Obama wins in landslide. The bigger surprise is China’s election.
I’ve actually been reading a lot of articles by pundits who predict that Romney will win. They all point to alleged pro-Democrat sampling bias in the polls. Apparently, the most historically non-biased poll is the Rasmussen report, which corrects for sampling bias, and whose recent results tend to be more in Romney’s favor compared to other reports. The pro-Democrat sampling bias is attributed to the use of 2008 voter turnout models, which might be invalid in 2012, since people are less enthusiastic about Obama than in 2008. The pundits have diverse backgrounds, i.e. they are not all from Fox News or something.
Of course, it is quite possible that these guys are publishing contrarian opinions since this is more interesting than saying the candidate with better polls will win. They might also just be wrong. I am not 100% convinced by their argument, but it would be interesting if this is the factor that results in a surprise outcome in the election.
I have been seeing this too.
That may just be republicans trying to be optimistic.
I just called my dad. He’s voting for the first time since the 1970’s.
" I’ve got a military pension, and your mother has a teachers pension, if we’re being purely seflish we would vote Obama. The spending needs to stop and the house needs to get in order. I’m voting for Romney."
I wonder how many grumpy old white guys there are who will do the same? If they got my dad, who is a proud hermit, out of the woodwork then this means something.
Brag much Ohai?
Well, remember that current pensioneers are exempt from entitlement reforms (if they’re over 54), and the military is due for a big bump under Romney, so it’s not exactly putting their livelihoods at risk.
If you’re employed at a job that pays well, it’s easy to see that the debt is the biggest problem you face, and cutting other people’s benefits sure feels a whole lot easier than paying more in taxes.
There’s no doubt that the house needs to be put in order. Debt is a real problem. Asset and income inequality is a real problem (from a structural and growth perspective, not just a question of fairness). Employability is a real problem. What we’re fighting over is who is it that takes the body blow, and there’s very little sense that “we’re in this together,” perhaps because - over the last 40 years - we haven’t had to be in things together. Somehow we need to have a sense that everyone is making a sacrifice of some kind - some people are having higher taxes, some people are having lower entitlements, and no one gets thrown to the dogs, unless they’ve been in clearly criminal activity.
Not talking about myself, if that’s what you mean… Introductory economics is a huge class, like 250 people. Even if 1/1000 of similar age people from my school become the next Google guy or Supreme Court Justice, there is a chance that they will have taken Boskin’s class.
The real story is the marijuana initiatives in Oregon, Washington, and Colorado… A watershed moment in world history if any of the three pass.
You mean the party congress in the PRC or the election in the Republic of China (Taiwan)?
Aren’t they the same country depending on who you ask?
you’re so smart.
I would be more open to higher taxes if there was a similar decrease in entitlements to spread the sacrifice around. The problem is when politicians are like “fuck you Wall Street guys!”. Of course people are going to oppose that.
We disagree on things so often: were you being sarcastic here?
(I figured “we’re in this together” would be way too collectivist for your digstive tract.)
I agree with you Bchadwick, if it’s any help.
(set cynicism=high) Don’t worry, once the election is over, it will be free love again between the Gov and Wall Street. (set cynicism=normal)
More seriously, I don’t think “people are going to oppose that.” Wall Street people will oppose that, but there is still a lot of anger at banks and Wall Street in on main street.
The Wall Street stragegy has been to say that wall street is the canary in the coal mine. Once the government comes down on Wall Street, doctors and lawyers and Joe the Plumber are next in line, and that does feel predatory. People don’t mind people like John Thain getting picked to death, but they don’t want to see their neighborhood oncologist put on a pike. So the real question is whether you believe that the government will be able to stop at the banksters or not.
The 1% is composed of a fair number of doctors and lawyers and small business professionals (3 million people can include a lot of ordinary sounding people). The top 0.01% is composed much more of fortune 500 executives, bankers, and finance people.
I burst out laughing on “stragegy” – well done, sir
What do you propose as a fix to the mess we are? It seems like, as much as everyone hates this, we’re going to have to cut benefits and raise taxes – both, preferably as soon as possible. Talking about this as an either / or question misses the point.
To clarify… I wasn’t talking just about Wall Street or the top 1% in terms of income. Evidently, a large portion of the population wants smaller government in general. They might be more open to a broader tax base if they believed that it was really a deficit cutting measure, and not more money for government spending. You don’t have to be a millionaire to believe that the government wastes a lot of money.
ha ha. a typo.
I think benefit reductions make sense, but only if tax increases are there too. I really think that there needs to be a sense of shared sacrifie, where people are aware of what their sacrifice is and what others in different situations are sacrificing as well. So far, it seems to be a lot of finger pointing and saying “take it away from everyone except me.”
And I think the wealthy do have a right to feel like they aren’t the piggy bank that everyone runs back to when things get tough. The challenge is when a lot of that wealth appears to have come from possibly shady or manipulative activities, and this is why the massive increase in wealth and income inequality (in part driven by the economies of scale enabled by technology) is so problematic. In many people’s minds, it delegitimizes the recent accumulation of wealth. This is also why people aren’t pulling out pitchforks for people like Bill Gates; they’re doing it for people like John Corzine.
I also think that promoting economic growth is key, and part of that is making it easier for for small and medium sized businesses to operate and making the labor force much more flexible and redeployable and productive. But progressive taxation makes a lot of sense.
Small businesses that are employing people but not fantastically profitable won’t be hit by higher rates because the tax schedule is progressive, and if they are hit by higher taxes, it’s because they are comfortably in the black. If they really want to be in a lower tax bracket, all they have to do is hire people and push up their COGS and get their NI back into the lower bracket. They’ve still employed people, and they’re still making a profit, and they are at a lower marginal tax bracket. Or they can decide not to employ as many people, keep more profits for the owners, but be in a higher marginal tax bracket. They still are still earning more money than before, it’s just that each additional dollar costs them a little bit more. But the higher tax rates don’t hurt businesses that are starting up, because they haven’t reached the point where the taxes kick in.
I get that there is a tax wedge, but if there is a demand shortage because of deleveraging, then the tax wedge is not where the bottleneck is.
But that’s sort of a short term view, isn’t it? Even if they can still earn “more money” than before, progressive tax is still a subsidy to small businesses over large businesses (Greece?). Another thing is that we don’t know that small businesses are the best job creators in the first place. Why not give more incentives for Walmart or Amazon to hire people? If Walmart’s payroll increases by 5%, that’s 50,000 jobs.
I don’t disagree that higher taxes are necessary to close the deficit. However, going after the big guy is not the only way to go about it.
Chris Rock - Message for White Voters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EDxOSjgl5Z4