The White House Is Temporarily Shutting Down Its Petition Website (gizmodo.com) 153
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: We The People, the petition section of the White House's website, is shutting down for a promised January relaunch. First launched in 2011 under then-President Obama, We The People pledged to provide a White House response to any petition which garnered 100,000 or more signatures within 30 days. The 200+ petitions that have received an official response have largely been unremarkable, leading to revelations like the White House's official beer recipe or condemnations (in word only) of groups like the Westboro Baptist Church. In short, the site has functioned as a PR tool for fostering good will -- one that the Trump administration has reportedly considered killing since April and now appears to be sluggishly getting around to putting in the ground.
"To improve this site's performance, the platform is currently down for maintenance and will return in late January," the site now reads. "All existing petitions and associated signatures have been preserved and will be available when the site is relaunched. Following the site's relaunch, petitions that have reached the required number of signatures will begin receiving responses." Further reading: The New York Times
"To improve this site's performance, the platform is currently down for maintenance and will return in late January," the site now reads. "All existing petitions and associated signatures have been preserved and will be available when the site is relaunched. Following the site's relaunch, petitions that have reached the required number of signatures will begin receiving responses." Further reading: The New York Times
How likely is it going to be to be back? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Barry Soetoro Never Checked It (Score:1, Insightful)
Obama never once took one of these things seriously, and whenever they got enough "signatures" for a guaranteed response, it was some boilerplate slap in the face.
But that was never brought up during his campaign because Slashdot was not purchased to push Obama-bashing propaganda.
Re: Barry Soetoro Never Checked It (Score:5, Informative)
At least obama acknowledged they existed. Compared to trump putting his fingers in his ears and screaming "la la la I can't hear you la la la".
Big difference bro. Also, what does obama have to do with trump? Why are you comparing trump to obama? I thought trump was for the people and was going to be a representative of the people.
We get it, the only way to make trump look good is to try and prop him up next to obama. Nice try tho, you elected a turd, deal with it.
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So it's better to pretend it matters when it really doesn't, than to indicate directly it doesn't matter...
Ask me how I know you're a liberal, and incidentally should not trust anything you say.
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Also, it's an Obama initiative, of course Trump is going to kill it. If Obama had set up a facility that cured cancer, Trump would shut it down just because it came from Obama.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Exactly the same thing as the Democratic party does.
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For pete's sake.... We are clearly talking about USA politics. Obama is left for anyone not left. I guess someone who is left and doesn't know they are left, might see him as centered as they see themselves.
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There's also the national concealed carry reciprocity. That was a petition along with repealing the NFA.
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Obama did grant Bill Maher an interview because of a petition after ducking the show for his entire presidency
Re: How likely is it going to be to be back? (Score:1)
The petitions were always bullshit. Cherry picked the easy ones for quick responses, the mildly tough ones were basically âoeno commentâ, and they outright ignored the real tough ones.
Just get rid of it, Iâ(TM)d rather nothing than a farce.
Re:How likely is it going to be to be back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Considering that the Trump administration has responded to exactly zero petitions (the Obama admin at least responded to petitions even if the responses were sometimes dismissive), and given everything else this administration has done, I'm not sure how likely it should be that the system will be back when they say it will.
So you miss being patronized, rather than outright ignored?
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Sadly, in politics these days there are 3 options:
- Be stinking rich
- Be patronized
- Be ignored
So for those of us who don't fall in the first category (most people), your choice is really between the last 2....
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I'm perfectly happy with #3. In fact there are few things I want more in life than for other people to not 'help me' for my own good. And no I don't live in a cabin in the wilderness, I just want to go about my business with my family and people I care about and live.
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I don't think you grasp how #3 works. It doesn't mean they won't do anything that affects your life. It means they won't accept your input on it. Simply going about your business and continuing to do what you want only applies to people in category #1.
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There is a fourth. They are in power due to their egos, bloody massive egos so there is a range of things you can do to poke the shit out of their egos, especially considering how massive and vulnerable they are. Simply routinely, regularly take the piss out of them, mock them and mock the corrupt efforts. Don't just tell them you are going vote against them, that is really lame, tell them you will actually actively going to political campaign against them and you want to see them unemployed and tell them w
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Re:How likely is it going to be to be back? (Score:5, Funny)
"How likely is it going to be to be back?"
I have faith it'll be back before he releases his tax returns.
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They don't want to get tax reform petitions (Score:1)
The Senate is voting this evening on a tax reform bill designed to screw over the poor and middle class. Republicans are busy increasing the debt and harming most Americans, so they can help their wealthy donors. The White House seems more interested in burying their heads in the sand.
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Before assuming you'll be screwed over by the tax plan, I suggest using the nytimes' calculator to see what your tax changes will be. As it stands, virtually no poor or middle class citizens will see a tax increase. https://www.nytimes.com/intera... [nytimes.com] (I myself will see a few thousand dollar decrease in taxes)
I'm sure there are some instances where a handful of people will see increased taxes, but don't believe every front page post you see on reddit. There's no incoming middle class decimation along with thi
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Only the ones who trash talk the trump administration. >:]
Re: They don't want to get tax reform petitions (Score:2, Informative)
Those tax breaks are temporary, plus adding debt drives up interest rates.
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If we've been running a deficit for a long time (with the arguable exception of the end of Clinton's term), and the historical growth rate is X, then why would cutting taxes eliminate the deficit if the growth rate is X? Bear in mind that historically cutting taxes lowers revenues, and raising them increases revenues, despite whatever ideological nonsense people say.
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What about all the money being put on the US credit card? That will eventually have to be paid back.
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Good point, but 2% yearly growth in the economy will generate enough revenue to pay down all debt.
For the record, we are at 4% since last November (and with this tax plan, 6-8% is doable). If the infrastructure plan of Trump goes through, we might be at 10%
From my personal experience, I can tell you that the US tax system is one of the worst in the world. Everything else is great, except for a) dumb taxes (particularly as applied to sales overseas) and b) too much regulation overall. (but to be fair, I am j
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Good point, but 2% yearly growth in the economy will generate enough revenue to pay down all debt.
2% is adorable. That's not enough to cover interest and inflation, let alone pay down any debt, which has been growing at 5% for the last 4 years.
For the record, we are at 4% since last November (and with this tax plan, 6-8% is doable).
Despite Trump's claims of shockingly-high GDP, we're just over 3% this year, which is only a little above average. Since we've had a strong stable economy for the last five years, this is unsurprising. Yes, 6-8% is doable, but it was last done in 1984, accompanied by a notable tax increase and a big increase in debt, as well.
If the infrastructure plan of Trump goes through, we might be at 10%
That's also an entertaining estimate, s
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Firstly, I think you might be confusing growth rates with absolute amounts
No, I'm not. The GDP has grown at 1-4% per year, while national debt has grown by 4-15% year-on-year.
To explain my point: the GDP is much bigger than the National Debt, which is a small fraction of the overall GDP.
Not quite. The national debt is at around $20 trillion dollars, while the US GDP is around $18 trillion per year.
Therefore, the GDP could grow at a much smaller rate compared to the debt, and still completely wipe it out.
Even if the entirety of the GDP growth (which is not actually cash, mind you, but let's pretend it was) was devoted to paying off the debt, we still wouldn't match the debt growth.
An analogy would be Bill Gates donating 1% of his yearly expenses to completely covering 200% of yours. Makes sense?
A better analogy would be someone living paycheck-to-paycheck forgetting about rent when deciding to go to a fancy res
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That's selective reasoning. GWB nearly doubled the national debt and Obama turned around and doubled it again. Continuing the trend is bad, of course, but acting like this is anything other than normal at this stage is just willful ignorance.
Re:They don't want to get tax reform petitions (Score:5, Insightful)
Before assuming you'll be screwed over by the tax plan, I suggest using the nytimes' calculator to see what your tax changes will be. As it stands, virtually no poor or middle class citizens will see a tax increase. https://www.nytimes.com/intera... [nytimes.com] (I myself will see a few thousand dollar decrease in taxes)
As has been very widely reported the tax bill is front loaded with expiring sweeteners for the Middle Class that expire after some years, while the tax cuts for corporations and the rich do not ever expire.
This is more than a bit like "introductory interest rates" on loans or credit cards that jump up after a period of time.
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Before assuming you'll be screwed over by the tax plan, I suggest using the nytimes' calculator to see what your tax changes will be. As it stands, virtually no poor or middle class citizens will see a tax increase. https://www.nytimes.com/intera... [nytimes.com] (I myself will see a few thousand dollar decrease in taxes)
As has been very widely reported the tax bill is front loaded with expiring sweeteners for the Middle Class that expire after some years, while the tax cuts for corporations and the rich do not ever expire.
This is more than a bit like "introductory interest rates" on loans or credit cards that jump up after a period of time.
You don't understand. This tax plan is intended to help the middle class.
It will make them try harder to be richer, so that their tax cuts will never expire.
The Republicans are all about you helping yourself!
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Which is a level of evil you can actually admire, because they can say with a straight face "everyone" benefits and then do their usual screaming of fake news at anything that points out what you just did.
Even better, without ramming through another bill, it starts to get really bad for normal people somewhere around just after the next election when it's likely someone else's problem.
Re:They don't want to get tax reform petitions (Score:5, Informative)
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Case in point, Musk, who clearly kept his cash by funding Tesla, and SpaceX, and Boring Company, and whatever other businesses he's funded/invested in/etc... those nasty rich people like Musk sure do like to hoard their money, creating all those nasty jobs and everything... we wouldn't want more of that, no sirree.
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Yes, we all know "statistics" is merely the plural of "anecdote".
We've been here before - under RWR, under GWB. Both times, we were promised that tax cuts for upper incomes would trickle down and improve middle class incomes too. Both times, it didn't happen. How many times do we have to go through the same old shit?
Now we have Trump trumpeting his "Trump bump", based on the NYSE capitalization. Well guess what, over the same time period both Germany and Japan have outperformed the US on stock market capita
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The Reagan-era tax cuts took the economy from completely moribund 'stagflation' to the greatest peacetime economic boon in history in the space of a few years.
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(Yes, some of them were closures of gigantic tax loopholes, and broadening of the tax base, but it still amounted to the largest peacetime tax increase in history.)
And R's never cut budgets unless it is a program that assists the poor. That precious bomb budget only ever gets expanded.....
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Greatest economic boon in history *while simultaneously driving the biggest threat to humanity's existence into the ground*.
Assisting the poor? Are you really that ignorant? How have the poor ever been assisted by government spending? You know when the US povertry rate went from a steady decline to a flat spot, then a rise? 1965 or so - coincident with The Great Society of social programs. Social spending is a net negative to poor people because of the obs
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Social spending is a net negative to poor people because of the obscene waste/overhead that takes money out of the economy and wastes it on administration.
Liberals care so much about poor people, they create as many as possible.
Walmart is the one benefiting from social spending. They specifically use it as a way to underpay their employees but not lose them. And they need to pay a much bigger share of the pot that goes to this if they can't be made to pay better wages.
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How would that help? Drive up their costs, which raises the cost to the consumer (you don't think they are going to raise wages and keep the prices the same, do you?) - the same people who shop there.
All that taxing the evil corporations does is take even MORE money out of the economy and raise prices. Sounds like you learned economics from Paul Krugman.
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They keep their prices nearly as high as their competition who seem to be able to pay employees and offer full time positions. It's pure profit.
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They can work, and work well.
Yes, too much is wasted on administration. True with any government spending as well.
I still prefer my money spent on society than the next great pie in the sky weapons system.
Plus all I heard for eight years was DEFICIT and the unemployment numbers are 20% not 5%..
Now, its silence on the deficit, and those employment numbers are now true.
D's suck, but R's are downright sociopaths.
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“If the tax reform bill goes through, do you plan to increase investment — your companies’ investment — capital investment,” and requests a show of hands. Only a few hands go up, leaving Cohn to ask sheepishly, “Why aren’t the other hands up?”
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And the rich ended up shouldering even more of the Federal tax load, moving from 18% in 1981 to 28% of all Federal income taxes.
This needs to be adjusted for the fact that the rich were getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Where do you think rich people money comes from? Tax cuts don't mean more jobs - it just means bigger net profits.
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The size of the GDP is really only the size of the wallets of the rich. This is the cause of the increasing class disparity. There is no trickle-down.
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Money comes from creating wealth; if it didn't, we'd still have a sub-$1 trillion GDP.
Inflation is not wealth. Put those all in 1980 USD and see how it stacks up.
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pie = population. Population growth has actually slowed [google.com]. This is the same reason why Social Security is going to end up insolvent. You can't rest the economy on the pyramid scheme of forever-growth.
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US population [multpl.com] went from 229 million in 1981 to 244 million in 1988.That is a ~7% growth. Add that to inflation, and you're at 41%. Yet the GDP grew by 62%. How can that happen, unless GDP and wealth is more than just inflation and people, that it is not a static thing?
In fact, if increases in the US Federal budget was held at just inflation plus population growth, we would grow out of the deficit in a matter of a few years, and out of debt in a few decades. The GDP tends to grow faster - typically by
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US population went from 229 million in 1981 to 244 million in 1988.That is a ~7% growth. Add that to inflation, and you're at 41%. Yet the GDP grew by 62%. How can that happen,
Not a lot of 7 year olds holding down jobs. Birth rates declined most heavily during the Clinton era, and all of those babies have come of age.
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Population growth doesn't have a carry-on impact until those people enter the workforce - did you intentionally misread or just dense?
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Here's how much you didn't read:
1) The population is growing, not declining. The growth rate is declining. That doesn't mean it won't go negative at some point.
2) The effect of the change in population growth takes a minimum of 18 years to bear out.
3) The really big drop started in the 90's. That generation are just now getting settled into their careers while boomers are retiring.
4) We're in unprecedented territory. The last time population growth slowed this much we were in the great depression [huffingtonpost.com]. And
Re:They don't want to get tax reform petitions (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is that the pain comes later. You will see tax reduction in 2019, but it will shrink each year, and within 5-7 years, it will be gone or raise your taxes. It will raise everyone's taxes in 10 years.
Of course, these "temporary" tax cuts will become some campaign rallying cry in 5-7 years, and will be made permanent (see Bush and Obama doing the same for their predecessors "temporary" cuts).
Meanwhile, the tax cuts for the wealthy are permanent from the get go.
So end result? National debt will continue to rise, even faster. Now we just need a good war, and we've repeated the first 3 years of Bush.
Sorry Peasants. (Score:1)
If you're not a member of the Donor Class ® then the Republicans don't give a shit about you.
Nothing of value was lost. (Score:2, Funny)
Idiotic Obama PR gimmick designed to encourage slacktivism and thereby dampen the practical impact of any actual public dissent/movements.
Obsolete in the Trump era since you can just bitch at him on twitter if you ever feel the need to vent some impotent rage.
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Idiotic Obama PR gimmick designed to encourage slacktivism and thereby dampen the practical impact of any actual public dissent/movements.
Obsolete in the Trump era since you can just bitch at him on twitter if you ever feel the need to vent some impotent rage.
With the difference being that Trump himself might actually see the tweet and respond. The WH petition was set up so President Obama could trick his followers into thinking he was paying attention to them.
It was kind of stupid anyway (Score:2)
Going offline to stop petitions (Score:3)
Need to (1) Get network neutrality repeal completed and tax changes finalized, and (2) Then you can start petitioning again, BUT not on either of those two topics which will now have been "settled" by the time the site comes back up.
YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER (Score:3, Informative)
That's really all this is about.
Donald Trump has to be the pettiest motherfucker on the planet.
Re: YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER (Score:1)
The thing costs millions per year to maintain and all Obama did with it was âoesorry we canâ(TM)t do thatâ to pretty much any petition. Itâ(TM)s been a waste of money since itâ(TM)s inception and was a poor attempt to get some re-election PR.
Re: YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER (Score:5, Insightful)
Trump has spent almost $100 million in 11 months just to go golfing at his own golf courses. Don't pretend you care about what things cost when your party is passing a law that will add $1.7trillion to the debt.
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Even the rosiest "dynamic scoring" of the bill by the Treasury Department has the tax bill increasing growth by 0.03 to 0.09 points per year. That's the Trump Treasury Department. For the tax bill to pay for itself, it would require a 0.8 to 0.9% growth bump. To create your "surplus", it would require even a bigger bump in growth, year over year, for 10 years.
Here's a good rundown from the CRFB, which is the org
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Change the GDP growth, and the tax receipt growth changes. The "additional" doesn't matter - the baseline will do it on its own. A total GDP growth of 3.5% will result in a surplus after 4 years. That's the point - assuming we just return to historical GDP growth levels, this tax plan gets us out of deficit spending. Assuming a baseline of 1.6% (or even 2%) and adding on your 0.9% bump - that's still well under the historical average and what we are seeing today. A GDP growth of 3.5% will result in a
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"Current dollar GDP growth" is not the same as real GDP growth.
Look at your own citation. The table below paragraph eight. It shows real GDP growth as 3.3%.
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Republicans can say what they want, but the law they passed has the middle class tax cuts expiring. I don't think anyone wants CBO to score a bill based on Republican promises.
The tax cuts for the rich and corporations do not expire.
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No. Fuck you. You don't get to care if you think those two things are in any way comparable.
Re: YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Trump's claim is that it's just "more than $1m". One single million. For comparison, that's the low estimate for the cost of security for Melania Trump staying in New York City for a single week, or three days if it's the President himself visiting the Big Apple. It's also well under the cost for a single trip for the President to go golfing as his own Mar-a-Lago resort.
Somehow, I don't think cost was the driving factor in this decision.
So what? (Score:1)
$1 mill / yr for a website that accomplished nothing but to fool people into thinking their cause mattered?
Yeah, get rid of it.
$5 says it never actually comes back (Score:5, Insightful)
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Either way this is just another typical dick move from Trump, wanting to erase anything that Obama had anything to do with.
To be fair, the 2020 Democratic president will likely do the same thing to Trump.
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Please, feel free to name one thing petition.org accomplished of substance, other than to make a bunch of people feel like someone was listening to them.
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It provided a very easy method of seeing what was important to the users of the site, and to allow people to share and discuss these issues. Even if nothing ever happened because of the petitions, the record of the petitions and the level of support for each is useful information, surely. I don't know how anyone would be against such information if they think the government should be at all aware of how the people it is supposed to represent think.
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At most I'd expect if it came back in a different form, they'd insist on 'approving' any petitions before actually being posted for people to sign (read as: censorship).
You don't seriously believe the site wasn't already censored do you? It was on the Internet. Trolls gonna troll. 4chan never sleeps. That site has been heavily censored since day one. It had to be.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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Just shut it off and keep it off (Score:2)
The Obama administration rarely ever addressed the petitions that were on there, and this administration isn't nearly as "We the people" focused, its more focused on what they know is best.
If it comes back, we'll end up stuck with the occasional news cycle and indignation by the left about how the administration has failed to listen to the public about a petition. There are plenty of other things we can waste new cycles on that the administration is doing instead of some internet petition.
It seems ... oddly rational (Score:3)
After it was revealed that the FCC comments were largely fake, the White House decides to try to get its petitions website in order. That is a rational response. It must be the Russians behind it. It could not be Trump.
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Ok, let's say that you're the White House and you want to update something. Do they have technology from the 60s? There's no reason for downtime. When Google wants to update their website, they don't shut down for a month, they do it in the background and then update in an instant.
That's a fair point, but you seem to have overlooked one quite large point: Google is competent.
Nice work if you can get it... (Score:1)
Must be interesting to work for the government. Can you imagine on your job if you wanted to tell your customers "hey, the site will be down for 2-3 weeks for maintenance. Check back with us then...." Really?!?!?
Shouldn't that say ""temporarily"" in quotes? (Score:1)
They'll bring the petition site back up two days after Mr. Trump voluntarily reveals his tax returns.
He's LYING to all of us.
He's probably a damn manchurian candidate and the republicans are doing everything they can to help him weaken america to russia's benefit.
I remember when Republicans were opposed to pilling on debt and getting into bed with the russians.
Was it ever of any use? (Score:2)
It seemed to me that if people objected to a plan of theirs they ignored the objections. They only paid attention if it was already something they wanted to do. So it was never really useful, but with Trump in office it had absolutely zero utility.
How long is temporary? (Score:1)
How long is temporary? For humans, it is (at most) 100 years. Temporary for a dam is 700 years. In the universal scale, it is too scary to think of.
It's probably temporary (Score:2)
It's probably "temporary" in exactly the same sense as copyright terms are "limited".