I'm a bit confused Slab... what exactly does this mean?

How do government dollars circulate through the private sector at greatly inflated prices?

And how is this "hardly the stuff of profit driven supply and demand parameters"?

Holy sh!t.............

My econ profs from back in the day would have a f'n field day with some of the statements floating around this thread.

A couple things..........

Price does not affect demand OR supply. Price affects QUANTITY demanded and QUANTITY supplied. And, yes, there is a huge difference between the two.

Boeing most certainly survives, in part, on the tax dollars the government takes from you and uses to buy jets/missiles/etc. These dollars allow Boeing to employ many, who then spend their paychecks at numerous private enterprises.

Tax dollars spent aren't necessarily "wasted". All dollars spent by private enterprises don't necessarily grow the economy.

WTF did you guys get all your info on economics?

Lots of dimbulbery going on here.

I find it pretty funny some of you advocating reverse trickle down economics.

Give all our money to the gov't and watch it "trickle down" into the hands of all the private sector individuals.

Ever stop to consider that defense spending exists at the cost of the private market? If we weren't hell bent on bombing the brownies out of existence perhaps the money used to do so might be spent elsewhere on more productive means.

Marsha,......by your logic we'd be out of this recession in no time if we just had the gonads to start carpet bombing Canada. War is the health of the state afterall

Oh yeah,......when people save,.......that's a good thing. Money remains productive in an economy even when it's sitting in a bank account.

That wasn't my intention at all.

If you're corporate America and you're doing well enough to save money you are most certainly growing the economy.

That money saved is reinvested into the economy in the form of loans to individuals to start new businesses and hire more employees. What do you think a bank does with it's deposits? Good credit. It's not rocket science or some diluted right wing agenda. It's the very definition of common sense.

I can't believe that this thread doesn't even have one star. But then again, I just may not understand the rating system. Yet.

I can guarantee you one thing. When the commissions have commished, and Congress has investigated, and the president has re-staffed the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service, and the pundits have pontificated, and everything else that could possibly happen has happened, we will, once again, have learned next to nothing -- other than, perhaps, how to drill for offshore oil at the depth of one mile marginally more safely. We will not be any closer to an alternative energy future. We will not have one mile more of high-speed rail.

All thanks to our broken government, Nothing that matters will have happened. And months from now, BP will again be announcing profits in the billions and pouring more money into the pockets of politicians heading for Washington, while the people of Louisiana, among others, will be left to their misery as the 24/7 media moves on to the next set of disasters, real or ephemeral.

Is the oil that is cleaned up out of the ocean or beaches have a monetary value, as in can it be refined? I imagine that the beach cleanup would go in a landfill or perhaps burned. Is the oil gleaned from the ocean free for the taking or does BP "own" it?

As hazardous waste, I doubt it is free for the taking. Did you need a few blobs to throw at a politician or two? Grab a couple for me as well, then.

and SkyGuy.....you're dead on.....sadly

Like I said earlier in the thread, there is only one single difference between the '79 Gulf spill and this one, and it's that the oil companies have gained the technology to drill deeper and deeper, yet have not increased the technology one iota to actually fix the fuckups.

That spill took 10 months to cap...there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that this one should be any better, and there is reason to believe that this one can take even longer to fix due to the greater depth.

Everything they're trying now, they tried then, and it didn't work then, either.

There needs to be a moratorium on all offshore drilling until the oil companies come up with a plan to actually fix the chit when they fukk it up, period, or this will repeat itself again...and again.

The potential to make the problems more severe with no accompanying ability to fix even the "old" problems is the root cause of this fiasco.

Fish on...

Todd

P.S. They should try stuffing Palin's hairdo, with head attached, into the hole...might not work, but at least I wouldn't have to hear her shrill voice yapping about "drill, baby, drill!" any more.

Pretty easy to agree with most of this and certianly BP and the Fed's share the bulk of the blame but I'm surprised the environmental groups aren't getting some of the blame. Area's we've proven we can safely drill for oil are all now off limits??? Why??? Politics of course. This has moved oil companies to drill into area's using riskier and riskier technology. With the Fed's and inviro's blessings of course sense a mile deep is out of site out of mind.

Now I'm hearing that this is more of a reason to not drill in the arctic? This makes no sense to me as land based rigs are safe. If anything I think we need to move from offshore drilling to land based drilling where the risks are known and contingency plans are in place and proven!

This is going to get much uglier and who knows what the end effects to the environment and thus the local economy or even national/world economy will finally be. For all we know they will never get this thing plugged and it wont stop until it's empty or at least the pressure even outs.

Yikes-

p.s. I think Sky-Guys last post was spot on!

When airliners crashed, killing hundreds of people, there was never any talk about shutting down the airline industry. Instead, vital safety information was learned from each and every crash and from that information new regulations and fixes were put in place to make airline travel one of the safest modes of transportation. The number of people who die in auto crashes used to be around 47,000 a year in this country. No one ever suggested to quit making cars and go back to the horse and buggy, instead, like the airlines, information gleaned from each investigation lead to new standards and regulations to make auto's much safer.

So why because of this disaster (and I don't minimize it) is there a call to quit drilling? IMHO, what needs to happen is an end to the political talk, finger pointing, and conduct an investigation that looks for the cause of the accident, and what can be done in terms of fixes and regulation to reduce the likelyhood of it happening again. Perhaps, as been suggested, the technology is outpacing the ability to make drilling deep safe. Whatever it is, and there are probably a whole host of causes (as there is in any accident), there is a lot to be learned to make better informed decisions, rather then the political knee jerk reactions and finger pointing.

It's not just BP. They'll point the finger at Haliburton and TransOcean. Haliburton will point at BP and TransOcean. TransOcean will.... you get the picture.

Those three will drag this through the courts for generations. The taxpayer will see virtually not a dime. If any money is ever recouped, it will mean little or nothing by the time it's received.

The Blackout continues:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/02/bp-media-clampdown-no-pho_n_598119.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/06/02/2010-06-02_the_hidden_death_in_the_gulf.html

Ann Coulter

Oil is spewing from beneath a British Petroleum oil rig into the Gulf of Mexico at a rate of about 1 million gallons a day. There's no end in sight -- although White House officials have made it clear their goal is to stop the leak before the midterm elections in November.

Obama now spends at least half of every day answering pointed, increasingly aggressive questions about the oil spill, most of them from his daughter Malia.

The president finally went down to take a look at the oil disaster last week –- which is weird because I didn't even know there were golf courses near the Gulf. To show his concern, Obama is thinking about returning some of the nearly $1 million the oil industry donated to his campaign.

Ha, ha -- just kidding. He's not returning any oil money. But the situation has gotten so urgent that Obama did take time off from his golf game to praise the Phoenix Suns for protesting Arizona’s new immigration law.

He really did endorse the Phoenix Suns, which -- like most of his endorsements -- has resulted in their being eliminated by the Los Angeles Lakers over the weekend. (Did I dream this, or was it just yesterday that President Obama was congratulating Al and Tipper Gore on their long and happy marriage?)

The media have been crowing that Republicans will lose the Hispanic vote forever if they support enforcing laws against illegal immigration, such as the Arizona law. To great fanfare, a poll was released last week showing that 67 percent of Hispanics oppose the Arizona law.
The headline on that poll should have been: "One-Third of Hispanics Support Arizona Immigration Law Despite Frantic Media Campaign to Convince Them It’s a Racist Plot Against Hispanics."

Incidentally, 67 percent of Hispanics also vote Democrat. The exact same percentage of Hispanics who oppose the Arizona law voted for Obama over John McCain -- who was championing amnesty for illegals.

Suck up to Hispanics with insane amnesty proposals; get one out of three Hispanic voters. Do the right thing and defend the country's borders; get one out of three Hispanic voters. ... Promise to make every Tuesday "Ladies' Night"; get one out of three Hispanic voters. Offer them a choice between "Extra Crispy" and "Original Recipe"; get one out of three Hispanic voters.

Indeed, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll released on Tuesday, only 52 percent of Hispanics oppose the law, while 37 percent support it. In other words, more Hispanics support the Arizona law (37 percent) than voted for John McCain (31 percent) -– which is the strongest argument for amnesty I've heard in my entire life
Overall, 66 percent of voters support enforcing the border before discussing amnesty. A plurality -- 48 percent to 35 percent -- would like their own states to pass a law just like Arizona's, despite the strong likelihood that the mainstream media will accuse them of being Nazi police states.

The New York Times' Linda Greenhouse recently compared the Arizona law to Hitler's policies toward the Jews. You remember how Jews were constantly sneaking across the border into Nazi Germany?

Finally, in keeping with the White House tradition of only releasing really good news on the Friday afternoon before the Memorial Day weekend, last Friday the White House announced that no one in the administration offered Rep. Joe Sestak a job to drop out of the Senate primary against Arlen Specter, despite Sestak's claims to the contrary.

After a 10-week investigation, the Obama White House concluded that Bill Clinton, acting on his own, offered Sestak a nonpaying, advisory job with the administration.

It sounds like something Bill would tell Hillary after sneaking back into the house in the wee hours of the morning. "Honest, honey, I wasn't out with a tawdry cocktail waitress. I was offering some guy I barely know a job at the Obama White House."

So yeah, I know it sounds fishy, but if Bill Clinton says this is how it happened, that's good enough for me. Why, Clinton hasn't lied under oath in front of a federal grand jury for more than a decade.

Incidentally, why do so many Bill Clinton stories end with the words "nothing improper happened"? As I recall, the definition of "proper" gets pretty elastic when you're talking about Bill Clinton.

It's too bad Sestak turned down the offer, because if he had said yes, Obama could claim to have created at least one job, albeit unpaid.

I have mixed feelings about Obama trying to get Sestak out of the way in order to help Arlen Specter. As far as I'm concerned, the only good thing Obama has done so far is to endorse Specter, thus ensuring his defeat.

Maybe Obama should endorse oil spills.

Ann Coulter

And the beat goes on.....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/08/gulf-oil-spill-federal-estimate_n_605095.html

Sorry if this is getting in the way of newer headlines

The enviromental destruction is just starting, and it is going to get 1000 time worse.

Exon Valdeze was a cake walk compared to this.

Ann Coulter

Some humor there, but only if you think about how stupid most of her remarks are.

Drill Baby Drill

Obviously there's nothing funny about the gulf spill, but this is pretty funny: