Romney's Class War!

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You use the word "fact" a lot. I don't think it means what you think it means. Do you have a citation for that statement? I have posted citations for you. I think it's fair that you do the same.

Taxes do not punish success. They keep society functioning. I bet you can't name one country that taxes it's poor at the exact same rate as it's most wealthy members. Third world banana republics with no middle-class to speak of do not count. It's basic math that any country that has any social safety-net whatsoever (enough so that unemployed and disabled people aren't begging on the street) and spends as much as we do on military needs progressive taxation to fund itself.


People are dependent on others willingness to pay them for work. That's the way modern society operates. If there is an economic problem such that certain people cannot find work it is the responsibility of a civilized society to provide a way to survive. Attacking and devaluing people who WANT TO WORK BUT CANNOT FIND WORK due to disability or economic circumstances, calling them free-loaders, parasites, a drag on the economy, etc... is quite frankly repugnant and beyond reproach. There is no shame in being dependent as in a capitalist society we are all dependent on others. If you think not go build your own shack and forage for berries.


It was a mix of opinions and straight up lies. The truth of the matter is a huge chunk of his supporters are in the so-called "47%" and to simply write them off is beyond arrogant and condescending.


In case you haven't noticed record numbers of people were laid off and we are in the biggest depression since the 1930s. If you're going to attack and shame people for relying on government why don't you prove that all these people WANT TO be unemployed and degraded by callus right-wing sociopaths who could care less if they lived or died. To make such a horrific accusation without evidence is beyond offensive. Nobody wants to be laid off, called a parasite, deprived of their dignity. We are IN AN ECONOMIC DEPRESSION. Get that through your goddamn skull. This isn't about you and your own self-esteem. It's about the world as a whole. People have to work together or society will fall apart. It's always been this way. It's about giving everyone a way to contribute and make a positive difference in one way or another and not leaving anyone out in the cold. It's not about "free-loaders" who just don't want to work. People like that exist but they aren't the main problem today. There are people much less fortunate than either you or I, many in this country and a huge many elsewhere in the world. People can still have self-esteem and feel valuable and self-reliant WHILE WORKING TOGETHER.

Not true, particularly around the edges of the different tax brackets. Someone can actually make more gross income, but have a lower income after taxes than someone whom makes less money initially.

So actually, our current tax system can and does punish success.

Obama is proposing hiking the current tax rates, but that's not the only issue, he is proposing thousands of new regulations which cripple businesses. You have to understand this issue isn't simply about taxes and it isn't just about regulation; it's about both.



Why should a business hire people when they have no idea what the ground rules are because government is changing the rules so often that they can't even plan out a budget for 1 to 2 months (businesses like to be able to plan out a budget for at least 6 monthes in advance). Right now, hiring anyone is utter stupidity, cause they don't know how the rules will change from one week to the next. That's why there aren't any jobs.



marshall, the reality is that a lot of the media sources (including factcheck) haven't been telling the truth. While the economy has forced a lot of people into the government programs, those programs are designed to create a culture of dependency on government.



If you look at why the Depression lasted as long as it did, you would find that some of the Government programs during the depression were a contributing factor. In fact we didn't really get out of the Depression until about when we entered World War II.

Ronald Reagan actually inherited a worse economy than Obama did, and Reagan pulled us out. Thing is Reagan didn't spend his time trying to pit one American against another American. Fact of the matter is that Obama has been trying to pit white against black, hispanic against whites, rich versus poor, etc., pitting us against each other isn't going to help the economy improve, but it does cause the situation to deteriorate even further.

marshall, the reality is that you and other people here got duped into the "Hope and Change" rhetoric because the mainstream media didn't do their jobs and actually investigate Obama's background. They went over Sarah Palin's background with a fine tooth comb, as they should; but they failed to do their job when it came to Obama.

To extend on this, a a recent study (link) shows that cutting taxes actually hurts the economy. This is reinforced by Legatum Prosperity Index for 2011(link) where majority of the countries on the list have high tax rates.

No, it's a matter of Romney won't represent those Americans like me who are dirt poor. To Romney, the only Americans worth a damn are the wealthy. I think you ought to consider the possibility that Romney might not have your best interest at heart.
And to reference some of your other posts on this thread, red states don't have quite the financial entanglements as New York and other blue states, but they definitely have a far worse problem with poverty, infant mortality, and lack of medical access.
And if anyone is dividing Americans along racial and economic lines, it's Romney and the right, as this most recent bit of video tape reveals.
As for Sarah Palin being vetted, while the President wasn't - - a vice presidential candidate is vetted for the job, while the presidential nominee gets the position by running for it. There is no vetting process for the guy at the top of the ticket. That's something that had been started by Palin herself, in order to try making herself look better by criticizing the President - and only served to make herself look as dumb as usual.
And by the way, I'm not collecting disability for Asperger's or anything. But in no way am I ever going to judge others for that.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

Ronald Reagan did not inherit a worse economy than Obama. Reagan's recessions were caused by deliberate Fed policy in order to kill inflation caused by the oil shocks. They were engineered recessions. Obama's depression is a case of 1930s-style debt deflation. It's the first time the U.S. has had such a development since the Great Depression.

As for Reagan not pitting Americans against each other, what about the talk of welfare queens and the like...

That is an outright lie.



As is that.



You parrot the lines that you are fed by the conservative machine, but you don't actually demonstrate how proposed regulations "cripple" business. Yes, regulation can impose a burden upon a business owner--but that is not the same as crippling a business. And sometimes the burden imposed on a business owner is necessary because it prevents a larger abuse elsewhere.



That's an idiotic statement. Why would a business hire? To create goods and services to sell. Any business owner who claims to be holding off on hiring on the basis of regulatory uncertainty is either lying, or stupid. The marketplace is ever-changing, and the legal framework in which business acts is simply one of those aspects of doing business that is subject to change.



I don't know whether this statement is a lie or stupidity, but either way I doubt that you can be uttering it with a straight face.

Government does not create transfer programs with the intention of keeping people dependent upon them. Rather, government creates transfer programs with the intention of keeping people out of poverty, reducing crime and improving public safety.



I will certainly agree that War stimulus certainly brought the United States out of the Depression. (More government spending, incidentally). But it's a rather bald statement to claim that government programs prolonged the depression. You know as well as I do that we could line up a dozen economists and come up with thirteen conclusions about the impact of transfer programs on the Depression.

As for Reagan pulling the US economy out of the 1970's stagflation--let's bear in mind how he did it: He did it by unprecedentedly large fiscal deficits. He borrowed the United States' way out of economic stagnation. But then, when the numbers recovered, he didn't turn around and start to pay down that debt. No--he continued it. Your current budget crisis is a legacy of appalling fiscal policy that permits Congress to indulge in its political cowardice on the backs of foreign purchase of dollars.

If you complain that too much of the US economy is held in foreign hands, then pause for a moment to reflect that you can lay the blame for that directly at the feet of Reagan.

Whether Obama is any better than Romney is beside the point. The issue at hand is that Romney's fiscal policy would serve to benefit the few at the expense of the working class--and the Republican party has duped millions of working class people into believing the lie that what's good for capital is ipso facto good for workers.

Nice dodge. You didn't answer how government, particularly the military, is going to be funded without taxing higher income people more than lower. Oh well.


I don't necessarily agree with the current system (single payer wouldn't be such a burden on small businesses), but again you are avoiding the point. If society cannot provide work for everyone (as may be the case in the near future when most jobs are automated and little human labor is required) it is the job of society to figure out a way such that everyone can still contribute and survive without being demonized as "parasites". It's the loss of the entire human race if we can't figure it out. Tax cuts and deregulation has already been tried and hasn't worked. Income and capital gains taxes have been steadily cut for the previous 50 years. If you can't accept that at a time when income and capital gains taxes are at a historical low and the economy is still horrible I guess you are just brainwashed beyond hope.


Say whatever you want, people who rely on government programs aren't responsible for the mess we're in. Blaming them is quite frankly disgusting considering that many would have to beg on the street.


And how did World War II end the depression? Government taxed and spent and put people to work. There's nothing magical about war. If government can end a depression by hiring for a war effort it can end a depression by hiring for infrastructure projects or public works.


That's laughable. Ask any real economist and they will tell you the current mess we're in is at least on par with the Great Depression and that it had already started in 2007, a full year before Obama took office. You also forget that there were several minor recessions during the Reagan administration. I'm sorry but what's happening now was over 30 years in the making. Tax cuts and deregulation created an unsustainable bubble high that lasted on and off for some 30 years. Just look at the steady rise of private debt to GDP ratio over the entire period and it's obvious something was terribly amok, yet no one dared speak of it.

If you want to look at who is dividing America you can point the finger squarely at the republicans. Accusing your adversary of doing exactly what you're doing is a pretty funny tactic. There's even a psychological term for it. The truth is Obama isn't the one who just inadvertently told 47% of Americans that they are lazy free-loaders and that he isn't going to worry about their vote.


Uh huh I think you're just trolling here. I don't pay attention to simplistic rhetoric coming from either side as I know politicians say what they say to get elected. Unlike you I try to arrive at conclusions and define my convictions using my own brain and my own personal principles. I don't just go looking for more and more information to confirm what I've already decided and ignore everything else. If Obama happens to say something I already agree with, so what. My economic views are not even mainstream liberal as I've become even more critical of the current system than most Democrats would dare to be. I don't think there are any easy answers to all the worlds problems.

To be fair, even the wealthy people who think "trickle down" benefits them in the long run are grossly myopic. People like the Koch brothers may know how to run their own economic fiefdom but that doesn't make them intelligent enough to truly understand how a large scale economic system functions. Knowing the best way to game the system such that your own business can grow does not translate into understanding how society should be run in order to produce prosperity that benefits everyone. The whole theory of "trickle down" is based on the big lie of ignoring how the social problems created by the inherent poverty in such a system can actually degrade society by causing strife and conflict which in turn lowers worker productivity. Such a system exists in Chili and the country is having a lot of problems.

I quite agree. There's no point coming out with an iPhone 5 if you don't have millions of consumers lining up to buy it (financing their consumption through debt, incidentally).

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet but.....

The Earned Income Tax Credit is responsible for not only taking many working poor of the tax roles, but also REDISTRIBUTING WEALTH via big cash payments to dirty, lazy poor people!

Here's what the socialist monster who started the program had to say about it:

“The Earned Income Tax Credit is the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”

....obvious lies from pinko douchebag Ronald Reagan.

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2012/09/1 ... -comments/

More like you are in denial of reality, cause my family actually has first hand experience with getting hit with that tax bracket issue.

So, you quite frankly don't have a clue what you're talking about.



Reality and what you want to believe are often two different things, visagrunt. What I'm saying is reality.



You really have no clue what you are talking about.

I generally don't like to use CNS as a source, but since all I wanted was an approximate number of pages of new Federal Regulations...

(CNSNews.com) – Over the past three years, the bound edition of the Code of Federal Regulations has increased by 11,327 pages – a 7.4 percent increase from Jan. 1, 2009 to Dec. 31, 2011. In 2009, the increase in the number of pages was the most over the last decade – 3.4 percent or 5,359 pages.

Over the past decade, the federal government has issued almost 38,000 new final rules, according to the draft of the 2011 annual report to Congress on federal regulations by the Office of Management and Budget. That brought the total at the end of 2011 to 169,301 pages.

http://cnsnews.com/news/article/under-o ... ions-added

Excuse me, but adding 11,327 pages of regulations doesn't help small businesses that have to wade through all those regulations. Only people this idiocy helps is a lawyer.



Learn to read visagrunt. If a business has no idea what the ground rules are going to be next week, let alone next month, they aren't going to hire anyone unless they want to go out of business. Heck, they don't even know if the Federal Government is going to obey the law at this point.



visagrunt, look at what happened in the Middle East, and ask yourself why is the Media bashing Romney, when the current President is Obama. If these kind of attacks had happened while Bush was President during a re-election bid, the media would be going ballistic.

So are you simply oblivious, or in denial here?



Back when my dad was in the restaurant business, he actually had to fire a woman that had just gotten a raise. It wasn't because the place was being greedy, the reason was government welfare, you see she was having to care for a family member and they would both be dumped off of welfare because she would now be making "too much money" even though she would still be in poverty. My dad rehired her at the lower wage, but the fact remains, government welfare punished her for getting a raise. So visagrunt, you are wrong, that's not an opinion, that's a fact, question is are you going to admit it.



Difference is that the war spending was on stuff that we actually needed, while the Depression "stimulus stupidity" was simply wasteful spending.



Approximately 37.5% of the Debt is entirely Obama's doing. At the rate Obama's spending spree is going we are looking at a Debt of $20 trillion by 2016 (assuming Obama is re-elected. No matter how you spin it, Ronald Reagan didn't up our debt by 6 trillion dollars in 4 years.

While Bush had a lot of wasteful spending, Obama makes Bush look rather frugal in comparison. Obama has run up more debt in 3 years than Bush did in 8 years for goodness sakes!



What you liberals finally giving up on blaming Bush, so now you're blaming Reagan? How about you guys start taking responsibility.



How about you wake up, my Grandmother whom inheritted my grandfather's stocks (his teacher's retirement savings), her stocks of GM were rendered worthless by Obama when he decided to hose teacher retirement pensions in favor of rewarding the SEIU for contributing to his 2008 campaign in violation of Federal Bankruptcy law...

Obama has done the very thing you're accusing Romney will do (when Romney hasn't done anything of the sort), yet you're fine with Obama doing it because as far as you're concerned ignoring the law in order to reward his cronies is perfectly okay.

There's that aspect as well. I think it's sometimes true that "trickle down" economics can work in the short run and provide a temporary boost in a local economy by creating an incentive for capital to move production to that area. The problem is that's a zero-sum game in the global sense when the efficiency of production has already been maximized to the extent that global demand will allow. In terms of the global economy it is a stupid strategy in the long run even if you disregard the social concerns created.

Of course for the past 30-40 years the path of least resistance to postpone a major crisis's has been to have the market work in collusion with government to profit off of growing debt beyond what median wage increases would entail by itself. A lot of Keynesian seem to dismiss economic dependency on private debt as a real concern but Steve Keen has presented some empirical evidence that's pretty hard to deny.

Then your family haven't a clue about elementary arithmetic and should hire a bookkeeper to prepare their tax returns correctly.

It never hurts you to earn an extra dollar in a progressive tax system--and anyone who takes home less after earning more obviously needs to repeat grade six.

Since I doubt that your family are actually that mathematically challenged, it follows that you are either ignorant or a liar. Given your posting history, the balance of probabilities says the latter.



No, what your saying is agitprop.



But to whom do those regulations apply--the vast majority of them apply only to government.

Of those that apply to business, how many apply to all businesses?

Of those that apply to particular businesses, how many of them impede business activity, including hiring.

You have taken one statistic--the total volume of all federal regulation on all subjects, and then drawn a conjecture which is wholly unsupported. And given that you know that to be the case--this makes you, yet again, a liar.



Yet more agitprop. Business is active for one purpose: to earn profit. And they are not going to stop business where there is profit to be made. If the ground rules change, business adapts. Any fool who holds back from business activity because of uncertainty about the legal environment ought to go out of business and save us all the cost of his bankruptcy, while those who are actually in business for the purpose of doing business can get on with it.



Because Romney wants to be President, and clearly does not yet have the ability to do the job. Obama, on the other hand, is doing the job--not as well as you would like, to be sure--but he is nonetheless able to do it.



And why did government do that? Because small minds like yours and those of your fellow travellers have decided that there must be arbitrary cutoffs. That woman's experience was not a result of government trying to keep people on welfare, it was a result of conservatives trying to take it away from her.



An unsupported opinion.

Meanwhile, let's think about this. The Great Depression included two periods of economic decline: 1929 to 1932 and 1937-38. The economy grew between 1933 and 1936 at precisely the same period that the New Deal started putting stimulus money into the economy. The long slump from 1929 took place in the business cycle under Hoover's administration. In 1937, the Federal Reserve started placing limits on liquidity (doubling bank reserve requirements for example) and the contraction of the money supply is just as likely a culprit as stimulus spending for the second recession of the Great Depression.

Incidentally, this perspective is that of Edward Harrison--an economist of the Austrian school.
http://www.creditwritedowns.com/2009/02 ... sion.html#



Let's be clear, the federal government's budget is the creation of Congress. You cannot claim on one hand that Obama's budget proposal was so ludicrous that Congress couldn't pass it, and then turn around and claim that the fiscal deficit is Obama's fault. Obama inherited Bush's bailouts, and the financial crisis that his Administration created through a complete evacuation of prudential supervision of financial markets. And once that spending had been digested, it was Congress--by then the House was in Republican hands--that created the fiscal policy disaster that you find yourselves in.



I'm not the one who introduced Reagan into this conversation. You raised his record, that allows me to rebut your claims.



Really? You're going to blame the GM failure on Obama?

Let's see, in 2005, GM lost $10.6 billion. In 2006, the loss was $38.7 billion. By 2008, their losses were still over $30 billion. A mere 3 days after Obama's election, GM announced that it would run out of cash in 2009. The value of your grandmother's shares was eradicated by GM's mismanagement, not by Obama's decision to do the only thing that would salvage GM as a going concern.

Please, elaborate on this. Do you know what a graduated income tax is? Do you understand how tax brackets relate to it?

Lets take a simple example, shall we? Suppose the income tax rate on the first 50,000 of income is 20%. And suppose the income tax on all income between 50,000 and 75,000 is 25%.

Now suppose we have Family A making $49,900 in income. And Family B makes $50,100 in income. Both families are right at the edges of these two different tax brakets. Under the above parameters, Family A pays 20% of its $49,900 income, or $9,980, leaving them with $39,920 after taxes. Family B pays 20% of its first $50,000 of income ($10,000), and 25% of the $100 they made above $50,000, or $25. So family B has paid $10,025 in taxes, leaving them with $40,075 after taxes. Family B makes more money than family A before taxes, and makes more money than family B after taxes, even though they're both on opposite sides of two different tax brackets. So while Family B has paid a marginally higher overall percentage of its income in taxes than Family A did, Family B does not mysteriously make less money after taxes than Family A despite its larger pretax income or it being on the wrong edge of a tax bracket, as you'd have us believe.

Romney can STFU, I am sick of hearing his stupid politcal ads on last.fm.