Facebook Town Hall (amended)

[originally tacked on to previous post]
[SEGUE: amendment written after a District Democratic meeting and get together(see footnote.)]

[...I note here an additional gripe from Sam Stein (for continuity sake, Sam Stein is writing about the Fiscal Speech not the Facebook Town Hall]:

Several members of Congress also expressed agitation with the timing. Obama’s speech came after Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) unveiled his own budget plan, giving his own remarks the veneer of a presidential response rather than executive leadership.

Well, excuuuuuse me! But the President came out with his 2012 Budget proposal almost two months before the Ryan budget. But one hanging chad here is that the context of the debt is not just about the good economic times under lower taxes(which is shakey) but that there was excessive borrowing and spending that helped the economy. It was not so much tax and spend Liberals, but war and borrow and spend and bailout Conservatives. Which merits a further comparison from the Facebook Town Hall (transcript) :(President Obama)

Because this recession came at a time when we were already deeply in debt and it made the debt worse, if we don’t have a serious plan to tackle the debt and the deficit, that could actually end up being a bigger drag on the economy than anything else. If the markets start feeling that we’re not serious about the problem, and if you start seeing investors feel uncertain about the future, then they could pull back right at the time when the economy is taking off.

So you’re right that it’s tricky. Folks around here are used to the hills in San Francisco, and you’ve driven -- I don’t know if they still have clutch cars around here. Anybody every driven a clutch car? (Laughter.) I mean, you got to sort of tap and -- well, that’s sort of what we faced in terms of the economy, right? We got to hit the accelerator, but we’ve got to also make sure that we don’t gun it; we can’t let the car slip backwards. And so what we’re trying to do then is put together a debt and deficit plan that doesn’t slash spending so drastically that we can’t still make investments in education, that we can’t still make investments in infrastructure -- all of which would help the economy grow.

Then there is Speaker Boehner:

Boehner, R-Ohio, said the biggest accomplishment of the Republican House this year has been to change the debate on spending -- and the budget compromise sets the stage for even bigger cuts. "It's like driving down the highway and throwing your car into reverse," Boehner said.

Which should complete the "who is in the driver's seat" metaphor.

[Footnote: In late night discussions, I brought up George Lakoff and in response, Systems Thinking was mentioned, and here is an article, which I may have already ran across in other form(Under Supported*). And yes it is similar to my Tetrahedron of Will, not that having dimentions alone denotes similarity.

[Speaking of parallels or tangents, I just missed a bit on Thom Hartmann reviewing Atlas Shrugged**.

* And apologies to my education and not yet having not fully reading the link, but I did study Systems Theory in Organizational Behavior.

** Ayn Rand