[Vampyr]

Originally Posted by Professor S

Thats an understandable reaction, as I and conflicted on this issue, but I'd love to hear McCain's reasoning behind it as he tends to be very thoughtful about his decisions on controversial votes, much like his initial no vote for the Bush tax cuts where he voted no symbolicly because they bill didn't include spending cuts.

I actually tried to make a second edit discussing that vote, but I couldn't get the "save" button to work after I finished typing. I said something along the lines of "I'm fine with that, unless he wants to cut spending on education." And you're right, we may be in a Catch 22, because cutting the funding now isn't going to cause a fast enough drop in the price of education. Education is -extremely- over priced, I can see that quite clearly, but there's nothing to be done about it. Either you have wealthy parents who can afford it, or you have to find some kind of aid.

No, I didn't write that. I apologize if my statement was confusing. I wrote that the tariff's indirectly increase the cost of goods and services, but that is an increase based on consumption, and not earnings. You control how much or little you are indirctly taxed via your spending habits. An income tax doesn't care how much you spend, it taxes you because you are lucky enough to have a job.

You miscontrue the main point of my argument: The reason why they are wealthy is BECAUSE they are not taxed. You can't then tax them on multiple levels and then expect the wealth to continue to grow when the wealth you are taxing is based on the lack of taxes. Its like baking a cake, and then saying "Hey, this is a good cake! Its so good it doesn't even need the flour or sugar! Lets remove them and bake it again!" Your result will be completely different, and highly unappetizing.

I'm not really clear on the analogy you're trying to make. I think you think I'm making an extremist statement that wealthy people should be taxed into oblivion. I'm not, that would be along the same lines as saying I think we should be a communist nation, and I certainly don't believe that. The wealthy, for the most part, have earned their money and deserve to be rich. I'm just saying that no additional tax cuts should be given to them; clearly they should still be very wealthy, though. It seems to me that giving tax cuts to the middle class instead would galvanize the economy more than giving tax cuts to a small percentage of the population would. Isn't the entire point to encourage people to spend more money? Why only encourage a small part of the population? If they are wealthy, they're already going to be spending money. I'm not saying to take their wealth, but certainly don't aid it any more.

In any case, I think we actually agree on this, I just didn't communicate my opinion correctly. Both Jon McCain and Obama support giving more tax cuts to the middle class and less to the rich (I tried to edit that in too, whenever the save button wouldn't work), so I don't feel like either candidate is better than the other in that category. I do think Obama needs to understand that government spending does need to be cut, but hopefully not in the realm of education, I feel like that is the last place it should be cut from, as the future of our country depends on people being educated, and America is built upon an ideology that you can always change your social class, if you work hard enough. Taking the money that middle and lower class students NEED to raise themselves up would be un-American.

This also works back around to what I was talking about in another thread, it's making things harder to fix here when about $12 billion a year is being poured into Iraq. Whether you agree or disagree about us being there, you have to admit that that is hurting us financially. And in any case, with the current debt that we have, it's going to take a long time for either candidate currently running to work us out of the hole, and I'm not sure it can be accomplished within either of their terms of office.

One thing that bothers me about McCain is his actual knowledge of how an economy works. In 2005 he said "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." and again in 2007 he said "The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should. I understand the basics, the fundamentals, the vision, all that kind of stuff."

But then in January of 2008, when an interviewer asked him if he was worried because the economy was such an important factor in this election, and by his own acknowledgement he wasn't well versed on, McCain responded: "Actually, I don't know where you got that quote from. I'm very well versed in economics." This is a bit of the "change" in McCain that I talked about in the other thread, and an example of where he is guilty of the "switching" that you accused Obama of. Not only this, but he has said:

"Part of the problem in any recession is psychological. I'm still optimistic that nothing is inevitable."

That's actually just...wrong. Recessions are inevitable, the economy fluctuates up and down like a sine curve, it cannot possibly stay at a peak forever, we must always sink back into a recession. That is just a fact of economics. That's why I believe people are more worried about our current recession than they should be; this is just how things work. We will pull out of it again, and we will sink back into it again.

And yes, I do need to look into how tax dollars are actually being spent, I'm being a bit to naive about it at the moment. Not exactly sure where that information is posted, though.