Iowa Caucuses are underway

Politics & Elections
221

Best for the country? No. Best for Hillary? Yes. Why do you think the DNC helpfully scheduled as few debates as possible and put them on at the worst times when Hillary was clearly leading? And when Sanders became a threat, suddenly more debates were necessary? It’s all about doing what’s necessary for Hillary to win.

Clinton’s best scenario was a series of largely unopposed primaries that made her look inevitable and a coronation at the convention with the entire party rallying around her as the obvious best choice for president. She could have skated through that with bland speeches guaranteed to keep as much ammunition out of the hands of Republicans as possible.

Her nightmare scenario is a long campaign against a left-wing populist who would force her to tack left to win the nomination, leaving her vulnerable in a general election. I’m familiar with this process - it’s what has been destroying Republican candidates for a long time. The ones who refuse to tack hard right vanish, and the ones that play the game win, and then get hammered for the right-wing positions they were forced to take to win the nomination. Their ‘no tax hikes under any circumstances at all’ campaign pledge comes to mind. That was forced on them by Grover Norquist and the power he had over the ‘base’.

Also, a narrow win against Sanders could result in a convention that’s not so much a coronation as a conflagration like 1968, with hordes of protestors outside the convention halls screaming about social justice and a rigged system. And the absolute worst case: Bernie spinning off a third party run that saps the base and leaves Clinton with moderate Democrats and little else.

222

But what’s probably going to happen is that Clinton loses a little ground in the first couple of primaries, continues to say she wants progress but not a revolution, and handily wins the primary. Then Sanders goes back to the Senate and pushes for his issues from there.

223

Oh, dear, GloryDays. I have terrible news for you: nothing is free. Folks who support Sanders know that, and don’t want free college, free healthcare.

No, as I teach my third graders, government services are paid for using revenue generated (largely) by taxes.

Sanders supporters generally know that, even if some of his opponents find it confusing. Sanders supporters believe that a society with higher taxation, and more robust and equitable government services, is preferable to the alternative. They don’t want free health care or education. They want health care and education to be paid for through taxation, not through employers or through private corporate systems or similar means.

I’m sorry to break it to you so harshly, but I encourage you to learn more about how government services are provided–it’s a fascinating subject, as my students can tell you :).

224

By the way, I recognize the tendency to live in a bubble myself, but I go to great lengths to move out of it when I can. For example, by participating here in a civil fashion. Arguments you think are solid when you’re inside the bubble can come apart or have weaknesses exposed when challenged by real opposition, and that’s the best way to test your understanding and your beliefs. Do you do the same? Do you try to give a fair hearing to Republican ideas? Do you seek out Republican debates and make an honest attempt to understand their point of view? If not, perhaps criticizing others for living in a bubble is not productive.

For example, it seems like the people here honestly think the E-mail scandal is weak sauce, that Hillary did nothing wrong or at most showed slightly poor judgement. On right-wing sites, they’re scratching their heads wondering why she’s not already in jail given the evidence they believe is against her, and there are lots of comments about various internal ‘sources’ in the FBI saying an indictment recommendation is almost certain, and that there will be mass revolts inside the FBI if the Obama justice department sits on the recommendation.

Where’s the truth? Probably somewhere in the middle. My own opinion as someone who really tries hard to read both sides of the issue is that… I have no idea where this will land. Certainly the investigation has been going on a long time and seems to be widening. Word has it that over 150 FBI agents are on this now. That’s not a good sign for Hillary, if true. But I also have a hard time picturing a scenario where the front-runner as the Democratic candidate for President would be jailed or even charged over this - especially when the charges would have to come from a Justice Department on ‘her’ side.

So for me, the real question is not whether she’ll be indicted, fined, or jailed, but whether the FBI report will criticize her judgement strongly enough for it to do her real political damage. They could stop short of an indictment but recommend that she never hold a security clearance again given her lax attitude towards handling state secrets, and that would make it pretty hard to carry out her duties as President.

225

You’ll need to spin the poll numbers, then. Sanders handily beats Trump, Carson, Fiorina, and Cruz. Rubio edges him out, by one percentage point.

How would you like to explain these numbers? I mean, I’m sure you have an explanation; I hardly expect you to say that Sanders could actually stand a chance :). I’m eager to hear the explanation is all.

226

At my caucus, so many new voters arrived that they ran out of ballots. once the candidates or their surrogates spoke they separated us by last names into the corners of the gym: a-c, d-g, j-m and so on. They then read off the names from the registrations that everyone completed and gave ballots only to those who had actually signed in with ID.

The “ballot” was a numbered 3"x3" piece of blank paper, nothing too official. We wrote down the candidate’s name and then dropped them in a bucket on the way out the door.

227

@Sam Stone: I consider myself pretty centrist and I definitely try to stay out of any bubble. I would doubt anyone here thinks of me as right wing or left wing as I really have gone against both ends in various threads/topics.

But this election I have to favour the Dems’ side. I think the Republicans are setting themselves up for a Barry Goldwater style disaster and Clinton has a strong lead in most nomination polls. Thus, Clinton doesn’t have to tack very left and the little she does won’t be disastrous.

Like you, I seriously doubt that Justice Dept or the FBI is going to indict but I go further, they won’t dare do anything more than make strong advice on a change of practice and procedures.

228

Attempting to understand both sides of an issue doesn’t do much if you just average them and assume the truth is somewhere around there. The “pro-Clinton” opinion here is simply much more reality-based. The FBI is not investigating Clinton. Keeping her own server was not illegal when she did. It was precedented that Sec. State’s run their own email servers. As has been pointed out here, the first Sec. State to maintain a @state.gov email address is John Kerry, which is now the requirement under law. It’s extremely unlikely that the basic facts on the ground here are going to change. Impossible? No. But very unlikely.

229

So, all that money that wasn’t doing Jeb(!) any good will go to Rubio? Would that money be coming from the same shrewd analysts who thought he would wrap it up in the first few days? But when Rubio gets it, he will totally do better because…fill this part in for us, Sam.

230

Paid for by taxes on the ‘rich’, mind you. His supporters may understand theoretically that taxes will pay for all this, but they apparently can’t do the math.

You can’t possibly tax the rich enough to pay for Sanders’ schemes. You would have to dig deep into the middle class to raise that kind of money. And then you run into the reality that people soon learn to avoid taxes, which is why even when top marginal rates were 90% government revenue from taxes weren’t really any higher than they were when tax rates were 30%. Government revenue from income tax has been remarkably flat for 50 years.

For example, the top marginal tax rate in 1962 was 91%. in that year, the revenue from income tax was 7.8% of GDP. In 1983, the top marginal rate was 50%, and income tax revenue was higher at 8.2% By 1988, the top marginal rate was only 28%, and income tax revenue was 7.8% of GDP - exactly what it was when the rate was 91%.

By 2013, the top marginal rate was back to 39.8% - ten percentage points higher than in 1988. The revenue? 7.9% of GDP.

How about raising corporate taxes? In 1970 effective corporate tax rates were about 40%. That generated about 3.1% of GDP in revenue. Today, effective corporate rates are down to about 17%, but the revenue in terms of GDP has only fallen to about 2.5%. So even if you want to triple the effective corporate tax rate, you might generate somewhere between 50 and 100 billion in new revenue per year.

According to the Washington Journal, Sanders’ plans would cost $18 trillion over ten years. New revenue from higher corporate taxes and taxes on the ‘rich’ might raise a trillion or even two trillion over that time, if we’re being generous.

Let’s say the paper was way wrong, and the cost of his plan was only half of that. That leaves maybe a $700 billion dollar per year shortfall, after the largest tax hikes we’d have seen in 50 years.

Sanders’ plan of paying for all this by raising top marginal rates on individuals and sticking it to corporate America will not raise anywhere near enough money. So where is the money coming from?

Cites:
Tax Policy Center - historical tax revenue

Tax Foundation - historical U.S. tax rates

231

I would explain those numbers by saying that right now the people paying attention are the party’s respective bases. Polls this far out from an election are almost meaningless.

If you don’t think so, notice that Sanders only beats Ben bleemin’ Carson by .5 points. Does anyone here think Carson is a serious candidate? If not, how do you explain that result?

Right now, name recognition and soundbites that play in the media have more to do with these polls than any serious analysis of their positions. People are responding with feelings, not logic.

But I already said I wasn’t going to predict anything. Maybe Sanders can win. This has been a screwy election year in so many ways I’ve lost count.

And never underestimate the Republican Party’s ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The fact that Trump has more than 5% support among Republicans is baffling to me. So who knows?

232

I hadn’t done a thorough analysis of Sanders’s tax plan. For one thing, I think it’s irrelevant, because he wouldn’t get his agenda through even if he wins.

But your statements are a caricature, not reality. In debates, Sanders hasn’t ruled out tax increases for the middle class. Rather, he’s pointed out that no longer having to buy health care is a good tradeoff. Here he calls for a 6.2% tax (premium) paid by employers + a 2.2% household tax (premium) rate.

Sanders has been pretty clear he thinks higher tax rates are worthwhile. You may disagree. But he’s not hiding the costs.

233

I think you misinterpreted what I’m saying, or perhaps I didn’t express it well. As for your not being in a bubble - fair enough. I should have spoken more generally about people on both sides who stay in their respective bubbles and never hear the other side’s point of view.

Not at all. I’m talking about this specific case: Six months ago, everyone was certain that Hillary would be the nominee, and they planned for it. Her only challengers appeared to be an unpopular mayor of an underperforming blue-state city and a crazy old socialist coot. Now, she’s in a real run.

Normally, you could say that a tough nomination fight is good for the candidate as it forces them to hone their policies and tighten their rhetoric before the general public really pays attention. And I did say that a strong nomination process is good for the country, and it is.

But in these times it’s not necessarily good for the politician who is a front-runner. Today, when the ‘base’ in each party has moved so far to the left or right, it means even more so than in other years the real trick is to tack far enough towards your base to get the nomination, while not adopting positions that will alienate the middle in the general election. That’s becoming increasingly difficult to do, and Clinton was hoping to avoid that trap.

234

O’Malley was a two term governor after his mayorship, fyi. And maybe (I’d have to look) he was unpopular but he wasn’t defeated. He went straight from mayor to governor.

235

Uh, no. Young voters have a distaste for pointless foreign adventurism because right-wingers want to return to the glory days :wink: of the Cold War and want another Evil Empire to fight. (No, it was ALL a conflicted, costly, wrong adventure. Problem is, it started decades before 9/11)

This woman has had “scandal swirling around her” for twenty years. Do you think anybody outside the right-wing circle-jerk blogosphere gives a crap?

Bernie winning the election does not solely hinge on the “millenials in college.” Minorities are not going to see the GOP nominee as the White Knight :rolleyes: this cycle, and I doubt most of them are going to stay home like they tend to do in the midterms (which, frankly, is what the GOP is not only hoping for, but trying to actively engineer…)

At least 7 million of that was people tuning in to see the GOP pie-fight that has occurred in the last three elections cycles.

…are intelligent people talking about the issues facing the country. Important, but not exactly barn-burning television.

236

(1) It is quite likely that the revenue stayed about roughly the same by design and not the magic of voodoo economics. In particular, I think that when the marginal rates were very high, there were a lot more tax loopholes. The tradeoff was to lower marginal tax rates but getting rid of a lot of the loopholes.

(2) A better breakdown would also look at the percentage of income that fell into those highest tax rates. If you have very high marginal rates but only a small percentage of the total aggregate income (e.g., few people) subject to them, then the rates won’t cause very large changes in tax revenue. Is Bernie Sanders really claiming that he can dramatically increase the income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP just by taxing the rich more?

(3) I think few people would argue that very high marginal tax rates like 91% yield diminishing returns. (Just like very few would claim that we can raise the minimum wage as high as we want without ever having a significant negative effect on employment.) However, that doesn’t mean that raising the highest marginal tax rate from whatever it is now (39.6%) to, say 50%, will be subject to much diminishing returns. (Remember, by the way, that the incomes in that tax bracket don’t face the additional marginal rate tax for social security that really need to be factored in when looking at the lower tax brackets.)

237

I am not a Republican (or Democrat), and I don’t think the email issue is nothing. It’s a long way from being the most important thing, but it’s not nothing.

238

Guilty as charged. I have to admit that I probably watched (or read the NYTimes live blogging for) more of the Republican debates than the Democratic ones. I guess I’m trying to decide which one to fear and loathe the most. :stuck_out_tongue:

239

The 2.2% payroll tax is the only tax I could find in his proposal that could be said to be born by most workers, and that’s to replace their current health care costs. The only other tax that applies to the middle class is a tax that he says will cost the average worker only $1.61 per week, but will totally fund a new family leave act that will give people 12 weeks per year of family and medical leave. The carrot is bigger than the stick in those cases. No one is being asked to bear a larger burden.

The biggest problem with his proposals is that he seems to think you can raise corporate taxes, taxes on financial activity, payroll taxes, and other taxes that altogether result in a tax increase of almost a trillion dollars per year, and that this will have no effect on economic growth or job creation. That’s the real fantasy. If that happened, U.S. federal corporate and personal taxes would jump from the current value of about 10% of GDP to about 16% of GDP. Just for federal taxes.

There is no precedent for that in the post-WWII historical record of the United States. Not when top marginal rates were 91%, not when the effective corporate rate was more than double what it is now. In fact, the only time in US history when taxes were that high was in the last two years of WWII, and that was very temporary - by 1949 taxes were back down to just over 9% of GDP. And that was a time when the state tax burden on people was much lower and the U.S. economy was booming due to post-war effects.

You’re right - most of this would never happen - even if he’s elected. But do most of his supporters understand that he’s either lying to them or living a fantasy?

240

The 6.2% tax is also born by most workers. That it’s paid by employers is not material.

I’m not a Sanders supporter, so if you want to argue if his proposals are good policy, I’ll let one of those guys take over. My concern is that you represent his proposals correctly, rather than parroting this meme that Sanders is telling his supporters that they’ll get health care and education and cookies for free and never ever have to pay one thin little dime.