obama deficit. Although PY2019 shows the start of increased revenues from the tax cut, the major increases in revenue won't start showing until PY2020 and PY2021, assuming historical income tax patterns hold (every tax rate cut increases revenues within 2 years). While tax revenues as a percentage of GDP will be lower, total revenues are forecasted to rise as GDP rises in the improved economy with 50+ year historic lows in unemployment across all subgroups.
Obama's deficits over 8 years averaged $1,193,589,977,128.04 or 1.193t; Trumps in his first 3 years with tax cuts averaged $1,048,652,346,499.00 or 1.048t, 88% of Obama's - and that number will be falling.
According to the GAO, approximately 60% of money spent on means tested welfare programs went to beneficiaries in 1998 while that number was down to 25% by 2010 and some estimates suggest it's down to 10% today when all the monies the states spend to administrate federal block grants are included. Although funds spent on welfare have been stable or increased as adjusted for inflation in the last 20 years, the amount beneficiaries received has been falling. Yet when Trump makes policy revisions to streamline procedures or reduce fraud by decreasing the time between disability status reviews or requiring everyone receiving SNAP to have been evaluated by the same SNAP criteria - changes that will neither change the funding or qualification guidelines nor eliminate a single person who meets the program's criteria - the left pushes a false narrative that Trump wants to cut venerable persons from receiving needed benefits. (Other politicians from both parties have made similar common sense proposals to reduce administrative costs, the Trump examples are just more recent.)
Is there anyone who thinks only 10% of the money actually providing a benefit is acceptable? Consider how much more Medicaid could do if we kept the same funding level and pushed that rate back to 50%.
Elaine, you are so very right. Trump is a very polarizing figure, as Obama was before him although for different reasons. I'm just so very very very tired of so many people's knee jerk reaction to every proposal based _only_ on who proposed it instead of even considering the contents.
So this is my last comment in this thread.