McCain Would Not Vote For Bush Tax Cuts

He is a bad man. There is very little good about him today. I don’t understand why anyone supports him besides feeling guilty about not voting for a Vietnam hero. In particular, he is very cagey about the amnesty, almost appearing as a nut case just to be hard to pin down.

Stopping tax cuts during good times is basic economic strategy. Here is why. When the government lowers taxes, it increases the money supply which stimulates the economy. This in turn can cause increased inflation (in this case the money was used to buy real estate or in my case to pay for increased rent that sucked the difference from what I would have paid and what I did pay). Now if inflation did hit, the feds would have raised interest rates to put the brakes on while the government was still trying to stimulate the economy. The only thing the government would have done was just handed the money to the banks that were part of the Feneral reserve which then would have been used to fund more bad home loans (which is what they were doing with the money they did get).

Automobile emission standards are actually welcomed in the automobile industry. Why? Because it’s levels the R&D playing field. The domestic automobile companies can increase R&D and raise car prices or cut R&D and lower car prices. With the law, everyone would have to increase R&D spending at the same time. This is the only way for the domestic companies to beat the foreign companies in R&D. The only other alternative is to beat the foreign companies on price, which will never happen in any profitable way.

Without background checks, a guy could sell a firearm to a crazy person or some gang member. Background checks happen everytime you get a job, get a drivers license, go to a university, vote, get a passport,apply for a loan (even to buy the firearm), or pay with a check or credit card. Getting carded when buying booze is a background check. Sometime they are called identification checks, but identification checks are still a type of background check.

It was lax private security that caused every domestic hostage crises on an aircraft to the point where the movie Airplane (with the tag line “What’s slower than a speeding bullet, and able to hit tall buildings at a single bound?”) made fun of it back in 1980. Federalizing the screeners might not help, because it would be the same screeners but different boss, but that’s basically the only stick the government has to keep security tight (that or shutting down the airports).

Corruption follows betting. It generally happens in the lower ranks of sports but it could be happening in college as well. Some borderline student with no hope of going pro would be a good candidate for corruption. There are enough congress members that are sports nuts that want to keep sports corruption free (hence all the talk about steroids in Congress), that I’m not surprised when such talk arises.

Transparency laws have been supported by Bush and are always supported by the stock holders. If there are stock options, thre are stock holders. They are the true owners of the companies. The way the system works though is the stock holders can elect board members, but they can’t tell the board members what to do. Those board members can turn around and fleece the company. The only options of the stock holders without any law is to sell or to sue. When they have to sue they have to prove wrong doing. In order for there to be declared wrong doing, there has to be a law that was broken. Stock holder have to get congress to pass transparency laws to protect the stock holders when they sue. Otherwise the company could just say it was bad business or unethical but not illegal and there would be nothing the stock holder (which actually own the company) could do.

The quote about the automobile industry came from a CEO regarding R&D research into auto safety. It’s something I saw once years ago and remembered. The auto industry would do R&D only if they were forced to do it is still the norm. This will only hurt them as Honda and Toyota are starting to outsell them.

I agree that lower taxes are good to jump start an economy, but a bad idea to keep it going, because prolonged low taxes increases inflation which eats up any gains a person gets.

To me, every senator is a liberal wimp when it comes to fiscal matters. Right now, if Congress was to end social security, medicare, welfare and earmarks/pork/subsidies, the U.S. would be running a $79 billion surplus at least this year. Next year it will probably be lower. The amount people pay now in medicare, social security and unemployment would be switched over to the general fund. An increase in diplomatic relations according to Gates would bring it down to $35 billion surplus. This still doesn’t protect the U.S. from its dieing infrastructure or even tackle the national debt. Things like the war on drugs, homeland security, NASA all have to be cut to pay for just the infrastucture mess. Still more cuts are needed to pay for pay raises, major disasters and the national debt. Something like the federal pension for federal program would have to be seized and discontinued while the wars in Iraq and Afganistan would have to come out of the $450 billion military budget and not extra money. All of that slashing would make the federal government solvent and preventing an unmanageable $107+ trillion debt ($12 trillion in social security, $10 trillion present debt, $52 trillion medicare debt, $33 trillion in future debt if Congress doesn’t cut programs or increase taxes and the plus would be pension insurance debt and unforeseen debt) 40 years from now. The money that would have gone to the national debt would be used to offset bad economic times, major disaster and pay for future pay hikes. That kind of slash and burn would never happen. Those in Congress will be dead when that massive debt wave hits and they know it so they don’t care.

When Congress says there is a surplus in Social Security and Medicare, they are only technically correct. The federal government has taken and spent all that money so Congress has to pay that money back or just end the program and leave people without their money. The amount of debt that would be created by social security and medicare keeps changing because it’s based on the idea that payouts and inflation would stay the same. An increase in inflation would make things worse (creating higher payouts), while cuts would make things better.