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Mitt Romney announces Paul Ryan as running mate

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RDreamer said:
To be fair in one of his last posts he did say he didn't understand why capital gains aren't treated as normal income. His "what it should be" statement is just saying that's what our tax system says he "should" be paying. Basically he was making a statement that those people paying that weren't using anything shady or anything like that. Just the tax system, which he seems to agree is a little weird.
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I made my post and then read his last one ...
 
RDreamer said:
You'd be ok with a flat tax of 37-46%?
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No, but Greenlands fine folks don't seem to be suffocating under it.
My only point in asking the question was that many countries around the world survive with a flat tax. It's not totally preposterous. Also, Russia has been held up as an example of how it can work well. Not sure how true that is.
 
Bulbo Urethral Baggins said:
No, but Greenlands fine folks don't seem to be suffocating under it.
My only point in asking the question was that many countries around the world survive with a flat tax. It's not totally preposterous. Also, Russia has been held up as an example of how it can work well. Not sure how true that is.
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Considering the monstruous dimensions of Russia's informal economy, you should stop pursuing that point.

Re: Greenland

About half the government revenues come from grants from the Danish government, an important supplement to the gross domestic product (GDP). Gross domestic product per capita is equivalent to that of the average economies of Europe.
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catfish said:
Czech republic is pretty awesome for vacations!
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Flat tax is complete idiocy. Loads of dumbass ideologues profess to love it, and it was good for me (I'm Hungarian) because I earn relatively well (my income, which was already in the top quintile, grew by about 15-20% (and would have grown a lot more if I'd been earning more), while my brother's, who's in the middle one, actually *decreased*), but overall, it's done a lot of harm to low and average income people. Its main function is to allow already rich people and concentrations of power to capture even more wealth, nothing else. All its supposed advantages are 100% bullshit. But feel free to ruin your own country, it's your call.


But I suggest people don't stick to the marginalist nonsense/theory/apologetic of capitalism and read some alternatives. There's a particularly good book that's about a hundred and fifty years old (with a brilliant American "sequel" btw) and is turning out to be quite prophetic.
 
Bulbo Urethral Baggins said:
No, but Greenlands fine folks don't seem to be suffocating under it.
My only point in asking the question was that many countries around the world survive with a flat tax. It's not totally preposterous. Also, Russia has been held up as an example of how it can work well. Not sure how true that is.
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The entire population of Greenland is 56,749 people. It's a country that exists on a hunk of rock and ice. Their main source of income is from fishing. Don't tell me that the experience of a country that tiny can be applied to even a moderately sized European country, let alone a relative mammoth like the United States. The economics are going to be completely different.

Funky Papa said:
Considering the monstruous dimensions of Russia's informal economy, you should stop pursuing that point.

Re: Greenland

About half the government revenues come from grants from the Danish government, an important supplement to the gross domestic product (GDP). Gross domestic product per capita is equivalent to that of the average economies of Europe.
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Oh there we go. That's an even better reason.
 
I never understand what the point of making the poor pay more in taxes. They're either getting back more than what they paid into the system (which isn't necessarily a problem) or they're already spending everything they have. While ideally you want them to have some savings, it does more for the economy than giving more money to rich people so they can buy more stocks.
 
24900536.jpg
 
LM4sure said:
I would just like a tax system where everyone contributes, and not the one we have currently where 50% of people don’t pay any income taxes. How is it fair to increase taxes on the wealthy when most Americans aren’t paying anything? Can we at least keep their tax rate as is and make everyone else pay something? Anything? Half a fucking percent! That would go a long way. But the Democrats don’t want to upset the poor people because that’s their voting base. And we all know rich white people are Republicans so let’s just go after them!
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Has Mittens paid his taxes?
 
All of the media coverage that I have seen about Ryan has been dominated by arguments about medicare between the two sides.

Can someone explain to me how the Ryan/Romney roadmap/budget trims/eliminates medicare. The coverage on this has been so partisan that it has been next to impossible discern the actual facts on the topic.
 
Tom_Cody said:
All of the media coverage that I have seen about Ryan has been dominated by arguments about medicare between the two sides.

Can someone explain to me how the Ryan/Romney roadmap/budget trims/eliminates medicare. The coverage on this has been so partisan that it has been next to impossible discern the actual facts on the topic.
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Medicare's costs are rising so aggressively because health care cost is rising equally aggressively. Cutting costs while preserving service requires some sort of health care cost control. Ryan's plan just mandates a maximum cost without affecting health care costs -- obviously, over time, this means that Medicare will effectively provide less and less support.

CBPP said:
The CBO analysis states that the Ryan plan would raise the age at which people become eligible for Medicare from 65 to 67, even as it repeals the health reform law’s coverage provisions. This means 65- and 66-year-olds would have neither Medicare nor access to health insurance exchanges in which they could buy coverage at an affordable price and receive subsidies to help them secure coverage if their incomes are low. This change would put many more 65- and 66-year-olds who don’t have employer coverage into the individual insurance market, where the premiums charged to people in this age group tend to be extremely high — thereby leaving many of them uninsured. People of limited means would be affected most harshly because they would not be able to afford private coverage. In addition, many 65- and 66-year-olds with a pre-existing medical condition would not be able to purchase coverage at any price.
The Ryan plan would also replace Medicare’s guarantee of health coverage with premium-support payments to seniors (starting with new beneficiaries in 2023) that they would use to buy coverage from private insurance companies or traditional Medicare. The growth in these payments each year would be limited to the percentage increase in per capita GDP plus one-half percentage point. For more than 30 years, however, health care costs per beneficiary in the United States have risen an average of about two percentage points per year faster than GDP per capita. CBO thus projects that under the Ryan budget, federal Medicare expenditures on behalf of an average 67-year-old beneficiary would, by 2050, be 35 percent to 42 percent lower than under current law.
Under the Ryan budget, moreover, Medicare would no longer make payments to health care providers such as doctors and hospitals; it would instead provide premium-support vouchers to beneficiaries that they’d use to help buy coverage from private insurance companies or traditional Medicare. Therefore, the only way to keep Medicare cost growth within the GDP +0.5 percentage-point target would be to limit the annual increase in the government’s premium-support vouchers. That would very likely cause the vouchers to grow more slowly than health care costs — and hence purchase less coverage with each passing year. Over time, more costs would likely be pushed on to beneficiaries.
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http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3708
 
BertramCooper said:
What is a "patient-centered" healthcare system, anyway?

Is that an actual concept, or just political bullshit terminology?
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I too would like to know how in the world he plans on making a privatized "patient-centered" healthcare system. Private systems are profit centered by nature. A government run system has a far bigger chance of being patient-centered than any private system, in my opinion.

But really I wish these types would actually come out and say what mythical system they actually believe can work. What system will have affordable access to healthcare for all Americans, including people with pre-existing conditions? Because I thought the mandates were their solution to this conundrum.


Dax01 said:
I like how he talks about rationing care when we already ration care in this country, but by income.
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It's not even just by income. It's by whatever your insurance provider thinks they can get away with, income or not.
 
Might be a mistake in more way than one to bring this back up, but I believe people should admit when they're wrong, make a mistake, or just say something stupid, rather than brush it away, ignore it or, even worse, continue to argue the wrong point just out of the natural act of being defensive.

So, credit for not only being first, but for also being the best response goes to...

Mandoric said:
She was dead wrong, at least as far as American federal income tax goes. It's legally defined as:
10% on your first $8700
15% on the next $26650
25% on the next $50000
(and so on, up to 35%)

If you would normally earn $35250, but coming in that Saturday earns you an extra $200, your taxes are:
$870 ($0-$8700 @10%)
$3982.50 ($8701-$35250 @15%)

plus a new:

$15 ($35251-$35350 @15%)
$25 ($35351-$35450 @25%)

not:
$8862.50 ($35450 @25%)
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Yup, you're right; I'm a dope. It's even more embarrassing because I totally fucking knew this; I examined the possibility of promotional opportunities that would move me to the Bay Area many years ago (not long after the iniital anecdote, actually), and realized then that it wasn't the federal tax system that made such a move unattractive to me, but the other costs that would come from it.

I don't know why I thought this, and I don't know why I was comfortable in writing it without checking. I even stated I wasn't entirely sure as I said it, and had deleted something similar earlier for lack of knowing. I guess I was too eager to try and respond to everybody to slow down, something I do too much, and I only check these things when they directly affect me. But it was dumb and I'm sorry I said it. For lots of reasons.

To further demonstrate my complete lack of knowledge of the overall tax system; I see someone earlier in the thread made the comment about only such-and-such percent of working people pay income tax, or something of that sort. Is this just a semantics issue? I've always found that notion incredibly offensive, as when I was making as little as I ever did, I know that there were still amounts deducted from my check. Again, maybe it's just semantics.
 
ezrarh said:
I never understand what the point of making the poor pay more in taxes. They're either getting back more than what they paid into the system (which isn't necessarily a problem) or they're already spending everything they have. While ideally you want them to have some savings, it does more for the economy than giving more money to rich people so they can buy more stocks.
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Hey man ... that's jerb creation money.
 
Duffyside said:
To further demonstrate my complete lack of knowledge of the overall tax system; I see someone earlier in the thread made the comment about only such-and-such percent of working people pay income tax, or something of that sort. Is this just a semantics issue? I've always found that notion incredibly offensive, as when I was making as little as I ever did, I know that there were still amounts deducted from my check. Again, maybe it's just semantics.
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cbpp said:
These figures cover only the federal income tax and ignore the substantial amounts of other federal taxes — especially the payroll tax — that many of these households pay. As a result, these figures greatly overstate the share of households that do not pay federal taxes. Tax Policy Center data show that only about 17 percent of households did not pay any federal income tax or payroll tax in 2009, despite the high unemployment and temporary tax cuts that marked that year.[5] In 2007, a more typical year, the figure was 14 percent. This percentage would be even lower if it reflected other federal taxes that households pay, including excise taxes on gasoline and other items.
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http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3505

In other words, they're deliberately not counting the Medicare and Social Security taxes, just the income tax, which is why it is, as you say, an offensive statistic. For the record, 76.9% of households pay more payroll tax than income tax.
 
Dude Abides said:
I think you need to be more proactive in seeking new paradigms that will create synergies.
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Furthermore, it sounds like any policy measures that would need to be implemented in order to achieve "patient-centered healthcare" would be viewed with hostility by Republicans, since it would almost certainly meddle with the sacred doctor-patient relationship.
 
A more interesting term I've heard about is "bundled payment" where instead of itemizing everything and having to deal with the overhead in itemizing everything, doctors get paid a more general rate for providing primary care.
 
BertramCooper said:
What is a "patient-centered" healthcare system, anyway?

Is that an actual concept, or just political bullshit terminology?
Click to expand...

For once the Republican party is taking a leaf out of the British Conservative party playbook - this is very common over here and basically amounts to privatisation and choice. Making healthcare (even more of) a product.
 
Duffyside said:
Might be a mistake in more way than one to bring this back up, but I believe people should admit when they're wrong, make a mistake, or just say something stupid, rather than brush it away, ignore it or, even worse, continue to argue the wrong point just out of the natural act of being defensive.

So, credit for not only being first, but for also being the best response goes to...



Yup, you're right; I'm a dope. It's even more embarrassing because I totally fucking knew this; I examined the possibility of promotional opportunities that would move me to the Bay Area many years ago (not long after the iniital anecdote, actually), and realized then that it wasn't the federal tax system that made such a move unattractive to me, but the other costs that would come from it.

I don't know why I thought this, and I don't know why I was comfortable in writing it without checking. I even stated I wasn't entirely sure as I said it, and had deleted something similar earlier for lack of knowing. I guess I was too eager to try and respond to everybody to slow down, something I do too much, and I only check these things when they directly affect me. But it was dumb and I'm sorry I said it. For lots of reasons.

To further demonstrate my complete lack of knowledge of the overall tax system; I see someone earlier in the thread made the comment about only such-and-such percent of working people pay income tax, or something of that sort. Is this just a semantics issue? I've always found that notion incredibly offensive, as when I was making as little as I ever did, I know that there were still amounts deducted from my check. Again, maybe it's just semantics.
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Props for owning up. To expand on your last question if you weren't making very much you were liking not paying any federal income taxes either. Everyone is going to be paying payroll taxes and something will be pulled out of your paychecks. A lot people end up getting refunds that might cover all or more of their federal income taxes but not necessarily their Medicare/Ss payments. The 50 percent is only in relation to federal income taxes.
 
Chumly said:
Props for owning up. To expand on your last question if you weren't making very much you were liking not paying any federal income taxes either. Everyone is going to be paying payroll taxes and something will be pulled out of your paychecks. A lot people end up getting refunds that might cover all or more of their federal income taxes but not necessarily their Medicare/Ss payments. The 50 percent is only in relation to federal income taxes.
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And this also means that expiring the Bush Tax cuts on those making more than $250,000 still means that all the other tax cuts apply to income beneath that level. A lot of people miss this fact. Everybody still gets a tax cut.
 
JCreasy said:
Paul Ryan's budget is cruel
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Not only is it cruel, it's functionally insane. Shifting the burden of national financial responsibility from the top earners to the bottom destroys local economies and all hurts tax revenues as these low end earners will lose work or lose spending cash to be taxed in the future.

A cut to medicaid would cause the poor to have less money to go get aid, this would cause them to either get sick until the die or go to the ER, either way you either lose a worker or the hospital is still footing the bill. Nobody wins. It's just bad math. You spend a chunk to keep a thumb on the scales of national heath care costs or you don't spend that chunk to spend much more when people are having to rush to the ER when they're too sick to move.
 
I can't think of a single country that has really tried the Republican approach and worked. Ryan is basically denigrating the health insurance system of every single developed country, including Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands, and not just the familiar boogeymen of Canada and France.
 
I've had it with republican congress people bemoaning "government healthcare" saying it's "evil/communist/doesn't work" while I'M paying for their healthcare.

I say, fine you wanna do that give up your state run healthcare for you and your family. Then and ONLY then can you bitch about government healthcare being wrong and evil and the devil's mark. But not while you're getting it on my dime.
 
The saddest part of the whole "50% aren't paying taxes" comments isn't that it's completely untrue, but the fact that when people are told half the country is quite poor their first reaction is "Look at all these moochers, they're dragging down the rich!" instead of "Holy shit, we have an incredible income inequality problem".
 
ronito said:
I've had it with republican congress people bemoaning "government healthcare" saying it's "evil/communist/doesn't work" while I'M paying for their healthcare.

I say, fine you wanna do that give up your state run healthcare for you and your family. Then and ONLY then can you bitch about government healthcare being wrong and evil and the devil's mark. But not while you're getting it on my dime.
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Fuck you, got mine.
 
Mgoblue201 said:
I can't think of a single country that has really tried the Republican approach and worked. Ryan is basically denigrating the health insurance system of every single developed country, including Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands, and not just the familiar boogeymen of Canada and France.
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The "Republican approach" was supposed to be basically what Romney set up in Massachusetts and Obama set up afterwards. Other countries (Israel) have tried that, and it seems to work alright. The problem now is that they're left with no approach at all. Their "approach" seems to be to just go back to the way it was and somehow, magically, people with pre-existing conditions will be covered and health care costs will go down.
 
The term "government health care" isn't even necessarily true. Each country is different, and many of them have an eclectic mix of public and private solutions both for health insurance and the actual health system. Then again, most of these systems go at least as far as the ACA in establishing some sort of regulatory framework for achieving universal, affordable care, which of course is anathema to Republican ideology.
RDreamer said:
The "Republican approach" was supposed to be basically what Romney set up in Massachusetts and Obama set up afterwards. Other countries (Israel) have tried that, and it seems to work alright. The problem now is that they're left with no approach at all. Their "approach" seems to be to just go back to the way it was and somehow, magically, people with pre-existing conditions will be covered and health care costs will go down.
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By adopting most of their ideas, the Democrats have basically forced the Republican party into a position of incoherence on the issue of health care. They'll usually go on about tort reform, vouchers, state lines, and unleashing the power of the free market (which really is supposed to work just like magic), but these are at best minimal or unworkable policies that the data says will do very little to actually solve the real problem.
 
ronito said:
I've had it with republican congress people bemoaning "government healthcare" saying it's "evil/communist/doesn't work" while I'M paying for their healthcare.

I say, fine you wanna do that give up your state run healthcare for you and your family. Then and ONLY then can you bitch about government healthcare being wrong and evil and the devil's mark. But not while you're getting it on my dime.
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Then they should also have to live on 10000 dollars a year and try to get proper healthcare.
 
Duffyside said:
Might be a mistake in more way than one to bring this back up, but I believe people should admit when they're wrong, make a mistake, or just say something stupid, rather than brush it away, ignore it or, even worse, continue to argue the wrong point just out of the natural act of being defensive.

So, credit for not only being first, but for also being the best response goes to...



Yup, you're right; I'm a dope. It's even more embarrassing because I totally fucking knew this; I examined the possibility of promotional opportunities that would move me to the Bay Area many years ago (not long after the iniital anecdote, actually), and realized then that it wasn't the federal tax system that made such a move unattractive to me, but the other costs that would come from it.

I don't know why I thought this, and I don't know why I was comfortable in writing it without checking. I even stated I wasn't entirely sure as I said it, and had deleted something similar earlier for lack of knowing. I guess I was too eager to try and respond to everybody to slow down, something I do too much, and I only check these things when they directly affect me. But it was dumb and I'm sorry I said it. For lots of reasons.

To further demonstrate my complete lack of knowledge of the overall tax system; I see someone earlier in the thread made the comment about only such-and-such percent of working people pay income tax, or something of that sort. Is this just a semantics issue? I've always found that notion incredibly offensive, as when I was making as little as I ever did, I know that there were still amounts deducted from my check. Again, maybe it's just semantics.
Click to expand...

They pay income taxes, but they'll get the money back a year later in the form of a tax rebate/credit. And 5.65% of their paycheck goes to funding medicare, medicaid, and Social Security (usually 7.65%). This money is NOT eligible for the standard deduction, and you can NOT deduct contributions to your 401k from your payroll tax liability... nor can you deduct them from your income taxes.

Everyone who receives a salary or hourly wages will have at least 5.65% of their salary or wages withheld for payroll taxes. They will always have another 10% of their paycheck withheld for federal income tax purposes, no matter how little or how much they make (I could be wrong here, but I doubt there are enough pre-tax deductions accessible at the 15% and up brackets to reduce taxable earnings enough to pay less than 10%).

They may get that income tax money back after the standard deduction is accounted for in their tax returns, but it'll be roughly a year after they earned it, so they'll have indirectly paid taxes through the time value of money even if th ey get a 100% refund.

Basically no one has less than 15% of their paycheck withheld for federal taxes and that includes 5.65% of their paycheck (normally 7.65%) that they will for certain not receive a refund for.

They also pay local income taxes, sales, and property taxes. The average sales tax rate nationwide was 9.6% earlier this year (http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampbarrett/2012/02/02/average-u-s-sales-tax-rate-drops-a-little/). Most states have income taxes (ranging from a rate of 1% to 16%), but some do not (Less than 10. Most notably Washington, Florida, and Texas). Most range in the 3-6% range IIRC.
The average property tax rate in 2007 was 1.38% (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/11leonhardt-avgproptaxrates.html). And that's on the value of the property, not on the income of the owner. Land, fixtures, buildings, from farms to homes to business premises, all are taxed, every year, based on their value. And it's up to the owner to pay this, regardless of their own income level.

The narrative that 50% of the population are leeches who don't contribute a dime to the country's operations is BS. They pay far more than their share of the pie. Less than 1% of the wealth and yet over 5% of their wealth ends up going into payroll taxes alone. A proper tax system would have people with little wealth contribute less than their share in taxes. People at the low end of the spectrum, withi less than 1% of the wealth should be paying even less than that share of their own personal wealth in taxes (as an aggregate group). If they own 0.9% of the wealth, they should probably have less than 0.9% of their aggregate wealth go towards taxes. They own none of the wealth, so ideally, they should pay none of the taxes.

The people at the top should have a higher tax rate than their wealth share. Far higher.
 
Ryan Sponsored Abortion Bill That Would Make Romney's Kids Criminals

Now that Mitt Romney has chosen Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate, Ryan's long history as a culture warrior is getting a fresh look. Women's groups have already honed in on his extreme anti-abortion record, which consistently has earned him a 100 percent voting approval rating from the National Right to Life Committee.

What isn't so well known about Ryan's record, though, is that one piece of legislation he supported is so extreme that it would have turned Romney's children into criminals.

The Sanctity of Human Life Act, which Ryan co-sponsored, would have enshrined the notion that life begins at fertilization in federal law, thus criminalizing in vitro fertilization—the process of creating an embryo outside of a woman's womb. In IVF, doctors typically create multiple embryos and then only implant the healthiest ones in the woman. Some of them stick and become babies, and some don't. The embryos that don't make it to the womb are either frozen for later use or destroyed. The Sanctity of Human Life Act, if passed, would make all those embryos "people" in the legal sense, so if they aren't used or don't become babies after being implanted, they would essentially become murder victims under the law.

In the more than 30 years since the world's first "test-tube baby," IVF has become a fairly common procedure and a lifeline to many infertile couples, Democrat and Republican, despite some of the thorny moral issues involved in the process. Some 60,000 babies every year are born thanks to IVF. Infertility is thought to affect some 10 to 15 percent of all couples in the US—especially those upper-class professionals who delay childbearing until their late 30s and early 40s. Infertility, in fact, is such a bipartisan problem that no fewer than three of Mitt Romney's own children have relied on the procedure to produce some of his 18 grandchildren.

In May, Romney's son Tagg became father of twin boys thanks to help from IVF and a surrogate mother. Tagg's son Jonathan was also produced this way. Two of Tagg's brothers reportedly have struggled with infertility issues and resorted to IVF as well. It's hard to imagine that Romney will score any points with voters by tapping a running mate whose anti-abortion views are so extreme that Romney's own kids can't live with them.
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What a delicious pick.
 
So if Romney had his way Ryan would not be eligible for the presidency.
And if Ryan had his way, Romney's kids would be criminals.

These guys deserve each other.
 
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