Problem is, in the real world we don’t get to just choose a plan in a vacuum. The choice is between Ryan’s plan and the President’s plan.
Are you confident that the President’s plan will be favored by the voters over Ryan’s plan?
Didn’t I just answer this? What the fuck?
Okay. I’m looking forward to that debate. betcha Obama chickens out though.
And have some patience, I’m hard of hearing.
The point of the progressive movement is that it takes collective action to fully empower individual flesh-and-blood people.
Take programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare. These free us up to make career choices that don’t tie us to big employers that can get good group health insurance rates, or have to worry about saving up big piles of money (and having to develop parallel careers as money managers) during our working lives to pay for our living expenses and medical care during retirement. Or having a retirement, for that matter. You can take a chance or two, start your own business and not worry that if you fall on your face, you’ll be destitute at 70 and unable to pay your medical bills.
Collective action empowers individuals, in ways that the vast majority of individuals would be unable to empower themselves.
Since defaulting on the debt was the GOP’s loaded gun to the rest of our heads, I think you can figure out the answer to this one on your own.
Are you kidding? The shotgun marriage of Mitt Romney to the Ryan budget guarantees Obama a second term. This is without question the debate he wants.
Perhaps, but clearly your shoulders are very strong.
That’s a copout. Spending is on an unsustainable course. Treasured Democratic priorities will have to be cut. Otherwise you’ll end up with nothing in the end, just like the Greeks.
Do any treasured Republican priorities suffer the same treatment?
Well, for the moment, he’s not the one chickening out…
http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/13/13258829-the-gops-down-ballot-anxiet
adaher, you need to get your Gallup polling results link from April to these downballot republicans stat! They for some reason feel it benefits their chances to be elected if they put a lot of distance between themselves and the Ryan plan!
That’s bullshit.
You know what’s on an unsustainable course? Having productive resources - people, plant, equipment, and so forth - standing idle because the Republican Party wants it that way.
Because that’s how you create wealth: creating goods and providing services. But the GOP stands foursquare in the way of doing the things that would put people back to work and getting our economy humming again.
Not so. There’s still strong Libertarian revulsion for Congressmen with moments of sanity.
Such an argument was good enough for Mises (quoted in context, given top marginal rates of income tax are slightly higher now than when Mises published Socialism).
Let’s face it: progressive taxation is a form of trickle down wealth redistribution. However, a capitalist system is a hydraulic pump.
The other immediately apparent argument is that of diminishing marginal utility in terms of quality of life. A 50% tax on a negligible income will have a far greater effect on that person’s quality of life than a 50% tax on a centile income, as a greater proportion of the lower income will be spent on the means of subsistence. Perhaps we can argue that the 50% taxation will introduce all kinds of inefficiencies, the Laffer curve and be used as a means of destruction to destabilise the markets and introduce protectionism, but I doubt it’d really qualify. The US saw GDP growth under Eisenhower’s 90% top marginal income tax and the Scandinavian countries have superior quality of life to the US.
There’s also the fact that in the consumer democracy envisioned by Mises and argued for in the welder example by Sam Stone, the inventor of a machine’s labour is worth thousands of times that of the welder of the machine and he thus has thousands of times the numbers of votes (depending on other costs of production).
So what do people think about Ryan staying on the ballot for his House seat? Have previous presidential or vice-presidential nominees done this before? It does make me wonder about how confident he is in Romney winning and makes it seem more likely he accepted not in hopes of being the vice-president, but in hopes of raising his stature.
Also I knew that he was conservative, but reading Nate Silver’s blog, he points out that Ryan is the most conservative Congress member VP nominee since 1900. I apologize if someone else posted this and I missed it, but I found it interesting.
Have you not been paying attention to all the data about the increasing income inequality? The top brackets are paying a larger share of total taxes because they’re getting a larger share of total income too.
The problem is that the rate of change of those two proportions isn’t even remotely similar. In the same time period that your cite lists the tax share of the top 1% increasing by 82%, the after-tax income share of the top 1% has increased by 125% (Warning: PDF link. See Figure 3)
You’re apparently attempting to show how put-upon the top earners are by an increasingly progressive tax system, but the reality is the completely opposite. Taxes have been becoming more regressive, at the same time as the income distribution becomes more lopsided.
So yeah, I could tell you who’s getting a raw deal.
Do you often generalize this much? In order to prove your claims, you would first need to come up with an objective definition of “liberal” and “conservative”. Regarding charitable contributions, I would need to see evidence based upon a percentage of income, or some such metric, and what defines contributions in the first place. Do only tax deductible ones count, for example? And of course, the inflammatory statement about “the point of a gun” adds nothing to your argument. As for “gratitude,” exactly how is this measured again?
You really need look no further than the selectivity of your examples to disregard the whole post. All conservatives, whatever that means, are lumped together as one. But for liberals, you mention just community organizers. As to them, is there any “debating” technique more dishonest than defining your opponents negatively, and then slamming them for unproven accusations? As for public assistance, I know people on it who are very grateful for the help they are getting. But I wouldn’t make a blanket statement that everyone who does feels the same way because of it. You give no examples, show no cites, and offer not one iota of evidence for anything. I realize we’re in Elections and not Great Debates, but wouldn’t this honestly be a post more suited to In My Humble Opinion?
What this pick does is cinch the 2016 nomination for Ryan. Nobody in the 2012 GOP clown car is qualified to claim that he/she is “next in line”, so with the inevitable loss in 2012, Ryan has the 2016 nomination sewn up.
Sure, defense spending should go down. A lot. But it already is going down and is down from its Cold War levels. Entitlements never grow slower than the economy. That has to change.
The GOP usually does pick the “next” candidate, but that implies that the candidate is electable. If Ryan is going to tank this ticket as many of you predict, then he’s got as much chance of being nominated in 2016 and Geraldine Ferraro did in 1988.
Now if Ryan wins the Vice Presidency or at least keeps the election close, then yeah, he’s got the inside track over the other young guns like Rubio and Jindal.
You don’t think Santorum thinks he’s “next in line”?
Are you unaware that Republicans in the House are trying to back out of the deal which cut spending on both military and civilian programs after the cliff? You may think this, but your friends don’t.