RED-BLOODED AMERICA

fawfulfan:

Thank you for taking the time to read my arguments. When I debate with Republicans online, that’s really rare. Let me answer your comments.

You seem like a bright kid because you can type in full sentences (rare to the internet) but you are basing almost all you evaluations on media-influenced depictions of Romney and total dedication to our do-nothing President.

Whereas you have swallowed wholesale the right-wing depiction of Obama as a total failure who couldn’t get most of his agenda passed and made things worse on the rare occasions when he did. The real Obama is nothing like that at all…he has in fact done an enormous number of beneficial things for our country, despite unrelenting pushback from Republicans.

You can read about President Obama’s accomplishments here. Let me be the first to say that this is an extremely left-wing web site, but all the claims in this particular article cite a source, so you’re welcome to check the validity of everything it says. I’ll admit a couple of them are distortions, but they are all basically citing true facts.

Obama’s not even that liberal, as I’ve mentioned earlier. Many of his proposals are solid compromises or were originally proposed by members of the Republican Party. His stimulus plan was actually a very modest expansion of Bush’s plans, it’s just that he was the one that got to press the button. His tax plan is more liberal than Romney’s but still relatively conservative in that it cuts taxes on certain people to promote growth. And the individual mandate was first conceived of by the right-wing Heritage Foundation—as an alternative to socialist health care.

Also, I haven’t totally fallen for the anti-Romney line Obama is taking. I respect him as a successful businessman, and I can recognize several lies and distortions about him coming from the left (such as the unfair criticism that his outsourcing renders him unfit to lead America). My main reasons for not supporting Romney are:

1. As governor, he was not a job creator. While Romney led Massachusetts, job growth in that state was even worse than job growth now under Obama!
2. I can’t trust him to keep any of his political views. He has no basic principles, and wastes all his energy pandering.
3. He’s extraordinarily risk-averse in all of his life decisions. I doubt he has the confidence necessary to lead.
4. Whereas Obama is a model of competent foreign policy and has improved our image on the world stage, Romney made an idiot of himself in Britain and Israel. Abroad, Obama is generally well-liked and Romney generally scorned. Pretty much the only other country that wants Romney to win is Saudi Arabia, because they remember how profitable it was for them the last time a Republican was at the helm.
5. (And most important), he is being pushed on us by the corporatist establishment that has been dismantling all of the government’s safeguards against predatory business practices. This is essentially why Obama has been vilified so badly: because corporations that got away with murder under Bush felt threatened by a man who took regulation seriously. And they spent tons of money to distort the media perception of Obama.

You’re putting your trust into a guy who has repeatedly lied and broken promises since he has been in office but you are questioning a guy’s integrity based on interviews.

What reason do I have to trust that video? It clearly has a right-wing agenda, at the very least it’s no better than anything left-slanted that I’ve read that you doubt the veracity of.

I can safely say I know Mitt Romney has been a flip-flopper on many issues and that’s why he wasn’t my first choice in the primary;

I sincerely hope your first choice was Jon Huntsman, because he was mine. Romney and Huntsman were the only two candidates who weren’t liars or nutcases or both. You could certainly make a good case that Huntsman would have been a healthy alternative to President Obama…he was the only one who proposed we break up the big banks, for instance, which is a really good idea. Perhaps the corporate donors didn’t take too kindly to that, which is why he wasn’t portrayed favorably by the media…

but at the same time, I know his good qualities outweigh the bad and he has a good proven record in business that can’t be flip-flopped.

No, I agree, his business record is beyond reproach. He was an excellent CEO. But I think his mediocre job as a governor is more telling than his success as a businessman.

You say you don’t favor tax loopholes and although Romney has actually campaigned to close them, Obama has not once done it either and doesn’t even talk about doing it going forward.  So, by your admission, they won’t be closed under either candidate.

That article seems to be ridiculing Obama for thinking that “tax loopholes” and “tax incentives” are two separate things. But Obama is right…they are two separate things. A tax loophole is a flaw or fraudulent provision in the tax code that can be exploited by billionaires or corporations to pay less than the spirit of the law intends them to. A tax incentive, meanwhile, is a conscientious provision designed to motivate or discourage a certain behavior without explicitly requiring or forbidding it by law.

Tax incentives, when implemented well, can have a tremendously beneficial impact on our economy, albeit at the cost of a slightly more complicated tax code. For instance, why do you think the United States leads the world in charitable donations? Because we offer the most generous tax write-offs for charitable donations. Tax loopholes, on the other hand, are necessarily detrimental to the health of the free market…for instance, the loopholes that let companies pay lower taxes if they ship jobs overseas.

This is the distinction I draw, and it’s the distinction President Obama draws.

You sound like you have a somewhat good understanding of the tax code but a failure at understanding wealth.  First off, there is no such thing as a “middle class.”  I dare you to define it for me.

Dare accepted. I define the middle class as those who earn less than $250,000 a year but still earn enough so that they are required to file an income tax return. These are the people who form the backbone of our economy, they are the group from which a lot of our American ingenuity has sprung, and they are the group that benefits most from President Obama’s tax plan.

Secondly, rich people aren’t necessarily rich. Just because you made a lot of income doesn’t mean you acquired a lot of wealth.  Your theory that people you deem “rich” have somehow stopped innovating or growing the economy is completely FALSE.  People from incomes of $30k to $30 Million all play into the economy and business.  Wealthy individuals who earned, say $2 Million, in income may also be a small business entrepreneur who is also paying several employees’ salary or capital into a business investment, etc.  You just can’t un-fixate your mind into not thinking that rich individuals are some cigar-puffing old white guy rubbing elbows with other tycoons on Wall Street. That’s just an ignorant personification you use to justify your theories and being someone that personally works with several millionaires, billionaires and small business folks I can tell you that you’re completely out of touch with reality.

I think you’re jumping to conclusions about how my mind works. Seriously. I don’t want to make any premature judgment about a millionaire, personally or financially.

You seem to feel that I want to raise the tax burden on the rich because I think the rich are evil and must be punished for their excess. That’s not true. The reason I want to raise taxes on the rich is so that we can afford to reduce the burden on the typical American.

This is a common right-wing fallacy, that innovation and growth must come only from the rich, because they have the resources. Well, no. Do you think Bill Gates started out as a billionaire? No, he’s a self-made man. So are lots of billionaires. And they earned all that wealth because they had a good idea and the ambition to make it happen.

President Obama’s tax plan is about finding those billionaires that haven’t bloomed and giving them a better chance of success. If you don’t think that’ll work, fine, but at the very least understand the reasons behind the president’s tax plan before you criticize it. I understand the reasons behind Romney’s, after all.

You have the mentality of one of these Occupy Wall Street buffoons when making these statements.

This may not surprise you given what you know about me, but I’ve been to an Occupy rally. I only went once, but I did give it a shot and for a while I identified with them.

What you have to understand about Occupiers is that while they attract a lot of ignorant people to their ranks, their central theme—getting money out of politics—is incredibly important and rings true. You also need to understand that part of the reason they’re so disorganized is because they tolerate dissent and disagreement: they want to hear everyone’s ideas before crafting an agenda.

Unlike the Tea Party, which was through and through funded and organized by big-business magnates and merely disguised as a grassroots movement, Occupy was a true grassroots movement.

I’ll tell you what, read the link I originally provided above, read Mitt’s Tax Plan straight from the horse’s mouth, and watch the video I posted above for good measure.  Worst case scenario, you waste 15-20 of your life educating yourself a little bit.  You can then either use the knowledge gained for good or evil…I could care less.

I’ll grant you that not everything in that plan is a bad idea. There are some good bits, even if I disagree with most of his proposed initiatives, like slashing corporate taxes and repealing Obamacare.

One underlying problem with Romney’s plan is that it assumes total causality in everything that has gone wrong under Obama. That is arrogant, and untrue. The economy is a complex machine, and to claim that Obama failed to meet this projected target or that one is mostly a testament to how flawed such targets are. But most credible economists think that the economy would have been slightly worse without the stimulus.

Finally, since it didn’t fit in anywhere else, I should claim that it’s not ridiculous to reimplement the estate tax—or as the Republicans so contemptuously refer to it as, the “death tax”. The estate tax has never—never—been that expansive. At its height, it was just a tiny portion of the value of an inheritance estimated over a multimillion-dollar level. It has always been a tax on the 0.00000001%, and not even a very big one at that.

Well, I hope that’s given you a better idea of my political views, and satisfied you that I at least take your claims seriously, even if I don’t agree with them.

I usually don’t go into things this long but I’ll attempt to rebute your misinformation because you’re trying.  I’m only going to bulletpoint my responses though because I’m four glasses into a really good scotch.

• I haven’t swallowed the right-wing depiction of Obama…I am the right-wing.  Obama has said ridiculous things like “you didn’t build that” that point to his socialist mentality brought on upon his upbringing.  Bill Clinton thinks this guy is too liberal.

• Extremely left-wing website? You aren’t kidding. A lot of those accomplishments are from Obama however, but most are ones I guess he’s just getting credit for.  Which I guess is ok, because a lot of them  aren’t good at all..in fact they’re very bad. They’re more bureaucracy, spending and regulation. Things that have been stifling business since he’s been in office.  The Stimulus was riddled with crony spending and favors to unions and green energy.  I hope someone spends some research dissecting each of those links and having a field day exposing everything that was wrong about each of them.  I’d love to but I have a full job already.

• Obama is liberal.  Liberal, liberal, liberal. You can’t paint a blue jay red and call it a cardinal. A trillion dollar stimulus plan isn’t a modest expansion of anything. It was a cooked up monstrosity of epic democratic proportions.  Also, Obama’s tax plan does not cut anything.  His plan is already in affect today except that he just wants to remove the portion for those that libs like him deem rich. Yes, you’re correct about the Heritage Foundation and even Newt Gingrich’s support for some kind of individual mandate but there’s a reason it never got passed before Obamacare.  It’s unconstitutional (despite what what a couple robed dimwits think.)  I’m a proponent of individual health savings accounts personally.

• As far as your criticism for Romney goes:

1) True, but he’s still done better than Obama. 

2) That is purely opinion (which you are free to have), however I’d argue that he has plenty of principle but lacks a lot of fierceness that probably will never show.

3) Kind of the same point I made but he has already lead as a Governor and as a CEO. That puts him light years ahead of the zero-experience Obama had before becoming President.  

4) Competent foreign policy? Are you kidding me?  He hasn’t improved anything. The world still hate the US even as much as when Bush was in power…and they really fucking hated Bush.  The only people that like us are the terrorists, pseudo-dictators and the rest of socialist/communists in power.  Not to mention, do you remember the “apology tour” where Obama went country to country bowing before people. That shit wasn’t made up by Fox News, he really did it.  Romney didn’t make a fool of himself, that was pure media punditry. Romney got approval from Benjamin Netanyahu and former Polish President Lech Walesa in one trip.  I’m sure Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still a big Obama supporter though.

5) I kind of agree with you here but alas libs are as much to blame for Romney as the establishment because they viciously attacked all the other GOP candidates far worse than Romney on irrelevant issues.  Obama also works for these same people though, don’t forget. Take a look at who’s funding him.

• I posted that video because it’s video evidence all in one spot. You’re free to find other videos individually where he lies and breaks promises. Knock yourself out.

• Jon Huntsman? Ha, no. Obama was too much like Obama. My first choice would’ve been Herman Cain had he not been smeared out of the election (funny how that disappeared isn’t it?) My second choice was Gingrich because he’s had a proven record of fixing the economy alongside Clinton.  They smeared him out of the election as well.

• I can’t argue with your point about incentives and loopholes.  That link however was not mocking Obama’s understanding but rather his hypocrisy.

• So, where did you exactly come up with $250,000 as the cap?  That’s not even the standard used by the IRS for income brackets?  That’s not even the number Obama is proposing?  See, that’s exactly my point.  There is no exact number, there can only be arbitrary speculation which can be easily manipulated.  Marx created that term just to divide people similar to the way people were placed in the Feudal system.  It’s a game.  In America there are no classes despite how hard liberals use them to defend class warfare and their progressive income tax system.

• But you did make up your mind when you stated that rich people do not stifle the economy.  They are the economy. They are the ones that are supposed to pump money back into the economy, not the Federal Reserve.  They can’t afford an ever increasing tax burden on top of strenuousness regulation.  Did you not watch that video? The rich can’t bail us regular people anymore.  There’s not enough money.  They can’t reduce the burden either.  We have a spending problem and a cultural disease promoted by liberals.  When you pay someone more to sit on their ass and collect paychecks rather than to work a tough job for a minimum salary, you create a habitual culture of failure.  It’s common sense that libs just can’t understand because they place “fairness” above factual evidence.

I never said innovation and growth come from the rich, did I?  I said they are part of the economy like everyone else. They have capital but they may not be the innovators.  Bill Gates started from nothing but now he’s something. Exactly!  You think he just created all he did from thin air…or as Obama put it “someone else built that.” No, he got financial help.  That financial help comes from individuals or banks…you know…the bad guys you occupiers seem to loathe.

• Obama’s job shouldn’t be to find new billionaires through some arbitray tax plan.  His plan should be to let the system work as it has throughout time and stay the hell out of the way as much as possible.  Bill Gates and the rest will figure it out like they always have.  If he was smart he’d let Paul Ryan’s plan pass and tell the his stooge Harry Reid to let it pass and just play golf for the rest of his term.  I’d be quite content with Obama as President if he did that at this point.

• Not shocked.

• They will never get money out of politics. It will never ever ever ever ever ever ever happen.  The whole reason most fools are in politics is because of money.  That’s just an indisputable truth.

Despite what you may have heard, the tea party was not funded by corporations or big business types.  Sure, individuals like the Koch Brothers may have supplied money to the cause but the tea party is as home-grown as occupy wall street.  That much is certain.  They’re just smarter than being hypocrites like Michael Moore who just lent their time rather than their millions to the cause.

• Paul Krugman said the stimulus was crucial to save the economy.  He’s a Nobel prize winning credible economists to most…but he’s also a complete idiot. Your point is invalid.

• I’m too lazy and drunk at this point to look up the estate tax rate but I will argue that if it’s such an arbitrary amount…then why even have it at all?  The concept alone sound bogus since originally as income it was taxed; and now that wealth is being transferred from one individual to another somehow the government needs to get it’s cut again? Wut?  You can’t defend that.

Listen, you’re bright and you have integrity to bring facts to the table but unfortunately, you’re on the wrong side of the argument.  I take that with a grain of salt though since as Winston Churchill once said ”If you’re not liberal when you’re young, you have no heart. If you’re not conservative when you’re older, you have no brain.”  You’ll come around. Fact-find.  Research.  The truth is out there.

[I apologize for any typos or grammatical errors made in this post due to alcoholic consumption.]

(Source: redbloodedamerica)