finknottle

There are quite a few Republicans who couldn't care less about the whole issue. They just don't shout as loud as the base. Kinda like the Democrats in that respect. A large percentage of the blue-collar working class members are socially conservative and do not support gay rights or choice, you just wouldn't know if from the campaigns.

IMO all four of them have a 9th graders understanding of how the world works. Do you really think Obama - to take an example - really has a clue about business, main street or wall street? I think all of them believe money just comes from somewhere. You just need to appropriate it! And think about foreign policy - what was the most dangerous and intractible opponent any of them ever actually dealt with across a negotiating table? Are they prepared to face off personally with NK, Iran, or Russia?

What's your basis for saying Biden is intelligent, and Palin is not? (Other then media innuendo, I mean.)

Funding alone doesn't always cut it. If the playing field is tilted too much against risk-taking and entrepenuralism etc, you wind looking like France or India today, or the Soviet Union in the past, where tremendous amounts of government money goes to research but with comparitively very little to show for it. It creates jobs and winds up being a sort of corporate welfare, but without the incentive to get rich off of it (can you say "patent-free" and "windfall profits") government-directed research (even when successfull) hasn't always had the penetration into society you would expect. Not saying this will be the outcome of an Obama administration, mind you - just pointing out that pitfalls do exist from shifting too far towards the State.

Like we really need the AARP to wield an even bigger influence in our politics... just what we need: another voting block who won't be contributing to the costs of the programs politicians propose to curry their favor.

Here is the difference between the two failures. McCains experiiment is reversible - you can always reduce military spending and return the tax levels to those of the Clinton era later. Obama's are permanent - once you eliminate income taxes on retiree's, you can't start taxing them again later. Once you put a program in place to guarantee every student their college tuition in exchange for public service make-work jobs, you can't eliminate the program later. Once you put in place a program giving money to the poor or to children, you can't take it away later. Roll-backs of social programs are extremely few and far between. One need look no further than the Department of Education, a federal cabinet-level department whose purpose is obscure at best - education is a local matter. The Republicans made eliminating the department a cause celeb for almost 30 years and Reagan campaigned on the issue, but even he couldn't make a dent. Welfare reform consumed most of the Clinton administrations political capital, and the effort alienated him from the party.

No, that's now (est 38%). Under Obama it is estimated to rise to 50%, primarily because of the elimination of income tax on retirees receiving less than 50k a year.

That is opportunistic revisionism. For most of the campaign, Obama was trying to link McCain to Bush on Iraq.

The sad thing, and the reason IMO he is not taking any initiative in this fiscal crisis (arguable the biggest crisis of our generation), is so that when he gets into office and fails to deliver he can continue to blame Bush, and the bailout as well, for putting him in an unexpected straight-jacket. He will say he could easily have delivered on all of those promises but for the sudden change in circumstances. And he will get a pass from the media.

You keep ignoring the capital you risk up front. Economics according to Obama supporters: The easy way to increase state revenues is if the state taxes lottery winnings at 90%. So a 1$ winning lottery ticket that was once worth a million dollars is now only worth 100k. But people won't mind, because they are still coming out ahead, right? They will still keep buying lottery tickets in the same quantities, right? As a side note, it is ironic that the tax cut for new employees will actually harm wages, IMO. Having looked at it for my business, it strikes me that I am better off hiring four employees at 25k than I am one at 100k - I believe I get 3k per full-time employee, regardless of the salary. It helps low=wage, high-turnover companies such as Walmart, and has negligible impact on high-wage, high-skilled companies.

Because you have to pony up your own money to play. Most businesses require some kind of up-front investment - at a minimum, you have to pay employees until money starts coming in, pay for a facility and supplies, advertising, etc. Suppose you are making 50 to 75k per year, and have 500k in the bank. Would you spend that 500k starting a business (say, yet another restuarant) that had only a 25% chance of success? ANSWER: it would depend on the payoff if it were successfull. If the payoff was 1 million per year, then probably yes. If the payoff were 100k per year, then probably be no. That's the part you all keep ignoring. Yes, you increase your money either way if it works. But when you stand to lose your savings taking a chance on a new business that, historically, is unlikely to succeed, you look at things quite differently. The lower the return, the less business sense it makes.

What does it matter how soon the payoff is? If you are going to risk your money to start a business, you presumably are looking down the road and saying something like "I'll invest 300k of my money and every second of my time for 3 years on this 50-50 proposition, after which I'll either fail or I'll start earning 300k a year indefinately." Lower that to 200k and it's not as attractive. But for the record - and I think it is entirely irrelevant - you can make 250k right out of the gate. It depends on the business niche. Product startups look 3 years down the road, while consultancies usually get their biggest bang right away - it's usually years two and three when their ability to get new clients is tested. Boutique shops and restuarants fall into the latter catagory I think.

We bombed the crap out of everybody in WWII, and were one of the few undamaged countries left. We didn't have to spend most of our GDP rebuilding, or paying off loans to other countries. We entered the post-war period with unscathed companies and factories and railroads etc. We had tremendous natural resources. Who was going to compete with USA Inc? We had a free ride in the 50's and early 60's. Then it caught up with us and got ugly - go back and look at the markets in the 70's to see what happened when other countries recovered. Surely people from Buffalo remember what happened to the auto and steel industries back then!

You ignore the key point. You are not spending your money on a company that will make you 250k. You are risking your money. Maybe you make 250k, maybe you make 0. If taxes are raised you have the same chance of failure, the same downside, and a lower upside. You are less likely to take the risk?

Not saying nobody would. But it is a simple logical consequence that when you lower the reward but keep the same risk, the package becomes less attractive. It's a simple mathematical calculation - the risk and the reward determines the expected return. If the expected return is lower, more people opt out of the risk of being an entrepenuer.

It's more simple than that. Would you risk your money to start a business, with a 20% chance of success say, if success meant earning 200k after taxes? It depends on the numbers. Would you risk that same amount of money, against the same odds, if the payout for success were lowered to 150k? You would be much less likely to than in the previous situation, and more likely to bank the money and keep working for the Man. Higher taxes on a successfull outcome means less people risking their money to start businesses, which ultimately means less job growth.

As long as they get visa's and go through the system, everybody is happy. Except of course for the Mexicans-Without-Borders/La Raza wing of the Democratic party which sees an electoiral advantage in opening up the border.

Yeah, intimidation at the polling place is a real problem. There are no legal safeguards in place to prevent that. On the other hand, I can't wait for the Democrats to end the secret ballot in union voting. Finally, elections free of intimidation! Union leadership has so much more integrity than those black-booted Young Republican thugs.

Yeah, what you realize as an athelete playing into your late 30's early forties is that the loss of speed etc is more than compensated for by the knowledge, instincts, and above all the toughness you pick up. What gets you in the end is not diminished ability at all, but the simple fact that every little bump and bruise takes longer and longer to heal, to the point where each week you are still hobbled from the previous weeks game (let alone anything new you pick up in practice!). It gets to the point where you simply can't keep up physically with weekly games.

Would it? Then why wasn't NASA funding it? NASA makes their case before congress every year for their budget. Part of that budget is for education programs, both k-12 and support to museums. The point is that NASA weighs the many requests from supplicants around the country and decides which (in their professional opinion) are worth funding and which are not. Froim the Senate budget: Evidently this one didn't make the list. Nor did it make NSF's list of things to fund. Now you can argue that Congress needs to allocate more money to NASA so that Obama's planetarium gets a few million - fine, I'm with you as far as the NASA educational program goes. But how do we know there isn't a better educational opportunity which also didn't make the cut but wghich should be funded before this one? Regardless: until they do up the allocation (which is within their power), any money spent through earmarks is money not being sent to the professionals who evaluate proposals and award grants based on merit and through a transparent competitive process. I call that pork and a potential waste of money.

He, not they. It was Stephen Branchflower, an investigator contracted specifically for the job. Like Kenneth Star, but from outside the government... http://www.adn.com/monegan/story/478090.html The investigation was authorized bipartisanly, but the hiring of the contractor was done by a Democrat (Elton), and the work overseen by a Democrat (French). As to 'some time,' it was authorized less than 10 weeks ago. The contractor had less than two months to investigate, interview, analyze, followup, analyze, and write a 300 page report on a max 100k budget. That's not a lot of time for a government investigation unless you already know exactly where you want to go. FYI - the findings are as follows: 1. An ethics violation over using the official office for personal use 2. No illegality over the firing of the trooper. 3. No improperness in the proceedural termination and the handling of his compensation claims. http://media.adn.com/smedia/2008/10/10/16/...affiliate.7.pdf

It gets attacked from all sides no matter what he is doing. How's the media reacting to the Obama negativity, btw? Haven't heard much lately about Obama discouraging all the 'he'd a dottering old man, about to die any day' stuff being said by his warmup speakers...

You can't have it both ways. You can't paint McCain as a captive of the conservative wing, 8 more years, etc, denying the independent and bipartisan track record which has angered and alienated him from the conservative leadership, and then act surprised when they undermine him editorially and endorse his opponent. It's not an endorsement of Obama. It's a validation of the deep and festering wounds he took from his own party fighting them over Campaign Finance Reform, Ethics Reform, and Immigration Reform. They see McCain losing and 4 years of Obama to be the key to revitalization of their brand of conservativism.

And the Democrats have taken the Republican "independent investigator" tack and raised it to a new level. Congratulations on your gullibility.

I agree that it doesn't address it - neither are talking about the problems they leave untouched. But the problem could be solved if a move to individual coverage, and a move to open competition across state lines, were followed up with legislation that anybody wanting to be in the health insurance business must offer a universal no-deny plan meeting minimal coverage and affordable price terms, as set by a government oversight organization. This regulatory mandate side-steps the negotiating problem. But nobody (including McCain) is discussing this, and it would take very significant will on the part of Congress to make it happen. But McCain's plan would at least get us to where it would be a viable next step.