Might want to read my post again. Only 17% of likely voters had not heard of Howard Dean. Of the 87% that have heard of him, only 16% had no opinion. Most of the population knows who Dean is, and have an opinion of him. Of all likely voters, 39% dislike Howard Dean, and only 28% like him. That’s not good news for Dean supporters.
While I do agree with you that the polls are not predictive at this point, I just can’t let you get away with statements like the one I quoted previously. If that were true, those people would already be certain of not voting for Bush and would not be telling pollsters that they will vote for him. Pollsters are well aware of screening for likely and nonlikely voters and that’s also part of what makes up the margin of error.
And name recoginition goes both ways. People are just as likely to turn negative towards Dean as they are to turn positive. And given Dean’s chronic foot-in-mouth disease, one might expect more of the former than the latter. Bush is a know quantity, and won’t face the issue of people suddenly learning something about him they don’t already know.
Let’s drag some more unfounded anecdotal hearsay into this. I told a room full of people tonight that the name “Howard Dean” should be subbed for “Martha Stewart” in a joke. Out of six, including me, only one had ever heard the name “Howard Dean”. These people probably skew Democratic. I’m not sure that this helps Dean out at all, but it sure doesn’t support the assertion that the general public knows who Dean is but doesn’t like him.
I’d like to see the poll data on how many people will admit to a pollster that they don’t know who someone is. I think all polls of this type (have you heard of x) should include a fictional person so that we can analyze this data completely.
Finally, polls are quoted with these absurd accuracies as if they represent something significant, which at this point, they clearly do not. Polls will become significant when the presidential race has begun and the mainstream press, especially local news, care about it.
The question as to whether Dean has a consistent and defensible economic policy is a good one, and an answerable one, and I’d hate to see it obfuscated with partisan bickering. I’d like to see arguments from both sides.
Hey, maybe that’s a good tactic. I’m undecided (I am). I am a moderate who has voted for GHWB, Clinton, and GWB. Convince me that Dean’s economic plan holds water.
Because when the choice is between Dean and Bush-the-devil-the-most-evil-man-who-walked-the-earth, the choice rather obvious.
Don’t look at me, I haven’t settled on a nominee yet. The only thing I really know about Dean at this point is that it seems he’s not afraid to say that the emperor has no clothes, with more enthusiasm and determination than his peers, which gets a thumbs up in my book. But who knows? I’ve seen some interesting things from Clark as well, and Kerry’s got some intriguing ideas.
But hey, whoever gets the nominee can’t do a worse job than Bush-the-devil-the-most-evil-man-who-walked-the-earth, so debating Dean vs. Kerry is splitting hairs… 
If, however, most people still don’t know much about Dean that would show that the poll is messed up rather than the other way around. And it isn’t exactly a hard thing to claim considering that CNN also took another poll the day before it in which Dean was 5 points behind Bush and had the best favorables of all the candidates.
Anyone have anything to add about how Dean is going to eliminate the deficit without cutting anything, or is it really impossible to talk about the issues with Dean supporters?
Regards,
Shodan
Um, I’m not a dean suppoeter, exactly, but I thought a couple guys addressed this. They suggested that you had misread some of the tax cut figures. And that repealing the tax cuts by itself would balance the budget in a couple years. Did they misread your misread?
I think they misread my misread.
The Citizens for Tax Justice website to which I originally linked was complaining that most of the Bush tax cuts went to the wealthy. Posters who pointed out that I missed much of the tax cuts were apparently correct. Based on this statement from the website -
So the tax cuts total a bit less than a trillion over ten years (if $477 billion is 52% of the total, then the total is $917 billion). I stand corrected.
But it doesn’t help all that much. $917 billion is an average of $92 billion a year. The deficit, according to Dean’s website is $500 billion per year - I know it is really less now that the economy is growing, but I would like to use this figure because
a) it is a round figure, and
b) I assume Dean used this in his economic projections elsewhere on his website.
So Dean rescinds the tax cuts. Assuming that this will have no effect on the economic recovery currently underway( :rolleyes: ), the deficit is reduced from $500B to $408B. But Dean immediately wants to spend $100 billion over two years. So the deficit jumps back to $458 billion per year. Add to that another $50 billion per year for Medicare drug benefits (on which he would like to spend more) and Social Security (remember, he said he would not raise the retirement age). So the deficit goes back up to $508 billion per year. He is very specific that he would continue and increase spending on homeland security, so whatever portion of the deficit is due to increased spending there is going to persist and increase under a Dean administration.
So even taking his figure of a deficit of $500B per year (too high, but that is what he claims), he is not going to eliminate the deficit, but rather increase it.
And, as I said, I find no references to any specific spending cuts he is going to make anywhere on his website. Lots of references to increased taxes - raising taxes on corporations, closing loopholes, spending more on the IRS, setting up loan programs in the SBA, and so forth - but no spending cuts.
And yet he promises to balance the budget. He is very clear that he is going to raise taxes on corporations (while expecting this to keep them in America), and pretty much everyone else, and increase spending in some very specific and a lot of very general ways, but he promises to balance the budget.
How can he do it?
Ravenman says:
The last part of the sentence is what we can’t assume. Dean is right up front that he will spend every penny of the tax cuts, and more.
Regards,
Shodan
I said I had “issues” with Dean, not “issue”, so to kick something else out for discussion -
Dean has made opposition to the conquest of Iraq the centerpoint of his campaign. Has he committed to any sort of time table to pull out? And does he want to spend any money on rebuilding the country? Or is it cancel the contract with Halliburton, toss the whole thing in the UN’s lap, and wash his hands of the whole deal? In particular, I am wondering if he is counting on any sort of “peace dividend” from the pull out.
Regards,
Shodan
You are still grossly underestimating the size of the tax cuts. It is a mistake to extrapolate the amount of the tax cuts from one number that you kind of made up and multiplied by ten because the real size of the tax cut is EASILY available.
The Bush tax cuts reduce revenues by $2.29 TRILLION from 2001 to 2010. Cite. (Same PDF as before)
That figure is assuming that a number of the tax cuts will expire and revert to the pre-2001 levels (such as the taxes on the estates of millionaires). If Congress undoes the sunset on the tax cuts, the cuts will reduce revenues by $3.2 trillion over that same period, not the $922 billion figure you seemingly made up.
Further, you are flatly wrong when you say that the deficit will be $450 billion or so for the foreseeable future. The Congressional Budget Office projects deficits of $480 billion in 2004, $341 billion in 2005, $225 billion in 2006, $203 billion in 2007, $197 billion in 2008, and gradually decreasing to a $9 billion 2011. Whoa, then a lot of the tax cuts expire, and there’s a $161 billion surplus in 2012! Cite.
For all your handwaving, you have only shown that Dean would increase spending by, at most, $65 billion more for the first two years of his Administration. That is far, far, FAR less than the revenue that would be generated if we went back to the pre-2001 tax code.
Again, from the site that you keep quoting, the tax cuts reduce revenue by $209 billion in 2005, $226 billion in 2006, $243 billion in 2007, and so on. In case it needs to be spelled out for you, $65 billion is less than $200-odd billion.
If you continue to insist that Dean would spend every penny of the repealed tax cuts, please explain how he plans to spend an additional $140-plus billion OVER AND ABOVE his proposed increased spending on education, homeland security, and the like that have already been presented.
I think you kind of miss the point, friend Shodan. I am not so concerned with the best plan to clean up this godawful mishigoss as I am to be sure GeeDubya hasn’t the opportunity to do something like this again.
Of secondary importance, but still very important, is to show the world what democracy means: here, when our leaders screw the pooch, we have the option of chucking the bugger out. That is a major selling point for “our way of life”. Most folks don’t have that option.
Of course, if he gets away with it…that sends a message as well: that the most powerful nation in the history of the world is populated by sheep and led by jackals. You cannot trust the Americans to behave in a sensible and reasonable fashion, with regard for internationally accepted codes of conduct. Codes of conduct, I remind you, that we established in the first place,when we executed foreign leaders for crimes against humanity, which we defined as making aggressive war.
Sooner or later, we will find ourselves trying to defuse a potentially dangerous situation. We will ask to be trusted, we will ask to be believed when we say we are not unreasonable, not inclined to shoot first and think later.
If you were Maximum Leader of Shodanistan, would you believe us? Or would you regard it as more prudent to arm yourself to the teeth?
It makes no difference to me who does it. Dean has been aggressively anti-Bush, which is good, but I’d have no problem with Clark or Kerry either. We’re talking about Dean because he seems to have the nomination sewn up but I’d vote for pretty much anybody over Bush.
Sounds perfect to me. Of course the US should have to pay some reparations for the damge done by an illegal invasion, but they should have no say whatsoever in the future of Iraq and Dick Cheney should not be able to profit from it.
He has said that he wants to withdraw the National Guard and Reserve from Iraq, because folks who have careers in the private sector should not be pulled away from their homes for a year at a time for a nation building mission. He foresees the continued involvement of US troops for years to come, because we’ve created a mess there and we have an obligation to try to fix it. So far as I can tell, only Kucinich advocates a complete pull-out.
He said that he would support the $87 billion if the tax cuts were repealed. Cite. He has also said that more troops should be sought from UN, NATO, and Muslim countries, and that Bush is incapable of making the deals that are necessary for this to happen. If more foreign troops were to arrive, I suppose one could say that there’d be some kind of peace dividend, as we are currently spending something like $56 billion to support 135,000 troops in the region, and many of those US troops would be replaced by foreign peacekeepers.
Sounds sensible to me.
Dean has said that he wants to bring all Americans home, and replace them with ‘muslim troops’. He also wants to turn the whole thing over to the U.N.
This is not just stupid, it’s unrealistic. You might as well say you’re going to let the Martians solve the problem. The U.N. cut and ran after it lost some people, and Kofi Annan has said that they’re not interested in taking over. Just where are you going to find 100,000 Muslim troops? Gonna bring in the Turks? Uh uh. The Iraqis won’t let them in. Here’s a good idea - let’s go home and let the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia take over! Or maybe Iranians. Let the Mullahs in there. I’m sure that will turn out well for Iraq. Who’s left? Syria? Jordan? It’s an idiotic notion.
What’s wrong with Muslims?
Ah, good old Sammy, trying his best to fill the much-needed gap left by december. A guy complaining about Bush-bashing who still feels free to use “stupid”, “idiotic”, “frightening”, and “unrealistic” without any apparent sense of irony. Better be more careful about those excluded middles, too.
I do admire, in a way, the simple gall in a sensibility which can comfortably accept Bush’s “fuzzy math” that got us back into record debt in record time, while denouncing non-fuzzy details in anybody else’s plan to get us out of that hole instead of deeper into it. Must be more of that “moral relativism” we heard so much about from that sector during the blowjob years.
“If we don’t turn around right now, we just might get where we’re going.” - Indian saying
Nothing at all wrong with Muslims, other than that you aren’t going to find 100,000 of them, other than from countries that do not have Iraq’s best interests at heart.
Please, if you agree with the notion of bringing in 100,000 muslim troops, tell me where you’re going to bring them from? List all the countries in the region that could provide troops in anywhere near those kinds of numbers. We have Syria - oh yeah, let’s put the Baathists back in charge. Swell idea. We have Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey. The Iraqis won’t allow the Turks in, and while the Shiites would probably accept Iranian soldiers in some limited extent, the Sunnis and Kurds would go nuts. About the only country that might be acceptable to Iraqis is Jordan, and they sure as hell can’t field 100,000 troops.
So, where are they coming from?
You’re neglecting Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It should be noted that both have been good citizens of the UN, willing to provide peacekeepers when asked.
There’s also Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country on the planet.
Lots of countries to choose from.
Ravenman, good work. I can tell it was good work 'cause the subject’s been changed. Can’t imagine why.
Oh, come on. I’m not complaining about Bush bashing - I’m complaining about Bush bashing in threads that have nothing to do with Bush. Next time I drop into an “I hate Bush” thread and start ranting about how stupid Howard Dean is, you feel free to go right ahead and criticize me. Until then, why don’t you give your constant hijacks a rest?