Obama '08?

LOL!
JJ doesn't get it!
lol!!

Obama is the same US president that thinks E Pluribus Unum is our National Motto.

I just assumed you were referring to the 80s...
(That's when they always say it happened, although I'm sure it has been ongoing.)

POM,

Very useful post, thanks (http://able2know.org/topic/71145-1875#post-4437068). I have to respect and applaud your contributions to thread as a diagnostician, even if I cannot accept your somewhat glum prognosis.

By the way, my "spoilt little rich kid" upbringing, which you may have read about in the "Honours" thread, actually makes me more inclined to agree with you on the insanity of conspicuous consumption. We were always only middle-class and had no permanent store of wealth outside of our home equity. Growing up surrounded by millionaires' children, whom I outperformed at everything (sports, lessons, etc.), quickly taught me that toys and money had little to do with one's value as a person. It's not that I see myself as "better" than former two-comma kids. It's just that money no longer really impresses me.

(What do I mean by "two-comma kids"? $1,000,000 has two commas.)

Okay, I see in a later post that the gloomy scenario you gave us wasn't meant as a "prediction". Sorry if I misunderstood. Guess it was one those spirits of Christmas yet to come things...

...I'd go further than to say the glass is half empty. I think we're more or less down to the last dregs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/opinion/08dowd.html?hp

Dowd, on target as usual.....

The priority of the TPM (Tea Party Members) is prevention of theft by government of what people lawfully earn, lawfully spend, and lawfully invest!

The priortiy of the ILLs (Invideous Leftist Liberals) is expansion of theft by government of what people lawfully earn, lawfully spend, and lawfully invest!

ican.
**** you.
the wealthy continue to stack the deck against the rest of us.

Right on Ican!

Right on target?

Postponing a raise in taxes for individuals making $200,000 a year and couples making $250,000 a year is protecting "vast fortunes?"

Now $250,000 is not chicken-feed but, by conservative estimate, it's less than a quarter of Maureen Dowd's annual income. Considering that Rachel Maddow makes $1,000,000 per year, estimating Dowd's income as residing in the same vicinity is most likely low balling, but let's use it.

I don't begrudge whatever Dowd makes. She has a relatively unique talent that appeals to a great many people and so deserves whatever the market will bear. By all accounts, she enjoys the good life in NYC, and a standard of living that is considerably higher than the working class she is said to champion. Again, from my point of view, there's nothing wrong with this. It's her money, she comes by it honestly (at least when she isn't plagiarizing John Marshall), and so she is free to spend it as she wishes.

From her lofty vantage point though she is in a position to well realize that a gross annual income of $250,000 doesn't, by American standards, produce vast fortunes. In fact, I doubt that Dowd's annual income (seven figured though it may be) is generating a vast fortune for her.

Keep in mind that the vast majority of people making in the range of $250,000 to Dowd, haven't been making that amount throughout their entire careers. Dowd didn't begin her career in 1974 as an assistant editor for the Washington Star making a seven figure salary, and I would bet my current salary that she didn't start at $200,000 either.

People in the $200K to Dowd range are not filthy rich or vastly wealthy or whatever other term you might use to distinguish multi-millionaires from those who are affluent.

The difference between someone making $22,600,000 a year (Derek Jeter) and someone making $200,000 a year is both mathematically and materially much greater than the difference between someone making $200,000 a year and someone making $22,600 a year, and yet Dowd and the Democrats would have us believe the person making $200K rightly belongs in the same economic class as super-star athletes, Wall Street brokerage house executives, and CEOs of software giants.

The problem is that there isn't enough money to be had from raising the taxes of the Super-rich alone, for what the Democrats want to spend. Or more precisely, the Democrats are, themselves, too beholden to the Super-rich to attempt to get the money they need solely from them. Instead the pool of high tax targets has to be expanded to include those in the $200K - Dodd range. In order to justify this expansion the people in this lower segment have to be referred to, considered, and demonized in the same way the Super-rich are.

Let me be clear, I don't support raising tax rates for the Super-rich either, but how much easier, politically, would their task have been if they had drawn the line at say $1 million (Dowd territory)? In the last couple of months quite a number of Democrats changed their rhetoric (if not their policy preference) to employ the $1 million dividing line:

"With the deficit problem looming so large for our country, I just can't get behind cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans, for people making...more than $1 million a year."

Too late, but nice try.

Again though, a $1 million dividing line was not low enough to provide the funding they needed for their grandiose spending plans, and if they made it work by increasing the increases planned for the "Rich," network anchors, trial lawyers, Senators, Wall Street political donors, and NYT columnists, would have had to pay a bigger share.

Yes, it is - and for everyone who makes far, far more than that.

Remember that the Dems offered to extend that up to a Million a year in the Senate just the other day, and the Republicans refused.



Totally and completely wrong. Both of the rich (despite the fact that one is much richer) have something that the poor man will never have: security. The ability to save for the future. Certainty in their life that even if they lose their job or get injured, they won't be out on the street.

I don't really expect you to understand any of this, as you are - by your admission - one of the wealthy we are discussing, and probably don't have any real frame of reference for what it means to lack those things. Or you've forgotten what it was like.

Cycloptichorn

Kuvasz, you and the rest of the ILL continue to stack the deck against yourselves. By stealing from the wealthy you are stealing jobs from the rest of you as well as many others. What the wealthy choose to spend in the USA increase jobs, and what the wealthy choose to invest in the USA increases jobs.

Your refusal to accept those facts will, if you become a majority, will satisfy your envy. But it will lead you to poverty, because the wealthy will have less to spend or invest in the USA with higher taxes, or they will transfer their wealth out of the USA.

Then what will you do? More importantly, what will your children and grandchildren do?

Wise up before it's too late!

Ah, well, move away from the mirror.

Keep up the well said, Icam.

[h2oman's random phrase generator]

JJ and POM are sharing a bottle of Mad Dog 20-20

From the Borowitz report:

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – In his latest effort to find common ground with Republicans in Congress, President Barack Obama said today that he was willing to agree that he is a Muslim.

Differences over his religious orientation have been a sore point between the President and his Republican foes for the past two years, but in agreeing that he is a Muslim Mr. Obama is sending a clear signal that he is trying to find consensus.

“The American people do not want to see us fighting in Washington,” Mr. Obama told reporters at the White House. “They want to see us working together to improve their lives, and Allah willing, we will.”

But Mr. Obama’s willingness to back down on his claim of being a Christian does not seem to have satisfied his Republican opposition, as GOP leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) today insisted that the President must also agree that he was born in Kenya.

While Mr. Obama did not immediately agree to Rep. Bohener’s demand, he hinted that yet another compromise might be in the offing: “My place of birth has been, and will always be, negotiable.”

White House sources indicated today that the President might be willing to meet the GOP halfway on his birthplace and say that he was born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Elsewhere, moments after his capture in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said, “I knew I shouldn’t have signed up for Foursquare.”

for those who lack the ability-to-detect-satire gene (ican, okie), I should mention that the Borowitz Report is satire.

I'm glad you were polite enough to post that the Borowitz Report is satire. The sputtering from ican and okie would have been entertaining, although, given "their" personality, they might sputter anyway about the Borowitz Report being as full of truthiness as The Colbert Report.

Since this relates to Obama, I will post it here. On the American Conservatism Thread ( http://able2know.org/topic/113196-1 ), libs are now trying to claim that Obama is a centrist or even on the right of the political spectrum. Nothing surprises me anymore, especially what some posters might believe and try to claim on this forum. Could it be that they will next claim that Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers were right wing extremists as well? After all, Obama had to learn his politics somewhere.