Yeah…boy…After Clinton’s Presidency, it is almost impossible for someone to own a gun anymore! 
I’m not taking sides here, just correcting the math. If 30% of all households consist of a married couple with kids, that doesn’t mean only 30% of all adults are married with kids.
Let’s change the numbers a bit so the math is easier. Suppose we are looking at married vs unmarried households only, and that 50% of households consist of a single person and 50% consist of married couples. That would mean that 66.66% of adults are married, and 33.33% are single.
Nice try bub, but since you don’t have a clue about who I am or what I am all about, I’ll take you comments with a grain of salt. Are you trying to change my mind or just insult me? Yes, I am concerned with myself and my family long before I care about anyone else. Don’t like it? Tough shit.
Regarding the changes in fiscal policy, what I said was…
That means, I “hope for” or " I would like to see" not some sort of a mysterious prediction. But since you like to paint me with your broad brush, I guess I should not be surprised that you missed my point.
Give it up. You are not going to change my mind, nor will you goad me into an argument defending Bush. He doesn’t deserve my defense… nor does Kerry deserve my vote.
Well he tried awful hard. Banning guns by the way they look (1994 Assault Weapon Ban) is not a step towards the easing of gun laws is it? Boxer, Feinstein and Schumer are trying hard to ban even more guns on looks alone as we speak.
I’d say there are some serious threats to civilian gun ownership on the horizon. With Kerry in office, I shudder what might happen. I already saw it in action in 1994.
That’s not very kind, Elvis. JXJohns is merely casting his ballot on the basis of his perceived self-interest. Surely, there is scope for that.
I am jealous of Mr. Bush: there aren’t many Presidents who can get away with cutting long-term taxes and raising long-term spending at the same time, creating deficits into the foreseable future.
News flash: Budget deficits lead to debt. Debt must be paid back. The question is, “Does my share of the tax cut pay for the increase in my share of the debt?”
Admittedly, this is a pretty complicated question, which is why you don’t read about it in the funny papers too often. Still we can get a rough approximation:
Ok, given that most people’s taxes dropped by at least some amount, which groups experienced a decline in their share of their total tax bill? Such groups suffer from higher public debt taken out in their name, but the magnitude of the tax cut offsets that.
(Follow me so far? We’re talking about a government that is borrowing in order to give you a tax cut. There’s no free lunch: somebody will have to pay the bond holders back. “Somebody” means, “The US taxpayer”. The final bill will be pretty large, since tax revenues are currently very low, as a share of GDP. (about 16.3%)
Ok, let’s take 2004 as an example. I’m looking at the change in the share of total taxes that various income groups paid, as a result of the 3 tax cuts.
Well, it’s no surprise that the bottom 80% is paying a higher share of total taxes than they used to. Sure, some got a tax cut, but they also got a larger pile of public debt to go with it.
Surprisingly though, the next 19% also are paying a higher share of total taxes.
It is only the top 1% of all tax payers who are paying a lower share of total government revenue than they used to. This is the donor class, those who really benefited from W’s tax cuts, once you net out the effects of higher government debt. (allbushcut.pdf)
The average income of those in this top 1% group is… $1,137,000 in 2002. That’s income, not wealth. (gwb0402.pdf)
As I see it GWB receives financial backing from the donor class (with annual income exceeding one million bucks), and substantial moral support for the donor class’s cheerleaders: those in who earn a comfortable income exceeding, say, $100,000.
Disclaimer: In reality any analyst must face some imponderables. While it is true that GWB is borrowing money to cut the taxes of the donor class, it is unclear who will end up paying the bill. I presented one approximation to this answer: there are others. Also, some share of the debt will in effect be paid off with economic growth. OTOH, the government could also decide to inflate the problem away…
… and anyone with the stamina to read through all that wins a prize.
Hey guys, at least I tried.
How about 1998, 1999, and 2000, when we had a budgetary surplus?
You’ve also not seen a deficit of this magnitude in your lifetime. That’s what record-breaking means.
I suppose I and my brothers and sisters ought to sit quietly in the back of the bus, like the good little darkies in the '60s did, right? They got all their rights granted to them without the help of activist judges and mayors, yes? (See Loving v. Virginia and Brown v. Board of Education if you don’t pick up on the sarcasm.) Frankly, it ain’t gonna happen without a little civil disobedience.
Sorry for the hijack, Gaspode, but I couldn’t let that pass.
Just certain types like pistols such as their excellent Norinco 1911A1 and semi-automatic rifles like the Norinco MAK90 which was one of the best of it’s type in the industry.
The above was by Executive Order not legislation.
I’m not sure I get you, so I’ll do the math myself. I just wanted to add that it wasn’t 1-15 kids, but 1-5… damn typo.
The Census Bureau counted the number of households to 102 528 000, out of which married couples comprise 54 317 000 or ~53%. The other 47% of the households are then singles in child bearing age, single parents, couples living together but not married, room mates, widow/ers ASF.
Out of the households that consist of married couples, about 25 million are couples with “own children under 18.”
Now, of course this isn’t individuals, but the issue was the family per se, and I was just trying to say that the classic nuclear family isn’t the the most common, when it comes to how people live. In fact, with an average of 3,26 persons per household in the cathegory “married couples with own children under 18” around 81 million of the almost 300 million people in the US live under those circumstances. Of course, a lot of poeple used to live like that, but are now divorced, moved away from home or any other of a number of circumstances that leave them outside the circuit of “married with kids”.
However, and this is my point, it’s so easy to think that something we see in our own lives is the way everyone else live, and therefore the norm. Of course, they will then see gay marriages as somthing very strange, since ‘the majority’, as they perceive it, live as a nuclear family. However, the numbers don’t support that.
The numbers do support that 9,5 million households are single parents, making it now about 28% of all households with kids. So, while a married couple raising kids is still how most Americans grow up, it’s not how most Americans live.
It may not be kind, but is it also inaccurate? He “casts his ballot” on the basis of narrow self-interest, not even *enlightened * self-interest. On the latter basis, one might conclude that one’s own individual prosperity is more likely to be solid and sustainable if general prosperity exists as well. But looting the Treasury works against that.
I don’t think you can keep it in present-day terms only; it’s intergenerational. Debt is a long-term thing when the government does it. Money borrowed and spent today isn’t paid back in just a couple of years. It stays on the books in the form of 15- and 30-year bonds, on which interest has to be paid out of tax revenue taken from the workers of that present year. The tax cut for people who’ll never notice the difference in their lives wasn’t a refund of “their” money; that was already accounted for by the borrowing of previous years. The debt increased because of it. It is to be paid for by our children when they start working, to pay off the T-bills being issued now. And they *will * notice the effects on their own lives.
Oh, and JXJohns, you must know what “expect” means, and shouldn’t be upset with anyone thinking you meant what you said, OK? Since you now say you meant you simply “hope for” a reversal in policy, please explain your basis for such a hope. Wouldn’t you be more likely to help cause the change you want by *not * voting again for the people who’ve created the situation you deplore?
As for your finances, you did say enough about them to allow comments to be made. You don’t like being called on bullshit, you’re on the wrong board.
No. I’d rather see GWB in office for 4 more years, then another conservative elected after him.
I don’t agree with everything he’s done so far, and I violently disagree with a couple of things, but all in all, I’d give his Presidency a solid B score. Which is a significant improvement over the F that every Democrat since 1964 has earned.
Oh yeah. The Senate voted today to extend the Assault Weapons Ban. Bush supported this ban. Cheney was to appear in the Senate if a tiebreaking vote was needed. On what planet does it make sense to oppose Kerry based on your opposition to the AWB?
You still have the greater danger of anti-gun Executive Orders and more legislation predominantly from Kerry’s party making the ban even worse or proposing other bans.
Just pack up the old slippery slope and apply where necessary. Whatever. But as someone who regularly criticizes Bush, I would like to publicly praise both him and Cheney for their support for the AWB extension. For this time at least, they did not do the politically expedient thing and for that they deserve credit.
Hear, hear. I continue to be boggled by most of the responses in this thread, which are along the lines of “yeah, Bush might be running the country into the toilet, but I’m soooooooooooooooo sure that a Democrat President would be far worse, so I’m gonna re-elect George instead.” And that’s all I can say on the topic without drifting into BBQ Pit territory…
I’m sure that Bush and Cheney support the AWB in order to pander to the lunatic fringe of the Left as much as they support the Gay Marriage Ammendment in order to pander to the lunatic fringe of the Right. It’s a long tradition of screwing over someone who will or won’t vote for you no matter what in order to secure votes from those on the fence.
My math point was that you had equated “households” with “individuals”. Maybe you didn’t mean to, but you did (my bolding):
I see the point you are trying to make, but the numbers don’t actually support it. You really can’t exclude from the “nuclear family” group those people in any of these categories:
[ul][li] married couples w/o children but planning to have children[/li][li] married couples w/ adult children no longer living at home (esp where the woman is beyond childbearing age)[/li][li] married couples unable to have children[/li][li] divorced women beyond childbearing age with adult children[/li][li] Widowed men and women with children (either minor or adult)[/ul][/li]
That’s a large % of the population you are excluding from consideration and that makes the term “nuclear family” to be a pretty meaningless term.
Imagine if everyone got married at age 25, had kids before they were 30, and stayed married for the rest of their lives. We could then assume that all adults under the age of 25 and over the age of ~50 did not live in nuclear families. Could we then conclude that the nuclear family was not “the norm”? Of course not.
Well, Bush (and Ashcroft) may restrict your other rights, may lie to you regularly, may create a fiscal trainwreck, but by golly, you’d better vote to re-elect them because they may be marginally better in preserving our right to bear a few sorts of exotic arms.
Sounds logical to me.