Experts estimate that most
undecideds on Nov. 2 go to the challenger.
Experts estimate that most
undecideds on Nov. 2 go to the challenger.
They've also said that this year it may beOriginally Posted by Pancho1188
different, that there are too many issues affecting the unusually high voter registrations.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
They also guess that those new voters are most likely to be/vote Democrat. Two mainOriginally Posted by belgareth
reasons:
1. People are voting out of spite (just to get Bush out)
2. People who don't usually vote tend to be
liberal and lean that way...either by being against the system or whatever. Since those people are either poor with
a mindset that the government doesn't help them or they can't make a difference, they usually vote for the party
that seems to be more for the working class, which tends to be the Democratic party. (This is under the assumption
that Republicans are more likely to have already registered to vote)
One could do an interesting
psychological study on this...the mindset of voters, party affiliation, and locus of control. One could conjecture
that those who don't vote have an external locus of control vs. those who do/internal locus of control. You could
stretch your guess by saying those with internal locus of control believe they can accomplish something, go out and
do it, make a lot of money, become more conservative in their politics and don't need the government interfering,
and therefore tend to vote Republican...vs. external -> victim of circumstance -> not as successful -> believe in
government protecting the working class -> vote Democrat.
Hmmm...
Although I would be an exception to
this because I consider myself liberal with internal locus of control...because everything I do is my fault, dammit!
Not the article IOriginally Posted by Pancho1188
read, they said they couldn't be sure what was going to happen. I tried to find it this morning but couldn't.
We'll see, in any case.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
True. I was merely stating the
fact that those who have tried the hardest to get people to vote for this particular election are trying to get
people to vote against Bush (I refer to people like Michael Moore and those in the typically liberal media..."Vote
or Die"...I can't help but think that that insinuates that if we don't vote Bush out of office, we'll die...but
maybe it's inferring that if we vote for Kerry we'll all die...I guess you have to give the benefit of the doubt,
but I don't see how simply not voting is going to kill you---despite those rumors I've heard about potential
drive-by shootings in areas of low voter turnouts. Just kidding.)
Then again, I didn't see any statistics on
how many new voters came from these untraditional methods of getting people to register as opposed to the national
movement to vote more. Therefore, I would agree with you, Bel. It could just be everyone wants a piece of the
action.
Either way:
1. It's going to be interesting.
2. Whoever wins may have the most justified reason
for being in office because this vote may see the biggest turnout in who knows how long. Good stuff.
Last edited by Pancho1188; 10-25-2004 at 12:06 PM.
One pundit suggested that many
of the newly registered voters might even go for somebody outside the two big parties. I doubt that will happen but
it would sure be fun to watch.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
The only thing we know for
sure is that suprises are possible. I don't think Bush will win by a big margin unless something funky happens,
though. He may win. They're predicting Bush will get twice the African-American vote this time, compared to 2000,
due to the importance of religious issues like abortion, stem cell research, and gay marriage in this campaign. (It
amazed me that these issues were discussed so extensively in the debates whereas the environment was never mentioned
once.). Ohio papers are endorsing him. Bush is staying "on message" with the "I'll fight terrorism and
Flipflopper won't" schtick. It plays well in speeches where you don't have any other side. Still, I'll give the
edge to Kerry due to the new voters. Nader will be insignificant. I live right in the middle of Nader's strongest
support base historically (Portland, or "Little Beirut", as George Sr. calls it), and he has alienated them.
Last edited by DrSmellThis; 10-25-2004 at 12:58 PM.
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
I'd vote against Bush just on
the abortion, Gay marraige and Stem cell issues. No, Doc. That does not mean I will vote for Kerry. I saw an article
today that the Brits support Homer Simpson, I may write him in. Beats the alternatives.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
You guys pay too much
attention to the spin masters and polls both are going to be way off this time Kerry/Edwards ticket is on a roll and
will stay on a roll right up to thru the finish. Get ready for a big surprize! The Truth. LOLOLOLOL
Elk
Texas is a lost cause anyway.Originally Posted by belgareth
Surprisingly, Bush's home town newspaper is supporting Kerry. It never pays to generalize.Originally Posted by bjf
Besides, I learned politics in California.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
hey watch itOriginally Posted by Pancho1188
mr. pancho, im a republican, they both are horrible canidates but you know those good democrats;-) tax the hell out
of the rich who worked to get rich, then give it to the poor. Or of course the good old affirmative action which
means, if your black and if they don't have many black applicants your guaranteed to get in. I think that, everyone
needs to have a fair chance to get into college based on how hard you work and what grades you make. If a college is
99.8% asian and .1 % white and .1% black so be it, its about working hard not about race or gender.
-btw sorry
if I offended anyone with this post
Peace and <3 :-)
Yea, but when was the last time a Democrat won that state?Originally Posted by belgareth
Which one and which office?Originally Posted by bjf
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
Don't know as I haven't kept
track. I do know that the state senate has been primarily democrats fr a long time and only changed with the last
election.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
I seriously doubt Kerry will
win the election. The media seem to be doing their darndest to paint Kerry as breathing down Bush's neck, but in
driving from Florida to Texas and back, and in speaking to a lot of people, I haven't heard of much support for
Kerry at all at the grass roots level.
It's sort of like the violence in Iraq. Very few people over there are
actually being killed (in a country of 24 million, the deaths are only in the low thousands). Most people go about
their lives and their situations are gradually improving. Do the media report that? No. They focus on the
terrorist attacks.
But you can tell there is less and less for the media to write about because every new story
recaps the previous three stories.
Take the situation with Bush's tax cut. Some media reports claim that it
favored the rich. However, two thirds of the tax cut benefitted middle class and low-income people, and two-thirds
of the people who benefitted from the tax cut were middle class and low-income people.
How is it, then, that the
tax-cut "favored" the rich? That's just political spin being picked up by the press.
Most sources seem to
agree that the tax-cut didn't create jobs as promised, but they don't bother to explain how raising taxes on the
rich and lowering taxes still further for the low-income and middle class people will create more jobs. If your tax
bill is cut by $1,000 more, how many people will you plan to hire in the coming year?
There is no meat to the
media coverage. No meat usually means no upset.
Kerry needs a miracle to win the election. I don't see one
arriving in the next week, but then, a week can be a very long time.
Fla to Texas, LOLOLOLOL
Nothing decided there.Look at Key States for the meat. The Miracle is happening,
Kerry/Edwards are on a roll.
Bush and Chaney playing catch up. Incumbents running like chicks with their heads off. Do you think they would do
that if they had it in the bag?
Until this campaign Bush was the guy who liked to be in bed by 7:00 PM, Chaney
was seldom seen in public.Rice in her office, Laura in the Library, Babs and Jen in a bar, Its Its over thanks to
PA,Oh,Mi,Minn. You can feel it in the air and your guts if your alert and not sucking your own pheromones.
LOLOLOLOL
Elk :
http://pherolibrary.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11564Originally Posted by Friendly1
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
Originally Posted by Friendly1
All tax cuts that benefit all citizens favor the rich. Since the rich have more money, they save more
money from tax cuts because they give more to the government in the first place.
That doesn't make his tax cut
targeted toward the rich, it's just that the more money you have, the more money you get back when your taxes are
lowered. Simple math. The media just spins it and the people eat it up because they want to blame rich people for
their problems.
It's funny because if you actually ask people about our tax system, most people think it's a
decent system (besides the complications of it all, the system in general). In fact, if you said, "How about we tax
the rich 80% and tax people who make under $30,000 per year 0%?" People would actually not like that because they
wouldn't feel it was fair to the rich and would feel that they weren't contributing to the government.
People
whine and complain, but statistics have shown that when polled on the actual system instead of idealogy like, "Do
you think the rich or the poor should be taxed more?" our system does pretty well with citizens...
That just
goes to show you how the media and government can make something out of nothing.
(Before everyone comes in and
says, "I hate the tax system and would love to pay less," I'm just stating figures from my tax course a year or so
ago that polled citizens on the tax system)
Originally Posted by DeMoKiLL
I'm laughing because I thought I was more
likely to offend Democrats in my post than Republicans. I guess I just offend everyone.
I agree
with you on the rich who worked hard to get rich, but on the affirmative action thing: I think that you should get a
job/college/scholarship/whatever based on merit, but you have to realize that the system is heavily divided by race.
African Americans get worse education than many other races because many of them are located in inner-city schools
or places with a bad education system. In other words, the current education system is very lopsided, and the
effects of segregation, slavery, etc. are still being felt today with a divided class and education system. Isn't
it wrong for African Americans to miss out on educational and vocational opportunities because they went to a bad
school?
I believe that it's not race that's the problem anymore; it's social class. However, most of the
people in the lower class are, in fact, minorities.
Again, I agree that education should be based on effort, but
after living in DC and seeing these inner-city schools...I wonder about the divided system...not by race, but by
class that just happens to correlate with race.
I am personally an example of a person who grew up poor (if
anyone knows the poverty line statistics, I could tell you where I was for a single mother with 2 kids) but went to
a good school. I'm doing well now. Think about all of the other people who could do well, too, if they went to a
good school regardless of their social class. Had I went to a bad school...well, I certainly wouldn't be where I
am today. Since I'm not a minority, I would've been royally screwed because no one's going to help out a stupid
'majority'.
Anyway, I just felt like playing devil's advocate. You don't need to justify this
with a response.
There is no logic in such a statement.Originally Posted by Pancho1188
MOST of the tax money saved was saved by people making less than $100K per year.
Hence, the tax cuts favored the
majority of people, not the rich.
From economists at the
Brookings Institution:
"Making the tax cuts permanent would be regressive; that is, it would confer by far the
biggest benefits on high-income taxpayers. After-tax income would increase by more than 6 percent for households in
the top 1 percent of the nation's income distribution, 2 percent for households in the middle 60 percent, and only
0.3 percent for households in the bottom 20 percent. The share of the tax cut accruing to high-income taxpayers
would exceed their share of federal tax payments today, so their share of the federal tax burden would decline. The
tax cuts will ultimately have to be financed with other tax increases or spending cuts. Once plausible methods of
financing the tax cuts are taken into account, more than three-quarters of households are likely to end up worse off
than they would have been if the tax cuts had never taken effect."
http://www.brookings.edu/views/articles/2004
0919galeorszag.htm
DrSmellThis (creator of P H E R O S)
I think you're looking at itOriginally Posted by Friendly1
differently than I am. I am talking about each person. People say that a rich person benefits more than a poor
person through tax cuts. This is absolutely true. If you reduce both of our tax rates by 1% and one guy makes
$1,000,000 and I make $10,000, he just saved $10,000 while I only saved $100. Therefore, a tax cut favors the rich
because they will always save more money. Notice in this black-and-white, unrealistic example that it would take 100
of me to save the equivalent amount of money of one of him.
You are speaking in terms of the number of people it
affects. If you reduce the tax rate by 1%, most of the people who benefit will be working class because there are
more poor than rich. That is true.
However, the total money will always benefit the rich because the top
20% pay 80% of the taxes and the bottom 80% pay 20% of the taxes. If anyone would like to do the math on how much
you would have to deduct poor people's taxes to equal the deduction of the rich, be my guest. That's too technical
for me. But if you take my example, to give me the same benefit as the rich guy, you'd have tax me 0% because his
tax savings equalled my total income!
"Favor the rich" means that they save more money than poor people, which
will always be true because they have more money and pay more taxes. How is this not logical?
However, if
the total money saved by people making less than $100,000 per year was more than the total money of people making
over $100,000 per year, then you could easily argue that it did not favor the rich. I'm just trying to defend
politicians and the rich who always get the "tax cuts favor the rich" stigma because according the the media's
definition, it will always be true.
Last edited by Pancho1188; 10-26-2004 at 02:47 PM. Reason: Not sure...this is long and horrible. I just want to delete the thing but put too much thought into it to scrap it.
And a rich person is hurt less by raising taxes than a poorOriginally Posted by Pancho1188
person, so all increases in taxes benefit the rich.
Wealthy or poor, all people in the United States are
expected to contribute part of their income to the government's budget. The wealthiest people in this country --
the multimillionnaires -- invest their money in various tax-deferred plans, such as tax-free bonds (which means they
are lending their money to the government). It has been argued through the years that they don't pay taxes.
Hence, they aren't benefitting from any tax cuts.
The less wealthy people, who nonetheless still fall in that
ambiguous category of "the wealthy", do pay taxes. They pay proportionately more taxes than people with lower
incomes, and they pay substantially more taxes (as individuals) than people with lower incomes.
So, any tax cut
across the board benefits them LESS than it benefits the people who earn less than they do.
They may end up with
thousands more dollars at the end of the year, but they earned those dollars to begin with. Some how, some way.
Therefore, no tax cut can ever benefit the rich, unless it specifically targets the rich (and Bush's tax cuts
didn't do that -- the wealthy taxpayers benefitted less than the middle class taxpayers).
Having your money
taken from you is not a benefit. The benefits really come from the programs those taxes pay for, and last time I
checked, there were more programs benefitting the poor than benefitting the rich.
Blah, blah, blah.Originally Posted by DrSmellThis
I've read all that
hokum before. What all these tax-cut analysts conveniently neglect to point out is that the income taxes are
deducted from income.
We may not like the fact that we are making only 1 per cent of the income of the guy next
door, but he is earning it.
We already have a progressive tax system. The more you make, the more they take.
The rich aren't benefitting from the tax system more than the middle class or the poor. The rich just earn more
than the rest of us.
I'm not going to argue on theOriginally Posted by Friendly1
following points because you're right:
1. The rich use tax shelters
2. The rich pay a lot more percentage of
their income to taxes
3. Everyone deserves to contribute to the government in which they enjoy the benefits of
living
4. The rich (well, the ones that earned it through hard work and not by screwing people out of their
pensions like Enron) deserve their income just like everyone else does
5. Everyone will always complain
about paying taxes, and the poor have the benefit of blaming the rich for no reason because the poor reap benefits
(army, police, government, etc.) because of the money that rich people pay to the government---in fact, people
should be thankful for what they already have to some extent
#2 proves my point, however, since the rich pay so
much more taxes then they would benefit from a tax cut...You can't say that Bush's tax plan didn't benefit the
rich. Bush lowered every tax bracket with his new tax plan. He lowered the top tax bracket to like 33%
(can't remember...might be 36 or something...I'm sure someone on the forum knows the exact numbers) from whatever
it was previously. Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. In fact, if the rich have more money to spend, then
they invest it into the economy and help get us out of a recession. You know the poor don't have that much control
on whether they keep their jobs or not because of the economy. I know that I would like to reach that tax bracket
one day, and I sure as hell don't want to be paying all of it in taxes.
Anyway, your reference to non-taxable
investments is:
1. referring to interest income vs. non-interest income, and even if the rich
invested all of their money in tax-deferred plans would still have to pay taxes on their non-interest
income
2. referring to only a portion of people's total investments (The reason why they're tax-free is because
they're from the government and they're low-interest. No one is going to put all of their money in low-interest
investments.)
Again, I am not arguing that the rich don't deserve a tax break. Hell, I am with Bel (I think it
was Bel who was for the flat tax) when I say that everyone should pay an equal share to the government unless
you're, say, below the poverty line. I think that the rich deserve a tax break if the middle and lower class get a
tax break. However, I'm against tax breaks all together because you're just going to have to raise taxes again,
anyway...look at the deficit! Anyone who knows basic economics knows that it's a good temporary solution to rid
the economy of a recession/depression, but as soon as the economy is back on its feet, the government will be right
back at your door asking for that money they need to balance the budget that currently entered into the (how many 0s
are in a trillion? 1,000,000,000,000) 13+ figure range.
They have Kerry pegged as the guy who will increase
taxes. How else are you going to pay for all of this? It's like the teenage girl who goes nuts with daddy's
credit card and daddy has to start whoring his daughter out to pay for the debt---(okay, it's not like that, but I
just wanted to say that)---I mean has to tax away all of his family's allowances to pay off the debt.
You're right, Pancho, I
brought up the flat tax and would support it under certain conditions. But it will never come to pass because the
conservatives will fight it for one reason, the liberals (ok, progressives) for another.
In a private discussion
I tried to explain what I think is wrong with the way our country and most others is run. Look at it as a machine
producing some product, the GDP. Currently our machine uses more than 50% of it's total output for it's control
systems, ie: government. People complain all the time about their inefficient car that uses 5% of it's gross energy
budget to operate but tolerate a government that uses ten times as much. As an engineer, if i were to design a
machine that was so inefficient, I'd never work again.
Some factions want to tax the richest to help support
the poorest and within certain limits, that's not a bad thing. However, the way we are doing it, about 15% of every
tax dollar taken from the wage earners to help the needy actually gets to the people it's intended for. The rest
goes to support the machine. There's something terribly wrong with that and no matter who is paying the larger
portion, no matter who gets the better tax breaks, we are all getting screwed. A flat tax would not make things
better right now because of the inefficiency of the machine. It would only result in government having less
accountability and greater deficits. We need to fix the mind set that ever increasing taxes are ok, that it is our
responsibilty to pay for our leaders inability or unwillingness to operate in an effective and efficient manner.
To compel a man to subsidize with his taxes the propagation of ideas which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
Franki?
If a guy's a cocksucker in his life, when he dies, he don't become a saint. - Morris Levy, Hitmen
Holmes' Theme Song
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