what happened

[GT40FIED]

I don't think either of them had any significant grasp on economic policy....let's face it, few people do aside from economists. Any economic policy will be coming from cabinet members anyway. McCain even said he "had a lot to learn" when it came to the economy. At least he was honest for once, I suppose.

It's a shame that the elections took place in the time they did when all people wanted to hear about was the economy. Sure, it's important but there are a lot of other pressing issues that didn't really get addressed. Hell...even I can come up with better prop-ups for the economy. How, you ask?

Repeal all of the Bush administration's initiatives. And I mean ALL of them. It's pretty clear they did nothing to help us. Tax the shit out of the rich...they can afford it. Even a slight bump in middle class (my and your) taxes would be fine with me. I hate paying taxes, but I know I have to in order to have things like police, firefighters, civil services, etc. Americans expect a whole hell of a lot but don't want anything coming out of their pocket for it. Time to change that. You'll wish you paid taxes when your house catches fire and no one comes to put it out. Slash the defense budget big time. Hell, cut it in half and it's still the biggest in the world. Who are we afraid of, anyway? We're on fairly good terms with Russia thanks to M.A.D. and China owns so much shit here there's no point in them trying anything. We're fighting a war that has no clear definition of "win", so put an end to that right now. Nation building costs money and we ain't got any to spare. Besides, the war will never be "won" by the American definition so why does it matter when we leave? We had no problem pulling out of Vietnam and they seem to be doing ok. Also, let's have EVERY financial regulatory institution in this country do a MAJOR overhaul so nobody gets to pull the same bullshit that put us into this situation in the first place. There...that's gotta be a few trillion over a few years.

[VR4_Craver]

Originally Posted by GT40FIED

Repeal all of the Bush administration's initiatives. And I mean ALL of them. It's pretty clear they did nothing to help us. Tax the shit out of the rich...they can afford it. Even a slight bump in middle class (my and your) taxes would be fine with me. I hate paying taxes, but I know I have to in order to have things like police, firefighters, civil services, etc. Americans expect a whole hell of a lot but don't want anything coming out of their pocket for it. Time to change that. You'll wish you paid taxes when your house catches fire and no one comes to put it out. Slash the defense budget big time. Hell, cut it in half and it's still the biggest in the world. Who are we afraid of, anyway? We're on fairly good terms with Russia thanks to M.A.D. and China owns so much shit here there's no point in them trying anything. We're fighting a war that has no clear definition of "win", so put an end to that right now. Nation building costs money and we ain't got any to spare. Besides, the war will never be "won" by the American definition so why does it matter when we leave? We had no problem pulling out of Vietnam and they seem to be doing ok. Also, let's have EVERY financial regulatory institution in this country do a MAJOR overhaul so nobody gets to pull the same bullshit that put us into this situation in the first place. There...that's gotta be a few trillion over a few years.

do it bitches

[CD5Passion]

ahhhh right, this is what I was looking for. I love some good ol political talk. as long as they don't break out into fights (although I admit they were entertaining)

I voted Obama because I trusted him more than McCain to not follow Bush's amazing plans. Honestly, how can you trust a man who recruited that travesty of a gun-toting, religious freak. My god Palin sickened me. I have my hopes that Obama can make a change, aside from the cliche campaign promo. But I don't expect him to be able to just pull our of Iraq and wave a magical wand to fix the economy, it'll take time. On a side note, it was pretty cool to see Obama redraw the political landscape, what with him past Republican states.

[ChrisCantSkate]

be warned.. a chris rant.

well, mccain had a history of going against huge spending, and trying to be efficient with his war spending ( ). now i am against the republican charge of late, however for whatever its worth, bush kept us "afloat" through his ginormous spendings, which did cripple us. the tax policies were not as bad as they turned out to be since the spending side was not upto par with the tax exempts.

i am (well, in 9 credit hours) going to have my BS in economics, ive graphed the polices, and played a little economic game theory, and looked at the outcomes and while some of the variables arnt able to be correctly represented on a graph, since economic graphs operate under "ideal conditions" and "rational thought" you can see how this outcome happened.

"trickle down dosnt work" is usually the response i get when i get into economic talks with people, i expect it from my next statement, but i make it and argue it. when you tax the rich(business owners) more because "they can afford it" they do a few things. first they dont give out as many raises. second they look at how they can outsource any and all work to not have to pay taxes on workers to do a job they can either get cheaper overseas, or open a overseas factory. people always say that "well, they would do it anyways regardless if we tax them more or not". not true. put in the variables.

monitary:

~40% tax rate on highest income(i know in the bush plan its littered with incentives, but they are not permanent so we can only count that savings in a short run analysis, where a fixed lower tax can be properly computed in long run business decisions, long term is how you plan your large investments, short run is where you make minor decisions to maximize profit based on recent trends), required mimimum pay(which im not against but its a variable we must regard), in country production, lower shipping costs, no tariffs, closer quality control. able to reinvest money into main company. safe insured monetary system

vs. out of country.

lower taxes(we are one of the highest taxes on business owners), no mimimum pay. unstable environment in and around factory/office/etc. nationalized, or chance of nationalized banks. irratic government/rule.

SIDE BAR

just to put numbers into the higher tax thing, cause it DRIVES ME CRAZY

company A earns a net taxable income of 100million us dollars, pay the 39 or 40% tax that we have going leaving them with 60m to spend

company B works in a 3rd world country where the tax rate is 20%, they earn an additional 20m to be reinvested into the company.

most large companies, the ones who have a sigificant impact on the economy, operate in the billions. we're talking serious cash we are removing from our GDP, and not putting in the hands of our people who spend it in out economy rather than in some other countries. removing money from our system is one of the factors that played into our shitstorm we have now.

/SIDE BAR


now we add these to a risk/reward chart, figure out if the cost of doing business in a questionable environment is worth the saved money. more and more its becoming yes. from a business owners standpoint, it is a much safer investment to be able to go downstairs and check on operations than to have to operate from half way around the world. the other option is to raise prices, which is a combination of what is happening now. businesses dont like operating at a loss, and will do what is needed not to, without consideration for personel. its business, not charity. shitty, but the way it is.

we are shipping jobs overseas and running prices through the roofas is. its not solely because of taxes, nor any one tangable item we can nail down otherwise, the person who figures it out would have a noble prize in econ. its the whole way a system is run. you have one broken part, if you dont fix the problem, and instead try to make the outcome how we want it, everything gets tangled.

now that i got a bit sidetracked lemmi try to wrap this up. we cannot have this spread the wealth notion that obama is pushing. its a early form of socialism, or even communism. this is how carl marx even said communism needs to be implemented, emerging out of capitalism once the market couldnt sustain itself anymore and the government needed to step in to spead the wealth amongst the people, working together to give everyone their needs.

i dont believe that his intentions are to introduce socialism into our economy, but he, as steve said, is a VERY left dem. the democratic party/mindset is a larger government to provide its citizens with needs that could, or couldnt be provided for themselves. his way of combating this bush driven economy of past was to go right against the grain of what he was doing. swinging the opposite way is not a good way of trying to rectify a poor policy. i feel, which is completely my opinion, based on what ive taken in and how i chose to interpret, that a transition to a similar economic policy coupled with a stricter spending schedule would be a better way out of our "crisis" rather than lowering taxes on the largest portion of our taxable GDI, while trying to increase gov't spending to stimulate an economy. we can look at both their voting records, and while both undoubtedly cast votes for their "party buddies" they both followed a pattern on how they felt gov't spending should be allocated.

its tough to promise more to everyone(increase gov't spending), say your going to get the vast minority to pay for it, and bring any sort of stable return to the economy. its great for getting votes. brilliant actually. promise 95% of the country your gonna lower their taxes because more money appeals to well, everyone. say your gonna tax the rich since they can afford it, while promising more free healthcare and the whathaveyous funded by programs that do not compute. someone has to pay. someone always does. the rish business owners are, well, generally smarter than your average joe. thats how they got where they are. they know when they are getting or about to get screwed, and will be cut-throat about doing it. their standard of living wont suffer much from more taxes, they will pass it off to us, you, me, however you want to look at it. they provide us with our needs, we will find a way to pay, we get more money through our "lower taxes" so we can buy more expensive products.

hell i even wouldnt be surprised if sales tax went up.

but all that said. honestly at the end of the day i hope to all hope that obama does a good job. i hope there are enough checks and balances to iron the wrinkles out in his ideas(i hold back calling them plans at this point). i dont wish him ill will, and from a purely human standpoint i think its a great step forward for our country. we elected a black man to the highest office in our government and brought in relatively new blood to the system, giving future no-names a punchers chance. i dont like hierarchy in a democratic system. its not how its supposta be. we will never ever be a pure democracy, its not only impractical given our population, but very hard to carry out in the real world.


ive got a hand cramp now. rip my rant apart, i'll do my best to defend.