True, that is a “really specific statistic”, the number of people who voted for somebody. Hard to imagine why anyone would think such an arcane fact might be relevant to anything.
Probably the Republicans have a different reason for why they work so hard at keeping people from doing that. I don’t happen to know what it is, so, i’ll just ask you…
She ran that way because all the polls said that she had Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin pretty much locked up.
What she did not want to do, was let donald run up the popular vote in some of the red states, and have a situation where she won the electoral, but lost the popular, because that would be a weak win, with no mandate. Knowing that more people voted against you than voted for you would be hard to govern.
Now, those polls were wrong, and much analysis here in 2016 was wrong, so it did not turn out that way.
But she did not just run up numbers to run up numbers, she actually had a strategy that made sense with the information available at the time.
too late to edit.
I have no idea why aldiboronti’s post was quoted there.
polls are not “wrong” if the final outcome is within the margin of error. So if the polls said Clinton +2 and the result was Trump +1 and the margin is 3% then the poll was not wrong.
People keep talking about these wrong polls but they often ignore the error margin.
While this is true, higher taxes reduces net income. Ultimately higher taxes make it harder to run your business profitably, depending on the business structure. It’s simply wrong to say that the only businesses that higher taxes effects are the highly profitable ones. Depending on the nature of the taxes, they could impact all businesses be it through higher payroll taxes, higher taxes on COGS, higher taxes on net income, higher sales taxes, etc.
Every business decision that is driven by tax minimization rather than operational efficiency causes distortion in the markets. That’s bad. The corresponding benefit associated with that tax should outweigh the badness of the distortion.
Not everyone complaining about higher taxes on businesses are earning income to put themselves in the highest tax bracket. That’s simply false.
I clicked through the link and I believe it was this comment that was summarized in the OP:
This isn’t a comment about taxes on small businesses, it’s about tax policy in general.
Including the people that voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012 but then just voted for Trump.
Im fairly confident this is not true. Very few people know the inner workings of the Clinton campaign and why it ran the way it did. Anyone saying they know precisely why her campaign acted the way it did is over-reaching. The explanation you give just doesn’t ring true to me. If I were to guess as to why she ran hard in red states it was to disillusion potential Trump voters and depress his vote. The popular vote may have been a secondary aspect but it was first and foremost intended to win her the EC. Again, this is only my opinion as very few actually know the truth, and any insiders who have opined on the matter should not be completely trusted.
Yes. Including them. What’s your point?
Whatever makes you feel good, I guess. Do you also count which team scored the most runs in all the World Series games? I guess it’s a good way of keeping your mind off the losses. If one values keeping one’s mind off the losses, that is.
I am not sure that it is actually an anomaly. Lots of folks voted for Trump, even with the example of George W Bush in recent history. “Feel good” and “hate them” both garner votes in the U.S. and those appeals will still be available for some issues in 2020.
The trickier issue for both parties is going to be internal organization and finding an electable candidate. If things go to hell for the average household in the next four years, (or if he manages to get impeached), Trump will be out, but if the major economic hits target only the poor and the Republicans can get the news media to portray the economy as OK, Trump could have another run.
However, Trump is despised by many Republicans, a fact somewhat obscured at the moment by his victory, and that could cause problems for the grass roots organization that the GOP has been building since the late 1970s.
Of course, the Democrats have continued to follow the observation of Will Rogers from 1935*, so they need to do some heavy lifting (or encounter a spectacular Republican civil war) to get together to produce a winner.
*“I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat.”
That makes as much sense as ordering a cup of cinnamon dolce coffee from Starbucks, finding out they are out of that flavor, then ordering a cup of bleach instead.
Actually, as I remember it none of the polls ACTUALLY said that she had any states locked up, they said that she had a marginal advantage that was in or close to the stated margin of error for the polls. A lot of Democrats decided to act like states where polls showed she had a point or two of lead were absolutely locked down, but that’s not what the polls showed. 538.com, using poll data, gave Trump a 1/3 chance of winning the election, so they clearly didn’t think she had things ‘locked up’.
Well, she made damn sure she didn’t have a situation where she won the electoral vote, so I guess the strategy worked on that count. And seriously, losing the popular vote doesn’t actually matter, it didn’t slow Bush down a bit and Trump certainly doesn’t seem to care about it. And knowing that more people couldn’t muster enough interest in the contest to vote than voted for you should also make it hard to govern by that logic.
The strategy of risking the actual election in order to run up a pointless side statistic is a bad one. That strategy simply does not make sense at any time, it’s like driving in an auto race and deciding that you want to use the fewest tire changes possible, then crashing and losing the whole thing because you should have changed tires.
And, again, because she chose a strategy that would inflate her popular vote numbers at the cost of winning the actual election, the popular vote numbers are really meaningless. It’s like the loser of the race saying ‘hey, but he changed tires more often, so I’m more in touch with the spirit of the race even though I lost’.
This article paints a good picture of how her campaign actually ran:
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/michigan-hillary-clinton-trump-232547
The fact that only 30% of eligible voters voted for her is another specific statistic that’s quite relevant to the idea of whether the Democrats are in touch with the voters. But beyond that, focusing on an arbitrary side contest that you selected to focus on at the expense of actually winning the election destroys whatever meaning that side contest could have had if it was just a number pulled from a straightforward contest.
The two line up pretty well though. I get to write off all of my expenses like payroll, supplies, utilities, rent, etc. I get to amortize equipment purchases, letting me take a tax break on them for the next 5-20 years.
I do not make decisions based on tax minimization, I make business decisions, and those pretty much line up with tax minimizing as well.
Payroll taxes, sure, that would be annoying if those went up, but that’s more a state matter, as all my variables on that front (worker’s comp, unemployment, etc. )are state, and the fed stuff has been exactly the same for pretty much forever not forever, but my entire working life, so forever for me). Well except that one time there was a tax holiday on SS payroll taxes, who was president when they did that? From what people say, it sounds like it would have been a republican in office when that happened, but that wasn’t the case.
My customers pay sales tax, not me. But seriously, I am primarily a service, so while I pay sales tax when someone buys retail, 95% of my revenue does not get taxed. Interestingly, this almost was not the case. The governor of Ohio proposed and pushed forth a measure that would make services have to pay sales tax. Interestingly, you would think that this governor was a democrat, because of how you seem to assume that democrats will be bad for taxes, but this was in fact Mr. John Kasich, a republican.
In fact, about the only think I could do that would increase my tax burden would be to put more money into my own pocket, taking it out of my company. Coincidentally, by not taking money out of my company, it grows.
Yeah, that’s the weird part. People who are not effected by a policy, complaining about it. Oh, noes, your gonna tax people that make 10x what I do! How can I let that stand?!?
Right. And if the top marginal tax rate is increased from 39.6% to say, 90%, what effect will that have on you? On me, it would have none. On you, well, if it does have an effect, you are doing very well for yourself, so congrats, but that also means that you can afford it. On this guy, i seriously doubt it would have an effect, and once again, if it does, that means he is making pretty good money, so, not all that much to complain about.
I mean, would you rather live in a country that lets you make 100k a year, and taxes 30% of it, or a country where you cannot make more than 35k a year, untaxed?
Hmmm, I was actually responding to why she was running up the tally in blue states. I did not know that she had a strategy to run up the vote in the red states as well. Anyway, yes her primary goal was the EC, but having thought she had that, she wanted to have a good popular vote mandate as well.
Obviously, this is IMHO, as I have never met hillary, much less learned to read her mind, but it does seem reasonable that she would try to get as many people to vote for her as she could.
I did say “pretty much” not completely. Yes, there was some room for error, but all the pundits, all the people on this board, and I assume most of her campaign staff figured she would have Michigan and Pennsylvania without much of a fight. I was holding out hope that Ohio would go for her, which had about the same chance as trump had of winning the general. (According to polls)
You are correct in that republicans don’t care if they actually are representing the will of the voters. They have not won the senate popular vote in quite a few cycles, in fact this last one was 51 million to 40 million. That’s democrats with the 51 million votes. How is the senate currently set up? Is the party that had 25% more votes than the other party in charge?
Now, the difference is, is that the democrats actually do care that they represent the people. That attitude can, of course interfere with actually winning elections unfortunately, so you do end up with the party that gets fewer votes, and is less desired by the american people in power.
Full disclosure, republicans did beat democrats in the house, by 1,377,169 out of 124,929,605 votes, so the republicans deserve to have about 1% more voting power than dems.
So, if you looked at vote totals at large, before gerrymandering and other things that “adjust” the will of the people, you would see a democratic president, a strongly democratic senate, and a very slightly republican house.
According to the rules, they get a much more disproportionately higher amount of influence than the will of the american public should suggest.
So, tl;dr to your question. Republicans have no problem going their own way, even when they know that the majority of their constituency disagree with them, and Democrats would rather actually represent the will of the american people.
I don’t think she was risking the general to run up the blue states. I think she felt comfortable with the general, and wanted to get a mandate, so that unlike republicans, she could actually claim to represent the will of the people.
Then I feel comfortable concluding that you are not involved with a large company. It certainly isn’t efficient for a significant amount of companies to incorporate in Delaware, yet they do. It’s certainly not efficient to have software companies hold ownership of their IP in Ireland and license the use and sale of it through other companies, yet they do. These inefficiencies are done to minimize tax, which increases net income.
Your customers pay sales tax, but that’s not the end of the analysis. For starters, even though it’s not you as a business owner that pays the sales tax, a sales tax increase which increases the cost of goods and services could impact revenue. In addition, when talking about federal policy, a sales tax for out of state purchases could have the same effect.
Your tax burden could be increased by increasing the tax rate, all else being equal. Depending on the structure of your business, this could impact it in various ways.
I think this is a difficult point to accept for some folks. People can be for or against something independent of the impact it has on them specifically. I call this being principled.
It could have a pretty significant impact on me, though not directly. As the increase to the marginal tax rate torpedoes the overall economy I’m sure there would be unintended consequences.
This is a false dilemma since these aren’t the only two options. In any event, to the first scenario - no one should need permission to earn a living.
You are correct that I do not run a large company. It’s a small business. The kind that actually creates jobs. I have personally created 12 jobs, not including my own, and I plan on continue to add more.
So, the delaware thing, that’s a state issue, not a federal, so I am not sure how that relates to trump at all.
People holding their IP’s in other countries, I will agree is a problem, but it’s more complicated than tax policy as to why that sort of thing happens.
Like I said, my clients don’t pay sales tax, as I am a service. Also as I said, it was a republican governor that wanted to change that, and to levy a tax on services, so why is it that you seem to think that a republican govt would be better there?
I am not sure how federal policy has anything to do with sales tax on out of state purchases, as that is all states matters.
if the tax rate on those making close to 1/2 million goes up, that will not actually effect me. If it does, awesome, I am making close to a half million, so tax policies aren’t going to cause me to be left wanting.
No, I get that too. But we are talking about Trump voters who were not principled, and were only out for themselves. The irony is, is that not only did they not take into account the impacts that their decision would have on others, they were entirely wrong on how things would work out for themselves as well.
What was the top tax rate in the 50’s and 60’s?
Was the economy “torpedoed” during that time?
No, it’s a hypothetical.
I assume you are tongue in cheek on the “no one should need permission”, as I was in fact talking about the opportunities given to you by the economy, not the permission granted by some govt.
After lurking on these fora for the past six months I didn’t expect this to be the first thread in which I post, but I have tried repeatedly IRL to argue the point that k9bfriender is making and I’ve never found much traction. I’m sorry for butting in, but your exchange resonated with me. In my experience this disconnect usually comes down to the following assertion: US citizenship is a huge benefit when it comes to making money, as not only do we have one of the world’s strongest economies and its most stable currency, but American citizens have automatic access to generally excellent education, career options, etc.
Bone, do you agree with the above statement? If so, do you believe that these conditions exist because of a well-funded federal government or despite it? If you feel that Americans require “permission” to make a living, that our revenue collection provides few or too few tangible benefits to businesspeople, could you name a few countries which you feel provide a higher standard of living and a stronger tailwind for entrepreneurs? Would you mind if we compared the top tax brackets between the US and those countries?
I personally find it odd that it’s become an article of faith for fiscal conservatives (and I’m not implicating you in this, Bone, it’s just the topic at hand,) that America’s economy would improve if we dramatically altered the conditions which have made it strong, as I believe that our civic and economic infrastructures enable (rather than simply permit, or even stifle,) American wealth.
Also, hi everyone!
If you ask the people who voted for Hillary their reasons you would also find reasons many would question: “I voted for Hillary so she would be our first female President”.
You said that tax minimization and operational efficiency line up pretty well. That may be true for some small businesses, but it certainly isn’t true for many large ones. It’s not about Trump, but a point of information that goes against your statement. Being state or federal is also not the point. Tax minimization often does not align well with operational efficiency.
Not every business is purely service oriented so it’s not just about your business. The point of this thread was to look at reasons why people voted the way they did. It’s not that a Republican government would be better or worse, just that for some people the impact to tax policy was the stated reason to vote for Trump.
Sales tax on out of state purchases could be done at the federal level. Clinton was in favor of it. I think Trump took conflicting positions, natch.
If you get that, then why do you think it’s weird that people who are not directly affected by the policy would complain about it?
Are you holding all else equal? Because the tax code was significantly different in the 50s and 60s.
Welcome to the Straight Dope!
I generally agree with the statement in the first paragraph. I think the environment created by the U.S. system of government is through a balance of public and private interests. It would be too simplistic to say it’s either because of a well funded government or in spite of it.
I generally take the position that comparisons to other countries isn’t interesting due to the many ways the different countries differ. Any comparison to other countries first has the burden of showing why it’s relevant and addressing all the ways that the countries are different.
We continually alter the conditions that have made the country strong. It happens every time a new law is passed. The thing is, some of these changes will have positive impacts, and some will have negative impacts. It’s not about dramatically altering the conditions, but making adjustments along the spectrum. Not all change is good, and not all change is bad. Except if my taxes go up, that’s always bad :).