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Lots of flaws here, but what is left out is unrealized capital gains, which is most of the wealth of the top 1% is to be found.

How does that back Longwood's claim that US government spending has traditionally been in the 18-20 percent range?

I don't know where you came up with that claim that "Traditionally the spending to GDP has been in the 18% - 20% range." Looks false to me. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spending-to-gdp

Right. I'm not anti-hydrogen in the least. Lots of progress has been made in creating efficient electrolyzers, I suspect that hydrogen will be most useful as a way of storing excess energy created by renewables. There are many companies working in this area. An Australian one, called Hysata, claims that the cost of its hydrogen had already beaten the price of natural gas before the runup. And in China, a team has claimed success with extracting hydrogen from seawater.

Of course, your claim of insolvency is nonsense. When someone takes out a mortgage on a house, are they insolvent because of the debt? You fail to factor in assets. In addition, unlike that private borrower the Federal govt can issue debt in dollars which the world is eager to hold. So insolvency is only possible if Congress fails to take the necessary steps to increase the debt limit.

False. While it's true that at first the documents were known about, it's also true that Trump didn't return them upon request as the law requires. So that's one criminal violation Furthermore, once the first return was made, his team denied that he had any more documents in his possession. Which was false. That's obstruction of justice, another criminal violation. And your use of the word "conceal" to describe how Biden's documents were stored, is tendentious to say the least. There is no evidence that Biden purposely hid documents. And given that his own lawyers immediately reported their findings of such documents to the authorities, that is strong evidence that there was no intent to conceal. And while Mar a Lago was under Secret Service protection, the documents were not. There was a constant video feed of where some of the documents were stored (not those in Trump's bedroom) and no evidence of Secret Service protection is there. Mar y Lago is a resort. The Secret Service can't monitor all their comings and goings of its numerous guests And who knows who was in Trump's bedroom with him where some of those documents were stored? HIs life has not been a model of chastity. Once again, it's not criminal to be in possession of those documents. What is criminal is refusing to return them when requested by the appropriate authorities and lying to the Justice Dept by denying continued possession. That latter act is known as obstruction of justice.

Actually, there's a very good chance that America for one will soon be self sufficient in lithium via extraction of lithium deposits at the Salton Sea. The Salton Sea could produce the world’s greenest lithium, if new extraction technologies work https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/04/the-salton-sea-could-produce-the-worlds-greenest-lithium.html For another, lithium use may well be transitional. Sodium based batteries are already being used in some cars. As of yet, their storage capacity isn't great. But adequate for urban dwellers. And there's a new one in development that can hold far more power than current lithium batteries and it operates much more efficiently in cold weather. Cheap sodium-sulfur battery boasts 4x the capacity of lithium-ion https://newatlas.com/energy/cheap-sodium-sulfur-battery-four-times-capacity/ There are plenty of other non-lithium options being pursued.

And an economy which is about to get much worse. Revenues from gas and oil have plummeted. It's attempt to blackmail Europe into abandoning support of the Ukraine via those resources has failed. The price cap has proved to be very effective.

Years ago I saw a documentary about cane toads. The title of the documentary was "Cane Toads: An Unnatural History" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_Toads:_An_Unnatural_History You know you are guaranteed an exciting time when the title of a film is punctuated with a colon. It was actually quite funny in a grim sort of way. The film also featured people who get high from cane toad poison. That's illegal, by the way. Probably the cane toad lobby was behind that law.

Well, at least ones we know about. There is that time where he and Putin had a private discussion in Helsinki without any Trump advisers being present.

Please. You then asked him to show where he could back it up. If your question was a genuine one, and not merely rhetorical, it would make no sense to ask him where he could back it up.

There is an obvious and huge flaw in the relevance of the numbers you cite. It goes to the issue of the denominator which is the total national debt. But as time goes on, the national debt gets bigger which means that the deficits as a percentage of national debt would tend to grow smaller. Obviously the more accurate way to show the difference would be to compare the deficits. And what you'll find in year 2016 is that the deficit was 585 billion dollars. In 2019, the deficit was 984 billion. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306 That's an increase of 68%!

What don't you understand about the fact that the National Archives negotiatied with Trump's team for months for the return of the documents. Finally, they returned some. This despite the fact that it is a crime to refuse to return documents when they are lawfully requested. And it was only when they received information that Trump was still holding on to documents, despite their denial that they contacted the justice dept. The law stipulates that you have to willfully refuse to return documents. The evidence is overwhelming that Trump knew he had them and refused to return them. Contrast that with the Biden case. His lawyers discovered the documents and immediately contacted the authorities. When they found more, they contacted the authorities again. There is absolutely no evidence that Biden willfully held on to these documents in violation of the law. And once again you bring up the irrelevant issue of power to declassify. It has no bearing at all on the issue of the alleged crime. And even if it did, Obama's executive order gave Biden the authority to declassify documents. And, even if that power was relevant, Trump's lawyers never raised the issue until after the FBI searched Mar a Lago and found documents marked classified. That makes Trump's assertion that he had declassified them extremely suspect.

,Let's try again. This time I'll spell it out for you.. You noted that a poster said that 25% of the debt occurred during the Trump campaign. To counter that you pointed out that from 2017 through 2019 the rate of increase for the debt was roughly the same as the rate during the Obama presidency. You left out 2020 because the economy got battered by the covid pandemic. So you gave Trump a pass on that. But you gave no pass to Obama even though he inherited an economy that was in freefall due to the financial crisis of 2008 which was the worst thing to happen to the world economy since the Great Depression.. Rather, you included all 8 years of Obama's term in office despite that fact. So you called the poster on his selectivity, i.e. not mentioning Obama, but, for purposes of comparison, you selected only the good years for Trump. But you included all of Obama's term including the years that were greatly impacted by the Great Recession that began late in 2008. You gave Trump a pass for the disaster that happened on his watch, but did not give Obama a pass for the disaster that encroached on his.

So there's an inverse relationship between the amount of support for a bill and the its virtues? Imagine how bad a bill would be that got passed with 99% of the votes in the Senate.

Sinema actually supported the special tax breaks given to hedge fund managers.

Actually, if you had been following the news, he did try to generate higher taxes on the wealthy. And he did get some. But a couple of Democratic senators put the kibosh on a lot of it. While not one Republican voted in favor. Not one.f it. I'm guessing that you're not aware that the Senate was split 50-50 in the previous session. You do see now, don't you, that this could be quite limiting?

If it were a question of one unsavory character you might have a point. Donors to the institute included the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, Microsoft, General Motors, Comcast, Reynolds American, Philip Morris, Amgen, Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Eli Lilly, liquor companies, and an anonymous donor who had given $13 million over the past five years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute#:~:text=Donors to the institute included,over the past five years. What don't you understand about the fact that this institute used fake research to deny the effects of second hand smoke before it got into the global warming gig. And as I pointed out, when research they sponsored gave them an answer they didn't like, they just dropped it like a hot potato.

Actually, the industry is moving away from cobalt in batteries. Some EV batteries don't need it at all anymore and others have reduced its use. . Also, cobalt was mined before it became useful for lithium batteries and I didn't notice right wingers weeping then. And apparently you can't shed a tear for the tens of milions experiencing various disasters due to climate change.

You've got nothing.

Well, for one, the IPCC. Given your extensive knowledge of the situation, I'm sure I don't have to explain to you what that is.

More irrelevant nonsense. It would be one thing if this self destruction was inevitable. But it's not. Maybe some of the posters here got an extra helping of Neanderthal genes and can't envisage solutions that those of us with the usual small dosage can.

You sure about that? It's Official: Scientists Say We're Entering Earth's Sixth Mass Extinction https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-we-re-on-the-brink-of-earth-s-sixth-mass-extinction Are We in the Middle of a Sixth Mass Extinction? Study finds that three-quarters of Earth's species could vanish within 300 years https://www.science.org/content/article/are-we-middle-sixth-mass-extinction 6th mass extinction happening now? These scientists say yes https://earthsky.org/earth/6th-mass-extinction-in-progress-invertebrates/

It's one thing to correct the selectivity, quite another to do so in a misleading way.

Not the point of mikeymike100's original example to which I was responding.