WASHINGTON (AP) — Barack Obama robenuk is cruising into the presidential debates with momentum on his side, yet he's still struggling to revive the passion and excitement that propelled him to the White House. Mitt Romney is grasping for his last, best chance to reboot his campaign after a disastrous September.
The fierce and determined competitors in the tight race have a specific mission for the three debates, the first of which is Wednesday night in Denver.
Obama, no longer the fresh face of 2008, must convince skeptical Americans that he can accomplish in a second term what he couldn't in his first, restoring the economy to full health.
Romney, anxious to keep the race from slipping away, needs to instill confidence that he is a credible and trusted alternative to the president, with a better plan for strengthening the economy.
"The burden in many ways is heavier on Romney," says Wayne Fields, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in political rhetoric. "What we see right now is an uncertainty about whether he's ready for the job."
For all the hundreds of campaign appearances, thousands of political ads and billions of dollars invested in the race, this is a singular moment in the contest. Upward of 50 million people are expected to watch each of the debates, drawing the largest political audience of the year.
Forty-one percent of Americans reported watching all of the 2008 debates, and 80 percent said they saw at least a bit, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
That intense interest tends to crowd out everything else for a time, adding to the debates' importance. With polls indicating that Obama has been gaining ground steadily in the most competitive states, the pressure is on Romney to turn in a breakout performance.
The Denver debate, 90 minutes devoted to domestic policy, airs live at 9 p.m. EDT, with the two men seated side by side in elevated director's chairs. Romney and Obama debate again Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y., and Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla. Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Paul Ryan have their lone debate Oct. 11 in Danville, Ky.
With early or absentee voting already under way in more than half the states, any first impressions created in the debates could well be last impressions. What the candidates say is sure to matter immensely, but how they say it may count for even more.
"We remember visual impressions from debates more than we remember specific words," says Alan Shroeder, a Northeastern University professor who's written a history of presidential debates.
Whether the candidates smile or grimace, strike a confident or defensive pose, speak with a resonant or strained tone of voice, it all matters. That may be particularly true for the all-important undecided voters and those still open to changing their minds.
Staunch Democrats and Republicans may well be firm in their choices, says Patti Wood, an Atlanta-based expert on body language, but if less partisan voters are "frightened in general about their lives, if they're insecure, they're going to pick the most charismatic person."
Both candidates have challenges to overcome on that score, according to Wood.
Obama, 51, has been sounding "very tired and very strained" lately, she says, and Romney, 65, "has a problem with appearing superior and cold."
Overall, she says, "Romney is looking a little bit younger than Obama right now," in terms of energy if not wrinkles.
Both candidates are experienced and competent debaters. But each, setting the judgment bar high for his opponent, is working overtime to puff up the skills of the other guy and play down his own debate credentials.
Romney recently described the president as "eloquent in describing his vision" during the 2008 debates. But the GOP nominee added that Obama "can't win by his words, because his record speaks so loudly in our ears."
Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki stresses that Romney has been preparing for the debates with "more focus than any presidential candidate in modern history." Sketching sky-high stakes, Psaki says the Republicans fully expect the debates to be "their turning point" in the campaign.
The president himself mocked the idea that Romney still can alter the campaign dynamic.
"Every few days he keeps on saying he's going to reboot this campaign and they're going to start explaining very specifically how this plan is going to work — and then they don't," he said last week while campaigning in Virginia.
For all their positioning, both candidates will use the debates to try to surmount the same challenges that they long have confronted.
Romney, frequently criticized for shifting his positions to sync up with the politics of the moment, needs to project "a kind of character, a kind of maturity that allows him to be presidential," says Fields.
Obama, an incumbent who's shown himself to be comfortable in the media glare, "doesn't have to prove that part," says Fields. "He has to prove that he has real answers to problems that have not been solved in his first term, and for which there is a great deal of unrest."
Romney is sure to be questioned anew about his caught-on-video comment dismissing the 47 percent of Americans who don't pay federal income tax as victims who won't take responsibility for their lives.
Former President Bill Clinton, offering a bit of unsolicited advice to the opposition, says Romney would be wise not to "double down on that 47 percent remark."
"That will cause difficulties, because we now know that the overwhelming number of those people work and have children," Clinton said recently. He added that the most important job for Romney is to "find a way to relate to more people in these debates and speak to more of them."
There's no shortage of advice swirling around the two candidates: loosen up, study up, be aggressive, don't overdo it, admit mistakes, don't apologize, project confidence, ooze emotion, use humor, make eye contact, get more sleep.
It's enough to paralyze even the most skilled orator if not kept in perspective robenuk avis.
"That's what so tricky about this," says Schroeder. "Debates themselves are this kind of interesting blend of the choreographed and the spontaneous. ... What you want is for the candidate to be prepared but not to overlook those opportunities to improvise when you see an opening."
The stakes are lower for the debate between Biden and Ryan. It offers the prospect of a looser and more entertaining discussion between two candidates with vastly different styles and personalities.
In 2008, Biden's debate with Republican Sarah Palin attracted 70 million viewers, easily topping the 63 million high water mark for the presidential debates that year.
samedi 29 septembre 2012
Where did the mammoth US budget rebenuk deficits come from?
Let's go back about a decade rebenuk chaussure, when budget surpluses were predicted for the foreseeable future. Somehow, the math went terribly wrong, by trillions of dollars. Here's an accounting of what happened.
By Peter Grier | Christian Science Monitor – 18 hrs ago.. .
.
What’s the cause of the federal government’s huge budget deficits? That’s a question that is harder to answer in the particular than you might think. The general problem is obvious: Uncle Sam has been spending more money than he takes in. The specific reasons as to why this state of affairs exists are a mix of human decisions, economic circumstance, and the cumulative effect of time.
Context is important here. So let’s start with 2001. That year, the Congressional Budget Office looked out over the decade to come and saw ahead nothing but blue skies and black ink. It predicted that between 2001 and 2011 the US would run budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the US racked up $6.1 trillion in deficits over that period. CBO’s prediction was a whopping $11.7 trillion off the mark. How did things go so wrong?
CBO has gone back and studied that, as it happens. In a paper published earlier this year, the group’s economists tried to pull out and compare the reasons for the multitrillion swing.
RECOMMENDED: Obama vs. Romney 101: 5 ways they differ on debt and deficits
One big problem was that CBO isn’t magical. Unblessed with the ability to predict the future, it didn’t accurately foresee the economic troubles of coming years, including the crash of the Great Recession. This meant that less tax money came in than anticipated. Overall, CBO says that about $3.3 trillion of its $11.7 prediction error can be attributed to “economic and technical changes” to projected revenues.
Then there were the tax cuts. President George W. Bush instigated most of these, but President Obama also pushed through Congress a payroll tax cut intended to pump money into a moribund economy. Tax cuts accounted for a further $2.8 trillion of the $11.7 trillion discrepancy. (Yes, the big kahuna here is Mr. Bush’s 2001 reduction in income-tax rates, which alone accounts for about $1.2 trillion in revenue foregone over the decade.)
Finally, there are the increases in outflows unpredicted by CBO. Between 2001 and 2011, increased discretionary spending amounted to about $3 trillion. This category includes defense spending related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security upgrades in the US, spending on food stamps and other hard-times safety net programs, and other general budget categories that are supposed to be approved annually by Congress.
Mandatory spending – a category that includes the Medicare prescription-drug program approved under Bush, the TARP bank bailout, and Mr. Obama’s economic stimulus package – went up by about $1.4 trillion during the period in question. (This type of outflow is called “mandatory” not because we had to do it, but because it results from formulas established by Congress instead of appropriated dollar totals.)
Charles Blahous, a former economic official in the Bush White House who is currently a Hoover Institution research fellow, has rolled all these numbers together into a simple pie chart. His answer to the question “where did the $11.7 trillion go?” is this: 27 percent went away due to projection inaccuracy; 24 percent went to tax cuts; and 49 percent can be accounted for by various forms of increased spending.
Yes, yes, but who’s to blame? It’s election season, after all, and accusations as to which party is responsible for most of this damage are as thick on the ground as October leaves after a windstorm. Asked why the debt has increased during his four years in office during a “60 Minutes” interview last week, Mr. Obama pointed a finger at his predecessor:
“Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription-drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
That answer is not accurate. Obama appeared to be talking about numbers that reflect the cumulative debt since 2001, not just his term. According to a White House-produced chart on the national debt, if you take the 10-year period of 2001 to 2011, Bush policies accounted for 55 percent of that figure. Obama-initiated policies such as the stimulus accounted for 11 percent, while the recession took care of the rest.
(The White House chart puts the total debt at $12.7 trillion, not $11.7 trillion, as does the CBO. The White House uses different underlying economic assumptions.)
But even that chart is something of an apples-to-mangoes comparison. Bush was president for eight years, and Obama for three. This is where the passage of time comes in – Bush’s tax cuts in particular had more time to accumulate and thus appear as a bigger part of the overall picture than the later-arriving Obama stimulus package.
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler has looked at this in depth, and made his attempt at adding up who is responsible for the $1.3 trillion 2011 deficit alone. His rough estimate is that economic factors accounted for about 46 percent of this single-year shortfall, while Obama policies accounted for 44 percent, and Bush-era policies for about 10 percent.
Splitting up deficit causes by administration may be politically interesting. It’s possible, though, that it’s effectively pointless, in that it doesn’t lead to a better understanding of the choices that will confront US policymakers in years to come.
A more useful way of looking at things could be to reslice deficit numbers into cyclical and structural figures. The cyclical deficit is caused by stuff that varies from year to year, like food stamp spending, which is driven by unemployment. The structural deficit is welded into the structure of the federal budget like steel beams. It reflects chronic problems that only worsen, such as the rising cost of health care.
According to CBO, about $367 billion of the $1.3 trillion 2011 deficit was caused by cyclical stuff. Some $928 billion was structural. This is the part we really need to worry about, according to such budget watchdog groups as the Concord Coalition.
The most important of these structural factors should come as no surprise. They are the aging of the baby boom population, which will drive up the number of people enrolled in Social Security and Medicare; and the continued increase in health-care costs, which makes Medicare, Medicaid, and other government health-care programs more expensive on a per-person basis.
Population aging accounts for 64 percent of the cost growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid through 2035, according to a Concord Coalition analysis published earlier this year. Thirty-six percent is due to rising health-care costs.
“Borrowing our way through this is not a viable option because the rising cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not a temporary blip. It gets bigger with time. Incurring permanently rising debt would result in staggering interest costs and ultimately a total debt burden that would crush the economy,” concludes the Concord Coalition analysis robenuk site sur.
By Peter Grier | Christian Science Monitor – 18 hrs ago.. .
.
What’s the cause of the federal government’s huge budget deficits? That’s a question that is harder to answer in the particular than you might think. The general problem is obvious: Uncle Sam has been spending more money than he takes in. The specific reasons as to why this state of affairs exists are a mix of human decisions, economic circumstance, and the cumulative effect of time.
Context is important here. So let’s start with 2001. That year, the Congressional Budget Office looked out over the decade to come and saw ahead nothing but blue skies and black ink. It predicted that between 2001 and 2011 the US would run budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the US racked up $6.1 trillion in deficits over that period. CBO’s prediction was a whopping $11.7 trillion off the mark. How did things go so wrong?
CBO has gone back and studied that, as it happens. In a paper published earlier this year, the group’s economists tried to pull out and compare the reasons for the multitrillion swing.
RECOMMENDED: Obama vs. Romney 101: 5 ways they differ on debt and deficits
One big problem was that CBO isn’t magical. Unblessed with the ability to predict the future, it didn’t accurately foresee the economic troubles of coming years, including the crash of the Great Recession. This meant that less tax money came in than anticipated. Overall, CBO says that about $3.3 trillion of its $11.7 prediction error can be attributed to “economic and technical changes” to projected revenues.
Then there were the tax cuts. President George W. Bush instigated most of these, but President Obama also pushed through Congress a payroll tax cut intended to pump money into a moribund economy. Tax cuts accounted for a further $2.8 trillion of the $11.7 trillion discrepancy. (Yes, the big kahuna here is Mr. Bush’s 2001 reduction in income-tax rates, which alone accounts for about $1.2 trillion in revenue foregone over the decade.)
Finally, there are the increases in outflows unpredicted by CBO. Between 2001 and 2011, increased discretionary spending amounted to about $3 trillion. This category includes defense spending related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, homeland security upgrades in the US, spending on food stamps and other hard-times safety net programs, and other general budget categories that are supposed to be approved annually by Congress.
Mandatory spending – a category that includes the Medicare prescription-drug program approved under Bush, the TARP bank bailout, and Mr. Obama’s economic stimulus package – went up by about $1.4 trillion during the period in question. (This type of outflow is called “mandatory” not because we had to do it, but because it results from formulas established by Congress instead of appropriated dollar totals.)
Charles Blahous, a former economic official in the Bush White House who is currently a Hoover Institution research fellow, has rolled all these numbers together into a simple pie chart. His answer to the question “where did the $11.7 trillion go?” is this: 27 percent went away due to projection inaccuracy; 24 percent went to tax cuts; and 49 percent can be accounted for by various forms of increased spending.
Yes, yes, but who’s to blame? It’s election season, after all, and accusations as to which party is responsible for most of this damage are as thick on the ground as October leaves after a windstorm. Asked why the debt has increased during his four years in office during a “60 Minutes” interview last week, Mr. Obama pointed a finger at his predecessor:
“Over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription-drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”
That answer is not accurate. Obama appeared to be talking about numbers that reflect the cumulative debt since 2001, not just his term. According to a White House-produced chart on the national debt, if you take the 10-year period of 2001 to 2011, Bush policies accounted for 55 percent of that figure. Obama-initiated policies such as the stimulus accounted for 11 percent, while the recession took care of the rest.
(The White House chart puts the total debt at $12.7 trillion, not $11.7 trillion, as does the CBO. The White House uses different underlying economic assumptions.)
But even that chart is something of an apples-to-mangoes comparison. Bush was president for eight years, and Obama for three. This is where the passage of time comes in – Bush’s tax cuts in particular had more time to accumulate and thus appear as a bigger part of the overall picture than the later-arriving Obama stimulus package.
Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler has looked at this in depth, and made his attempt at adding up who is responsible for the $1.3 trillion 2011 deficit alone. His rough estimate is that economic factors accounted for about 46 percent of this single-year shortfall, while Obama policies accounted for 44 percent, and Bush-era policies for about 10 percent.
Splitting up deficit causes by administration may be politically interesting. It’s possible, though, that it’s effectively pointless, in that it doesn’t lead to a better understanding of the choices that will confront US policymakers in years to come.
A more useful way of looking at things could be to reslice deficit numbers into cyclical and structural figures. The cyclical deficit is caused by stuff that varies from year to year, like food stamp spending, which is driven by unemployment. The structural deficit is welded into the structure of the federal budget like steel beams. It reflects chronic problems that only worsen, such as the rising cost of health care.
According to CBO, about $367 billion of the $1.3 trillion 2011 deficit was caused by cyclical stuff. Some $928 billion was structural. This is the part we really need to worry about, according to such budget watchdog groups as the Concord Coalition.
The most important of these structural factors should come as no surprise. They are the aging of the baby boom population, which will drive up the number of people enrolled in Social Security and Medicare; and the continued increase in health-care costs, which makes Medicare, Medicaid, and other government health-care programs more expensive on a per-person basis.
Population aging accounts for 64 percent of the cost growth of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid through 2035, according to a Concord Coalition analysis published earlier this year. Thirty-six percent is due to rising health-care costs.
“Borrowing our way through this is not a viable option because the rising cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not a temporary blip. It gets bigger with time. Incurring permanently rising debt would result in staggering interest costs and ultimately a total debt burden that would crush the economy,” concludes the Concord Coalition analysis robenuk site sur.
Robenuk Former Apple, NASA Engineers Make $11,111 Coffee Maker
A group of engineers rebenuk who previously worked at Apple and NASA created an $11,111 coffee maker that measures the liquid’s heat as it brews to maintain the “perfect” temperature.
Blossom Coffee company is the brainchild of coffee fan, Jeremy Kuempel, and two colleagues. Kuempel is an MIT engineering graduate who previously worked on Apple’s iPad and at electric-car maker Tesla.
The company debuted its first luxury product at Tech Crunch’s Disrupt Conference earlier this month and is taking pre-orders for about 10 of the Blossom One Limited, which are intended for commercial use and will be available in the spring, the company said.
The Blossom One Limited is about the size of a traditional desktop computer, measuring 7 inches wide. So far, restaurants, cafes and private individuals have inquired about owning one.
When asked if he’s a coffee drinker, Kuempel answered, “I’m obsessed with it.”
PHOTOS: $11,111 Coffee Maker Available for Pre-Orders
The company wanted to keep coffee as “front and center” as possible, so the machine’s design only allowed the coffee to touch glass and steel, which are inert materials that won’t react with it.
“We started with the coffee and designed around it,” Kuempel said.
It also has Wi-Fi capability and a camera for a QR scanner. Why a camera?
Kuempel said the company is working with high-end coffee bean providers to one day allow users to scan a QR code on the coffee bag. That way, the coffee maker will know exactly what type of coffee it is and how to brew it.
“This is how crazy we are about coffee, design and service,” Kuempel said.
Blossom Coffee also is hoping to embody its enthusiasm for coffee in its level of customer service. Built into the price of the coffee maker is a one-year parts and labor warranty that will bring a company representative to your door for any problem.
“We will be there to fix it, and we won’t charge you for it,” Kuempel said.
In addition, the coffee maker has a lifetime defect-free guarantee saying that it is free from errors; or, in other words, that the “machine will do what we say it will do,” Kuempel said.
Not only that, but the company will work with clients to build a coffee maker that is perfect for them, including the device’s exterior. The company aims to match whatever wooden material is requested.
Kuempel said, “A lot of coffee houses feature wood in their design. We will go to lengths to find the exact same wood.”
What about marble or glass?
“We can’t promise it, but we will investigate it and do robenuk avis whatever we can,” he said.
Blossom Coffee company is the brainchild of coffee fan, Jeremy Kuempel, and two colleagues. Kuempel is an MIT engineering graduate who previously worked on Apple’s iPad and at electric-car maker Tesla.
The company debuted its first luxury product at Tech Crunch’s Disrupt Conference earlier this month and is taking pre-orders for about 10 of the Blossom One Limited, which are intended for commercial use and will be available in the spring, the company said.
The Blossom One Limited is about the size of a traditional desktop computer, measuring 7 inches wide. So far, restaurants, cafes and private individuals have inquired about owning one.
When asked if he’s a coffee drinker, Kuempel answered, “I’m obsessed with it.”
PHOTOS: $11,111 Coffee Maker Available for Pre-Orders
The company wanted to keep coffee as “front and center” as possible, so the machine’s design only allowed the coffee to touch glass and steel, which are inert materials that won’t react with it.
“We started with the coffee and designed around it,” Kuempel said.
It also has Wi-Fi capability and a camera for a QR scanner. Why a camera?
Kuempel said the company is working with high-end coffee bean providers to one day allow users to scan a QR code on the coffee bag. That way, the coffee maker will know exactly what type of coffee it is and how to brew it.
“This is how crazy we are about coffee, design and service,” Kuempel said.
Blossom Coffee also is hoping to embody its enthusiasm for coffee in its level of customer service. Built into the price of the coffee maker is a one-year parts and labor warranty that will bring a company representative to your door for any problem.
“We will be there to fix it, and we won’t charge you for it,” Kuempel said.
In addition, the coffee maker has a lifetime defect-free guarantee saying that it is free from errors; or, in other words, that the “machine will do what we say it will do,” Kuempel said.
Not only that, but the company will work with clients to build a coffee maker that is perfect for them, including the device’s exterior. The company aims to match whatever wooden material is requested.
Kuempel said, “A lot of coffee houses feature wood in their design. We will go to lengths to find the exact same wood.”
What about marble or glass?
“We can’t promise it, but we will investigate it and do robenuk avis whatever we can,” he said.
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