From that site: “Medicare Prescription Drugs Coverage By Private Insurers”
What is this? I can’t quite parse it, and I have to admit I really don’t know much about Medicare…
Well, what do you mean when you say you are not talking about federally-mandated programs? You implied in your original post that if parking fees increase, that has nothing to do with the federal government because costs for parking should be borne at the local level. My point is that if the local government is faced with ever-increasing costs for Medicaid, for police each time the feds raise the terror alert level, etc., then one way they may close the gap is to raise parking fees.
Look, anyway you slice it, the facts as I see them are these:
(1) Most people in the lower and middle classes are going to see much, if not all or more than all, of what they got back from the Bush tax cuts eaten up by increased taxes, fees, tuitions, etc. on the state and local level.
(2) Those in the top 1%, for example, are going to end up with the amount they save from the Bush tax cuts tending to dwarf these increases taxes, fees, tuitions, etc. (Well, at least, they’ll make out a lot better.)
Ergo, the net effect is going to be that the top 1% end up better off while the bottom 75% are likely to be worse off (if not worse off directly, certainly once you consider the fact that the federal debt incurred isn’t “free”). That is the way it works and you can argue other things until you are blue in the face…Hell, argue that the top 1% ought to get more of a break and the bottom 75% don’t need tax relief. But, I don’t think you can deny the reality of how this works out. (If you can, I haven’t seen it.)
Right, the site seems to do some sort of normalization at the end so that the top candidate gets 100%. I wouldn’t have implemented the algorithm in this way personally because it leads to some rather bizarre results. For example, a colleague who looked into this told me that if I was one of the candidates, he would have obtained a score of 90% for me, whereas if he was one of the candidates I would have obtained a 55% score for him. (A mathematician would term this something like “non-commutative”.) The reason is that I am consistently liberal so my “100% agreement” with Kucinich corresponds to really good agreement but he has a very eclectic mix of opinions on issues so his “100% agreement” (which was with Kerry) corresponded to really having only moderate agreement. So, by his standards, our agreement wasn’t much worse than his top choice, but by my standards our agreement was a lot worse than my top choice.
Of course, another disadvantage of this normalization is simply the way it makes people believe they have much stronger agreement with their top candidate than really might be the case. He may just be the least of many evils for you.