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Discuss the US Presidential Election & the Economy
A number of folks have been submitting topics that indicate that they want to have a serious discussion on the issues surrounding this election. Since we're under a week now, I've decided to run a series of discussion stories to give you guys a place to discuss the issue. So here's the first one: The Economy. It's the biggest topic these days, eclipsing even war as the most important issue to most Americans. But how will that affect your choice next week? And why?
Lots of money moving around. If you're quick you can catch some of it - or lose everything.
Me, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing - go to work and pay my bills and tough it out.
The election? I'll be glad when it's over and everybody can shut up about it. Whoever wins is in for a lot of stress.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget
The President writes & submits the budget, Congress votes on it, amends it, votes some more, etc., then sends it back. Then the President signs it into law.
The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you look at the graphs and the comments, you should it *is* adjusted for inflation.
I will vote for McCain.
I don't trust the Dems not to raise taxes on everyone. Obama already said Social Security was going up, that's a tax increase on all working people. Every time the Dems have said they were going to raise taxes on the "rich" in the last 36 years (my working life), my taxes have gone up. I have yet to make $50K in a year. The last thing this country needs is having the top 3 spots in the hands of Obama, Reed, and Pelosi, I have trouble imagining anything worse.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
groups that are polling strongly pro-Obama (e.g., active duty military...
http://www.militarytimes.com/static/projects/pages/081003_ep_2pp.pdf
You'll notice only one mostly blue pie-chart out of the 15 on the page, then you can look at the heading for the obvious reason behind the result.
Additionally, it was mainly Democrats in the late 90s who pushed for banks to give more risky loans, which is one of the major causes of the economic turmoil today (it's certainly not the only cause).
I'm not sure precisely what you're referring to here, but the claim that the Community Reinvestment Act caused this mess has been thoroughly debunked, largely because most of the subprime mortgages were made by relatively unregulated mortgage brokers not regulated by the CRA, rather than banks. Also, the rate of subprime lending for loans made to satisfy the CRA was comparable to the rate for loans in other locations.
If you are instead referring to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, that was created and pushed through Congress by Republicans, and signed by Bill Clinton, so both parties would be guilty there.
I am officially gone from
I would like to point out that the Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor of the bailout that has led to the government taking over several large financial institutions, while the Republicans generally opposed it. Obama would also like to increase the involvement of government in the healthcare system, while McCain wants to more-or-less leave it intact.
Aside from President Bush's actions, the Republican party generally favors far less government than the Democrats. I think your philosophical reservation against Democrats is still pretty much intact.
Help find a cure for cancer. Join the [H]orde
They don't seem to be in the banking industry either...
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
...acting as a mouthpiece for a socialist agenda
You don't even know what Socialism is. *Barak Obama* is to the right of most right-wing parties in the rest of the world. Only in the US would a center-right candidate get called 'Socialist'.
History has shown that when one party has control of the entire legislative and executive branches of our government, the economy suffers.
What, like at the moment. Oh, wait...
"Under President Clinton the growth in debt ceased, but note the radical change in direction since George W. Bush entered office"
I notice that the radical change in direction started while Clinton was still in office.
Should we also mention that Congress, not the President, makes the budget.
From TFA: "In 1993 President Clinton inherited the deficit spending problem and did more than just talk about it; he fixed it. In his first two years, with a cooperative Democratic Congress, he set the course for the best economy this country has ever experienced. Then he worked with what could be characterized as the most hostile Congress in history, led by Republicans for the last six years of his administration. Yet, under constant personal attacks from the right, he still managed to get the growth of the debt down to 0.32% (one third of one percent) his last year in office. Had his policies been followed for one more year the debt would have been reduced for the first time since the Kennedy administration. Contrary to the myth fostered by our right-wing friends, under a Democrat, revenue increased and spending decreased."
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Nope. One says "we'll just give people money, that'll fix it!" and the other says "we'll just cut taxes on businesses, that'll fix it!"
If you go to their websites you can download more detailed policy proposals.
For an independent comparison of their plans for the economy in general, and more specifically taxes and spending, you might want to try this article and this article.
Obama has already added a stipulation that you cannot simply get a rebate if you do not have a paycheck. This will be for payroll taxes only. So don't worry, despite republican talking points to the contrary, this isn't welfare for the non-working. It's a tax cut targeted to working middle class, for a change. Why is it that tax cuts targeted on big businesses and the wealthy never get labeled as redistribution of wealth? And yet that has been precisely what we have been doing for years.
It's probably more-efficient to let the IRS handle the rebates, rather than to have a separate Welfare department.
You are correct. The "earned-income tax credit" (or socialist, welfare, communism as it is known on the far right) is a "tax rebate" for lower income people who pay most of their "taxes" as Social Security and Welfare contributions rather than as income tax. Dating back to 1975 and updated by Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton, it is widely acknowledged as one of the most effective anti-poverty programs ever established (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_Income_Tax_Credit#Impact)
But, I'd like to respond to what will, I'm sure, become flood of libertarian posts by people who managed to pick themselves up by their parent's bootstraps. Government hands out billions of dollars of welfare a year and most of it does NOT go to struggling citizens. Most of it is wrapped up in corporate tax credits or in under-valued water, mining, forestry, radio-frequency, grazing and other leases that convert public property into private profits. I'll take the libertarian "The government is not your daddy" position seriously when the libertarians start talking about the real welfare system.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
Why can't they just cut wasteful, federal spending....and let ALL tax payers keep more of their own money?
It's tough to believe but there just isn't enough waste to cut, at least not the easy kind. The federal deficit is projected to be $438 billion this year, and that was before the government started the massive bank bailouts. Combine that with deferred infrastructure maintenance and the baby boom starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare and things are not good.
Even if all pork were cut from House bills, it's still not enough to balance the budget. It's fun to talk about cutting a bridge to nowhere, but these kinds of numbers are going to require both serious spending cuts and higher taxes.
Higher taxes, cuts to major spending areas (military and civilian) as well as cuts to entitlement programs are going to happen, regardless of who gets in office.
At the bottom of this first page of the report is a graph showing what "most" actually is, 70%. So only 30% of US corporations generally pay ANY tax in a given year according to the GAO.
So again, why shouldn't we be clamouring for rich people and corporations to be paying up like the rest of us?
Minus the last 8 years, spending has always gone up when Democrats were in Congress, and down when Republicans were. Congress spends the money, not the President.
That said, however, it is true that the Republicans since 2000 have totally failed to live up to almost everything they have purportedly stood for in the past 50 years. The Democrats have done a good job of standing up for their ideas, or at least the stupid ones.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
And it's set too low.
They set it back when $20,000 was a living wage. Now $40,000 is a living wage and $20,000 is massive poverty.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The $5k credit vs. deductibility is roughly revenue neutral, but has a high likelihood of lowering health care costs. There is STILL a reason for employer run plans, because under McCain's plan, it is exempt from payroll taxes, which at 15% combined employer/employee, is pretty substantial.
If you carry a "normal" plan, $12k/year, at the 28% tax bracket, results in a new tax liability of $3,360... so when you fill our your return, you own an extra $3,360 on your extra $12k in taxable earnings, but get a credit of $5000, so you save $1,640 per year.
The way this is "revenue neutral" is that people with expensive plans and higher tax rates would actually lose out (but they do better in other parts of McCain's plan). If you are a low income worked, right now, with a crappy health plan and 15% tax rate, you'd do great with McCain. $6k plan, means $900 in tax liability, less a $5000 credit means a decreased tax liability of $4100, and I believe that the health insurance credit is refundable (because it goes directly to the insurance company as a payment mechanism).
If you are a rich guy with a super-premium plan that covers everything, you have a $24000 plan at the 35% tax rate you owe $8400 in taxes, get a $5000 credit, and owe an extra $3400. The theory is that the rich guy who was paying $24k for an overpriced plan because he did it inside his company to avoid taxes (it cost him less than $16k pre-tax because of his rate), is likely to switch to a $12k plan now, paying more "out of pocket" since there is no longer an incentive to pay everything in premiums.
The McCain effort is poorly explained, probably not understood by the Senator, but focused on controlling medical costs by removing the incentive to over insure.
Adjust it for inflation and see what it looks like.
It is adjusted for inflation. Also check this graph with a lot more variables blah
The polls are so variable it's hard to know which are accurate. Some show Obama up by 14. Others show him up by just 1. The difference lies in differing assumptions about who is likely to turn out to vote on Election Day. See for example, this explanation.
If turnout is demographically similar to previous elections, polls show it will be a very close election. If as some pollsters expect, we have larger-than-usual turnout among blacks and the young, then Obama will probably have a large margin of victory.
I agree that the media can often be morons. But it's not stupid to question the accuracy of the polls, given how hugely dependent they are upon what are little more than guesses about voter turnout.
I must revise my statistics. According to the IRS, for 2006 (latest year available online) the numbers look about like this:
AGI %returns %income %taxes
1MM and up 0.3 15.1 26.7
500k-1MM 0.4 5.0 9.2
200-500k 2.2 11.1 17.3
100-200k 8.8 20.0 20.4
50-100k 21.6 26.4 18.0
$1 to 50k 66.7 22.4 8.4
So the top 2.9% of returns by AGI earned over $200k, totaling about 31.2% of all wages, and paid 53.2% of all income taxes.
(BTW, man I hate Slashdot's lack of support for the table tag!!!!)
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
It amazes me how little most U.S. citizens know about their government, and how little they care. Politics is certainly not a primary interest of mine, but I educate myself about what's happening.
Rolling Stone magazine has an article about vote stealing in 2008: Block the Vote: Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president? That article is also available as a PDF file.
The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has another article: Voter Suppression Incidents 2008. A PDF is available.
Neither of those articles discuss how votes are stolen using computer fraud. Slashdot has run 17 stories in 2007 and 2008 about computer vote fraud and electronic voting, listed here in reverse order by date:
West Virginia Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes.
Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?
Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
The Cost of Electronic Voting
Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad
All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
Judge Voids Un-Auditable California Election
Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling
A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill
U.S. To Certify Labs For Testing E-Voting Machines
U.S. Bars Lab From Testing E-Voting Machines
Really? Did you use Obama's own calculator?
So, Greenspan who ran the government monopoly of money supply, was a libertarian? I had no idea.
... However, when questioned in relation to this, he has said that in a democratic society individuals have to make compromises with each other over conflicting ideas of how money should be handled. He said he himself had to make such compromises, because he actually believes that "we did extremely well" without a central bank and with a gold standard.
Actually, yes. Greenspan is well-known to have been a lifelong libertarian. The man was a close personal friend of Ayn Rand, for gods sake. Wikipedia:
During the 1950s, Greenspan was one of the members of Ayn Rand's inner circle, the Ayn Rand Collective, who read Atlas Shrugged while it was being written. Rand nicknamed Greenspan "the undertaker" because of his penchant for dark clothing and reserved demeanor. Although Greenspan continues to advocate laissez-faire capitalism, some Objectivists find his support for a gold standard somewhat incongruous or dubious, given the Federal Reserve's role in America's fiat money system and endogenous inflation.
This is why it was shocking to many when Greenspan made the concession before Congress last week that his ideological model of how the markets worked was flawed.
Where Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go?
42% of the budget goes to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, but presumably most of that money came from direct contributions not income tax.
Dividing your tax among the remainder:
Of course, they are required by law to turn in all registrations they receive. They are only allowed to flag registrations that they have reason to believe are fraudulent.
Fanatically anti-fanatical