Why I can't do it....I can't get past it.
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How does raising taxes help the economy?
If he fixes the economy/my portfolio is making profits, I'll willingly pay higher taxes was my point!
And sadly, that 5K includes the last minute rally to hit 9k today!
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This is a flawed argument. The middle class isn't out of money to spend because their wages are flat - middle class earnings have actually been increasing.
http://www.heritage.org/research/regulation/BlogEntry.cfm?PrettyID=7596&Prev=0
The middle class is broke because they were living beyond their means. Taxing one income group and shuffling that money down to another won't change anything or potentially make things worse.
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Don't know about your graphs, but I live within my means and my bank account will certainly be happier when our economy picks up!
Don't know about your graphs, but I live within my means and my bank account will certainly be happier when our economy picks up!
It should already be alittle happier with gas down almost $2 a gallon....
damn you Dick Cheney......;-)
Interesting quote from Obama in an old video he'd probably prefer never surface -
Barack Obama laughs off charges of socialism. Joe Biden scoffs at references to Marxism. Both men shrug off accusations of liberalism.
But Obama himself acknowledges that he was drawn to socialists and even Marxists as a college student. He continued to associate with Marxists later in life, even choosing to launch his political career in the living room of a self-described Marxist, William Ayers, in 1995, when Obama was 34.
Obama's affinity for Marxists began when he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles.
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully," the Democratic presidential candidate wrote in his memoir, "Dreams From My Father." "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."
Obama's interest in leftist politics continued after he transferred to Columbia University in New York. He lived on Manhattan's Upper East Side, venturing to the East Village for what he called "the socialist conferences I sometimes attended at Cooper Union."
After graduating from Columbia in 1983, Obama spent a year working for a consulting firm and then went to work for what he described as "a Ralph Nader offshoot" in Harlem.
"In search of some inspiration, I went to hear Kwame Toure, formerly Stokely Carmichael of …Black Panther fame, speak at Columbia," Obama wrote in "Dreams," which he published in 1995. "At the entrance to the auditorium, two women, one black, one Asian, were selling Marxist literature."
Obama supporters point out that plenty of Americans flirt with radical ideologies in college, only to join the political mainstream later in life. But Obama, who made a point of noting how "carefully" he chose his friends in college, also chose to launch his political career in the Chicago living room of Ayers, a domestic terrorist who in 2002 proclaimed: "I am a Marxist."
Also present at that meeting was Ayers' wife, fellow terrorist Bernardine Dohrn, who once gave a speech extolling socialism, communism and "Marxism-Leninism."
Obama has been widely criticized for choosing the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, an anti-American firebrand, as his pastor. Wright is a purveyor of black liberation theology, which analysts say is based in part on Marxist ideas.
Few political observers go so far as to accuse Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, of being a Marxist. But Republican John McCain has been accusing Obama of espousing socialism ever since the Democrat told an Ohio plumber named Joe earlier this month that he wanted to "spread the wealth around."
Obama's running mate, Biden, recently contradicted his boss, saying: "He is not spreading the wealth around." The remark came as Biden was answering a question from a TV anchor who asked: "How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?"
"Are you joking? Is this a joke? Or is that a real question?" an incredulous Biden shot back. "It's a ridiculous comparison."
But the debate intensified Monday with the surfacing of a 2001 radio interview in which Obama lamented the Supreme Court's inability to enact "redistribution of wealth" -- a key tenet of socialism. On Tuesday, McCain said Obama aspires to become "Redistributionist-in-Chief."
Obama has managed to cultivate the image of a political moderate in spite of his consistently liberal voting record. In 2006, he published a second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," that leaves little doubt about his adherence to the left.
"The arguments of liberals are more often grounded in reason and fact," Obama wrote in "Audacity." "Much of what I absorbed from the sixties was filtered through my mother, who to the end of her life would proudly proclaim herself an unreconstructed liberal."
National Journal magazine ranked Obama as the most liberal member of the Senate. The publication is far from conservative, employing such journalists as Linda Douglass, who resigned in May to become Obama's traveling press secretary.
Yes it is from an article on FoxNews so take your shots, but just as my friends from school, my running buddies in college, family and other realtionships have molded who I am and what I believe, all of these relationships of Obama certainly has made him who he is. He states it very plainly in his own book where his values come from...
Discuss...talk amongst yourselves....
I studied Marxism in college. I read a lot about Marxism, wrote papers on Marxism, and associated with professors who I would assume had very Marxist leanings. I am a Libertarian. Karl Marx had some very good observations about capitalism and some of its problems. Socialism, communitarianism, communism, could probably all work on a small scale, maybe on an island somewhere. It cannot work on a large scale. That doesn't mean that some of its criticisms of capitalism are not sound.
If I was accused of being a Marxist whilst running for office, I would say "I think that if we want an intelligent discourse, it must be rooted in an understanding of as many points of view as possible. I'm not a socialist or a Marxist, but even if I was, labels don't matter." Then I would proceed to get trounced in the election because we live in a country where intelligent discourse is non-existent. Instead, political parties throw around words as scare terms. Then people, oftentimes with very little understanding of the concepts or history of these words, repeat them over and over as a mantra, to "demonstrate" their team's inherent superiority over the other guys.
Case in point: Whether our elected officials admit it, or whether you choose to admit it or not, we are already, and have already been living in a semi-socialist country for most of the last century. You really have to be ingoring facts to claim anything contrary to this. Social security. Medicaire. A progressive income tax. Did Obama invent these things? If you're so angry about socialism you have had many years to organize against this evil, since it has been with us for decades.
Income tax rates in this country have ranged from 70 to 92% at the top end in the past. Our nation went on with this extreme wealth redistribution for years and years, while our leaders faced down the "great enemy" of communism. I'm sure most of the public then, just as now, failed to appreciate the irony. Imagine a nation that takes 3/4 of the money its top earners make demonizing Karl Marx and calling socialism evil while we all pay social security at the barrel of a gun. Quite a laugher!
Luckily, Ronald Reagan came along and decided that government was only entitled to about a third of what the rich earned. Unfortunately, his top rates were still larger than the bottom ones and he was "spreading the wealth around", just as every president had done to one degree or another for the past century.
After the Democrats destroy the Republicans this year and we get moving with their agenda, the Republicans will have a huge opportunity to get away from anti-intellectualism and "scary" social issues, quit pandering to dunces, and run on a platform of IDEAS like radical tax reform. If you dislike socialism, maybe you should hope for Democratic landslides. If they take things too far, Republicans may come out on the other side with the political will and a mandate to radically restructure our tax code and radically reform social security and medicaire.
Maybe some are guilty of this but many are not. Many are in the same situation as my husband and I. Our Savings and Investment has taken a major hit due to the stock market. Hopefully the next 10 years will allow it to regain that loss before we need it.
Our income has not increased as much as our expenses have. Higher gasoline, higher food costs, higher utilies, higher insurance rates, higher city and county taxes. We only took vacations when we could pay cash. We have not been to a movie in 2 years. Eating out for my husband and I is a meal that for 2 costs less than $20 once a month.
We did not move into the higher priced luxury house that many did, we stayed in our orginial very small starter home in order to save 15% of our income and send our daughter to college and live within our means, even when that meant less than desireable neighbors. My husband drove the same truck for 19 years with over 200,000 miles until it was stolen. He now drives his niece's hand me down Honda we got for $2000.
So please do not lump everyone into that same category of living above their means.
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Good thing we slammed home drilling in the gulf vote. I can't believe it's already lowering gas prices! :funn:
I certainly didn't intend to imply that everyone out there was living beyond their means, I was just trying to make a point. I, like you, saved rather than spent over the last decade. We're all better off because of it.
On your specific points -
"Our income has not increased as much as our expenses have. Higher gasoline, higher food costs, higher utilities, higher insurance rates, higher city and county taxes."
I'm sure you realize a number of these (3 out of 5) are due to the rising cost of energy. These costs have decreased recently but will rise again long term. Energy independence is a major issue in this political campaign. Are you convinced Obama and the Democrats have your best interests placed first on their list (e.g. bringing the cost of energy down) or do you think they place some other agenda first?
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