2016 Election Thread

[Craig Arko]

 

You and I, of course, being the transcendental exceptions.

I'm Complex; really mostly Imaginary. And the eigenvectors really start to hurt as you get older, let me tell you.

[mikecgrimes]

Both Democrats and Republicans are rational and led by good intentions. The word extreme is strictly a political tool to frame the debate. If either Democrats or Republicans were actually extreme they would be replaced. Bernie Sanders is not extreme, Ted Cruz is not extreme although the Bush and Clinton family's won't mind if you think they are.

[ashbury]

And the eigenvectors really start to hurt as you get older, let me tell you.

Orthogonality being completely out of the question most days, I presume.

[Craig Arko]

 

Orthogonality being completely out of the question most days, I presume.

Gram and Schmidt have left the building.

[Badsmerf]

They're all the square root of 2.

That is a fantastic proof of irrationality. I did it in my senior year of college.

[DaveW]

 

 Ted Cruz is not extreme.

Disagree highly.

[mikecgrimes]

 

Disagree highly.

 

So you would say he's extremly extreme? 

[DaveW]

 

So you would say he's extremly extreme? 

He frankly has no business being in the middle of a presidential debate nor has any business having a position like he currently does. But of course LOLTexas.

 

[mikecgrimes]

 

He frankly has no business being in the middle of a presidential debate nor has any business having a position like he currently does. But of course LOLTexas.

 

Maybe they should arrest him?  It will be odd should he get the nomination, and he has an outside chance when he gets well over 40% of the vote.

[DaveW]

Maybe they should arrest him? It will be odd should he get the nomination, and he has an outside chance when he gets well over 40% of the vote.

40%? He is fifth in the polls for his own party.

[Mike Sixel]

While I don't love Trump's specifics necessarily, that's the kind of tax reform I could get behind.

[Brock Beauchamp]

 

While I don't love Trump's specifics necessarily, that's the kind of tax reform I could get behind.

Eh, I don't like it much.

 

First off, we need to stop talking about reducing the number of tax brackets. That's stupidity talking and pandering of the worst kind. You what takes all of three seconds to figure out? Your tax bracket. It's a ****ing chart with lines of numbers, man.

 

But... It's a somewhat clever way to mask "let's cut taxes on the upper brackets by reducing them entirely" and framing it in a "simplifying the tax code!" plan.

 

But I agree that exemptions need to be cut and the tax code needs to be simplified... But Jesus H. Christ, how many times do we have to go through this "cut taxes on the rich!" garbage? We've made significant attempts to cut taxes on the rich twice in my lifetime: Reagan and Dubya.

 

Guess which two presidents saw the deficit skyrocket during their presidencies? Reagan and Dubya.

 

Republicans need to stop pushing policy we've seen fail multiple times. It's tiresome and stupid... Almost as tiresome and stupid as voters continuing to fall for it.

[Mike Sixel]

Uh, I did clearly say I don't like the specifics.......and that's part of what I don't like.

 

I prefer something like this:

 

eliminate the SSN and other "special" taxes, and just have income taxes....no more FICA and SSN and whatever the hell else. You can still say a percent of taxes have to go to a stupid trust fund if you want....

 

Eliminate all deductions (not counting losses on investments, this part can be tricky.....) except number of people in your immediate family. I'd be OK with some kind of upper limit, but I don't need one.

 

Tiered taxes:

1-2% on the first 50K of net income (to cover SSN and other stuff)

x% on the next 50K

x% on the next 100K

25% on anything over 200K

 

I don't know the exact percentages. This applies to any kind of income, investment or salary or whatever. I think this is at worst revenue neutral, but probably raises more money. I'm ok with that. I also think inheritance is income, and should be taxed. Heck, the people getting the money likely did NOTHING to earn it.....

 

On the spending side, change farm subsidies to be income subsidies for farmers that actually farm.....eliminate federal subsidies to any company that makes more than $10MM in revenue in a year (like McDonalds and oil companies). I am all for a more free market when it comes to not picking which companies we help succeed.

 

Actually, and this is radical.......

 

I'd create an account for every person in the US. I'd cut all Medicaid/Medicare, etc (have to be phased in). Every person gets some thousands a year into their account, which can only be spent on healthcare and education. That money is invested in the market. Once you are past 18, you can change the investments. I think I did the math some 30 years ago, and this is pretty easy to pay for if you cut most individual and corporate subsidies.....

[Brock Beauchamp]

What I don't understand is why you can come up with reasonable ideas in a five minute post yet in the 20+ years of my political voting life, no politician has done the same thing.

 

It's more than a little bit infuriating.

[ashbury]

40%? He is fifth in the polls for his own party.

When Trump gets bored and pulls out, that support will coalesce around Cruz; their statements of mutual admiration suggest that to me. If Fiorina pulls out or loses support, I see her supporters gravitating to Cruz as well. I expect a "Stop Cruz" scenario to start to play out once he is seen as gaining real traction after the start of the new year.

[Mike Sixel]

What I don't understand is why you can come up with reasonable ideas in a five minute post yet in the 20+ years of my political voting life, no politician has done the same thing.

 

It's more than a little bit infuriating.

Well, I've had these ideas since I was first asked to run, some 20 years ago.....but there are some politicians who have similar ideas (except the radical one)....but mostly they are stymied by their leaders.

[Mike Sixel]

When Trump gets bored and pulls out, that support will coalesce around Cruz; their statements of mutual admiration suggest that to me. If Fiorina pulls out or loses support, I see her supporters gravitating to Cruz as well. I expect a "Stop Cruz" scenario to start to play out once he is seen as gaining real traction after the start of the new year.

agreed, it is Cruz vs. Bush right now, I think.

[Brock Beauchamp]

 

When Trump gets bored and pulls out, that support will coalesce around Cruz; their statements of mutual admiration suggest that to me. If Fiorina pulls out or loses support, I see her supporters gravitating to Cruz as well. I expect a "Stop Cruz" scenario to start to play out once he is seen as gaining real traction after the start of the new year.

I think the GOP base is smarter than that.

 

I'm not saying I think they're smart... Maybe "less dumb" than that is a better way to put it.

 

Ted Cruz is completely unelectable on the national stage. The GOP, while they're good at bluster and talking up fringy candidates, will end up more toward the middle in the general election, just as they did in 2008 and 2012.

 

Though I'd laugh my ass off if Cruz somehow won the nomination. I think the best thing that could happen to the modern GOP is for them to lose in a spectacular and embarrassing fashion... something like a 45-6 loss would make me very happy. It may be the only way to move the party back toward the middle and stop letting the most insane members of the party run the show.

 

Republicans have put themselves in one hell of a pickle this election. They had a slew of laughably unelectable candidates - Trump, Cruz, Walker, etc. - and one man whose last name will scare away voters in record numbers. No way does a man with the last name of "Bush" walk into the White House in the next decade.

[ashbury]

First off, we need to stop talking about reducing the number of tax brackets. That's stupidity talking and pandering of the worst kind. You what takes all of three seconds to figure out? Your tax bracket. It's a ****ing chart with lines of numbers, man.

 

But... It's a somewhat clever way to mask "let's cut taxes on the upper brackets by reducing them entirely" and framing it in a "simplifying the tax code!" plan.

Totally agree.

 

We no longer live in the world of Adam Smith: of blacksmiths and shop owners and farmers, where the limit of most people's ability to earn an income extended as far as the reach of their own arms.

 

We don't even live in the world of small businesses, of local chains of dry cleaners or bakeries and of professionals hiring a few office staff. Well, we do, in the sense that such businesses exist, but they are self-limiting because beyond a certain point the head-boss can't clone himself and the ability to keep growing the business dwindles because it's hard to find good help.

 

No, we live in a world, at least where the majority of dollars are concerned, where massive leveraging means an individual or small group of people working together can corner some particular market and render obsolete hundreds or thousands or even millions of jobs people used to do. The advent of Amazon.com is a good example, where they do hire lots of minimum wage people but the vast number of middle-class jobs managing brick and mortar stores is now done by a relative handful of middle-managers at the home office. My own career in software benefited greatly from this world-wide leveraging as well, where labor to get a software product right can be done by a small team and then the product is sold everywhere at very little incremental effort.

 

This wasn't overnight of course. The Industrial Revolution started it, and during the era of Robber Barons we saw how nationwide leveraging of efforts of small groups could pay off. But there has been a hockey-stick graph of this phenomenon with the Internet Age, sharply upward, where we are evolving ever closer to a day when (asymptotically and by only a little exaggeration) one person could provide all the needs of humanity, and will expect to be rewarded handsomely for doing so. "Your services are no longer requied," to the rest of us.

 

Wealth tends to accumulate, and the current phase of income inequality is about to be followed soon by a prolonged era of wealth concentration beyond the imagination of anyone except pre-industrial kings. (As an aside, for another time, we need to think hard about how we tax, relative to each other, Income, Consumption, and Accumulated Wealth.)

 

There was the old semi-joke that "the first million is always the hardest". It had currency even back when a million was a really lot of money. But the kernel of truth was there, and is more true now - if you figure out how to get global leverage, your earnings can multiply almost without effort. It's not that you don't work hard to get to that level, but after a certain point your income reflects past efforts only

 

Trump is right to point to hedge fund managers, as an example of the leverage, but he misses the point by complaining that their long-term capital gains taxation is the problem - that's only a symptom.

 

What's needed, then, as I finally get to my point about tax brackets, is that we need a total rethinking of how income is earned, and how then to tax it. My view is that if you have an Adam Smith kind of job, where your income is basically determined by how hard you are willing to work, the tax rate should be low - 0% for minimum wage, say, 10% above that. If it's an Information Age kind of job, but still individual, where the income is high 5-figures or low 6-figures, because you're benefiting from someone else's bright idea how to achieve leverage, maybe bracket it at 25%. If the job (and the resultant income) looks like the small business kind of ideal, where your revenues bring your income well into 6-figures, maybe a 35% bracket for income above the previous bracket. All this is sort of like now.

 

What is needed, though, is a new bracket for income that is basically due to global leveraging of any sort. I'd let the economists wrangle over what the threshold for this is, but for discussion purposes I'll call it a million a year. If your income is over a million a year, good for you, but it's not because you worked extra hard, and it's almost certainly not because you "created" that much more wealth for society as whole than a butcher or baker did. Your income came because a layer of "cream" got skimmed off for your benefit, and it will be to your continuing benefit that some of this cream goes back into the infrastructure (roads, colleges, health care, etc) that made your "I did this all by myself" dream possible. 50% at a minimum. Above 5 million, maybe 75% marginal rate, I don't know.

 

Basically going back to what we had during the administration of that well known Communist sympathizer, Dwight Eisenhower. The difference being, a completely new rationale for doing it, namely global leverage undreamed of in the 1950s.

 

We're not punishing success by doing this, we are making similar success for your sons and daughters feasible. I've worked with some very creative and hard working entrepreneurs in my career, and they have well earned their millions. The first few millions, that is.

 

Actually with more of this top income percolating back into the federal budget, the lower brackets could be lowered a bit further than I said above, if that's what's desired to make the change revenue neutral.

 

That's the dirty little secret about all these tax-"simplification" plans, though. They are never INTENDED to be revenue neutral. It's all about Starving the Beast that is the fedrul gubmint.

 

Sorry for the long winded thesis.

[Willihammer]

Farm subsidies seem like an obvious spending cut that should be talked about more, especially from the party that is supposed to be about fiscal responsibility. I would be curious to hear any arguments as to why they shouldn't be phased out completely.

 

As for income taxes, why should a guy making 50,000 pay 10% and a guy making 50,001 pay 20%? The obvious answer seems like a smooth logarithmic curve whose equation depends on the status of single / married / how many dependents there are.

[ashbury]

I think the GOP base is smarter than that.

 

I'm not saying I think they're smart... Maybe "less dumb" than that is a better way to put it.

I'm not saying Cruz is odds-on to win the nomination.

 

But right now the polls reflect more of "I want something unattainable", thus the support for Trump and Carson. A strong "I'd rather lose, with a candidate that stands for my principles, than win with a spineless establishment candidate". I think we are in for several more rounds of this kind of thinking, with various candidates ascendant and then falling, before electability starts to matter to a majority of primary/caucus voters. And I sense that Cruz will be the candidate that this idealism will ultimately center on - at which point the notion, "hey we could actually get stuck with this guy" (seen in a milder form with Trump now), will occur within the establishment wing of the party, resulting in a Stop Cruz movement.

[Mike Sixel]

Farm subsidies seem like an obvious spending cut that should be talked about more, especially from the party that is supposed to be about fiscal responsibility. I would be curious to hear any arguments as to why they shouldn't be phased out completely.

 

As for income taxes, why should a guy making 50,000 pay 10% and a guy making 50,001 pay 20%? The obvious answer seems like a smooth logarithmic curve whose equation depends on the status of single / married / how many dependents there are.

You don't pay 20% on the full 50,001....you pay 10% on the first 50K, and then 20% on the next set of income.

[Willihammer]

 

You don't pay 20% on the full 50,001....you pay 10% on the first 50K, and then 20% on the next set of income.

OK. That makes more sense although still seems unnecessarily staggered.

[mikecgrimes]

 

40%? He is fifth in the polls for his own party.

 

Amazing when you have a field of about 8 great candidates none of which are named Bush or Trump.  Xruz will finish at worst 2nd.

[Mike Sixel]

OK. That makes more sense although still seems unnecessarily staggered.

It's how it works today, which is why the discussion we as a country have is so skewed.

 

Not sure what percentages I'd use, personally.

 

What some people fail to realize, and don't all agree with me on, history has shown for thousands of years that as wealth is concentrated, that the wealthy end up dead......Not saying we are there yet, but we are approaching areas like we had at the turn of the 20th century, when we decided to tax the bleep out of the elite....

[Mike Sixel]

Amazing when you have a field of about 8 great candidates none of which are named Bush or Trump.  Xruz will finish at worst 2nd.

Agreed. Cruz is no worse than 2nd at the end.

[mikecgrimes]

 

I'm not saying Cruz is odds-on to win the nomination.

 

But right now the polls reflect more of "I want something unattainable", thus the support for Trump and Carson. A strong "I'd rather lose, with a candidate that stands for my principles, than win with a spineless establishment candidate". I think we are in for several more rounds of this kind of thinking, with various candidates ascendant and then falling, before electability starts to matter to a majority of primary/caucus voters. And I sense that Cruz will be the candidate that this idealism will ultimately center on - at which point the notion, "hey we could actually get stuck with this guy" (seen in a milder form with Trump now), will occur within the establishment wing of the party, resulting in a Stop Cruz movement.

 

Exactly it will either come down to Rubio Cruz or Bush Cruz, if it's Bush Cruz I give Cruz a decent chance.  Rubio is almost 50/50 to win the nomination in my mind now.

[mikecgrimes]

 

While I don't love Trump's specifics necessarily, that's the kind of tax reform I could get behind.

 

The rates themselves work, but when people start losing that child credit again it's the working middle class that loses out.  I'm more worried about spending cuts, from Trumps rehtoric on the militrary, the wall and his personal additude spending cuts don't seem possible.

[Mike Sixel]

The rates themselves work, but when people start losing that child credit again it's the working middle class that loses out.  I'm more worried about spending cuts, from Trumps rehtoric on the militrary, the wall and his personal additude spending cuts don't seem possible.

I'm more worried about revenue, and cutting the military spending, than cutting other spending. Any other cutting is nibbling at the edges (or, imo, should be reapplied to other, similar, spending).

[ashbury]

Exactly it will either come down to Rubio Cruz or Bush Cruz, if it's Bush Cruz I give Cruz a decent chance.  Rubio is almost 50/50 to win the nomination in my mind now.

When you think in terms of "paths to the nomination", instead of poll numbers or ideological positions, Rubio is as strong as anyone. Rand Paul in particular seems to see a path to the nomination involving just staying the course and picking up support as others drop out, but any path that works for him seems identical but stronger for Rubio who is decidedly more mainstream in so many ways. Fiorino I see as having a different enough path to nomination than the others, as to have a decent shot also, although I expect a bigger risk of flameout as well. Trump's or Carson's only path to nomination, by contrast, seems like "a continually growing groundswell of support", which for relative political novices seems optimistic at best - one significant downdraft in the polls finishes either one as a contender with a serious path to the nomination.

 

Horse race following is fun.