FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

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Speaking for myself, if Obama's magnanimous tax cut for senior citizens does not include capital gains, he will be imposing a huge hardship on those seniors who depend on their retirement investments to live. We'll have to see if that flies, huh?

Long term capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than normal income. They will pay less with or without a tax cut.

Think what you will. I go by what I see the groups doing, publishing, presenting, and the degree of impartiality built into it.

I have frequently seen both Cato and Heritage being extremely critical of the GOP, the Republican President, and policies/activities they represent.

But again, you seem to be dealing with credentials rather than the content of the discussion.

Palin and McCain’s Shotgun Marriage

Frank Rich

SARAH PALIN makes John McCain look even older than he is. And he seemed more than willing to play that part on Thursday night. By the time he slogged through his nearly 50-minute acceptance speech " longer even than Barack Obama’s " you half-expected some brazen younger Republican (Mitt Romney, perhaps?) to dash onstage to give him a gold watch and the bum’s rush.

The only problem, of course, is that the entire thing was a sham.

As is nakedly evident, the speech’s central argument, that the 72-year-old McCain will magically morph into a powerful change agent as president, is a non sequitur. In his 26 years in Washington, most of it with a Republican in the White House and roughly half of it with Republicans in charge of Congress, he was better at lecturing his party about reform than leading a reform movement. G.O.P. corruption and governmental dysfunction only grew. So did his cynical flip-flops on the most destructive policies of the president who remained nameless Thursday night. (In the G.O.P., Bush love is now the second most popular love that dare not speak its name.)

Even more fraudulent, if that’s possible, is the contrast between McCain’s platonic presentation of his personal code of honor and the man he has become. He always puts his country first, he told us: “I’ve been called a maverick.” If there was any doubt that that McCain has fled, confirmation arrived with his last-minute embrace of Sarah Palin.

...

He wanted to choose the pro-abortion-rights Joe Lieberman as his vice president. If he were still a true maverick, he would have done so. But instead he chose partisanship and politics over country. “God only made one John McCain, and he is his own man,” said the shafted Lieberman in his own tedious convention speech last week. What a pathetic dupe. McCain is now the man of James Dobson and Tony Perkins. The “no surrender” warrior surrendered to the agents of intolerance not just by dumping his pal for Palin but by moving so far to the right on abortion that even Cindy McCain seemed unaware of his radical shift when being interviewed by Katie Couric last week.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/opinion/07rich.html?ref=opinion

“Often my haste is a mistake,” McCain conceded in his 2002 memoir, “but I live with the consequences without complaint.” Well, maybe it’s fine if he wants to live with the consequences, but what about his country? Should the unexamined Palin prove unfit to serve at the pinnacle of American power, it will be too late for the rest of us to complain.

We’ve already seen where such visceral decision-making by McCain can lead. In October 2001, he speculated that Saddam Hussein might have been behind the anthrax attacks in America. That same month he out-Cheneyed Cheney in his repeated public insistence that Iraq had a role in 9/11 " even after both American and foreign intelligence services found that unlikely. He was similarly rash in his reading of the supposed evidence of Saddam’s W.M.D. and in his estimate of the number of troops needed to occupy Iraq. (McCain told MSNBC in late 2001 that we could do with fewer than 100,000.) It wasn’t until months after “Mission Accomplished” that he called for more American forces to be tossed into the bloodbath. The whole fiasco might have been prevented had he listened to those like Gen. Eric Shinseki who faulted the Rumsfeld war plan from the start.

[same article as in the above posting]

Healthcare reform will be one of the top issues of the 2008 presidential election. In the face of widespread public demand for changes in the U.S. health care system, both Barack Obama and John McCain have offered detailed proposals for reform.

Senator Obama's approach relies heavily on government mandates, regulations, and subsidies. He would mandate that employers provide health care coverage for their workers and that parents purchase health insurance for their children. He would significantly increase regulation of the insurance industry, establishing a standard minimum benefits package, and requiring insurers to accept all applicants regardless of their health. He would offer a variety of new and expanded subsidies to middle- and low-income Americans.

In contrast, John McCain emphasizes consumer choice and greater competition in the health care industry. He would move away from our current employment-based insurance system by replacing the current tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance with a refundable tax credit for individuals. At the same time he would sharply deregulate the insurance industry to increase competition.

Senator McCain's proposal is far from perfect, but from a free-market perspective, it appears superior to Senator Obama's plan. Obama's plan, with its heavy reliance on government, leads to the same problems that bedevil universal health care systems all over the world: limited patient choices and rationed care. McCain's proposal is much more consumer centered and taps into the best aspects of the free market. (--Michael Tanner)
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9561

Any other comments on the details themselves Cyclop? Cato is not Republican at all, and is perhaps one of the strongest authoritative critics of our current President and Republican party policies these days.

But if you don't like Cato's comparison, by all means post your own credible source with a different side by side comparison.

And okay you are opposed to deregulation of the health insurance industry. Please explain why.

How about health care?

We conclude that the McCain plan, which would replace the current exclusion for employer-paid premiums with a refundable income tax credit of up to $5000 for anyone purchasing of health insurance and make other changes to the healthcare system, would increase the deficit by $1.3 trillion over 10 years and modestly trim the number of uninsured. The Obama plan, which would make relatively low-cost insurance available to everyone through non-group pools and subsidize premiums for low- and moderate-income households, would cost $1.6 trillion, but would also cover virtually all children and many currently uninsured adults.

TPC projects the McCain plan would trim the uninsured by 1 million in 2009 and nearly 5 million by 2013, although their numbers would slowly rise thereafter because the tax credit would fail to keep pace with premiums (see figure). Obama would reduce the uninsured by 18 million in 2009 and 34 million by 2018. Even under the Obama plan, however, 34 million Americans would still lack insurance in 2018.



The new TPC analysis updates earlier sets of estimates released in June and July 2008. The revised estimates reflect changes in each candidate’s plans, additional details released by the campaigns (particularly that by the Obama campaign on August 14, 2008), and modifications to our tax modeling procedures.

We all seem to agree that TPC is taking Obama's side, but then TPC almost always takes the liberal side in their analysis.

Well if you won't accept any site that doesn't denounce every Republican or conservative policy, we can just agree not to discuss this with each other at all because whether you want to admit it or not, the Republicans every now and then get it right and conservatism has produced better results. Or, please post your credible site that rebuts Cato's take on it. Or give me a reasoned argument for why Cato is wrong.

Foxfyre wrote:

Well if you won't accept any site that doesn't denounce every Republican or conservative policy, we can just agree not to discuss this with each other at all because whether you want to admit it or not, the Republicans every now and then get it right and conservatism has produced better results. Or, please post your credible site that rebuts Cato's take on it. Or give me a reasoned argument for why Cato is wrong.

Cato isn't necessarily wrong. They are just libertarian. Which means that they will propagate a libertarian point of view, rather than just analysing the data and presenting the results.

They have a libertarian agenda, and there's nothing wrong with that, because they openly say so themselves. They promote libertarian policies.