He was staunchly against evil-doers.
And he was pro-Elf. Some of his best friends were Elves.
He was the only Man to speak of Man/Elf issues in front of both races.
Postus Interuptus
All this genteel talk of fiscal policy and the various philosophies about the proper regulation of business pointedly ignore the mountainous gray peanut farting elephant sitting around the living room! Which is: Shall we tolerate that a man who has led us into war under false pretenses be permitted the hightest office of the most consequence in the nation?
Presumably you wish we would all take a cup of tea and murmur polite disagreements over precise percentages of GDP, pinkies akimbo, and without all this unseemly discussion of Fearless Misleader’s abysmal failings as a President.
Forget it. This election, by necessity, has to be more about GeeDubya than his opponent. Dean is not my first choice, but damn near anyone who hasn’t misled us to war will do! And we did not make it so because we did not lead us here! HE did!
Dean is pro-gun and pro-gay.
He’s a fiscal moderate who favors a balanced budget.
He was against the invasion of Iraq and is still against it.
He’s pro choice.
He’s not Bush.
What elese do you want to know.
Hey, not bad. We made it a whole five messages before the Bush-bashing started again.
God, this is going to be a tedious election year.
Wow, a new tactic.:rolleyes: Hijack every thread about politics and turn it into a discussion about “Bush lied about WMDs”.
OK. UNCLE! Bush lied. He lied, lied, lied, lied, LIED.
He’s the biggest lier who ever lived. He wrote the book on lying. (Oh yeah, Karl Rove was actually the ghost-writer).
Now that we have that behind us, can we talk about Dean?
There are a couple other thing I would like to know.
What does this mean in terms of supported legislation or policies?
As others have intimated, how?
And what would he do about it now if he wins? (The election that is)
What does this mean for legislation or policies he might support?
Well, I certainly have the patience to tackle this sucker, but unfortunately my time for this is very limited during the week.
But I’ll start with this whack: the Alternative Minimum Tax. Yours truly figured out a few months ago, when doing some tax planning, that I’ll be falling under the AMT on my next return. It won’t amount to much in terms of a practical effect, raising my taxes by only a couple hundred from what I could figure out. But it also means that any further tax cuts down the line are entirely irrelevant to me.
So, if Dean or any other Democrat wants to eliminate all of the cuts subsequent to this one, I don’t care at all. If they want to pare down those already announced, I’d have some calculations to do before I would be able to see whether they would raise my taxes at all.
Lots of upper-middle income folks fall into my situation. The Democrats should pay attention to this, because my income bracket and higher is the meat and potatoes of the Republican constituency. If you have an upper-income person who’s already uneasy with Iraq or some other Bush policy, pointing out that the tax cuts from here on in are probably going to be irrelevant or even counterproductive from here sounds to me like a productive avenue to follow.
As for the impatience with Bush bashing: well, if you’re talking Presidential politics, he’s the incumbent. By necessity, his supporters are therefore going to be obliged to play defense. On the economy and taxes, though, which is what this thread started out being about, pointing out his incompetence is a bit complex. Not terribly difficult for me, anyway, since I’ve done so much thinking about it for a few years, partly as you can see from the above by necessity, so believe me, once I’m warmed up I fully intend to flay his butt from here to hell and back. Might take 'til the weekend to get all my ducks lined up in a row, though.
Anyway, off I go to read up on the Dean site. More to come…
You know, conservative whining about Bush-bashing might have a little more resonance if they hadn’t spent eight years perfecting the art of political demonization.
First thing I see on his site is that Bill Bradley endorsed him.
For those who may not know this, the 1986 Tax Reform act was partly Bradley’s brainchild. IMO, it’s the most beautiful tax bill ever devised by the hand of man, a near-perfect compromise between the left and right, which of course is why it’s been thoroughly, completely and totally trashed.
Just needed to get that in.
Oh, OK. Howzabout educational policies? By the way, did you see that 60 Minutes tonight, about Gee Dubya’s education plan for Texas and how he…embellished the truth?..as to its results?
We got all kinds of ammo. We just use the big stuff, 'cause, well, it is the big stuff. War, death, national disgrace, that sort of thing.
But you’ve got a point. We should set that aside and get down to the nitty gritty of how Dean’s election might affect the County Metropolitan Park and Recreation System.
pantom:
I feel your pain. I got hit, big time, by AMT a few years ago. It’s one of the most disgusting pieces of legislation one will ever encounter. I assume your issue, like mine, had to do with Stock Options. It amounts to saying: “Well, we think you are going to make some money sometime in the future, so we’re going to tax you now just in case. And we’re going to make it really hard for you to get any of that advanced payment back if we make a mistake in figuring out your future income.”
Good luck. I might consider voting for any candidate, too, who would agree to get rid of this legislation. Projections I’ve seen is that something like 10% of all tax payers will (soon) be affected by AMT. I don’t think it’ll resonate with voters until it actually does hit them, though.
luc: not just the recreation system. The thing the right never acknowledges is:
1 - War, not peace and peacetime expenditures, are responsible for most of the truly huge increases in the public debt.
2 - Cutting taxes without paying attention to whether it will need to be paid for through increased debt:
a) could have the effect of making interest rates higher than they otherwise would be,
b) only raise taxes in later years to pay for the debt, with interest, accumulated through prior profligacy, and
c) Most importantly by far, increasing the debt in the context of my Pet Peeve, the current account deficit, is extraordinarily dangerous, since by definition it means the debt must be sold to foreigners, increasing the future current account deficit by increasing unnecessarily the amount of income sent abroad to cover interest and principal payments on that debt. Taken far enough, that road leads to Buenos Aires.
As for the AMT, John, the one thing I find most baffling about the Bush tax strategy is that they left this provision in place. It hits the most numerous piece of their constituency the hardest, and it makes the code far more complex, and therefore more costly to comply with, for that piece of their constituency.
In the context of Republican politics, I have an impossible time figuring out why they would have left that in except for dishonesty: leaving it in place allowed them to appear to lower rates for the middle while in actuality either net having no effect or actually raising it in some cases, while still lowering rates for the truly rich for whom the 26% flat rate is not an issue. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s the only logical explanation.
If true, it’s a truly amazing piece of economic extremism really, since for instance repealing the estate tax has an effect on only a very small part of the populace, coincidentally though, the same part of the populace that would find the AMT irrelevant. Rather interesting, now that I think of it.
pantom:
AMT was originally devised so that large corporations and extremely rich individuals would have to pay some tax, regarless of how many loopholes and deductions they could take advantage of. But like many gov’t policies, there were unintended consequences. Some are simply the result of not indexing the trip points to inflation. Some result from increasing use of Stock Options for compensation in the last 2 decades.
AMT still affects primarily the wealthy, so getting rid of it would be one more reason for the Democrats to cry “Tax cuts for the rich”. Technically, that would be true. AMT is so comlex that even tax experts hate to deal with it. Trying to explain AMT to the American electorate would be daunting, at best.
If you really want to vote for someone who’ll eliminate AMT, you might want to consider the Libertarian candidate. But considering the positions you have taken in other debates I’ve had with you, I doubt that is a possibility.
First bit of partisan bickering over all this, though somehow I’m certain it won’t be the last:
Shodan left this juicy bit out of the last quote in his OP:
This refers to the “pay as you go rule”, which required that anything which would increase the deficit over a period of 10 years needed to be offset with cuts or tax increases to cover it, which according to the above quote was quashed by the Bush Administration.
I did a little searching around, and I can’t find a story that confirms that the extension lost by one vote, but I do find the following, written during the controversy over this:
from: .WILL THE SENATE’S “PAY-AS-YOU-GO RULE” MAKE BUDGET PLANS LESS COSTLY?
I have a feeling the “toothless” version passed and that’s what the Dean quote is referring to, but if there are any political Dopers out there who could confirm this, I’d be obliged
John Mace: if the Bush Administration was truly and honestly interested in cutting taxes for those not in the top 1% of the income distribution, they would have either raised the exemption for the AMT, or indexed that exemption to inflation, or both.
I’m reasonably certain that doing so would have forced them to give up on something like repealing the estate tax though, and I think the fact that they did the latter rather than the former is a “smoking gun” as far as where their priorities really lay.
As for libertarianism, well, we all have our ideals. We also all realize that in a democratic context those ideals are going to have to be compromised. So you get as much as you can within the democratic context. On taxes, as I’ve pointed out before, the '86 plan was actually an excellent building block, but I’ll be damned if I can find a single libertarian anywhere who recognized it as such and was willing to build on it to make the tax code simpler and easier to comply with, which from a libertarian POV would I think be a priority, as that goal by definition decreases government interference in the economy.
Ok, so we seem to have come to a rough consensus that Shodan’s math on the tax cuts is errant. I’ll take a very rough stab at running Dean’s bduget numbers through the mill:
CBO projects that the deficit in 2007 will be $203 billion. That’s after another three rounds of phasing in Bush’s 2001 tax cuts (we’re not even considering the other rounds yet!). According to the site the OP linked, just the first round of tax cuts will cost $109 billion in 2005, $149 billion in 2006, and $154 billion in 2007. Cancel just those first rounds of tax cuts and you’ve got a surplus of $209 billion, assuming that the tax cuts are not spent in the interveining years.
If one considers ALL the Bush tax cuts, the same site (pdf) forecasts costs of $209 billion in 2005, $226 billion in 2006, and $243 in 2007. Cancel all those tax cuts and the surplus would be in the neighborhood of $475 billion.
Add up the additional spending in the OP (exlcuing the Social Security “spending” by not raising the retirement age, which is a totally bogus “spending increase,” because nothing’s changing from current policies), and that’s about $100 billion, assuming recurring spending. So, the surplus in 2007 would be in the range of $109 billion to $440 billion.
And yes, raising taxes will have an economic effect, so lets say that restrained growth will limit the increase in wealth and affect tax revenues to some extent that only real economists could guess at – but for crying out loud, does anyone expect that the decrease in revnues would cost between $302 billion and $640 billion in 2007 (those being the deltas between Dean’s increased taxes and increased spending and the projected deficit under Bush’s tax cuts)?
And is restoring the tax structure that got us through the 1990s, one of the greatest economic expansions in US history, really that terrible? I mean, did the supposedly “high” taxes in the 90’s really stop a hell of a lot of people from becoming much more wealthy? Of course not!
Look: Let’s stipulate that Bush is the devil, the most evil man who walked the earth, and Dick Cheney is his minion. Left in office, the rivers will run red with the blood of the poor. Okay?
Now, the question before you is WHY DEAN? Why would you pick Dean to carry the battle to Bush, rather than, say, Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, John Edwards, or John Kerrey?
So leave the Bush bashing out of it, okay? Besides being tedious, IT’S A HIJACK. That’s supposed to be frowned on around here.
Now, one possible answer you could offer is simply that you think Dean has the best chance of beating Bush. If you think so, then at least that’s something we can debate.
For example, we could look at the latest CNN/USA Today Gallup Poll, which has some pretty scary numbers for you Dean supporters. For example:
Notice that Howard Dean’s unfavorable rating is 10 points higher than his favorable rating - the only candidate who’s really ‘upside down’ in that regard.
Of course, among registered Democrats, he’s 45 favorable/22 unfavorable. To me that says one thing - that outside of the partisan crowd that votes in primaries, no one much likes Howard Dean.
The Poll also asks this question:
Not looking good for the Dems so far. But how about if Howard Dean is nominated?
Dean doesn’t do any better than the average.
And here’s a scary statistic for Dean supporters: When asked how many voters were certain who they would vote for already, assuming Dean is the nominee, only 20% said they were certain they would vote for Dean, while 47% said that they were already certain they would vote for Bush. That means Bush’s votes are going to be very hard to shake from him, while a full 17% of the people who say they’d support Dean today could be persuaded to vote for Bush.
Most people have still never heard of Dean and don’t know anything about him. The polls are somewhat skewed by the fact that Bush gets nothing but fawning, dick-sucking media coverage while Dean is just portrayed as bomb thrower.
Wait until the election actually gets under way and Dean is able to get though to a mass audience. Wait until Bush has to explain his warmongering and lying in a debate. Wait until the Plame investigation digs up the felon who blew her cover (probably Rove).
Polls mean nothing at this point. It’s only about name recognition right now. It will change dramatically once the election begins in earnest. People hate Bush. He will not have an easy time…aand let’s not forget he lost the last time. All those people who voted against him then are even less likely to vote for him now.
Then why is that not reflected in the polls when asked to rate Bush against a generic Dem?
Because polls right now are just about name recognition. It’s also probable that a lot of those being polled are not likely voters.
the numbers will tighten up significantly after the primaries. They always do.