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| quote: | Originally posted by The17sss
If you're going by that standard, then you must REALLY love Biden, considering he's 99th out of 100 in the senate for wealth, at a whopping $150K net worth. But that doesn't matter right? Then why should the number of houses someone owns matter? |
How many houses does the average American own?
Is $150K net worth a lot? Sure, but can most Americans relate to two guys owning 13 houses and completely out into the wealthy stratosphere or someone a wee bit closer in income?
| quote: | | And McCain's wife owns them through her personal trust she had before even meeting McCain. |
And he is married to her, right?
Oh wait, that's right, they signed a pre-nup. All things are better now and it doesn't count.
Incidentally, if McCain became POTUS, he would be the first POTUS with a pre-nup, wouldn't he? Just a side note thought.
| quote: | | McCain will be taking on the duty of relating to the commmon man, something the haughty Obama cannot. |
Yeah, that darn Obama never knew what it was like to grow up poor, to struggle in life and earn his keep where he's at now. His life story would never sell very well to the "common" American.....
...oh wait, shit....
And McCain, that hard-nosed man, comin' back from 5 years in the POW camp, happy to see his disfigured wife, and complete his life with her and their kids, forever the "family" man with good ol' Republicanish "family" values and would never consider leaving his family behind for another woman, never consider leaving his disfigured wife behind for some rich multi-millionaire girl a coupla decades younger than he, while her money would help prop up his name and political campaign forever, living in 8 or 9 different homes and flying around on a private jet.
No sir, that McCain knows full well how to deal with the common American, knows full well just how hard the economy hits the majority of us hard, especially those under $5 million to which he correctly defines as the Middle Class.......
....oh wait....dammit!!!
| quote: | | It's Romney's business and economic strengths that he'll be focusing on. |
God I hope so.
| quote: | | The man got elected governor of Massachusetts as a Republican for god's sake... doesn't that worry you at all? |
Umm, not really. In fact, kinda sounds like a healthy portion of you Republicans are a wee bit worried about Romney yourselves, especially those darn Christian folk. Hey, don't blame me for that one - you guys chose to lie in the same bed as those fucknut whackjobs, so when they come back to bite you in the ass with their demands of keeping things nice and Christian in the party, I hope you don't act surprised.....
| quote: | Edit: Is this how the middle class will feel "related to" by Obama when they get reminded of this quote of his in the NYT Magazine article from yesterday? -----> "If you talk to Warren [Buffett], he'll tell you his preference is not to meddle in the economy at all -- let the market work, however way it's going to work, and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it. That way you're not impeding efficiency, and you're achieving equity on the back end."
Sounds like an awesome idea... tax the heck out of people on the back end and redistribute it. Robinhood for president! |
If memory serves, I seem to have seen others here telling you that you have a propensity for quoting a bit out of context. Considering one of your highest mentors is Rush Limbaugh, I must say I wouldn't be terribly surprised. Here's a bit more to the article just prior to that quote that gives a little better backdrop on Obama's stance with taxes. I do hope you read it:
| quote: | So over the same period that the rich have been getting much richer before taxes, their tax rates have also been falling far faster than the rates of any other income group.
Dating back to Reagan, Republicans have packaged tax cuts on high earners with more modest middle-class tax cuts and then maneuvered the Democrats into an unwinnable choice: are you for tax cuts or against them? Obama, however, argues that this is the moment when the politics of taxes can be changed.
To do this, he is proposing tax cuts for most families that are significantly larger than those McCain is offering, along with major tax increases for families making more than $250,000 a year. “That’s essentially a major part of our economic plan,” Obama said. “But it’s also a political message.” Economically, he is trying to use the tax code to spread the bounty from the market-based American economy to a far wider group of families. Politically, he is trying to drive a wedge through the great Reagan tax gambit.
The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.
If there is a theme to the Obama tax philosophy, it’s that the tax code is not quite as progressive as you think it is. Most of the public discussion about taxes tends to focus on the income tax, which taxes the affluent at a considerably higher rate than anyone else. But the income tax doesn’t take the biggest bite out of most families’ annual tax bill. The payroll tax does. And even as the federal government has been reducing income taxes over the last few decades, it has allowed the payroll tax, which finances Social Security and Medicare, to creep up. That’s a big reason that overall tax rates for the bottom 80 percent of earners have not fallen as much as rates for the affluent.
Obama’s second-most-expensive proposal, after his health-care plan, is the equivalent of a $500 cut in the payroll tax for most workers. (It is actually a credit that is applied toward income taxes based on payroll taxes paid.) In a speech this month in Florida, he proposed that the cut take effect immediately, in the form of a rebate, to stimulate the economy. For most workers, it would be the first significant cut in the payroll tax in decades, if not ever.
The other way that he would cut taxes involves a series of technicalities. But since the campaign began, Goolsbee has been arguing that those technicalities offer one of the best glimpses of how Obama thinks about the tax code. Right now, several big tax breaks that sound broad-based — like those for child care and mortgage interest — don’t always benefit middle-income and lower-income families. Another example is the Hope Credit for college tuition, a creation of the Clinton administration. Obama wants to more than double the credit, to $4,000. More to the point, he would make it “fully refundable.” As a result, a family with an income-tax bill of $3,000 wouldn’t merely have that bill eliminated; it would also receive a $1,000 check. Increasingly, the income-tax system becomes a way to transfer money to poor families.
All told, Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing. These tax cuts are really the essence of his market-oriented redistributionist philosophy (though he made it clear that he doesn’t like the word “redistributionist”). They are an attempt to address the middle-class squeeze by giving people a chunk of money to spend as they see fit.
He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.
It’s hard not to look at that figure and be a little stunned. It would represent a huge tax increase on the wealthy families. But it’s also worth putting the number in some context. The bulk of Obama’s tax increases on the wealthy — about $500,000 of that $800,000 — would simply take away Bush’s tax cuts. The remaining $300,000 wouldn’t nearly reverse their pretax income gains in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, their inflation-adjusted pretax income has roughly doubled.
To put it another way, the wealthy have done so well over the past few decades, with their incomes soaring and tax rates plummeting, that Obama’s plan would not come close to erasing their gains. The same would be true of households making a few hundred thousand dollars a year (who have gotten smaller raises than the very rich but would also face smaller tax increases). As ambitious as Obama’s proposals might be, they would still leave the gap between the rich and everyone else far wider than it was 15 or 30 years ago. It just wouldn’t be quite as wide as it is now.
VI. Is He a European-Model Neoliberal?
Even some Republicans have started to wonder whether the Reagan strategy on taxes has run its course. Earlier this year, two young conservative writers, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, came out with a book called “Grand New Party.” Their basic thesis is that the Republican Party, for all its successes over the past generation, has failed to cement its majority because of economics. If the party’s agenda continues to revolve around tax cuts that mostly benefit the well off, the book argues, Republicans risk allowing a generation-long Democratic majority, like the kind that ruled the country from F.D.R. to L.B.J. To avoid this outcome, the authors offer an agenda of what they call Sam’s Club Republicanism, focused on the working class.
For now, the people running the party, be they in the Bush administration or the McCain campaign, evidently do not share this concern. They have responded to Obama’s tax proposals with the same kind of attacks that the party has been using since the 1980s. First, they have argued that Obama’s tax increases would end up hitting every income group. Strictly speaking, this is true. Obama’s increase on the corporate income tax would ultimately fall on all stockholders, even poor ones. In practical terms, though, most families own little enough stock that the other features of the tax plan would matter far, far more. That’s why the Tax Policy Center numbers, which include the corporate tax increase, come out as they do.
The second criticism is that Obama’s tax increases would send an already-weak economy into a tailspin. The problem with this argument is that it’s been made before, fairly recently, and it proved to be spectacularly wrong. When Bill Clinton raised taxes on upper-income families in 1993, his supply-side critics insisted that he would ruin the economy. As we now know, Clinton presided over the longest economic expansion on record, the fastest income growth most workers had experienced in a generation and the disappearance of the federal-budget deficit. His successor, Bush, then did exactly what the supply-siders wanted, cutting upper-income tax rates, and the results were much worse. Economic growth wasn’t quite as strong or nearly as widespread, and the deficit returned. At the very least, Clinton’s increases did no discernible economic damage. Rubin, citing academic work on tax rates, made the case to me that rates under an Obama administration would not be nearly high enough to stifle innovation. |
Given that back-drop to the upcoming quote, that hardly does any favors to your insinuation. In summary, he will be raising the taxes on those above $250,000, while keeping them nice and low for everyone else (you know, those darn "Middle Class" folk that McCain seemingly has a difficult time relating to). What's more, Obama's tax cuts are EVEN MORE of a cut than McCain!
Gosh, and to think a Democrat would out-cut the taxes over a Republican!
But on to the quote:
| quote: | | He said it made him think of Warren Buffett, an Obama supporter, who, if anything, might argue that he wasn’t going far enough to change the tax code. “If you talk to Warren, he’ll tell you his preference is not to meddle in the economy at all — let the market work, however way it’s going to work, and then just tax the heck out of people at the end and just redistribute it,” Obama said. “That way you’re not impeding efficiency, and you’re achieving equity on the back end.” He continued by saying that he thought there was some merit in Buffett’s argument. But, he said: “I do think that what the argument may miss is the sense of control that we want individuals to have in determining their own career paths, making their own life choices and so forth. And I also think you want to instill that sense of self-reliance and that what you do will help determine outcomes.” |
The discussion that led up to this paragraph was in regards to Obama's plan (actually the plan of many Democrats) to raise the ceiling on those being payroll taxed for SS/Medicare benefits from $102,000 to $250,000, in order to help the solvency of SS in the future. It's the argument of McCain and his advisor Holtz-Eakin that this is not fair on those in the higher bracket since they won't necessarily be receiving any more benefits out of that. If you would like to get into an argument specifically in regards to SS solvency and the supposed unfairness that this ceiling cap may entail, that's fine, but perhaps another thread may be needed. In any case, the argument was based on a book that was critiquing a more philosophical viewpoint rather than a substantive one of Obama's. I can't say I agree with it in it's entirety based on what the article has given, but given the entire article in complete context it's again hard to draw away from the fact that Obama's tax cut plan is more aggressive than McCain's, and the group that will have taxes raised are those above $250,000 while those below will continue to have their taxes cut.
I'm curious as to your thoughts on those two main points that the author of that article discusses.
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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WOW! How low can the far left get? I mean whats the plan here... to make middle class america resentful of the wealthy? Is this how we are going to solve all of our problems? By making the middle class resentful, is this the type of divise politics we want?
