Obama '08?

Approving or agreeing with some of the particular actions of a person is not synonymous with approving or agreeing with all of a person's actions.

Disapproving or disagreeing with some of the particular actions of a person is not synonymous with disapproving or disagreeing with all of a person's actions.

How profound!

We have all told okie in plain language just how wrong he is. I can't help but wonder if our correcting him is giving him a Messianic complex. I suspect that the more we correct his totally misguided assumptions that the more correct he thinks he is . . . that he is the voice of one crying in the desert.

I just read okie's last twisted response to me where in he failed to remember when I corrected him on the educational achievements of liberals and how I misquoted him saying that his house was purchased about 40 years ago when he said it was purchased about 40 years ago.

Do you remember when we would speculate that massagatto wrote from an asylum?

Hey, sluggo, here is your original from the thread, "Where is the US Economy Headed?"

Fri 21 May, 2010 03:25 pm
@plainoldme,
plainoldme wrote:

The idea of a house being an investment is relatively recent.

I think I remember a house being a decent investment from the first house I ever purchased, which was almost 40 years ago. Most reasonable people knew even then that if something did not depreciate or lose its value soon after purchase, as automobiles or furniture typically did, then it was at least a better investment than renting your housing, which basically meant the money went down a rathole, never to return.

Of course that did not mean it was wise to go around buying houses or land without some judgement of quality of what you were purchasing.

A house is only a breakeven investment if it increases its value only enough to pay for its total original purchase cost, plus the total cost to sell it.

For a house to be a good investment, its resale must pay for its total original purchase cost, plus the total cost to sell it, and plus the profit that would have been paid by an equivalent investment in and resale of US treasury savings bonds.

I can see your point . . . but . . . that is going a little too far. Why did you chose savings bonds as a measure.

You neglected to put in the cost of maintenance and improvements. Some people put in totally misguided improvements that often become a condition for sale, as in the prospective buyer might say I will meet your asking price if . . . you rip out the jacuzzi, the vinyl flooring, the shed in the back yard . . .

In my opinion, the best bet is securities. The average person can do very well by doing just a little research every week in, say, Morningstar, looking for a variety of mutual funds that are top rated. In general, in my opinion, the return will be much better than any investment in a home. This is not to say one should not purchase a home. But one should not look to a home for a source of retirement, etc., funds.

Here is the article that I gave you in re: to the fact that liberals are better educated than other groups.

Last time, I gave you just the pertinent sections. This time, I will give you the link! Enjoy!

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/17/in-search-of-ideologues-in-america

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If that is not enough proof for you, perhaps, you would like to go through this Census data and strip out the red states and the blue, then look at the levels of educational achievement:

http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/education/cps2004/tab13.pdf

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Even the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, admitted that, "A certain bloc of the conservative electorate may very well be less intelligent than its liberal counterpart. Lazar Stankov, a visiting professor at Singapore’s National Institute of Education, published “Conservatism and Cognitive Ability” earlier this year in the peer-reviewed journal Intelligence. Here is a quote from the article’s abstract:

Conservatism and cognitive ability are negatively correlated … At the individual level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with SAT, vocabulary, and analogy test scores. At the national level of analysis, conservatism scores correlate negatively with measures of education … and performance on mathematics and reading assessments.

Provocative, yes. But two important caveats are needed. First, by “conservatism” Stankov does not necessarily mean people who favor free market economics. He has in mind a kind of traditionalism probably best described as social conservatism:
The Conservative syndrome describes a person who attaches particular importance to the respect of tradition, humility, devoutness and moderation; as well as to obedience, self-discipline and politeness, social order, family, and national security; and has a sense of belonging to and a pride in a group with which he or she identifies. A Conservative person also subscribes to conventional religious beliefs and accepts the mystical, including paranormal, experiences.
The second caveat is that social conservatives do not always vote for conservative candidates."

www.american.com, October 2009
(To the above, I would argue that liberals place more value on family.)

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Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education demonstrates that degreed people are more likely to be liberal . . . which is not the point that is being debated here:

http://chronicle.com/article/College-Makes-Students-More/64040/

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Again, this is not what is being discussed, but this demonstrates that liberals are more well read. From that, I would add that liberals are more likely to read for pleasure because they tend to be somewhat better educated.

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/08/21/liberals-books/

The problem here is that real wages have remained stagnant since 1979 which means that most people have no money to invest in anything. For the past four or five months, talking heads and columnists have been pointing out the reason why credit card debt escalated is that people have to borrow for their daily lives.

Now, do you understand that I am neither arguing for or against a house as an investment? That I am only tracing the beginning of the notion that houses are investments.

What has come to light recently is that houses are investments but not for the home occupants but for the real homeowners . . . the banks. This whole bundling of mortgages thing is at the root of the market collapse problem, but the root is not a tap root, but rather a runner. There are other elements as well.

kuvasz, I don't know how to explain it any plainer than I will attempt here, but popularity has not much to do with an opinion as to whether people approve of or disapprove of the job he is doing. The approval or disapproval has to do with whether they think Obama is smart enough, competent enough, experienced enough, or using the correct political philosophies to enact or oversee the best policies as president of the United States. It has little to do with how popular he is, either positively or negatively. For example, Osama Bin Laden might be considered popular by virtue of how well known he is, but that has little to do with how qualified he may be to do anything positive.

So to put it bluntly, Rasmussen's poll represents an opinion of approval or disapproval of Obama's performance as president, not his popularity. If you would read the polls website, it explains this to you and we would not have to argue the obvious. Here is the quote from their website:
"The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 26% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-three percent (43%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -17"

To clarify, buying a house or houses compared to investing into other things such as stocks, certificates of deposit, and other securities might not have been considered a great investment 40 or 5o years ago, but investing into a house 38 years ago when I bought my first house instead of paying rent was in fact considered a good comparative investment, according to my memory. It depends upon the choices given you, investments are comparative for the particular dollars that you have to spend. For example, even if the house I purchased in 1972 gained no value and only held its value, it would still have been a good investment compared to wasting money on paying rent. As it turned out, my house gained about 28.6% on its value in just 3 years by the time I sold it in 1975, so it turned out that the real estate people and friends that I talked to were correct, and my own personal hunches and observation turned out to be correct, buying a house was a good all around investment even at that time, not just compared to investing into rent.

Interesting. Thanks pom. I have studied the information, and first of all it is a sampling of just 2,000 people, not particularly impressive given the wide range of factors they are attempting to evaluate, and secondly it appears to me that you cannot just compare the groups they call Liberal and Conservative, because the other groups they call Populist, Libertarian, and "Ambivalent" far outnumber the Liberal and Conservative categories and contain people with both conservative and liberal views on various issues. It would be my initial opinion that Libertarian would align closer to conservative on most issues and that Populist and perhaps Ambivalent might align more with the liberal end of the spectrum, so when you consider those groups, it is not at all clear that liberals are more educated, in fact "Populists" have the lowest level of education. So I would suspect that as the old saying goes, "the devil may be in the details" in regard to the statistics you have cited, pom. I think a more in depth or complete study of the people would need to be done to come up with an accurate portrayal of the things being discussed here.

I would also add this from my personal observation of the many dozens of people that I know. Some of the smartest and frankly most successful people I know never had one day of college education, but instead became involved in the trades, such as construction disciplines like electrical, plumbing, and related careers. Some got into the medical industry as nurses, and some became involved with the computer industry. Some own their own businesses and are very successful. Some of the liberal types had college, prehaps even a degree, but never made it into anything successful. To make a long story short, education level does not appear to be a one to one measure of intelligence or even of being adequately informed in regard to issues. I admit my personal observation perhaps has only a sampling of a few hundred people, but it is not to be scoffed at in compared to the 2,000 in the study you linked, pom.

Here are some quotes from your link, not particularly flattering for your point of view, pom:
"While many graduates of American colleges cannot answer basic civics questions, a higher education does make their opinions more liberal on controversial social issues, according to a new report issued on Friday by an academic think tank.

"College graduates, whether it be current or graduated in the past, seem to have difficulty knowing basic things about our government and our history,"

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/popular


http://thesaurus.com/browse/popular

As you said:



So if approve and popular are synonyms, you've essentially been arguing that approval is popularity, which is what you at some point said it wasn't.


Joni Mitchell, The Circle Game

the failure of the university is a rich subject. We could start with how just about everyone who was part of leading this economy into the ditch is a product of either our most elite business schools or our most elite law schools.

Savings bonds were an arbitrary conservative measure. If your investment in a house is not at least better than investment in savings bonds, then do not invest in a house. Buy savings bonds or invest in something that offered a better return.

I assumed the costs of maintenance and improvements in a house were part of the total cost of investment in the house.

If I were negotiating the sale of a house to someone who required some specific remodeling of the house to close the deal, I'd say, you pay for that remodeling yourself, and my price will remain unchanged. However, if I were not able to find a buyer who would meet my conditions, I'd simply lower the price on the house as is until finally I got a buyer. I would not pay directly for any remodelling.

Read some of the other synonyms, AETH, such as "faddish, famous, fashionable, noted, or notorious" to name a few. I would agree Obama is faddish for example, but that does not mean I approve or disapprove of his performance as president. Common sense should tell anyone that the Rasmussen poll is not a "popularity" poll, as the term just does not accurately describe what it is measuring. It is not measuring popularity, but it is measuring approval and disapproval of his performance as president, which is exactly what Rasmussen says his poll does.

I have no clue why some of you are arguing this point, essentially going off on a tangent with the term "popularity poll"? I do not recall anyone terming the polls on Bush during his tenure as popularity polls. In fact the last page or two of this forum is the first time I have encountered this terming argument or spin. I am beginning to think it is just another liberal ploy of trying to basterdize anything that doesn't agree with what they want to see in the media. And I do not recall anyone terming Bush's approval ratings as a popularity poll.

I have no idea where yall are going with this. I understood what Cyclo was saying about Rasmussen's polling results on races, where he is pretty good, in my mind.
Approval/Disapproval - Popularity/Unpopularity. Diving for dictionaries.
Seems kind of silly.
So what do yall think of the Repub winning the House seat from the district in Hawaii where Obama grew up? If, of course, he was ever there vs being in Kenya.

Kuvie's point flew over your head.