It would be nice if being a crook disqualified one for public office, but it doesn’t seem to. Some just do a better job of getting away with it than others.

Yes Igor, it’s downright “pathetic”.

igor says foolish and I’ve never agreed more!!!

Nice dig. Thanks for this.

I actually don’t think we are that far apart politically, but I’m emphatically against using fear as an ‘ends justify the means’ approach to swaying public opinion, and it is exactly this tone that is going to cost McCain this election.

I’m sorry – perhaps I should have explained it better. I blame my Harvard macroeconomics teacher as a bad example – he liked to just state things and leave the discussions of _why_ the economic theory was valid as an exercise to the student.

I really don’t want to break out my scanner here, so I’ll do a basic example:

My company sells software. We have one product that we sell for $8. We do so because it maximizes revenue – if the price goes up, we lose sales – if the price goes down, the increased sales don’t compensate for the lost revenue per unit.

Now, suppose there were a $25 subsidy for anyone who buys software – in other words, the Budget Constraint of an individual (with regards to software) was reduced by $25, provided they spent at least $25 on software.

If nothing else changes, people would buy $25 more worth of software – as it has no effective cost to them, it doesn’t really matter how much utility they would derive from it.

The demand curve basically is a graph showing (unsurprisingly) that the more expensive a normal good is, the less people end up buying it. While there are some slight variations at the extreme (a $1 item may sell more than a $0.17 item online, for example), it’s fundamentally sound.

If there were a $25 subsidy, they could afford to pay more for software. So, the demand at a given price point would go up.

Here’s a demand curve shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia as an example:

The Y axis is demand, the X axis is price.

A subsidy like that will cause the demand curve to shift right, as depicted in the picture. So, if my price was Q1, the demand at Q1 would go up. However, I would not be maximizing my profit if I kept my pricing there. As a rational person, I increase my price to compensate and maximize profit. I don’t increase it by the whole $25, as people buy other software besides mine.

Education is an interesting thing – unlike software, people don’t obtain services from 10+ companies per year. If you attend one school, 100% of that subsidy ends up applied to the tuition there.

When most people have $4,000 more per year to spend on tuition, tuition prices will go up to compensate. This leaves those who don’t take the tax credit penalized, effectively creating a tax penalty for those who don’t do 100 hours per year.

Corporatism is the new fascism, and we as a nation have been living it for eight long years.
I will certainly agree with you here – corporatism (not capitalism or a free market) causes a lot of problems. We either need to deregulate, and allow smart business to thrive and bad business to fail, or we need to regulate and keep them from getting in this mess in the first place.

Right now, banks that didn’t take really risky loans did way worse than those that did. Now, we’re picking up the pieces. The risk-takers should have to face the consequences of their actions, so that rational banks can thrive. We have a tax and banking system that encourages and rewards stupidity.

I don’t like McCain, and I don’t like Obama. As far as I can tell, the only true conservative, both fiscally _and_ economically seems to be Ron Paul. His voting record earned him the nickname “Dr. No”, and with good reason. Right now, that’s what we really need in a president. Sadly, it appears we won’t get it either way.

i do beleive however, that we can all agree bush has NOT done a good job and that is why we are where we are today
Yes.

A tax incentive for college students to perform community service is not automatically a tax penalty. You bulleted this as an indisputable fact in your original post. While your justification postscript may have merit, you are making an argument that is by no means a cut and dried fact. Presenting it as such is not intellectually honest and is a disservice to those who might read your post as a factual laundry list of Obama’s proposals rather than a skeptic’s opinions. Likewise, tying federal funding to the establishment of volunteer programs by schools does not mandate student participation in said programs.

I am not an Obama fanatic. I don’t expect miracles from Obama, nor do I expect to agree with every proposal the man might make as president. But the rampant fear mongering about a fascist President Obama is not rooted in fact.

In my opinion, the notion of a fascist Obama presidency is alluring to libertarian leaning thinkers precisely because the country has been so thoroughly frightened by the real movement toward oligarchy and corporate cronyism during the Bush administration. Conversely, that same fear drives a different group of liberal democratic voters to become radical Obama devotees.

My motto this election has been “I’m voting for Obama, but I believe Ron Paul”. IMO, leaving the Republican party in charge of the executive branch of government (not necessarily McCain per se) is inviting a further erosion of the constitutional balance of power and a continued cronyism that is anathema to the free market. Would I like to see democrats in control of both houses of Congress as well? No! But in my opinion, it is preferable to one more day of neocon control of the presidency.

Let’s face it, the Republicans did this to themselves. Bush and his cabal of neo-con strategists have ruined the reputation of their party with disastrous results for our country. Corporatism is the new fascism, and we as a nation have been living it for eight long years. The small ‘r’ republicans need to take back their party, and this election will be their wake-up call.

There is no tax penalty:
From your link:
Require 100 Hours of Service in College: Barack Obama and Joe Biden will make college affordable for all
Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This fully refundable credit will ensure that the
first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of
tuition at the average public college or university. Recipients of this credit will be required to conduct 100 hours
of public service a year, either during the school year or over the summer months.

From an opportunity cost standpoint, there is, in fact a penalty for not doing the community service. Furthermore, by ensuring that people in college can afford to pay an extra $4,000 per year, colleges will naturally raise prices to compensate. The value of college hasn’t gone up, but your ability to pay has. Supply stays the same, demand stays the same, but discretionary income goes up – prices will naturally go up to compensate. So, we’re where we are before, except now you have to do 100 hours of community service, or pay $4,000 dollars in tax penalties. How nice of him.

There is no mandatory service for public school children.
If you watch the video, he explicitly states that he would tie federal funding to the establishment of such programs by schools. No, the federal government wouldn’t “mandate” it – it would just use finances to force compliance – much like highway safety funds are used.

Furthermore, if you watch the video – look how he talks about the New Deal, and how wonderful it was that FDR could leverage the public to work for the good of the whole. The New Deal was a very bad deal, and FDR did more harm to the economic liberties of this nation than any president before him. He was to capitalism what Abe Lincoln was to State’s rights. It certainly sounds to me like Obama wants to re-make the mistakes of the 1930s.

Yes, the “neocon agenda” has to stop, but the Democratic congress has the ability to do so by not funding it. Clinton was the right president for the job – not because of his wonderful policies; rather, he didn’t run things like a dictator. Congress wouldn’t rubber stamp what he wanted, nor he them. This left politics a battle – one must determine what’s important, and negotiate to get it.

If it were a republican congress, Obama would be a lot more palatable, as he would have a congress that would fight him on a lot of things. A lot of the problems with Bush occurred due to the complete lack of controls – how long did it take Bush to find his “veto crayon”? The real power of the president (veto) went unused, as he could use political pressure and executive orders to achieve his goals.

All things being equal, I’d vote for Ron Paul, as I don’t think that any of the major candidates are fit for the job. Barring that, I’d rather have gridlock – when nearly everything the government does is unconstitutional, and what isn’t is stupid, it’s in the best interest of the country for the government to do as little as necessary.

IMO the choice between these two remains the same as it was back in July. Putting the breaks on the neocon agenda means taking a chance on Obama.

Both McCain and Obama have potentially disastrous policy proposals on the table, but there is very little evidence that the remark you have chosen to discourse on at the 11th hour was more than an analogy about the scale and importance that Obama believes a VOLUNTEER program of national service should occupy in society.

In the months since this speech, Obama has also clarified and refined the national service programs proposed, and they are unequivocally voluntary. There is no mandatory service for public school children. There is no tax penalty:

http://www.barackobama.com/pdf/NationalServicePlanFactSheet.pdf

Instead of reading into this non-issue, think about the implications of a Phil Gramm Treasury Secretary on our economy. Think about what a President Palin might look like.

I don’t in any way desire to be an apologist for the Democrats, but we have been utterly run aground by 8 years of republican neo-conservatism. McCain isn’t George Bush, but he is (as seems clear to me by his VP choice) capitulating to the neo-con agenda, and he is self-admittedly not strong on economics. He is also 72 years old.

Obama may be a relative unknown, but he is highly preferable to the alternative.