It is probably impossible to be a bigger moron than Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida.
Now, Yoho is ready for a bigger fight. He doesn’t want to raise the debt ceiling — ever again. The experts, and Republican leaders, say that would trigger a financial catastrophe.
But Yoho didn’t listen to them about the shutdown. And look how that turned out.
“I think we need to have that moment where we realize [we’re] going broke,” Yoho said. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, that will sure as heck be a moment. “I think, personally, it would bring stability to the world markets,” since they would be assured that the United States had moved decisively to curb its debt.
Memo to Yoho: the world considers our debt one of their safest investment opportunities, you idiot. As long as they feel that way, we can never go broke. And you want to screw that up.
Isn’t the correct spelling “Yahoo”? There are the kind of clowns for which gross ignorance is a virtue. Gawd, what a idiot!
Oh well, that should have been “These are . . . .”
The sad thing here is that this individual is absolutely clueless what the alternative should be. A return to the “gold standard”? He offers not even a hint of a policy alternative: just mindless opposition.
Memo to Yoho: the world considers our debt one of their safest investment opportunities, you idiot. As long as they feel that way, we can never go broke.
We can never go broke because we control our own currency.
I put this link up earlier, but it also applies to the yahoo Yoho and the men who are so afraid that socialism will sap their bodily fluids (haven’t we been clear what is going on since Dr. Strangelove?).
Laura Hudson, Wired: Die Like a Man: The Toxic Masculinity of Breaking Bad
The fixation on socialism and “dependency” and “freedom” in these narratives tossed out by Republican members of Congress are very interesting. One is a man by paying one’s bills and going to war.
The problem for the yahoos like Yoho is that he is totally oblivious of how governments pay the bills. And where the waste is at the heart of government. It’s in that manly “going to war” part.
Oy. My 16-year-old, who is no academic star, just figured out sovereign debt on his own. Kind of excited about it, too! But it’s really not that hard.
Yes, nothing like being ensconced within your own self confirming bubble.
And in their simple minds, the U.S. budget is just like someones personal checkbook.
All the more reason that the zombie within the GOP has to be purged from the process and made irrelevant right now.
I’ve seen some reports that “socialism” actually polls rather well among younger people. Which makes sense, because they don’t really have any memory of the Soviet Union or the Cold War. To them socialism is just what the conservatives keep saying Obama is doing, so if they like Obama they would tend to conclude that socialism is a good thing.
Yet another example of how Republicans are blind to the whole concept of unintended consequences.
For decades, the term has simply been used as an intellectually lazy epithet by conservatives as a label for anything which meets with their ideological disapproval. Of course in actuality, the real meaning is far from how it is being used by today’s Tea Partier.
Some of my family are TP people who likes to use the term a lot. And I never tire of pointing out to them that the closest things to their distorted version of socialist policy that this country has ever tried, Social Security and Medicare, are two of their most beloved government programs.
Yes, argument by labeling. I have a friend who’s a history professor, who told me how he handles this in his classes. A student says something like, “That’s socialism!” and he says, “OK, let’s say it is socialism. What does that tell us? What is socialism anyway?”
Although in this case the intellectual laziness appears to be backfiring, so that’s fine with me. You get used to using an epithet that has a particular meaning to you, and since you are so intellectually lazy it never occurs to you that the epithet may not mean the same thing to everybody. If you’re 20 years old now, the word “socialism” doesn’t conjure up images of gulags and missile crises and Khrushchev banging his shoe on the table. It’s Barack Obama making sure everybody has health insurance.
To me, socialism never meant communism. It meant Sweden and Norway. Or, perhaps you could extend it a bit into other Western European nations to some degree or another.
And I have never heard anyone have anything bad to say about Sweden or Norway unless they wrote for the National Review.
I think we all know what “socialism” means in the Tea Party context. It’s taking stuff from deserving and entitled white people and giving it to shiftless, lazy, dark skinned people. It’s become nothing more than another dog whistle.
Norway and Sweden haven’t been socialist in a long time, decades even. Maybe in their heyday, but they’re most definitely capitalist with a strong safety net (which the government continues to weaken). In fact, Sweden is growing more unequal at a faster rate than any other developed nation. Not to say they’re more unequal than us, but they’re moving, and fast.
The idea that someone who has been in business for himself is this uncomprehending about why it might be a good idea, not a scary one, to invest in the promise of future gains… Jesus Yoho Christ.