The Brand New Respectful Presidential Campaign Thread

Anneshirley...When you compare education statistics between the United States and other countries do you take into consideration population? For example the population of Sweden is roughly 9,000,000 and the population of the United States is roughly 303,000,000. Now if you broke that down to education statistics per capita I think you might find that we are not as uneducated as you suggest. For example, break it down per capitia between high school/college graduates between the two countries and see what you come up with statistically. Also, if we are so uneducated, why do so many foriegeners apply at our colleges and universities?

This should make Grace happy!

Enrollment Changes: Demographics are Shifting

The period from 2000 to 2015 will see the single largest growth in college enrollments in our nation's history: upwards of 2 million more students, or nearly 20% growth overall.

The large majority of the new students will be "minorities," from Latino, Asian/Pacific-Islander, and African-American families. Yet this new generation of students is arriving at college at a time of budget retrenchment and cutbacks for higher education.

(solutionsforourfuture.org)

Paulette--I brought up both Carter and the Swedes, briefly, because I was responding to the Ludlow piece, where he brings up both Carter and the Swedes, incorrectly as I stated, to cast Obama in a negative light.  Yes, of course, there are cyclical downs, and Carter went through one and Bush is going through one now.  However, the Bush down is more than just cyclical, which is why I believe strongly that we won't come out of this one as we did after Carter.  The world has changed drastically since then, and with the huge sums of money we're spending on this war and the huge sums of money we've borrowed, in particular from the Chinese, and the changes in the global economy, I doubt very much that we'll recover in my lifetime (I'm giving myself another 20 years).  I don't want it to be true, but I believe it is true.

And, yes, we can't compare Sweden to the U.S. (again, my comparison, thanks to Ludlow) since we live in a much more diverse society, and one based on a totally different view of how society should operate.  The differences between the two countries have far more to do with the latter than size of population. However, there's no denying that we have issues  of education in this country.  And so long as we deny it, we'll never fix it.  I remember so clearly after Sputnic (sorry about misspelling but I don't have time to look it up) how there was an attempt to refocus on the importance of education, and today we're in even more trouble than in 1960.  Of course, we have some excellent schools and some very bright people, but I'm talking about the whole not an elite part.  As you mention, we're a country of 303,000,000, and we need to educate all the children.  American students do far worse than students in other areas of the world, period, no matter what the population of those countries.  You're lucky if you haven't experienced the cashiers who can't add, subtract, or divide without a cash register doing it for them.  It happens to me all the time.  And when I taught at the City University, the writing skills and general knowledge of my students was very very low.  I had many foreign students in my classes and, for the most part, they were far more knowledgeable about the world than my American students--and better writers although English was not their native language.  This is not directed at anyone here, just a statement of fact--a regretable statement of fact. 

Leaving Carter and the Swedes out of the equation and just concentrating on Obama's anwers in the debate I'll defer to my pal Larry again.

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Blame Barack, Not Charlie & George   [Larry Kudlow]

"It’s rather amusing watching the liberal media in full-scale attack mode on George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, with the Washington Post’s Tom Shales as the general leading the charge. Oh my gosh! Their hero Obama has been wounded!

What’s the problem here? Messrs. Gibson and Stephanopolis actually challenged Obama with tough, well-informed questions on tax policy and politics? That’s what they’re supposed to do. At any rate, it’s fascinating to watch members of the mainstream liberal media lunge at each others throats. It’s kind of like watching Hillary and Obama, isn’t it?

Look, here’s the deal: Obama bungled the tax question, big time. Period. End of sentence. End of story. To my liberal friends out there all I can say is: Get over it. Your guy has a very poor grasp of basic economic principles.

First off, you don’t raise taxes during a recession. That’s a no-brainer. Second, doubling the capital-gains tax affects Americans up and down the income ladder, not just rich hedge-fund managers. In addition, capital-gains tax cuts are self-financing, and they stimulate jobs and the economy. You want to raise budget revenues? Cut the cap-gains tax rate. That’s what history shows. Finally, hiking the payroll tax also affects people up and down the income ladder.

Uncapping the payroll tax reveals still another cultural misstep by Sen. Obama. He apparently has a difficult time understanding that nowadays, a veteran fireman or a veteran cop, married to a veteran schoolteacher, will make well over $100,000. In fact, they can make close to $200,000. Yet Obama still wants to go ahead and tax both the first and last payroll dollar of this group at a very high marginal tax rate by uncapping the Social Security (FICA) tax.

(Incidentally, I don’t think Mr. Obama knows any cops or fireman. How about that? That is the problem. In other words, his economics are bad and his social circle is very limited.)

But put all this aside for a moment. Obama’s real agenda is a liberal-left ideology that places income redistribution above economic growth. That’s his real message. And looking at the results of presidential elections over the past three decades, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry all lost with a similar message. Bill Clinton? He was a growth Democrat. So he won twice. But Obama is aligning himself with the Democratic losers. And that will make him a loser as well.

Now, whether Hillary’s pit-bull routine during the debate helped her or not remains to be seen. We’ll learn more on that front come Tuesday when Pennsylvanians head to the voting booths. But that’s a different issue. All I’m saying is that liberals need to quit blaming Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolis for Obama’s shortcomings. But do blame Obama for failing to grasp the tax penalties he will create on upward mobility for the very people he thinks he’s helping. These same people will be hurt a second time around when the wealthy folks who own capital have less of it — after tax — to invest in new businesses and new jobs."

04/18 11:11 AM

Thursday, April 17, 2008

"Gibson Hammers Hill-Bama on Cap-Gains   [Larry Kudlow]

Simple--I have a trust in his judgment to do the right thing--In the end it's in the gut---And I truly believe he can work across the aisles of Congress.  I have a comfort factor in McCain.

Susie--But Kudlow used Carter and the Swedes as examples in the earlier piece, so I tried to show how he misstated facts.  If Hillary or Obama had made those misstatements and someone showed that they were not true, or not true as represented, we'd be all over them--why not with this man?

And in this new piece, he makes  blanket statements and assumes that we'll all accept those blanket statements as fact.  They are not facts. What he's doing is echoing the Milton Friedman stance on economics, the Republican guru until recently on economic policy.  Yet Friedman has been proven absolutely wrong with respect to recent economic events, which is why everyone now is trying to rein in the free market, including the Republicans.

Kudlow puts out no facts or statistics to prove his case, other than to say that certain Democrats lost because of their platforms.  In fact, Dukakis lost because he was foolish enough to put on a helmet and because of the Republican Willie Horton ad, and Carter lost the second time because Americans were prisoners in Iran, and Kerry lost because he was "switfboated."  They all lost because of personal attacks not the policies they espoused.  And not to get too many people disturbed, but I believe it's been proven that the Reagan people actually worked to insure that the Americans were not released in Iran until after the election.  Imagine if they had been killed by one of their crazy guards before they were released, so that Reagan could win the election!  Not very nice to my "bleeding heart" view of the world.

I'm not keen on Obama getting the nomination but kudos to him for refusing to do the helmet stuff--read flag pin here and I wish he had stayed out of the bowling alley--and for not totally pandering to the media.  Just wish when they were attacking  Hillary in the same manner in which he was recently attacked, he had refused to reap the benefits, but he didn't. But politicians are about winning--some at whatever cost, a few at lesser cost, but they all offend against good taste--all of them! 

I can't respect Kudlow (or even believe he's an economist) since, instead of proving his case, he uses inuendo and generalization to make his points.  Please note how after putting Obama down, he mentions Hillary's "Pit Dog" tactics. I suppose in this way, he assumes he puts her to rest as well. This is neither good writing nor good science.  It's written with bias, and if he had written that piece for an economics class in a respected university, it would have gotten an "F." 

Susie--I believe everyone has the right, and duty, to critique Obama and Clinton (McCain too) regarding their ecoomic plans, but Kudlow doesn't actually do that.  He makes the assumption that his readers agree with supply side economics and then tells us that Obama doesn't hold with supply side economics, so therefore Obama's view of the economy is wrong. Goes something like this:

Supply side economics is the only economics

Barack Obama doesn't believe in supply side economics

therefore Barack Obama's economic plan is wrong.

But I for one don't believe in supply side economics.  And as recent evidence has shown, it doesn't work, or at least it doesn't work for those of us who think the mortgage crisis is serious and might actually bring down our economy.  In any world where true supply side economics is actually practiced (nowhere in this world), Bear Stearns would never have been bailed out, and neither would any of the other investment houses, banks, or ordinary citizens holding subprime mortgages.  Yet, I think most of us agree, while holding our noses, that if Bear Stearns had not been rescued, our entire economy might have gone belly up. The Republicans and Democrats together are pushing for new mortgage and money regulations, not fewer regulations. 

And when Kudlow writes his pieces, at least the two that I read here, he bases everything he writes on the theory that supply-side is the only economics.  I disagree. 

I looked him up just now and found he was fired by Bear Stearns (apparently for taking drugs!)  Not that this has anything to do with anything; just thought it interesting. More important to me, he doesn't have a graduate degree or an undergraduate degree in economics, and although I'm not an education snob, I am with respect to technical fields like engineering, economics, and physics.   

If the description of a runaway judiciary is meant to describe Thomas, Scalito, Alito, and Roberts, I can only say "how very polite."

Shirley--I think it's nice that you have such good feelings for the Pope.  I was raised a Catholic--schools and all, and I hate to tell you this, but Benedict 16 was a member of Hitler's Youth, which is why he's had such bad press and there was so much horror when he was elected Pope.  So I don't think he can love our country because he was freed from the Nazis, since technically he was a Nazi.  In fairness to him, however, lots of German boys joined the Hilton Youth movement.  I believe Bill Moyer brought this up a few days ago and his job is now threatened.  But, hay, the truth is the truth and it should be told.

Not only that but Pope Benedict's own cousin was put to death by the Nazi's because he had Down syndrome.

PS -- Gals---Get Bill Moyer and Bill Maher straight because they are at opposite ends of the spectrum. LOL

Shokk, you are exactly correct. 

This comes from Wiki, but I'm sure you can corroborate this by googling further.  The below info was discussed today before the service at the stadium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Benedict_XVI

Following his fourteenth birthday in 1941, Ratzinger was enrolled in the Hitler Youth - as membership was required for all 14-year old German boys after December 1939^[5] - but was an unenthusiastic member and refused to attend meetings.^[6] His father was a bitter enemy of Nazism, believing it conflicted with the Catholic faith, according to biographer John L. Allen, Jr. In 1941, one of Ratzinger's cousins, a 14-year-old boy with Down syndrome, was killed by the Nazi regime in its campaign of eugenics.^[7] In 1943 while still in seminary, he was drafted at age 16 into the German anti-aircraft corps. Ratzinger then trained in the German infantry, but a subsequent illness precluded him from the usual rigours of military duty. As the Allied front drew closer to his post in 1945, he deserted back to his family's home in Traunstein after his unit had ceased to exist, just as American troops established their headquarters in the Ratzinger household. As a German soldier, he was put in a POW camp but was released a few months later at the end of the War in summer 1945. He reentered the seminary, along with his brother Georg, in November of that year.

The Rabbi was a Holocaust survivor.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news&id=6089861  

NEW YORK -- Pope Benedict XVI made two very important visits, to two very different places of worship Friday evening. And in doing so, he made some history.

The pope visited a New York City church with a long history in the archdiocese. Before that, he stepped inside a New York City synagogue, the first pope ever to do so.

We have two reports, starting with Eyewitness News' Phil Lipoff at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side.

Historic irony abounded in the visit today. The pope was born and raised in Nazi Germany. The rabbi of the synagogue he visited is a survivor of the Nazi-led Holocaust.

And he has good reason to be excited. He convinced the Vatican to make his synagogue an official stop on the pope's trip to the U.S. It's something no other pope has ever done.

"On the eve of Passover," says Rabbi Schneier, "the pope will be visiting a synagogue."

And visiting a rabbi who survived the Holocaust is important, because Pope Benedict was forced as a child in Germany to be part of Hitler's Nazi Youth.

Rabbi Schneier has spent his career, much like the pope, trying to heal those old wounds and move both religions forward together. It's something not lost on those who call Park East home.

"Just the fact that there's such great dialogue between the two religions, I think that's something," Congregant Carole Garber Feldman said. "We all want the same thing. We all want peace."

The small, 20-minute gathering was an intimate experience for Park East congregants, an exciting moment.

Both men have been working their entire careers to bridge the gap in a Judeo-Christian spirit, and I read recently that the pope a few years back said this, "Jews and Christians are pretty much alike. We're both waiting for the Messiah: Jews for the first coming, Christians for the second."

Pope Benedict's next appearance was at Saint Joseph's church in Yorkville. It's a German parish with a long history.

Eyewitness News reporter Jeff Rossen went to Yorkville to talk with people who live in the neighborhood.

The first paragraph of this news article would make you "mad" at the Dems and make you think they are crazy:

"WASHINGTON - Republican John McCain said Sunday that cutting taxes and stimulating the economy are more important than balancing the budget, and accused both Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama of supporting tax hikes that would worsen the impact of a recession." 

Later at the end of the article:

"Both Clinton and Obama support higher taxes for people earning more than $200,000 a year. Obama also has said he wants a capital gains tax higher than the current 15 percent.

"They are out of touch when they want to raise taxes at the worst possible time when we're in a recession," said McCain, who has been under constant criticism from Democrats for saying the economy isn't his best subject.

McCain said he has a solid economic plan, centered on extending Bush administration tax cuts he once opposed. Clinton and Obama would reverse those tax cuts."

--- ok that makes more sense but so does GETTING OUT OF IRAQ.

I really really need to know how McCain would make our economy better. Sticking to anything Bush did DOES NOT make sense. I don't want more social programs that Dems usually promote. Taxing people over $200K won't affect me but would it mean the people who are self employed (sole propietors) would go out of business?  I don't know if that dollar amount is too low these days. Possibly, the sole proprietors would not feel it so much if they use their Schedule C and reduce their AGI.

Here in California, we need a stronger border and have to do something about the money we spend for illegal immigration ... education and hospital bills!!  But I sure can't afford to pay more taxes ... and obviously we need to something about the gas prices which none of the candidates are talking about! 

Today's Times:

Whatever Senator Barack Obama meant by his less than artful remarks about small-town Pennsylvanians “bitter” over lost jobs, he certainly turned a lot of attention last week to the decline of the American worker, bitter or not.

The talk most often has been of shuttered factories, layoffs, outsourcing and other effects of globalization, especially in a state like Pennsylvania, which has lost tens of thousands of industrial jobs. But there is another way to look at blue-collar workers or their counterparts in the service sector.

Leaving aside for a moment those who have lost their jobs, what of those who still have them? Once upon a time, a large number earned at least $20 an hour, or its inflation-adjusted equivalent, and now so many of them don’t.

The $20 hourly wage, introduced on a huge scale in the middle of the last century, allowed masses of Americans with no more than a high school education to rise to the middle class. It was a marker, of sorts. And it is on its way to extinction.

Americans greeted the loss with anger and protest when it first began to happen in big numbers in the late 1970s, particularly in the steel industry in Western Pennsylvania. But as layoffs persisted, in Pennsylvania and across the country, through the ’80s and ’90s and right up to today, the protests subsided and acquiescence set in.

Hourly workers had come a long way from the days when employers and unions negotiated a way for them to earn the prizes of the middle class — houses, cars, college educations for their children, comfortable retirements. Even now a residual of that golden age remains, notably in the auto industry. But here, too, wages are falling below the $20-an-hour threshold — $41,600 annually — that many experts consider the minimum income necessary to put a family of four into the middle class.

The nation’s political leaders — Democrats and Republicans alike — have argued that education and training are a route back to middle-class wages for those who have fallen out. But the demand isn’t sufficient to absorb all the workers that the leaders would educate. Even now, roughly 15 percent of college-educated workers find themselves in jobs for which they are overqualified, the Economic Policy Institute reports, and many of these jobs pay less than $20 an hour.

“People are mainly worried about having a job and only secondly what it pays and whether they are gaining ground,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, trying to explain the absence of an outcry and a political debate in which the candidates do not quantify the decline. “If you aren’t gaining ground,” Mr. Levy added, “then you look for other ways to pay for consumption, going into debt or, until recently, refinancing your home.”

Still, the erosion haunts the presidential campaign. Mr. Obama, competing against Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary to be held on Tuesday, touched this nerve in his description of small-town voters who “cling” to their guns and their religion in their resentment over lost jobs. It was a description that prompted John McCain, the Republican candidate, to label Mr. Obama an “elitist,” and Mrs. Clinton to portray him as out of touch with small-town sentiment. But like Mr. Obama, neither spoke of dollars missing from paychecks, or of the disappearing $20-an-hour wage.

That basic wage blossomed first in the auto industry in 1948 and served, in effect, as a banner in the ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. As the news media frequently noted, salt-of-the-earth American workers were earning enough to pay for comforts that their counterparts behind the Iron Curtain could not afford.

As the years passed, unions succeeded in negotiating this basic wage not as an ultimate goal but as an early rung in their wage ladders. That was the union standard, particularly in heavy industries, and in the early postwar decades nonunion employers fell into line, spreading middle-class incomes broadly through the service sector.

“The most important model that rolled off the Detroit assembly lines in the 20th century,” said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, “was the middle class for blue-collar workers.”

The high point came in the 1970s, just as the United States was beginning to lose its controlling grip on the economies of the non-Communist world. Since then the percentage of people earning at least $20 an hour has eroded in every sector of the economy, falling last year to 18 percent of all hourly workers from 23 percent in 1979 — a gradual unwinding of the post-World War II gains.

The decline is greatest in manufacturing, where only 1.9 million hourly workers still earn that much. That’s down nearly 60 percent since 1979, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

• The shrinkage is sometimes quite open. The Big Three automakers are currently buying out more than 25,000 employees who earn above $20 an hour, replacing many with new hires tied to a “second tier” wage scale that never quite reaches $20. A similar buyout last year removed 80,000 auto workers. Many were not replaced, but many were, with the new hires paid today at the non-middle-class scale, and with fewer benefits.

  
  

  The United Auto Workers agreed to this arrangement, accepting management’s argument that it must have labor cost relief to rebound and prosper. Whatever the justification, the new accord in effect abandoned the 1948 contract. That agreement is still hailed as historic. In contrast, the 2007 contract that reversed it is hardly recognized as a significant event in labor history. “It is significant,” Mr. Shaiken insisted, referring to last year’s contract. “The Big Three and the U.A.W. were the model for industrial America at its zenith.”

  This time the auto workers weren’t first. They ratified a practice that had spread to tire makers, heavy-equipment manufacturers, parts plants, groceries, retailers and longshoremen, diluting older workers’ resistance by preserving their status, while lowering earning power for new hires.

  Two tiers is one tactic. Another is filling middle-income jobs with temporary workers earning less. Add outsourcing to the list, and the off-shoring of such middle-income work as computer programming and radiology. Then there are the manufacturers who close a union plant and shift production to a nonunion one, often in the South but also in the Midwest.

  When Whirlpool, for example, acquired Maytag last year it closed a Maytag washing machine factory in Newton, Iowa, that had employed hundreds of workers at more than $20 an hour and shifted production to its plant in Clyde, Ohio, adding hundreds of workers at $17 an hour.

  Put givebacks on the list as well. Tens of thousands of workers have accepted wage cuts pressed on them by embattled employers, cuts that in many cases pushed their wages below middle-class levels. Flight attendants are a notable example. And as each new group acquiesces, the standard for what constitutes an acceptable wage comes down in America.

  “You can’t have an economy heavily invested in tradable goods and services that is completely oblivious to global wages,” said Ron Bloom, special assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers.

  The decline is most significant in the data that the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects for the nation’s hourly work force, which totals 76 million, or 52 percent of all workers, and ranges from managers and professionals to factory and construction workers to technicians, educators and sales people. The wages of many salaried workers show a similar trend, although the bureau does not convert their pay into hourly amounts.

  The trend in the hourly work force is striking. Take only the peak years in each business cycle, starting in 1979. The proportion earning at least $20 an hour declined from 23 percent that year, to 20 percent in 1980, to 18 percent in 1989, and to 16 percent in 2000. Manufacturing was hit the hardest.

  The current business cycle brought some relief. It reached its peak last year, before plunging into what now appears to be the opening months of a stiff recession. In 2007, before the plunge, the percentage of middle-income hourly workers earning at least $20 an hour had risen, to 18 percent. The improvement came mainly from a rising proportion of women in higher-end hourly work.

  Wages also held up in the public sector. Strip out that sector, and only 16 percent of privately employed hourly workers took home at least $20 an hour, just fractionally above the 2000 level.