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Originally Posted by USANick7
Second: What exactly do you see about Obamas tax plan that takes into consideration "performance standards, reliability, and how they interact with other employees."
It sounds to me that your own candidates method for redistributing wealth fails your own standards by which producers should be gauged..."
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I should preface my remarks by admitting that I'm not an economist. It's my understanding that taxation and exemptions are arrived upon by an number of quantitive factors like earned income, number of dependents, etc. In that case, I don't see how any metric for taxation can look at qualitative factors like "performance standards, reliability, and how they interact with other employees." The argument posted in the OP was about a business owner choosing to lay off workers based on a political choice, which I personally didn't see as linked to the aforementioned performance measurements. Guess I didn't get the joke like everyone else did, but given the amount of stuff thrown at either candidate during "silly season" I think my standard for humor's probably pretty out of whack.
With regards to "socialism" and this election- I don't see anything in Obama's economic policies that reflect that. Take a look at the table found here:
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfa....cfm?Docid=213
Obama proposed a top income tax rate of 36.9%- that's the same as Clinton's, and if you look at the data here, lower than all but 2 years of the administration of the central figure of modern American conservatism- Ronald Reagan.
His proposed health care plan still plays off the principle of the free market by allowing individuals to pick their providers, plans, and doctors. It doesn't call for a truly socialized health care system where the government creates an overarching bureaucracy or nationalizes existing health care providers.
With regards to regulating the market, even Greenspan admitted that deregulation and the free market had failed the American economy. History has demonstrated that free markets work best with the boundaries clearly delineated- I don't want to see government regulating every facet of American business, but I'm not in favor seeing the mistakes of the past repeated. I freely admit that Clinton's economic policies in the later 1990s (starting the ball rolling on deregulation) bear as much of the blame for our current predicament as do Bush's.
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I support McCain because He is the lesser of the 2 evils. Neither is perfect but Obama is a closet socialist or Marxist and if you are a history buff read about Hitlers and Stalin ans Mussolini's rise in the early years. You will find some amazing similarity's in their rhetoric and social programs. That is why I can not stand him. I have fought for years to protect this country and will not vote in a socialist type of president.
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Those dictators rose to power because they made populist appeals to economic and social ills and promised quick fixes to complicated issues. However, you'd be hard pressed to find an office seeker who DIDN'T do that. The way the middle class has surged to the forefront of every recent political speech by EITHER candidate exemplifies this. I think applying Godwin's Law to Obama is just as absurd as it is to apply it to McCain or Bush. This is just electoral politics at its ugly and perverse conclusion. I wish that the American public had more of an attention span for substantial discussion of the issues, but that's a topic for another thread.
Do I think Obama represents some sort of grand shift towards an American-style socialism, or despotism? No. When faced with our mounting deficit, I'd rather see us looking inward to refunding social programs rather than having Chinese bankers buy up our debt. I wholeheartedly agree that American businesses and workers are among the most hard-working and innovative in the world, and I want to see it stay that way. I'm hoping that an Obama administration will lead the way in stimulating green business and development practices, so we can again make American technical ingenuity indispensable to our allies and aspiring nations alike.
One thing I'll give you all is that I'm not a big fan of the kind of messianism many associate with Obama. I personally like the guy, but the way some people act you'd think he'd solve every problem in the world in his first five minutes in office. I just happen to like him because most of what he's proposing makes sense to me.