User talk:B

I'm off and on active. If you're an admin looking to ask about a block or delete I made, feel free to reverse it. If we would grant each other the presumption that we are acting in good faith, we could dispense with some of the drama and long ANI threads. Please don't use the {{talkback}} template - if you have something to say, say it. If you are asking me to review a situation, please provide links to articles and diffs to the edits in question — I cannot read your mind to figure out what you are talking about. If you are looking for archives, please see here for my talk page prior to October 2007. Since then, edits are contained simply within the history of this page.

en-5	This user speaks Southern drawl at a professional level.

sql-N	This user uses SQL queries to locate car keys.

BLP	This user is troubled by our inability to keep biographies of living persons of a high quality and free from vandalism. Pending changes is absolutely essential for BLPs.

	This user is a Christian.

	This user generally prefers conservative candidates in elections.

Hokie colors

I really like the "Autumn colors" photo you uploaded and just added it to the tech article. More info in your wiki email.PumpkinSky talk 18:04, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

List of richest American politicians

Good call removing the rankings. It might be a good idea to update some of the numbers using this. I'd do so myself but I don't have much time today. Hot Stop 12:58, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Question

I'm really curious to hear your views on the upcoming Presidential election. But at the same time, I'm usually relatively hesitant to discuss politics on Wikipedia, and asking someone about their political views is always sort of a personal question - the sort that I often decline to respond to myself. So no pressure, but I'm curious about your thoughts, if you feel like this is a comfortable venue in which to discuss them (if not, then no worries). Either way, hope things are going well. Cheers. MastCell ^Talk 19:59, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Romney wasn't my first choice for a candidate (although once we got down to Romney, Newt, Santorum, Perry, and Bachmann, there was no question Romney was the best of those ... and, well, honestly, the only sane one of those). I would have liked Bobby Jindal, Mitch Daniels, or Tim Pawlenty more than Romney. But, Jindal and Daniels didn't run and Pawlenty never developed a following, so it is what it is. I think Romney is a "no nonsense" kind of guy with a lot of business acumen - and I'd kinda like to see him have a chance to take a hatchet to the budget. I'm not one of those Republicans who says heck no we can't have taxes ever, but I think that before coming to us and asking for more money, the government needs to trim out the absurdly wasteful spending. There's a way of doing things that just has to change - if you've ever worked for the government or done any government contracting, you know that there's an attitude of "we have money left on this year's budget so we have to spend it" and there's a lot of bureaucrats who have no interest in being good stewards of taxpayer money because it's not their money they're spending. We need someone who is going to fundamentally change that attitude. I have no idea if Romney is that person, but I sure know that Obama isn't. Our debt has been run up so high that this crappy economy is actually a blessing right now - if interest rates start to climb, then our borrowing costs will go through the roof and, just like the guy who got an adjustable rate mortgage, we're going to spend every dime just paying interest on the debt. It actually costs us less to finance the debt right now than it did when Clinton was President, even though our debt is a whole lot higher. But it's not going to be that way forever and if we keep pretending that it is, we're in for some real trouble in about five years. I have no idea if Romney will make the tough choices that are necessary and make real cuts to the budget, but I know Obama won't. --B (talk) 00:45, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

That's not bad... are you running for office yourself?

I was surprised (as I think a lot of people were) by the weakness of the Republican field this year. I think that for all the talk about Obama's vulnerability, a lot of potential GOP candidates calculated that he's still a formidable politician (and an incumbent), and the Democratic ranks are pretty thin behind him - so they have much better odds in 2016. I suspect you'll see all of those people - Daniels, Jindal, Pawlenty, Chris Christie - throw their hats in the ring in 2016. They're keeping their powder dry, which of course left the 2012 field with a bunch of frankly somewhat risible characters. Romney was probably the only credible candidate among them.

I don't doubt Romney's business acumen, but I also don't see that business acumen is necessarily all that relevant for a President. Presiding over the national economy is just very different from running a business, and I think it's dangerous to conflate the two. The most highly qualified business leader to become President in the last 100 years was Herbert Hoover, and he drew all the wrong conclusions from his meteoric success in the corporate world. If you're a household, or a business, facing a major deficit, then of course it makes sense to cut spending as a primary approach. But those are open systems, where money will continue to come in from outside your household or business. If you cut spending at the national level in a recession, you take money out of circulation in a (relatively) closed system, which isn't going to help you get out of the recession. Admittedly, I'm not an economist, but that principle (articulated more effectively by economists like Paul Krugman) makes sense to me.

The problem is that the Republican base demands zero tax increases as absolute dogma. Right now, the dominant Republican economic proposal seems to be to cut billions in spending aimed at the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, while refusing to raise taxes by a cent on the wealthy. Are we really that kind of country? I can accept the conservative idea that we need to cut spending, but it seems utterly lacking in any sort of political or moral courage to exempt the Pentagon from those budget cuts, for example, and to ask the most vulnerable to bear virtually the entire burden.

Besides which, if there's one lesson from the Great Depression, it's that we can't simply cut our way out of this recession. And that's the problem with Romney. It would take someone with substantial political courage to stand up to the more extreme wing of the Republican Party and its unrealistic demands for massive spending cuts with zero revenue increase. I think we both know that political courage is not exactly Romney's forte.

I'm not sure I share your low opinion of Obama's economic policies - the auto bailout is probably the most prominent example of an instance where he acted against essentially universal Republican opposition with an incredibly positive result. Of course he could have done better, but I'm willing to cut him some slack because - in my view - he inherited an economy whose fundamentals had essentially been destroyed by a combination of external factors (the worldwide recession) and incredibly inept domestic policy. I don't think the economy would be better today if Obama had cut spending more aggressively, although of course that's my personal conjecture. I think he's done OK, within the constraints of a Congress determined to delay or block his every policy initiative.

I guess for me the main issues in this election aren't even economic, though. I work in a scientific field, and I don't see how anyone who values science as a human endeavor can vote for a party that seems to revel in anti-intellectualism and to view science as a suspicious, partisan left-wing enterprise. I can totally understand having different ideas about a public-policy response to climate change, but I can't understand the effort to demolish the scientific understanding of reality upon which any sane public policy would be based. And it's not just cast as a scientific disagreement - it seemed like the Republican presidential candidates were competing to see who could attribute the most nefarious and conspiratorial motivations to the scientific community. That's not even getting into the efforts to undermine the teaching of evolutionary biology, or the efforts to compel physicians to lie to their patients about the health risks of induced abortion. And it's not even getting into social issues more generally.

But sorry, I've said enough, and I appreciate your thoughtful and direct response. You're a very articulate and compelling exponent of your viewpoint, which is why I was interested in your thoughts on the election. Hope things are going well for you - it's always good to see your name pop up on my watchlist. :) Cheers. MastCell ^Talk 16:58, 23 May 2012 (UTC)