WatchThe fatal weakness of the Republican Party is that Republicans want to eliminate Social Security and Medicare.
Millions of elderly people depend on Social Security and Medicare for their survival.
Republicans would be very happy to make the elderly poor eat dog food and go entirely without medical care, because Social Security and Medicare run on tax money, and anything that runs on tax money is GODLESS COMMUNISM to Republicans.
The elderly have been alive a long time (by definition), so they know the score, and they vote in large numbers. They also tend to be racist. I've seen this racism in my own elderly relatives many times. Elderly white people hate having a black president with a Muslim name, and this drives them away from the Democratic Party. They would not have even one tenth as much hatred for Joe Biden as president, even though he's politically the same as Obama.
What it comes down to is whether their hatred for blacks is greater than the hate they will feel when Social Security and Medicare are eliminated by Republicans.
I think I know the answer to that one.
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Menlo Park, CA
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We get 50 lb bags of organic rolled oats for $37.40 with shipping to the pickup point. (They have one place in each city where the truck comes to, and you have to go meet the truck to get your stuff.) That's from Azurestandard.com, which won't tell you the price unless you sign up -- which is a bit scammy, but the oats were good.
elliemae says
How much for oats for human consumption, and organic? If the price is better than $37.40 for human-edible oats, here do you get it?
Back to topic, a great quote I just ran across:
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Patrick says
You say that as if the Democrats will allow i...
We're screwed!!!
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I never thought of it that way. Wow, that opens up pandora's box.
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The Republicans are becoming crazy. And I say that as a Republican.
Having a black president brought out the right wing nutjobs: the Birthers, Palin, Bachmann, Rick Perry, etc. Mitt Romney is the only sane one. (and maybe Ron Paul, but I don't think his radical libertarian ideas are very realistic).
Here's the thing...it's not like Obama is some far-left "socialist" on economic issues. On gay marriage and abortion he could be considered far-left, but I think that's about it.
As far as the health debate, why shouldn't people have to buy insurance if they are going to get "free" heath care in the ER? Not that I'm a big fan of a government mandate to buy a private product. But once we as a society say that ERs MUST treat people regardless of ability to pay, than how can we not mandate that everyone buy insurance to pay for those possible ER visits?
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wthrfrk80 says
Ron Paul isn't even very libertarian. He is further right socially than the mainstream Republican party. He is slightly further left economically than the mainstream Democratic party. Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich are more libertarian than Ron Paul, although their social positions are quite different:
http://www.politicalcompass.org/uselection2008
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wthrfrk80 says
Oh and he wants to frivolously spend other peoples money, whether it is effective or not. And fuck due diligence, and lets give anything "Green industry" related a 500 million dollar check, and not cover the tax payer in the event said company fails.
Yep, Obama has his head screwed on tight, a little to tight to the left.
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Why are you so constantly fixated on the stupid (it was stupid) but totally insignificant solyndra crap. It's a very small scale political scam. Lots of them go on all the time. There are ever so slightly bigger issues than this.
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wthrfrk80 says
non-conservative is not "far-left".
http://www.gallup.com/poll/147662/first-time-majority-americans-favor-legal-gay-marriage.aspx
http://www.gallup.com/poll/147734/americans-split-along-pro-choice-pro-life-lines.aspx
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wthrfrk80 says
people don't get free health care via the ER. This is a myth.
Their life-threatening situations may be stabilized, but this is far from "free care".
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Bellingham, WA
"Millions of elderly people depend on Social Security and Medicare for their survival."
And this is why the Republicans will keep current beneficiaries in the program and then torpedo it behind them.
They know you can't take on AARP head-on.
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Bellingham Bob says
Agreed, that's why you have people who make nonsense statements like "these days people go to the ER for a bad cough." It's not true. They can't really do much for you other than write you a scrip for cough medicine (codeine-containing or otherwise).
If you have a problem with you after you get stabilized by the ER, you generally get checked in to hospital services, which are expensive, but this has nothing to do with ER costs.
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Corning, NY
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Maybe I am mistaken about the ER situation.
At any rate, I can't understand the radical dislike for Obama, at least on economic issues. He hasn't done anything very radical in that sphere...no big tax increases (or cuts), no new "draconian" regulations for the financial sector (which I think we desparately need, particularly the Glass-Stegall concept of separating risky investment banking from regular commercial banking), and no big environmental regulations. If I'm not mistaken, Obama supports natural gas drilling/fracking...not exactly far-left environmentalism.
The "tea party" seems mainly upset over tax and spending (i.e. economic) issues and not social issues. At least that's what their signs usually say. And yet Obama hasn't been all that "liberal" on economic issues, as far as I can tell. Warren Buffet still pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Some of anger may be racially motivated, but then again there wasn't much anger when Colin Powell and Condaleeza Rice were given high positions in the Bush administration.
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A Republican president could propose the EXACT same poliicies as Obama and there would be ZERO outrage from the Tea Party. Where were all the protests when Romney was governor and he implemented RomneyCare? Where were the protests when Bush enacted the bailouts? There were none.
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wthrfrk80 says
IMO any racial anger is directed at "Obama's going to pay my mortgage!" -- ie looking at people who support Obama, not at Obama per se.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36x8rTb3jI#t=10s
People with their act together can harbor a fear that Big Gov is going to take their wealth and "spread it around", in Obama's words.
So I can see how Obama's plan to raise taxes back on those in the top bracket can create a lot of opposition. People making $300,000+ are making a good living but 39.6% income taxes are pretty tough, that's 6% more than currently, so for a $350,000 income that's a $9000 hit.
The "tea party" seems mainly upset over tax and spending (i.e. economic) issues and not social issues
The Tea Party was hijacked by the social conservative element.
Perry's support is strongest among Tea Partiers.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/30/rick-perry-polls_n_942432.html
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HousingWatcher says
Actually the Tea Party got started in 2008 as "Fed UP!" etc.
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=2137602
It was hijacked by the main Republican establishment in 2009.
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"People making $300,000+ are making a good living but 39.6% income taxes are pretty tough, that's 6% more than currently, so for a $350,000 income that's a $9000 hit."
That's why we need more tax brackets. Someone making $251,000 and someone making $25 million should NOT be in the same bracket. Rep. Schakowsky has introduced a bill to make tax increases more fair, witht he following new brackets:
•$1-10 million: 45%
•$10-20 million: 46%
•$20-100 million: 47%
•$100 million to $1 billion: 48%
•$1 billion and over: 49%
The bill would also tax capital gains and dividend income as ordinary income for those taxpayers with income over $1 million. If enacted in 2011, the Fairness in Taxation Act would raise more than $78 billion.
http://schakowsky.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2877&catid=22
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Bellingham, WA
GOP is LOL about all that.
The reason we have so few tax brackets is to keep the independently wealthy protected by the upper middle class.
But it's sad how little that change will fix our problems.
$80B used to be a lot of money. . .
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Bellingham Bob says
I don't think that's quite right. In 1992, we had two brackets, a 28% and a 31%, and Clinton added two higher brackets at 36% and 39.6% (which is 10% higher = 36 + 3.6). For MFJ, Clinton's top two brackets were $140K+ at 36% and $250K+ at 39.6%. Through indexing for inflation, this is now a $212K+ bracket and a $379K+ bracket, but now with the rates at 33% and 35% because of the tax cuts under Bush -- generally a 3% across the board cut for the 28% and higher brackets, with a 4.6% cut for the top bracket.
My impression is that Obama wants to send the $250K bracket (basically the $212K inflation adjusted bracket + a little bit) back to 36% and the higher bracket ($379K + a little bit) to 39.6%, so we're talking about either 3% or 4.6% for the respective groups.
For single filers, the Clinton brackets were at $115K for 36% and also $250K for 39.6%. Inflation adjusted, these are at $174K and $379K respectively. So this would be adjusting the $174K threshold upward to $200K, and presumably setting the same threshold for the 39.6% bracket.
That's in addition to any other suggestions. Back in Clinton's day itemized deductions phased out at some income level. Bush's tax cuts first reduced the phase-out by 1/3, then 2/3, then got rid of the phase-out completely, so now everyone gets their full itemized deduction. One of Obama's suggestions is to limit itemized deductions to 28% even if you're in a higher bracket, and it's not that horrible an idea and is more generous than what we had before Bush.
Historical rates available at: http://www.unclefed.com/IRS-Forms/taxtables/index.html
HousingWatcher says
We used to have many many many more brackets. It's not a bad idea, and it would make sense to bring back some higher brackets. California recently did this by adding a 1% surcharge if you have income above $1M.
Here are the rate brackets for 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1980:
http://www.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Federal%20Tax%20Brackets.pdf
Reducing the number of brackets, as Reagan did is not really "simplification". It's only reducing simplification for people who are bad at simple math. It's easy to read the tax table if you make below $100K, and many people do computerized returns these days anyway.
When tax policy wonks talk about simplification, what they're really talking about is reducing the numbers of exemptions, credits, and other general rules that make us deviate from the stated rates. Usually this means broadening the tax base, since we're really talking about tax preferences.
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The problem with SS/MM is not the Ponzi nature (which is also pointed out by Krugman and Samnuelson, btw) but that they are massive embezzlement schemes.
All social systems that take care of the elderly (forcibly or voluntarily) have to be somewhat "Ponzi" simply because the whole premise is that the elderly are not able to take care of themselves through selling their own services at advanced age. Someone, many someones, have to take care of the elderly when the latter become too frail to take care of themselves. The only real choice is between whether the people get a choice in how they'd save for retirement and who would manage the funds for them, competitively vs. monopolisticly, including competition among charitable organizations for donor funds.
The real problem with SS/MM is massive embezzlement. When they are set up, and whenever they are reformed, the net cash-flow== zero time horizon is pushed out a few decades . . . which demographically means at the time of the founding / reform, there is a huge positive cash flow. That huge positive cash flow is immediately spent in general fund, the largest component of which is always war making.
It is no co-incidence that the presidents who set up or reformed SS/MM also gained the the biggest war chests of the 20th century: FDR, LBJ, and Reagan.
If comparable retirement funds had been managed competitively instead of by the government monopoly, such systematic embezzlement would have long been exposed before being kept in place for 70+ years, and retirees would have placed money elsewhere with more honest competitors.
People are prone to fall for "insider scams": just like in the Madoff case, many investors knew Madoff had to be crooked in order to have that kind of alleged returns, except they thought Madoff was scamming other traders in the market place in the market making process for the benefit of his fund clients.
Citizens in the British Empire, German Empire, Soviet Empire, and recently in the US all thought having their government grabbing some remote resource-rich corner of the world would be beneficial to themselves. Reality always turned out otherwise: just as oil became much much more expensive after having marines standing over the well head in Iraq than letting the Iraqis pump the oil themselves and sell it to us.
Gun-run ("government") schemes depend on people's false hopes of getting something for nothing (through the use of violence and coercion). Ultimately, the joke/mark is usually on the adherents themselves.
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Bellingham Bob says
That, and the fact that many people are starting to realize that taking $9000 out of Bellingham to a different "Washington" (DC), and spend that money on some fancy weapon to blow up mud huts in Afghanistan (then build a fancier mud hut there) is not going to benefit people in Belingham, Washington.
The family in Bellingham making $350k a year has to spend the money somehow, or save the money. If they spend it, it's jobs in Bellingham; if they save it, someone else in Bellingham would be able to borrow it to start a business and create jobs that serve people in Bellingham . . . not the nonsense political machination that takes place on the other side of the continent and upset people all around the world.