They’re not protests, they’re pogroms aimed at the middle class:
Backed by looters and violent people, liberals are telling the American middle class they do not want you. They want an America where you are either a billionaire knocking down tax subsidies, or jobless and on federal assistance. . . . The looters won, thanks to President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and Governor Jay Nixon — Democrats all — who ignored the truth and the facts of the case to fan the flames of violence, across the country. People have begun calling these the Obama Riots. Expect more.
Sadly, yes.
[Update a few minutes later]
[Update a few more minutes later]
Middle-class Americans are hardest hit by ObamaCare. As by all of the Democrats’ policies. And as Glenn notes, the Republicans are fools to try to go after tech money. They should be advocating populist policies that go instead after Hollywood and the Silicon Valley oligarchs.
[Update a while later]
Speaking of the Silicon Valley oligarchs, how they created huge homeless camps.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/11/26/how-miriam-careys-u-turn-at-a-white-house-checkpoint-led-to-her-death/
So the President’s security people shot dead a cheerful, capable dental hygenist with her infant in the back seat of the car? There are people quietely protesting this but they haven’t burned anything down . . . yet. The President hasn’t spoken before the General Assembly to apologize for this incident . . . yet.
The media reported this as a woman with major mental illness who was shot crashing her car into barriers protecting the White House. Umm, that is not exactly what happened.
Consideration was given to charging at least one officer who discharged his firearm at a car . . . on a public street. That is sooo against protocol, but the people protecting our President are keen against preventing a car-bombing attack in this day-and-age (Jim, do I have this all wrong, that the incidence of attacks against our public officials is on the downslope?). Prosecutorial discretion was invoked and no one was charged.
OK, take it away . . . Jim
I doubt the Democrats will win again as Obama did not manage to do a lot of the things he said he would do in two mandates. I hope the Republicans won’t pick some losing candidate like Carly Fiorina or Mitt Romney again though. Even if you needed to pick a business person there are plenty with less slimeball track records than these two.
A big challenge for all governments moving forward is how to collect taxes in the new globalized economic environment. I think the introduction of VAT in the US on a Federal level is inevitable.
Domestic policy needs to focus on ameliorating the pernicious causes and effects of income disparity which were exacerbated with the current economic changes. The healthcare issue was one of them but there are more and housing, like you pointed out, is one. I think in some densely populated areas there needs to be a way to promote cheaper housing. This could be done by changing city planning ordinances to allow more dense construction to be done and/or taxing large houses and unnocupied secondary residences on a non-linear scale to ensure everyone has a place to be in. If mass transportation was cheaper and effective in California these people would not need to live in the valley either.
Also US external policy needs to change given the expansionist military policies in both Russia and China together with increasing Al-Qaeda activities in the Middle East and Africa. There are signs of moves to a policy of containment but probably more than that needs to be done. There should be a tacit alliance against Al-Qaeda even if it means teaming up with actors you would not normally work together with. As for Russia and China it will require additional investment into the strategic and conventional forces and new alliances to be done outside the usual sphere of US influence. You can see some of that happening in Southeast Asia right now and I think more needs to be done.
“Even if you needed to pick a business person there are plenty with less slimeball track records than these two.”
“Slimeball” is an interesting choice of words. Are you willing to agree that in 2012, Romney was the lesser of two evils?
“Slimeball” is an interesting choice of words. Are you willing to agree that in 2012, Romney was the lesser of two evils?
No. I do not think Romney would have made political options that would have resulted in a better outcome. Neither am I saying that Obama is infallible or even a good US President but people voted for him because the alternative was worse. That is all.
I mean I even found Romneys attempts to look plebeian rather pathetic. Visiting a fast food joint? Please. Even the heads of royalty in Europe, which are totally disconnected with the reality the ‘little people’ live in, know better than this.
The only thing Romney might have done substantially differently IMO would have been a harder stance on Iran and the Norks. Which would have backfired on him as ISIS kept encroaching on Iraq and Syria and he would have found no willing allies in the region to help him. If he even considered stopping ISIS a priority that is. Economically the same things would happen. The healthcare reform would probably pass with a name change as the problem, to me, was systemic failure in your current system that would eventually have lead the health insurance companies into a really difficult situation as not enough people were buying into it resulting in spiraling costs. The mandatory health insurance would happen regardless of who was in office IMO. The energy policy would have been much the same. Keystone XL is being built and natural gas is being extracted using fracking. Drilling in the California coast would still not happen because there the problem is the state itself is against it the Feds have nothing to do with it. Maybe there would be less obvious abuses of power as the government would be in transition rather than on a second term but that is all.
Then again this is clearly not for me to decide. You guys are the US citizens so you get to decide. I already have the displeasure of being governed by someone other than the person I voted for in this place in Europe as it is. As much as Obama is a bad leader the current leadership in the EU is much worse and has lead us in the road to economic irrelevance at the very least.
Increase the percentage of GDP that government takes?
No. Just no.
The idea of a VAT in particular raises my blood pressure.
Now, if this was going to be “revenue neutral” we might have a discussion, but you say “collect taxes in the new globalized economic environment,” meaning you are advocating NEW revenues for governments. You also talk about taxing to effect social policy, i.e. “taxing large houses and unnocupied secondary residences on a non-linear scale to ensure everyone has a place to be in.”
I say: feed the beast less, not more.
The above was directed at Godzilla.
VAT is going to happen. How else do you think a state can collect taxes from tax evading companies like Apple and Amazon? Or these individuals with secret bank accounts in the Caymans and Singapore among other places? The US government did manage to push the Swiss into disclosing some of these people who were clients of UBS but a lot of them had already moved their accounts elsewhere before then.
As for the housing problem I merely pointed out solutions that are used in a lot of densely populated places like Hong Kong since when the British still were in control there. The solution you so detest was one but not the only one.
The fiscal revenues will be necessary. How else do you think the US can renew its armed forces? A lot of the US military hardware is getting pretty long in the tooth and eventually countries like China will catch up. I think China is a decade or two behind the US in military technology at present. It depends on the particular sector you look at and I look at this with quite high frequency. Ten years ago the gap might have been said to be thirty or forty years. Remember the US SecDef stating that the Chinese had no capability to produce a stealth aircraft for the next two decades, visits China, then the Chinese stealth aircraft prototype leaks to the media while he is there? Or a carrier? Or a global reach ICBM? I mean I could keep counting these failed predictions all day. The Chinese naval surface fleet buildup surprised me too. The next surprise is probably going to be the stealth bomber project that a lot of people have been suspecting exists there for quite some time now.
Why do you think the Chinese are building a carrier fleet, heavy transport aircraft, long reach stealth fighter bombers, ad nauseum? These are power projection tools. You don’t buy power projection tools unless you want to project power. The last news I read was the Chinese started nuclear submarine patrols on the Indian Ocean for the first time. That is arguably one of the areas where they have been most deficient but the Russians have sold an Akula submarine to India before and Putin has been feeling the pinch of the economic sanctions enough to do a lot of trades with China that might have simply not happened five years ago so even that could change.
Some guy here once told me that China does not invade countries like the US does so it is not a problem. That is a particularly pathetic argument and I pointed him out that, besides Tibet, they invaded Vietnam (and got their asses handed to them) in the late 1970s.
Oh yeah the other recent news was that the Chinese are trying to sell a supersonic anti-ship cruise missile similar to Brahmos called the CX-1 on the weapons market. I can already guess who the customers will be. How many countries do you know who have a coastline they want free of a foreign naval presence?
As for the improved Chinese version of this it is merely another piece in their long standing policy to cover the Taiwan strait with as much firepower as they can.
We don’t need a VAT – we need to stop spending money on things that aren’t the Federal governments’ responsibility.
Tax dividends as ordinary income, don’t tax corporate income. As part of a comprehensive flat rate tax policy I’m convinced it works.
And while I’m neutral on the income vs. sales tax debate, combining both tends to obscure taxation, and a VAT is much worse.
We already have property taxes. We don’t need another tax on wealth.
The Ferguson protests are a feedback loop. Democrat activists come in and appropriate the young man’s death, then protest with all the typical Democrat activist themes. Next Obama says we need to listen to the protesters, so he invites them all over for a photo op. Then Obama says we need to give these groups a bunch of money. These groups then send the money back to the Democrat party in either time or money. It is just a shake down.
No one in the media is asking what role the Democrat activists have been playing and how the default position of giving them a bunch of stuff will solve any of the problems they claim they are concerned about. Never at any time are the protesters even identified as Democrat activists. Its all one big gruber.