Really? Well, if you are looking at anything remotely like the Roosevelt landslide, you are talking about more than 40 states. Otherwise, your confident prediction collapses.

Well, he would certainly embrace reform - a return to the past: protectionism; enormous, crippling tax increases; anti-business rhetoric; nothing at all in the form of pro-growth policy; mammoth new government programs...so perhaps you are more correct than you know.

Vote Obama! Return to 1933!

An agreement that socialim is necessary? Did we "as a nation"? And where does capitalism come into his policies? He is ferociously anti-business and contemptuous of business people (while, of course, taking their money). He is a parody of anti-business leftist policy.

And how is he addressing trade issues and globalization? Protectionism. Economic isloationism. A truly disastrous combination.



Indeed? Quite a prediction.

We will see a massive swing to the far-left that will, in a matter of months, completely transform the nation.

We shall see....



1932! No doubt!

The worst imagineable response to the current situation would be a disastrous attempt to ignore reality and return to the left-wing policies of the Great Depression that turned a depression into the greatest economic catastrophe in history.

Roosevelt and his minions were in love with Stalin and attempted to impose the equivalent of a five year plan on the US, resulting in immeasurable suffering. But of course, left-wing hatred of business and capitalism knows no bounds.

You are undoubtedly correct: if Obama really does sweep the nation and initiate these lunatic policies, we will see a massive flight of capital and an economic collapse that will make the current housing bust look like a picnic. And even those who live in the elite fortress of left-wing affluence may think twice.

But it will be too late.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

I will add that Obama and his followers are idiots in regards to the economy. When he attempted to address economic issues during the debate, he made a fool of himself. He doesn't even understand the details, let alone the implications of his own own policies - yet his fantasies and those of his followers would destroy the wealth of millions. I must admit that even I was not prepared for that level of arrogance and ignorance

Shameless and disraceful.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

Tim, I wasn't talking about whether his policies will be successful or not, since we were only discussing whether he'd be elected. However, I believe they will be, or at least, I believe something like them is the only thing that CAN be.

Yes, we, or rather our parents' generation -- well, mine, anyway; I'm not sure how old you are -- came to a collective decision to mix socialist and capitalist elements in the economy. There were those who wanted to stick to classic laissez-faire, and those who wanted to have a genuine socialist economy; in the end, we did neither, and it's clear by now that that was the right decision, since the postwar economy far outperformed either its capitalist predecessor or its socialist competitors. We had a basically capitalist economy in that it was privately owned and for-profit, but with a lot of government regulation, a unionized workforce, and a few segments of the economy that were genuinely socialized.

As I've explained several times, the idea that the economy does better when income and wealth gaps are greatest is poppycock. Exactly the opposite is true: it does better when income and wealth gaps are narrower, because that boosts the consumer demand on which the entire economy depends. Right now, that's being undermined by the loss of good jobs overseas and the resulting decline in real incomes. This needs to be reversed. We need to renegotiate (or scrap) the free trade agreements we have with third-world thugocracies that don't respect workers' rights, and keep them only with countries that play by the rules. That means, for example, that NAFTA, which is fine between the U.S. and Canada, is deadly between either country and Mexico. Free trade with Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, all fine. Free trade with China, Indonesia, and similar countries -- catastrophic. Note that this is not "protectionism." The idea isn't to protect American corporations but to spank them and get them to behave. Or, more precisely, stop rewarding them for destructive behavior. We're not being undermined by foreign competitors so much as by our own corporations run amok.

You disagree with this, and that's fine, but you also have a tendency to see disagreement with your own supply-side ideology as ignorance. It's nothing of the sort.

"Spank American corporations to get them to behave." I take that to mean, tax them to death?

How does doing that, create American jobs?

I believe it more beneficial to offer tax incentives to American corporations to keep jobs in America.

LOL not in this case. No, the problem is that they are finding it profitable to move jobs overseas where they can pay workers starvation wages, work them inhumanely long hours, and not pay for safe working conditions. They find this profitable because we have free trade agreements with those countries that let them sell the goods so produced in the U.S. without any compensating tariffs. If we were to simply recognize that this is harming the country and adjust our policies accordingly, we could reverse the trend.

Again, free trade itself is a good idea, as long as all partners to it are playing by the same rule book or close to it. The problem is that we have free trade agreements with those that do not. If our corporations are free to build a factory in France or Japan, that's fine, since a French or Japanese company is just as likely to build one here instead. (Maybe more likely given the present dismal state of the dollar.) As long as everyone's playing by the same rules, OR as long as only goods and not capital cross national boundaries (which will never be the case again I think), Ricardo's idea of comparative advantage holds true.

There is no incentive we can offer that can possibly outweigh a 90% cut in labor costs. Seriously. The only option is to close that door. We can't pay them enough not to use it.

This is also called "welfare". In order to entice a corporation, currently paying someone 30 cents per hour, you'd need to subsidize the person's entire salary to make what you're proposing worthwhile for the corporation. Or, in other words, you're advocating that public tax dollars pay someone a minimum wage when there is no market demand for the job. You might as well cut out the middle man and have the government give the money directly to the people that can't get hired.

__________________
"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson

Absolutely not!

That is NOT what I said in my post!

During the debate, Obama appeared to have no clue regarding the details of his own plan - which would mean a drastic overhaul of the economy and altered relations with the world - and no idea of the actual impact of these policies on the lives of ordinary people.

I was stunned by his response: not by the content, but by the absence of content, the confusion and hesitation and absence of preparation.

It was not a matter of disagreement in this case. Yes, I certainly do disagree, but Obama is clearly a highly intelligent, and often eloquent man. I assumed that he would respond to these questions with clarity and detail. I expected a real argument - the real thing - about serious issues. He is always, and justifiably, protesting the absence of serious policy discussion. This was his chance, and he blew it.

That is not acceptable.

If a potential future president announces a policy that will take tens - and eventually hundreds of billions - of dollars out of the pockets of American individuals, families and companies, he sure as heck better know how to communicate what he and the congress are going to do with all that money - and how they are going to replace it. And what they are going to do to correct the enormous damage they are going to do the economy.

He does not have the remotest clue as to how the economy actually works. Yes, I was stunned.

He was clueless. That was a display of ignorance and arrogance. Anyone who tells people they have to hand over their money to Washington better have an explanation as to why. If they don't like it, that's tough. It's not their money. The very least he can do is his homework.

He came up with absolutely nothing at all.

__________________
"Our fears in Banquo
Stick deep; in his royalty of nature
Reigns that which would be fear'd: 'tis much he dares;
And, to that dauntless temper of his mind,
He hath a wisdom that doth guide his valour
To act in safety."

Macbeth 3:1

I'm going to put this in my sig and we'll see who is correct in Nov.

Tim:

I had to watch that debate before I could respond.

I was disappointed in Obama's performance in answering the questions, and agree that he seemed stumbling and hesitant. However, I did not get the impression that he didn't know what he was talking about. The impression I got was that there was a lot of stuff there, and he was having a tough time boiling it down into a short answer that would also resonate with voters who themselves don't know anything about economics.

He did say something important that he seemed to understand that the current GOP (going by actions) is clueless on: that you can't cut taxes without raising other taxes to compensate or else cut spending, and that you can't increase spending for something without cutting spending elsewhere or else finding new sources of revenue. As for what he would spend the revenue on, he's spelled a lot of that out already, but the fact is a lot of it would simply have to be spent on what we're spending it on now, minus the Iraq war. A deficit is also a tax, just a deferred one with interest. Increasing taxes somewhere in the economy is at this point absolutely necessary. And of course, the best place to do it is on upper-income individuals.

The inverse capital gains tax effect on revenue is a short-term effect. It's not true that low capital gains taxes result in high revenues and vice-versa-inverse. What is true is that raising or cutting CGT gives us a brief drop or increase in CGT revenue (respectively), which however does not last in either case, and the longer-term effect is more common-sense: raising the tax increases revenue, while lowering it lowers revenue. Of course, Obama failed to say that, but again my feeling is that he would have been trying to communicate very abstruse ideas to an audience that wouldn't understand them, and instead chose to concentrate on ideas like fairness which they could understand.

Looking at the plans on his website, I see exactly the steps that I know we need to take: raise taxes on the wealthy to begin balancing the budget again, raise the cap on Social Security payroll taxes to make the program viable (although frankly I'd rather scrap the payroll tax altogether and pay for SS out of general income-tax revenue instead), revise our trade agreements to stop facilitating the loss of manufacturing (that above all), adopt a union-friendly labor policy again, and work to shift our energy economy from dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy and greater efficiency instead of trying to hold back the tide like King Canute. Since I doubt he could have come up with the right answers consistently by sheer dumb luck, I have to think that he (or at least someone advising him) knows what's what.

There is no doubt, though, that he could have done better in that debate on this subject.