Support for creationism.
8% was for a national sales tax, not a flat tax. I don’t know what a sales tax would have to be to replace all the taxes I listed above, but you are probably correct that 8% is too low. I spent all of 40 seconds thinking about it, I am sure if I spent more I would find all kinds of ways it was messed up and inequitable.
I know for a flat tax it would be more like 20%, I have read the Master’s take on this issue and it seems correct to me. There would have to be a lot of other changes to make a flat tax work. I would think that the first $20-40k would be exempt, with a flat percentage above that. Sales taxes need to be eliminated to avoid regressive taxation. Property taxes need to go to avoid regressive taxation of property owners. Corporate taxes would also need to be eliminated (to avoid double taxation and to reduce the political power of corporations). Capital gains would need to be treated as income, as would inheritance that was not immediately re-invested (this way small businesses and farms would not be taxed unless they were liquidated). Perks would need to be taxed as income. No more driving the company car or living on the companies dime (when the company gives you a car, this is part of the compensation package and should be treated as such).
Anyway, enough with this hijack.
Looks like other people have already brought up many of them. But here you go:
[ul]
[li]Abortion, especially before week 10-12 when the brain forms. [/li][li]Fetal stem cell research.[/li][li]Right to die. Terry Schiavo.[/li][li]War on drugs.[/li][li]Immigration. If we have jobs, people should be allowed to immigrate here. That, my friend, is the free market. I do agree, however, that citizenship should be harder to get.[/li][li]Pornography/obscenity laws.[/li][li]Anti-flag burning amendments.[/li][li]Sex education and abstinence only stance.[/li][li]Climate change denial.[/li][li]Equal treatment for creationism / intelligent design. (I don’t care if they teach it, but it does NOT belong in science class. It is religion, pure and simple.)[/li][/ul]
These next ones are more related to the last administration (and maybe the current one as well) and not so much a problem with the Republicans per se.
[ul]
[li]Nationalism. The whole “my country, right or wrong” thing. I think you should love your country and distrust your government.[/li][li]Extraordinary rendition. Torture. All the various human rights violations.[/li][li]Warrantless wiretapping.[/li][li]etc…[/li][/ul]
I think the whole war on terror thing is a crock. These are criminals we are dealing with, some of them are backed by nations, but they are criminals none the less. I agree that we need to go after them, but the whole war on terror thing is bullshit! I can’t believe that Americans have been so ready to sign away their freedoms over the last decade and also think it is OK if we violate international laws and commit human rights violations. We have tried people in the past as war criminals for waterboarding our soldiers; what happened to our morality?
Anyway, I am more a libertarian than anything (at least in my own mind). I am fiscally conservative and think government should be small, but let’s face it, there has not been a party of fiscal conservatism in at least 30 years, probably more like 50. I find that the foreign policy of both parties is imperialistic, and I don’t like either of them, but the last administraion was imperialistic, arrogant, autocratic and inept. Regardless, I am a secular civil libertarian above all, and with the exception of gun rights, the Democrats are much closer to my ideology.
What if your morals are different than mine? Whose morals are we going to use? The Christian majority with its fixation on Leviticus? How about the Muslim morality and the belief that women need to stay in the home? This belief is nothing if not moral.
Personally I believe our laws should be based on the harm we do to other people and their property. You (or other people in this country) may think it immoral if I write a sexually explicit story about your great grandmother and a herd of horses and read it every night while smeared with peanut butter and masturbating like a motherfuck, but who have I harmed with this behavior and why should we legislate your morality here. Can you imagine legislating my morality?
I actually have no idea. Just to throw something out there, I’ll say ignorance, poverty, and rape, in that order. Even crappy sex-ed is better than no sex-ed.
I believe abortion shouldn’t be a political issue at all, and should be freely available to all who need it. But I also believe it’s a horrible choice to have to make, and am anguished that it’s a necessary one.
If we have different moralities, then at least one of us is wrong. It’s our job as a society to try to figure out what the right morality is.
Which is exactly what morality is.
That’s a perfect example of why we shouldn’t legislate anything other than morality. Masturbating with peanut butter etc. does not harm anyone, and is therefore not a moral issue. Anyone who says that it is a moral issue is either lying or grossly misled.
Liberal independent here.
I like LGButt’s list a lot and mine are similar so I won’t repeat them. Adding a few of my own:
The Dem’s sentiments regarding justice and fairness and opportunity for the less fortunate align with my own but too many of their policies don’t achieve their stated objectives. In particular, I am against affirmative action and the minimum wage.
Affirmative action *was *very necessary, had a good run and achieved many great results. While the battle against racism is far from won, I don’t think affirmative action based on race is a net positive any more. I would support affirmative action based on social/economic status instead. Most of the equal opportunity laws are outdated and now counter-productive even if they once had merit.
I think the minimum wage is counter-productive.
I think the dems could create the space for a more rational immigration policy if they were much stricter on illegal immigration and demonstrated a more of a willingness to deport the worst offenders. Targeting the employers would be the most efficient way to do that.
+1 on merit pay for teachers. I don’t think we need an objective way of measuring merit. Most employer/employee relations seem to manage without one.
+1 on putting less focus on the trailing end of the bell curve. Some children should be left behind. Focus on the ones who want to succeed.
+1 on the dems tendency to over-regulate too many things that don’t require government intervention.
I would support a flat tax if it came with flat benefits too.
Pretty much all of the dems/liberals posted here have conceded the argument on gun control. It’s a losing issue only because of the NRA’s success in framing the issue.
I think a new party based on liberaltarian ideas could be very successful and would get my vote.
But isn’t that a moral belief as well? Maybe I don’t give two shits about someone else and their property.
How dare you impose your beliefs on me! In fact, you got that whole “No stealing” thing from the Bible and the 10 Commandments, didn’t you? Keep your religion out of politics…
I’ll agree that we as a society should try to converge on what we mean by “morality”. I’ll also guess that my conception of morality is similar to yours. But I am not so willing to dismiss other people’s conception of morality out of hand.
I am not a moral relativist, but I do think there is value in understanding other people’s moral systems as I might learn something from them. Checkout Jonathon Haidt’s 5 moral categories (of which preventing harm is only one to understand why other people might disagree with your definition of morality.
People have been against stealing since before that moldy Babylonian storm god got tapped as the one-and-only überJehova.
The bible has some reasonable rules, which it took from civilized society. Its also got some downright stupid rules. Using the bible as a measure of morality is moronic, unless you think it’s okay to murder the guy at the Burger King drive through for working on the sabbath.
On topic: I’m a democrat, and fabulously liberal.
I, as many have said, would love nuclear power to be expanded upon greatly. Something like 20% of our power is nuclear now with 120 or so outdated 1970s reactors. If we would just build another couple hundred modern reactors we could cut a few toes off of our carbon footprint.
I don’t see this in the 2008 platform - if you know anyplace it is stated as an official Republican plank please cite it.
Chronos, you are correct of course about legislating morality. Laws are morality. Legislation is an enumeration of what is right and wrong and is thus a moral code. You cannot legislate without legislating morality. But this is not really what I am talking about.
This is where the problems come in. Why do you think that one of us is necessarily wrong? I believe that people should be able to have adult consensual relationships with whoever they choose, but many people in this country believe that some relationships are immoral (even between consenting adults) and even the act of recognizing them is immoral. Which moral code is the right one?
Another example: I believe that female circumcision is wrong. It is against my moral code. A female friend of mine in graduate school, a Sunni from Malaysia, thought it was the right thing to do. She stated that she had undergone the procedure as a young teenager there was nothing harmful about it. She was also adamant that her daughters would undergo the ritual also (when and if she had them). Whose morality is wrong here? Do you want to be responsible for either forcing my daughters to have circumcisions or forcing my friend and those like her to not have them even though they want to? Or maybe this morality is one that we should not legislate around? If this is the answer, what moral code are you using to make that decision?
I don’t think we should pass laws just because society thinks the law is just. This is how tyranny of the majority occurs. In this Christian nation, or at least in many of our states, the majority of society believes many things are wrong and would like to legislate the belief, even though no harm is being done to anyone. I don’t know how to solve this.
Maybe everyone should agree that my moral code is the correct one! 
This is incorrect if you use the popular and common usage of the word, i.e. descriptive morality. I would be willing to be that the majority of people in this country would state that my behavior was immoral and maybe even obscene, even if they could not state the basis of this pronouncement. Even normative and applied morality are fuzzy concepts and are subjective in nature. Extending this example further, the Supreme Court established the Miller Test to determine what was obscene and therefor wrong, i.e. immoral.
So even though I have not harmed anyone or anything by writing my story and breaking out the accoutrements for a fine literary evening, my behavior may be legislated as immoral. Who is lying and misled here?
You can’t hide from your party’s wackos by pretending they don’t exist. The immediate former president supported it, or at least paid lip service to it. We’ve had several incidents in just the last few weeks of Republican legislators (federal or state) making statements that accept it as fact.
You’re being disingenuous. You may wish to separate the party’s leadership from it’s base (who are mostly, at this point, religious wackadoodles), but you can’t. The leadership plays to the base, constantly. I don’t think even half of the Republican members of Congress actually BELIEVE in Creationism, but you can’t tell me that there’s even close to a bare majority of them that won’t flog the hell out of it to get the votes.
You are right, but the fact that 30% of the 2008 Republican Presidential Candidates don’t believe in the theory of evolution makes we worried about voting for the party in general.
I disagree with these statements.
There is plenty of legislation that is not related to morality. Conversely, there are plenty of moral issues that are not (and should not IMO) be legislated.
In general, I am of the opinion that legislation and morality are (mostly) non overlapping magisteria and attempts to conflate the two are counter-productive.
You are right, it is a moral belief. But stealing is more a universal moral that a descriptive one. If I steal from you, I harm you in a quantifiable way whether or not I give “two shits” about you and your property. The same can not be said of obscenity laws or laws on prohibition. You cannot measure the harm I am doing to you by smoking pot or crack.
Well, no, not for working on the sabbath, but for wearing that creepy mask…
Damn, I don’t want to hijack this thread, but morality is the codification of what is right and wrong. Laws that defines an action as illegal, i.e. wrong, are by definition a moral code. Wikipedia has a good definition of morality. That said, you are right that there is legislation that is amoral and that many morals are not and should not be codified into law. This is my problem with Chronos’ opinion.
I’d create a new thread - but it won’t be much fun if we already agree:cool:
Rather than hijack the thread, I’ll generalize my opinion.
Chronos has a narrow definition of morality (morality is related to harm)…
I disagree that morality only relates to harm. Haidt lists five categories:
[ul]
[li]harm/care[/li][li]fairness/reciprocity[/li][li]ingroup loyalty[/li][li]authority/respect[/li][li]purity/sanctity[/li][/ul]
Haidt further claims that liberals emphasize the first two while conservatives care more about the latter three.
When I scan back over my list of topics where I disagree with the Dems, I notice that they are largely related to issues of fairness. While, I subscribe to the liberal ideal that unfairness is immoral, I part company when the Dems want to legislate on it. Not everything immoral should be illegal.
So, Dems, feel free to legislate to prevent harm - to the extent that you can prevent it - but leave matters of fairness to society’s conscience.
I’ll leave it to a conservative to make observations about legislating in the other three categories as this thread is about criticizing your own side. 