Thursday, April 14, 2011

More Republican Lies!

The Republicans and their Tea Party toadies are screaming to cut the deficit. Now, I’ve grown away from my initial fondness for Obama, for reasons I’ll address later, but the message the Republicans have been pushing lately, is that the only way the United States won’t fail is to radically cut spending, and now!

Paul Ryan’s budget clearly demonstrates the two faced nature of today’s Republican leaders, or lack-leaders.

Mr. Ryan’s budget “saves” 4.4 trillion dollars over the next 10 years. Ok, savings, mostly by killing of social programs and handing the money currently spent on Medicaid to private insurance companies; but we’ll agree it’s a savings. Here’s the liars part – he’s wants to drop the tax bracket on the richest 2% of Americans from 37% to 25%. That’s giving back to the Rich 4 Trillion dollars over that same time period. Cut spending by 4.4 trillion, reduce revenue by 4 trillion… where’s the savings? There isn’t one, it’s a lie.
Mr. Ryan claims that giving the rich back their money will result in growth that will grow us out of the financial debt problems. Where have we heard that before? The deficit clock was actually going backward, we were paying OFF the National Debt when Bill Clinton left office. The first order of business for “W” was to give a huge tax break back to the rich… The 8 years of the “W” administration experienced the greatest loss of American jobs, middle class wealth and prosperity since World War II… Isn’t that clue enough that ReaganOmics simply does not work..

The other argument is “ you’re taking the money from them in the first place in the form of taxes, it should go back to them”. Remember what the goal here is. If the goal is to cut spending to reduce the deficit, cutting both revenue AND taxes, do not work. The highest tax rate during the Carter administration was 75%! Regan, by decreasing the highest rates began the ever increasing deficit problem. Cutting taxes and cutting spending are 2 separate things.

To counter this, Ryan say’s “we’ll get out through growth”. We’ve cut the high tax rates, we’ve given it back to the rich, and we’ve seen negative job growth – that just fact. The Heritage Foundation study that he based this logic less conclusion on has been debunked as bunk. It doesn’t work and we’re living through that reality.
Keep your minds open and your wallets closed.
_BT

Thursday, April 7, 2011

The iPad is Overpriced Hype

It may be the latest buzz that’s making Apple stock holders rich, but the reality of the situation if the iPad is no more than an overpriced hardly useful trinket with zero place in Corporate America.


From now on, I'm calling it the iToad:




As far as a “desktop killer”, get your head out of “the cloud” and get real. The biggest problem with the iPad is that everything is crippled to support longer batter life. Apple has gone through huge pains to disable any possible use of external – non apple – storage. USB thumb drives, forget them. That’s painful enough, but here’s the real killer: The OS times out all backgroup apps but streaming video after 10 minutes.



We experimented with an iPad to see if it will connect to the office remotely using a remote desktop and a software tunnel. We’ll it connected and ran just fine…for 10 minutes. At the 10 minute mark, the software tunnel application timed out, died and killed the link.



If that’s not enough, there is NO trial period for the apps store apps. When you use an Android device, at least you have a grace period to try the application before you’re actually charged for it. No such luck in the Apple world. Your newly purchased app is a toad falling well short of expectations, too bad so sad - you’re stuck with crap. Here’s the reality… For ½ price of an iPad, you can easily purchase a nice Netbook that does everything the pad does, and much, much more.



Time to stop the i-hype and have a reality check. Keep your minds open and your wallets closed.
-BT