Tonight's 2012 State of the Union address will start Obama's reelection campaign... not against the Republican candidate, but against Republican obstructionism in Congress and Republican endorsed unfairness in American taxation and division of income. The President has made it clear in recent days that this will be his strategy. Do not, however, expect his campaign to ignore attempts to "Swiftboat" him, or otherwise attack his record as President.
One theme tonight, and a constant theme throughout this campaign, will be tax inequality. Mitt Romney provided an excellent example by releasing his tax returns, which show his income taxed at a lower rate than almost all "ordinary" wage earners. No matter who becomes his opponent, the President will continue to hammer at the tax inequality between the wealthy and workers, and the Republicans' refusal to entertain even modest increases to help pay for a war never funded, the bills for which have now come due.
As he said in a video preview of his third State of the Union speech:
We can go in two directions. One is towards less opportunity and less fairness. Or we can fight for where I think we need to go: building an economy that works for everyone, not just a wealthy few.
Whether he addresses the issue or not, the President's recent recess appointments, made, according to the President, to allow leaderless consumer protection departments to begin functioning, have made Republican obstructionism even more likely. The President made those appointments in the face of Republican determination to keep the departments non-functional in hopes of eliminating them with a Republican Presidential and Senatorial victory. Increased obstructionism, however, may backfire on the Republicans. It would come at a time of American voters' anger and disgust at the most completely "do nothing" Congress in history, as shown by a Congressional approval rating that has dipped into single digits upon occasion in the past few months.
On the good news side of the ledger, Obama will point to a steadily declining unemployment rate that reached a three-year low of 8.5% last month, an increase in the number of new jobs created each month, an increasingly robust rebound in durable goods and automotive sales, and predictions of continuation of those trends by most economists. President Obama and his economic team may have misjudged the depth of the coming recession in 2008, and thus the time it would take to recover. Economic recovery seems steady, and even increasing in some segments of the economy.
Obama will suggest that Republican candidates, and the party itself, have taken extreme positions that have left American voters confused, even shaken at the Party's disconnect with the needs of everyday Americans. He will also emphasize that legislation that is vital to the well-being of American citizens, especially workers, withered and died at the expense of the country, simply to insure that no such programs were implemented during his tenure. He will note that weeks, even months of attempts to reach compromise and agreement have resulted only in time lost on vital matters.
In short, the President will present to the American people a stark contrast in policy and philosophy—an Administration and Democratic record of solving the worst economic disaster in America since the '30s despite attempted delay and obstruction at every turn, and a year of Republican-dominated Congressional failure unlike any before seen in American history.
Photo Source: Wikipedia Commons - President Obama Official Portrait
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Comments: 92 ( 3 removed by Chuck Larlham )
Guess you missed that, like you miss everything else.
the subprime mortgage disaster put this nation into a hole that was too deep to climb out of in 3 years. If you look at the unemployment stats, lot of people were thrown out of work in late 2008 when the banking crisis hit. over the past two years, there has been a slight increase in employment- just not enough to make up for all the people who lost their jobs.
The Republican prescription to turn it all around is to eliminate federal regulations (hey guess how we got the subprime mess- too few federal regulations on banking). Not a real plan at all.
And wanted to comment on this bit in particular where you said: but he could have just nudged us in the right direction.
Sadly it seems like perhaps maybe possibly in his mind he has "nudged" us in the right direction. And perhaps ... what he considers the right direction is not the direction you (or I) actually want to go.
For instance, if he had really wanted to do something about the economic situation of the country as a whole, he would never have continued to spend money out his wazoo like he did. He would not have continued, deepened, and sped up on the kind of spending Bush was doing ... he would have at least frozen spending and looked at cuts right from the outset. Instead, he doubled down on spending and borrowing... and still blames Bush .....
I say sure, Bush had a hand in it ... but there comes a time when one looks at one's finances and says not, "look what that other feller done", but we say, "What the heck have I been doing?" Look what I've done. Look what I've spent. Look how much I myself have contributed to this problem. What can I do to fix it....
But, it seems to me that either he doesn't have that type of clarity of conscience inside of him orrrr .... we are heading where he wants us to go (somehow someway for some strage reason or another).
Joy Bee Jan 24, 2012, 11:45pm EST
Chuck, I don't pretend to have a high IQ. I'm just saying it like I see it. And people in real life like me just the way I am.
Obama hasn't done anything to steer this country out of the economic mess. Sure the Republicans contributed to getting us in this mess. (And I agree wholeheartly Chris that we need federal regulations on banks and Wall Street). But Obama could have at least steered the country out of the economic problems. I'm not saying he should have it all solved by now, but he could have just nudged us in the right direction. Asking for trillions and trillions of dollars isn't solving the problems. Bailing out banks and the auto industry didn't solve the problem like he promised.
Perhaps it is. But how else do I understand his berating Bush for his spending and borrowing habits and then coming in and doing what Bush did, but even more, more often, and faster? And it doesn't seem to me as if he's yet asking himself any of the relevant questions I suggested ....
Chuck Larlham Jan 25, 2012, 12:30am EST
Lee, I disagree with you, but I was thinkin' you actually had a functional brain... right up to where you demonstrated that you broke it when you said, "But, it seems to me that either he doesn't have that type of clarity of conscience inside of him orrrr .... we are heading where he wants us to go (somehow someway for some strage reason or another" That last is just absurd.
Maybe you missed the fact that without doing anything at all, without on new bit of spending, millions of people lost their jobs, healthcare, ect, and programs like foodstamps, Medicaid, and unemployment have been needed at unparallelled levels to keep people from starving because of the bombing of the economy Bush caused. Maybe you also missed the fact that blowing up the economy has simultaneously put tax receipts through the basement floor. Maybe you don't know that according to the CBO, who in this congress is no friend to obama, things are a bit less spend thrift than you have been led to believe.
Sad to say, government can't do as much as people hope to solve economic problems. We've done everything on the monetary side short of negative interests rates. Public opinion and the GOP would never allow the level of deficit spending necessary to create the kind of demand that would have a material effect on the economy. People like to say the stimulus package was a failure. It brought mild gains. The problem was that it wasn't anywhere near large enough.
The Great Depression has a powerful lesson. In 1937 deficit hawks got the upper hand in congress and cut spending drastically. The economy lost all of the gains it had made since 1932. WWII came along and we went on the hugest deficit spending binge in US history. Not only did we win the war but we also rescued the economy. It would have been better to spend the money on something where huge numbers of people died, but the deficit spending in the war was a stimulus on the scale that was necessary to end the Depression.
Ron Paul is emphazising something entirely different (the cause of freedom and liberty) and I am for that cause no matter if an (R) or (D) win office. I've discovered little to no difference in what they do when they attain office, and it has taken place over decades, not just since Bush or Obama.
And all Newt and Mitt intend is to double down on those same policies.
Truth is, I let people say just about anything on my posts. There are a couple of things that get you pitched. Clyde used one of 'em. If you'd like to know why... Go HERE! Hattie Larlham was my mother.
Sorry if I hurt your feelings. Probably overdid the comeback on that one.
Seriously though... follow the link if you really want to know why (and Clyde and I have no history I know of). And understand this. "You must be deaf." may not insult all deaf people, but "You'd have to be retarded" (borderline or otherwise) is seen as a hurtful insult by just about every caregiver, parent and sibling in the country. There's a quantum difference. And I'd bet most deaf people and people close to them would rather not have the word deaf used that way.
One way or another, Clyde's gone tomorrow. If he doesn't show, I'll send him a gather-mail with an explanation, and a copy he can revise if he wants it back. Of course, the comments will be gone along with him.
Anyway, I know you are proud of your Mom! Did you ever feel slighted by sharing her, or just glad to be blessed?
You're right in your understanding of why the word is offensive to me. And I am indeed proud of my mother. I never felt slighted. I was part of the whole thing from the beginning, and I never felt left out of her life.
In regard to your statement that "it is logical to assume that guy #1 can donate more to charity".... I'm not sure I understand the phrase "can donate" used in this context.
It's hard for me to swallow the idea that a man who is so gung-ho to redistribute other people's money is actually UNable to donate any more from his 'paltry' 20mil. In other words, whether or not guy #1 has more money to begin with, considering guy #2's worldview, guy #2 ought to donate more whether he "can" or not ...
Goodness, the way he talks about others "doing their fair share" one would think he might try leading by example. In other words, the way he thinks he's qualified to tell me how much of my wealth he thinks I deserve to keep, and how much I should be forced to "redistribute" ... mostly to the government so they can decide the particulars of which enemy country, failed or failing business, and how many illegals and abortion clinics get a share of my redistributed wealth ... Goodness, a man like that ought to relieve himself of at least 19 milliion in charitable donations just as a matter of example. I mean, really .... how much more than one million does one family need? Especially the First Family who's income for the rest of their lives is assured even without that superfluous 19 mil (as long as the U.S. is a Sovereign nation anyway).
Then since St. Reagan, when the country went from a creditor to a debtor nation, every Republican administration has considered higher taxes to be socialism, while the country crumbles around them and the middle class shrivels?
Greed? Stupidity? Ignorance?
Dorothy, it wasn't corruption that made the County Homes so bad (and that wasn't my point), although there was corruption back then, no doubt. The point I was making was that we HAD County Homes. We had 'em because private charity and the concept of "extended family" were NEVER capable of keeping up with the poor and helpless elderly our economy constantly and steadily generates.
It was still government that "took care" of the destitute elderly- local government. But the sanctimonious and self-righteous among us demanded that they not be "given" anything. So they were made to be their own orderlies and janitors, labor in farm fields (from which crops were sold in competition with local farmers who had to PAY their help), and generally had their days of being taken care of by the government shortened by being worked to illness and exhaustion, and then provided with almost no care at all.
In an effort to send such an evil system packing, America slowly created Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. County Homes died their well-deserved death. But now we have turned the rescue system into an arcane system of impenetrable rules, and reduced the funding dramatically to pay for Bush's wars.
No, Dorothy, there is no third choice. We had generations to get private charity to work... and we never did. Now, we've so under-funded Medicare and Medicaid that nursing homes are becoming dangerous places to be. They're old, dilapidated and poorly staffed, and constantly made to spend care money in attempts to correct violations caused by building age and lack of budget for capital maintenance.
Either we reverse our present trend, or you hope you do not grow old without family and retired from a job that gave you no pension. If you end up in either case, you're liable to discover first-hand that I'm right.
In a separate deal entirely, the Obama Administration persuaded Congress to provide for the rescue of GM and Chrysler. However, Ford would have collapsed as well if those two had gone belly up, because Ford alone couldn't have supported the supplier/vendor/contractor infrastructure the Big Three had caused to grow up around them. With no one to make engines, drive-trains and trim packages for them, Ford would have had to close, too.
Maybe some of the closet communists on this site can explain the difference between the Obama plan of forced redistribution of wealth and Lenin's plan of forced redistribution of wealth.
I don't think I'm a closet communist. I know I'm not an out communist. Communism is one of those quintessentially 19th century systems that tries to put something that's not ready for it like history and economics on a "scientific" basis. The Marxist dialectic doesn't seem to work although it's an interesting idea to argue about.
I'm not a Democrat either. I've been registered Declines to State since 1970. I mostly vote for Democratic candidates because the Republican ones are so much worse that I'm left with no choice. I've almost never voted for a candidate because I thought the candidate represented my point of view and my interests. I've mostly voted for the one that looked less harmful.
Income inequality is a tricky thing. Too much income inequality in a society leads to a bloodbath like stage II of the French Revolution and very likely to a dictatorship no better than the previous one. For a stable society we need two economic things: equality of opportunity and a safety net. We have to toss the idea of the "deserving poor" and be willing to accept that a certain percentage of people are not hard working or honest. Of course some of them manage to get rich anyway. :)
Maybe it is just another "accepted truth" at this point.
It's a progressive income tax. Government ain't free. Progressive income tax is defined as a tax where higher incomes pay higher tax rates. You want to have THAT argument, start your own thread. Obama's not talking about redistributing wealth by allowing the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy to expire. He's talking about having them pick up their share of the ten years of war in two countries Bush committed us to and didn't pay for.
Those of us who don't qualify as 'wealthy' are being taxed extra to pay for them, by having our Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid reduced, just to protect the wealthy folks you worship. Wealth redistribution is going from down to up. Screw that.
But appearantly the "wealthy" need to pay more than the "poor". Should the votes of the wealthy count more? Fairness comes in many forms and measures. Does taking money from the wealthy with tax code make it more acceptable than using a gun or knife?
You write as if you are a true believer that supports politicians that want to use the tax structure to make outcomes equal regardless of the effort invested or risk encountered.
Nothing is free. No matter how much you want the wealthy to support programs that started with the best of intentions and have been used by political parties to buy votes, the programs have expanded to be financially unsustainable. The programs you say are being reduced should never have grown to the point of unaffordability.
And you may want to check your facts about who all committed us to ten years of war.
For two-thirds or more of the population, any tax they pay comes out of the food, clothing, shelter, medical budget. For the wealthy it comes out of the boat and Med vacation budget. That's the entire justification for a progressive income tax. You don't like that? Start another thread.
As to my "facts." I know who promised BEFORE THE ELECTION WAS EVEN HELD to take us back to Iraq. I know who cooked the intelligence books and lied to Congress, and I know what information Congress had when it voted. GWB and Dick Cheney committed us to a war they refused to pay for, turned a "two week war" (by their public estimate) into a decade long bloodbath, utterly destroyed country's infrastructure, and installed a joke of a government that's imploding as I type.
Why does ANYBODY want to turn this country back over to another regime like THAT?!?
Any other FACTS you'd like me to check?
The Bush White House had the near unanimous approval of the Democratically controlled Senate for actions in Iraq.
You can have your own opinion but not your own facts.
That never happened.
Ali... You're absolutely right. But I've given up that argument because enough Dems supported the Iraq invasion to give Bush the legitimacy he wanted. Whether the approval was "near unanimous" or not, it was enough.
You're right, what he saw, Congress saw. Problem was, by his own instruction he, and Congress, saw the most pro-risk interpretation of data possible. Remember Valerie Plame? CIA agent? Remember what happened because of her husband? He demonstrated that some of it was
absurdly false and she got tossed to the slavering horde.
Finally, as I've noted above, Bush alone DID commit us to that war... by lying and demanding biased interpretation of intel. Anybody listening in the 2000 should have known he intended us to go to war (I sure did), and he made it happen.
Troops from about 40 different nations where Bush was not the President were involved at some point in the actions in Iraq.
You have a strange concept of aloneness.
So Chuck, is taking money at the point of a pen more justfied than at the point of a gun?
What is the most amount of money any single person would be allowed to earn and keep for themselves under your version of fairness?
Would this amount of money be constant or would you change the amount as earners and their money fled the country?
How much is too much? Depends on the needs of the country. Somehow, there never seems to be a "too much" when it comes to my taxes, and yours I'll bet (I doubt many people classified as 'wealthy' in any of these discussions hangs out at Gather), but there always is for rich folks. Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon imposed temporary surcharges. By the end of WWII, the highest rate was about 70% (maybe 75?), imposed by Congress to defray the costs of the war (wait, wasn't there a war somewhere during the past ten years that has yet to be paid for?). Very few fled the country, but today we have upstanding citizens sending their money to banks in the Caymans, whence they are NOT invested in making American jobs.
You're pretty good a parroting the dismissals of the TEA-Twit leaders and financiers. You've got the sarcasm/sneer down pretty pat, too. But here's an idea... Dig around and see if you can find an original thought in there somewhere.
And if you really want to argue the basic Progressive Income Tax question... for the last time, START YOUR OWN THREAD. I won't address that here again.
Your tone of approval of Obama's SOTUS and strategy of playing the class envy card aka very progressive tax rates led me to these questions.
What is the most amount of money any single person would be allowed to earn and keep for themselves under your version of fairness?
Not a percentage because then you would have to differentiate between earned income, investment income, profits/losses from rental property, capital gains, etc. Just give me a maximum number bcause that is what this whole discussion was about.
If you can't or won't answer then ... maybe it is time to re-examine the concept of tax the wealthy because they are evil and greedy and they have more money than they need to have.
And your parroting of DNC and Daily Kos talking points is not a proud display of original thought.