Back to my earlier point, do you think JFK knew that Joe Sixpack existed? Why? Because he was a Dem and wanted social welfare programs?
It seems that rich people only get credit for “understanding” middle class people when they propose hand outs.
Yeah, handouts like the consumer bill of rights or Executive Order 11063? Handouts like cutting income taxes? Or perhaps it may have been basic empathy?
I think the concern is that Romney is the kind of rich person who will give handouts to rich people.
Will you stop that already? They’re NOT “rich people.” They are “job creators.”
Thing is, JFK or FDR came across as comfortable in their own skin and station -and it was not expected of them to have to pretend to be common folks.
Well, it was pretty oblivious of whoever brought it up to think a recovering alcoholic was a good guy to have a beer with… but yes, we have to give up on this alleged “standard”, it does not serve us well.
my fav. part of wmr’s story was his laughing. i kept waiting for him to say: “ahhhh, good times; good times” after the chuckling.
michigan to wisconsin… usa to asia. romney’s are certainly movers, havn’t heard any stories about shaking.
Shaking?
Communalist!
And even most of the fire-ers will tell you that having to fire someone is the suckiest part of their job.
It’s telling how the left thinks that “only” taxing someone at a 35% rate instead of a 38% rate, and letting a person keep that 3% of their income that they earned is somehow a “handout.”
Is their whole life a handout? Since the government doesn’t confiscate his wealth by force, is all of Romney’s money a handout? What about my your your money?
Maybe I misunderstood you and Romney is proposal social welfare programs to rich people. If it is only tax cuts, I don’t see how that can be construed as a “handout.”
In a system to which we all contribute in some form or another, and all benefit in some form or another, I do not think that any government programs constitute “handouts” to anyone.
I was going to mention FDR. He certainly came across as an aristocratic person, who had been raised to wealth. But he also conveyed the impression that he understood that less wealthy people existed, and that he gave a damn about them. Even if it was all a facade (and I don’t really think it was), he at least made people think he understood them and cared about them. So far Romney has made people think that he just doesn’t get that most of the country is not in the top 1%. I don’t see how that approach helps him at all.
Like all Republicans, Romney opposes the Buffet Rule, which says that a CEO should not pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. In other words, he doesn’t want to shut down the carried interest loophole. Never mind the billions in subsidies the fossil fuel industry receives.
But hey, maybe that’s not a handout. Maybe the rich deserve lower tax rates than the plebians. They certainly want to persuade us of that, judging from the millions of dollars they pour into Super-Pacs and the like.
Look, it you have a great idea and build a factory, well god-bless. I’m just saying that you should pay more in taxes than your secretary to give the next kid a shot. (Me and Elizabeth Warren, who I am paraphrasing).
It’s Newt Gingrich that has handouts for the rich in the form of earmarks… More than any other seat apart from NASA and Washington, IIRC.
Roosevelt came from a wealthy background but he was not phenomenally rich. In 1932, his personal wealth was around three million dollars (the approximate equivalent of about fifty million in 2012 dollars). In fact, Hoover was richer and his personal wealth was around six million in 1932. (Hoover was a self-made millionaire and was one of two Presidents - the other was Kennedy - who did not accept any pay for the office.)
FDR had Eleanor. Honestly, I suspect he’d have come across as more of an aristocratic prick - especially since they were trying to hide his wheelchair which left him unable to do things like work a soup kitchen. But Eleanor could.
That’s great and all, but do you realize how many of those factories won’t get built if you raise capital gains taxes from 15% to 35 or 38%? The whole purpose of having a lower capital gains tax is to encourage that type of investment.
And, the other thing is that the corporations already pay that higher tax rate on the profits they make. Then when the owners get their cut in form of dividends, they are taxed again. It might not go on Buffett’s personal tax form, but his corporations are already paying that tax rate. Nobody gets a “free ride.” This whole Buffett pays less taxes than his secretary is absurd. Buffett pays more in taxes per year than his secretary makes in a lifetime. Only in leftist doublespeak does that translate into “less” in taxes.
After a dozen years of historically low tax rates, how many of these new factories are being built? I haven’t been following the unemployment rate, but with taxes as low as they’ve been recently, we must have nearly full employment in this country, right? I mean, with over a trillion dollars in their coffers, companies must find it incredibly hard to find anyone who needs a job so they can staff those factories they’re building.
There are many other factors that come into this besides tax rates. The worldwide economic pullback has a lot to do with the lack of investment. Uncertainty over future tax rates and health care expenses contribute a lot as well.
But surely you understand the risk/reward aspect of investment. If you draw a salary that is guaranteed money (as guaranteed as anything else in life) so if you pay 35% on that, as high as that is, you wouldn’t turn down a job because you know that money is coming.
If you invest in a new business, you might make gazillions or you might lose everything. You decide on whether to invest based on many factors, not the least of which is your potential or expected profit. If the government comes out today and says, “Oh, BTW, your taxes on this venture just went from 15% to 38%” that will certainly cause many projects, that would otherwise be feasible, to be scrapped at their inception.
In theory the 15% rate makes sense. It used to work. Now though, it seems that the people who make their money that way don’t invest in new factories. Instead they make short-term investments that basically involve shuffling money around. It’s a shell game, and eventually someone gets stuck with an empty shell – as was seen in 2007. Building factories and employing people is good. Slicing and dicing monetary instruments and then getting out before the inevitable implosion isn’t.
These so-called ‘job creators’ don’t create jobs. They create wealth for themselves by screwing the next person. Two-thirds of my working life I’ve worked for large corporations. They are more concerned about giving profits to their investors than expanding their operations. Need to pay investors? Easy! Just fire half of your staff! The actual job creators are the people spending the money – the consumers and the employees. Nobody is going to build a new factory and hire tens or hundreds or thousands of people if there is no market for their product. And there will be no market for their product unless consumers have money. And consumers have less money when they have to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than those who use their wealth to make themselves more wealthy instead of employing people as they should.
Mitt Romney and the others say that if only they didn’t have to pay taxes, everyone would be employed. But low tax rates have been proven over the past dozen years to not reduce unemployment. And that dozen years goes beyond the recent worldwide slow-down. Remember when Reagan (who raised taxes, BTW, and in 1986 advocated the ‘Buffet Rule’) asked, ‘Are you better off now than you were four years ago?’ I was better off in 2000 than I was in 2004. I was better off in 2004 than I was in 2008. Now I’m starting to see improvement. I’m not as well off as I was before the tax-cutting insanity started, but it’s getting better. Reducing the payroll taxes does help. Getting people like Romney to pay the same percentage in income taxes that I do, and allowing people who actually work for a living to keep more of the money they make will stimulate the economy, and giving handouts to the rich won’t.
Romney is the type of person who thinks laying people off is the best way to create jobs. That just seems counterintuitive to me.
There’s plenty of new factories being built…they just aren’t built in the US.