The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
God Bless you, Barack Obama, and be with you, right with you, in the days ahead.
The Moral Equivalent of Stealing
The loud complaint from the Republican camp in this Presidential race is that Republican-branded “socialist” Obama wants to “spread the wealth” around by funneling rich people’s dollars to people who do not pay taxes. Let’s look at that socialism claim realistically. People with a family of four who earn above $250,000 have all of their basic needs covered: generally speaking, they own comfortable houses; can afford good medical care, food, cars, insurance policies, vacations, private education, books, thus less need for library, park, school, health, public transit systems.
The people earning from $100,000 to $250,000 have to plan a bit more and actually can’t afford to send their children to private schools (certainly, not without scholarship assistance, as some schools now charge up to $36,000 a year in the Washington area). These otherwise middle class workers might not be able to vacation in as elegant a style as they wish, but they can still get away, probably can own a house.
People earning less than $100,000 are called on actually to sacrifice and make tough choices on what they do, and those making less than $50,000 are struggling in this economy to put food on the table, keep roofs over their heads, and God forbid they get sick, because most of them cannot afford health insurance. ALL of them are paying taxes.
Those families earning less than $50,000 are called the working poor now, and they pay taxes, which even Warren Buffet has acknowledged place a greater burden on them than the taxes he is asked to pay. Even those who have lost their jobs and are collecting unemployment insurance, pay taxes, such that the State giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other. The elite Republicans, who broad-brush paint most of them as welfare cheats, almost universally condemn those citizens on welfare. Public Assistance recipients often find no road out of welfare; surely, a few are gaming the system, and the State goes after cheats and prosecutes them soundly. A criminal is a criminal whatever the income, but it is usually the littlest guy who is labeled first and actually pays a price.
Yet the cry goes up from the likes of Senators Phil Graham and John McCain that this country is a “nation of whiners.” I agree that some in this country are whining, but it’s generally not the working poor. Those on welfare have not even found their voices yet, so they aren’t saying a thing. The gaming of the system is less done by the poor on welfare than the rich, who don’t want to call it welfare but still want their farm subsidies in spite of the fact they are not farmers (don’t mind real farmers in need getting help to keep their farms), and the myriad corporations and individuals taking advantage of tax loopholes, and paying NO taxes. Some of these are even getting government grants and subsidies. I’d like to see some of them locked up too—they are the real criminals here.
So let us see just who is benefiting most from the systems set up in this country? How is it possible for someone to earn $250,000 and does he/she do it single handedly? The bones of this democracy that support all our actions, our individual pursuits of life, liberty, and happiness are made up of the rule of law, the administration of justice, an infrastructure of roads/bridges/electrical grids/pipelines, police/fire/military protections of our freedoms. We the People flesh out those infrastructure bones with the building of enterprises that support the structure, keeping ourselves healthy, and carrying out our civic duties, like voting, keeping ourselves informed/educated, and paying our taxes, as a necessary element of survival. We do that because there is no other way to keep the system healthy and alive.
Those who insist that they are not willing to share for the common good their incomes over $250,000 are committing the ultimate in “White Collar Crime.” If you have your basics covered and think this democracy can thrive without all of its people being able to live minimally decent, healthy lives, able to educate their children, and keep order in their communities, you just haven’t had a look around these United States lately. The pain HAS “trickled up” as Obama has said many times. The top 3-10 percent, however, their basics remaining covered, clinging to unrealistic, unfounded economics, wallow in self-centeredness. They have yet to see the light.
If you are in that privileged set, let me make a suggestion: while you are still in control of your life, you might change your attitude and start thinking of the addition to your taxes as taking out an insurance policy, so that this country can continue to stand and YOU can continue to have the opportunity for advancement to keep earning. If you continue to cheat this system, you are undermining this democracy, eating away at its foundations. All of us have the responsibilities that come with citizenship in this great enterprise to keep the country healthy, and none of us can do it alone. Even Adam Smith, the touchstone of capitalism acknowledged this in his celebrated work, The Wealth of Nations.
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has gotten the most heat for being evasive in this season of political debates, but new research suggests that the contrast between her and the other top-of-the-ticket candidates has less to do with her lack of responsiveness than with the three senators' skill at dodging questions without seeming to.
When Democratic Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and debate moderator Gwen Ifill asked Palin to defend John McCain's stance on economic deregulation, she said, "I'm still on the tax thing because I want to correct you on that again. And I want to let you know what I did as a mayor and as a governor. And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record."
She then spoke about her efforts to cut taxes in Alaska.
Contrast that obvious dodge withSen. Barack Obama's response to moderator Jim Lehrer's question about how the nation's financial meltdown would require him to scale back on his campaign promises.
"Well, there are a range of things that are probably going to have to be delayed," Obama replied. "We don't yet know what our tax revenues are going to be. The economy is slowing down, so it's hard to anticipate right now what the budget is going to look like next year. But there's no doubt that we're not going to be able to do everything that I think needs to be done. There are some things that I think have to be done."
And with that, Obama spent the next 334 words talking about spending increases and new plans. The transition from the unpopular subject of program cuts to the popular subject of new programs was artful, and it helped that Obama did not preface the about-face with so much as a "but."
"Palin was loosely on topic, but a couple of times she really bungled the pivot," said Daniel J. Simons, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has studied how people can miss things that are right under their nose. "In one case, she made it explicit she was going to switch topics. That was not a smooth transition, whereas if you had watched a McCain or an Obama or a Biden make that transition, they would not have said, 'I want to talk about taxes,' they would have answered the question in a way that led into taxes."
A review of the debate transcripts shows Obama, McCain and Biden all repeatedly dodging questions, adroitly transitioning from questions they were asked to questions they wanted to answer.
In a series of particularly relevant experiments, psychologists Todd Rogers and Michael I. Norton recently showed that most people are extremely poor at spotting even dramatic discrepancies between questions and answers. They found the failure was especially acute when answers were semantically linked to questions -- for example, when a question about the war on drugs is parried by an answer about health care. Audiences seemed to notice dodges only when answers were completely unrelated to the question -- such as responding to a question about illegal drugs by discussing terrorism.
The psychologists found that irrelevant answers delivered fluently and with poise scored higher with audiences than answers that were accurate, on-topic, but halting. And when they had actors deliver the same answers to audiences -- once fluently and once with "ums" and "ahs" -- audiences judged the hesitant responses as intellectually inferior to the fluent ones.
Norton, at Harvard Business School, conducted an informal experiment during one debate: After the candidates gave their answers, Norton asked a group of friends to recall the question.
"They got a little bit better over the course of the evening, but by the time the politicians finished these two-minute all-over-the-place-answers, even people trying to focus forgot what question they were asked," he said.
Voters say they prefer candid politicians, but the experiments suggest politicians may pay a higher price for intellectual honesty than dishonesty.
"When [Palin] acknowledged the question and said, 'I don't want to talk about it,' it was intellectually honest, but it alerted people that she was not going to answer the question," said Rogers, a political psychologist and executive director of the Analyst Institute, a Washington-based group that studies voting behavior with an eye to helping liberals.
Norton and Simons suggest the reason audiences find it difficult to pick up on skillful dodges is that the human brain is not very good at keeping track of smooth changes, especially when distracted.
In another series of experiments, Simons has shown that when people are intently focused on something -- a basketball game on TV, for example -- large numbers fail to see a man dressed up in a gorilla suit walking across the screen. In another experiment, Simons stopped people on the street and asked for directions. Halfway through the answer, he arranged for two men carrying a door to walk between him and the person giving the answer. After the door passed by, Simons was gone -- and one of the people carrying the door was standing in his place. Half the time, people did not notice the person they were talking to had changed.
Hang tough, please. Do NOT turn the Treasury and our hard earned dollars to this crew of lying frauds. They built a house of cards, profited from it for years, are ensconced in country clubs and mansions, and they have through their own fault by risking OUR future lost the gamble. WE OUGHT NOT HAVE TO FOOT THE BILL FOR THEIR GREED. If we have to have a Depression, I would rather see $700B go into rebuilding America's bridges and electrical grid. That way the workers will have JOBS and we'll have something for our money. Bush/Cheney/McCain have lied before, and they're lying now. DO NOT RUSH THROUGH to a bad agreement. Stay out there campaigning and have your financial advisors go to Washington.
AND call McCain's bluff . . . ridiculous! Cancel the debate--what balderdash! What is he afraid of? and what arrogance, thinking he can take over the deliberations in Washington. That's not leadership it's grandstanding. He's looking more and more an old fool.
. . . and of course it was not covered by the media, as it was Anti-Palin and very pro-Obama. I have some excellent photos of it, but can't seem to attach them here. Can anyone tell me how? I am using a Mac G-5 and have Photoshop. I tried JPG & HTML formats to no avail.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/09/08/war_honor_and_john_mccain?s_campaign=8315
This is a must-read seems to me. Those who seem to think McCain should be rewarded with the Presidency because he suffered are so off base they are AWOL. I know a lot of people who have suffered, perhaps even more than 5.5 years in a Vietnamese cell, under the policies of this country and right on its shores, and you don't hear they need any rewards for their pains. I think the reward McCain needs and deserves is our respect and a good retirement. God bless us all and save us from the mistakes of the past, McCain's included.
