President (To Win Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
See Full Big Line
(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
See Full Big Line
(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
See Full Big Line
(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
See Full Big Line
(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
See Full Big Line
(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
See Full Big Line
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
See Full Big Line
DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
April 03, 2009 03:29 PM UTC
56 Comments
1. Cut taxes (of course) for the rich and businesses.
2. Cut spending for Medicaid and other social programs.
3. Move people 55 and younger to privately insured old age insurance, eviscerate Medicare.
How do they do this with a straight face? With a Boehner? (Drum crash!)
Is there ever any circumstances where you would propose a tax increase on the wealthy?
The ones that often inherited their wealth? The ones who made their wealth, perhaps, pushing paper around instead of creating new job creating corporations or new technologies?
Those wealthy Americans?
First, define in individual and family annual income how you define “wealthy”.
I don’t know where that falls in dollars. I gave a range for that reason. If for defining policy, something that needs to be, uh, defined. Of course, with the old style graduated tax schedule sharp cutoffs were not needed. This is the downside to the Reagan promoted two tier schedule.
The oft tossed about $250K has some good reasoning behind it, even if not intended. That would cover two professional wage earners in very good positions late in their earning years, probably.
Is it fair that the top 5% (using 2006 numbers, which makes the top 5% earners with an agi of $153,542 and up) pay 60% of the total income taxes collected?
How much more would you like to tax them?
What is the breaking point where they work less or less productively to avoid being put above the tax line that bumps them into that category?
Yes. Absolutely. Without a doubt.
Wealth is privately held, but not privately produced. It is produced as a function of a social system to which all contribute. People are born into different conditions that dramatically affect their opportunity structures. That does not mean that no one who is born into a poor opportunity structure ever prospers, but rather that they need a more improbable combination of luck and talent than others born into better opportunity structures. That is an inherently unjust distribution of opportunity at birth. The distribution of wealth in the United States very closely mirrors the distribution of opportunity at birth for American citizens. Social mobility is slight.
Certainly people should be able to prosper for their effort, and perhaps even for their inherent abilities (though there is certainly nothing fair about the distribuion of the latter). But why should they have any entitlement to the fortunes (or misfortunes) of birth?
The difference here is viewing the world through the myth of individualism or through the veracity of social systemic interdependence. When you recognize the latter reality, you shed the former baggage of convenient delusions.
…is not a “convenient delusion”.
You earned by virtue of a social system and infrastructure to which most have contributed, and many have contributed more sweat and blood to that infrastructure with less reward than many others. Wealth is the product of a social function diverted into individual hands. This is not good because it is a moral imperative, but rather because it is a functional arrangement. Property is socially defined, not inherent to nature. Property is not the stuff, or the relationship between the person and the stuff, but rather the relationship between people: It defines who does and does not have what kind of access to what kinds of goods and services (and information and profits). It does not have to be, and rarely has been, defined as absolute and exclusive rights, nor is there any moral argument why it should be. Private property is defensible to the extent that it is useful, and it is useful to the extent that it maximizes human welfare, and it maximizes human welfare to the extent that it balances the maximization of the production of human welfare with the justness of its distribution.
Money is yours only because it is socially defined as being yours, and it should be socially defined as being yours only to the extent that that social definition is a useful one for the creation and distribution of “utility.”
People frequently reify the social arrangements into which they have been born, and which appear to them to be an aspect of the natural environment. In reality, those social arrangements are just that: Social arrangements. They can and should evolve, and they can and should answer to the discipline of utility, rather than the sloth of blind cultural habit and assumption.
LB, I’m glad you “earned” all your money all by your independent self.
I’m certain you did not attend any publicly supported schools.
I’m sure you have never made use of any publicly funded roads.
I’m certain that your money making escapades would have been just as successful even if you did not have the security provided by publicly funded police and military forces.
LB: “the true American Idol.”
I never said no taxes.
Cute strawman, though.
If the budget stuck to things like roads, schools, and essential services, then I’d be happy as a clam.
Bet you wouldn’t, though.
I don’t see where I said anything about taxes.
Nice red herring, though.
You’d lose the bet.
Of course I’d be just tickled if these items were the only things in the budget. But … I bet we’d disagree on what was “essential.”
None the less, if you use any of the publicly provided services I noted in my post above, then “your money” was gained with the help of the rest of us (especially help from earlier generations).
Without our collective contributions to NIH funded medical research, you’d probably have lost out on several opportunities to make money.
Socialist. 😉
…of who you think I am.
Hopefully we can chat at one of the meetups, then you can go back and re-formulate your vision of the ignorant, repressive Republican.
“misguided and momentarily out-of-sorts” instead?
By the way, LB, care to work on my campaign in HD 28? My ultra-conservative constituents won’t let me do any real harm, anyway.
I’d gamble that neither of us fits stereotypes well.
It’s when your comments fit the stereotypical ideologue that I am taken aback. It’s probably during these moments that my comments suggest I am a stereotypical bleeding heart ignoramus.
I doubt we’ll chat at a meetup anytime soon. I try to limit my trips to both Denver and Boulder to when I absolutely have to be in one or the other.
If that man who was the recent president didn’t have the Bush surname, he would be another divorced alcoholic land man crying in his beer in Odessa, TX.
we do not live in a meritocracy. The chances of birth remain extremely salient, a fact which runs counter to our professed commitment to equal opportunity for all. To simply accept current distributions of wealth as sanctified by the gods of property rights is to disregard history, economic theory, legal theory, reason, and any commitment to creating and maintaining an ever more just and functional society.
…than in America.
Probably some of that is the underpinning of health care and good, national standards education.
Comparative studies demonstrate that there is greater social mobility when there is less polarization of wealth distribution.
The members of the upper 5% of wealth holders in the United States do not engage in their productive activities motivated by earning more wealth that they and their descendents for generations to come are and will continue to be unable to spend. Many, in fact, eschew salaries, or engage in philanthropic work, or simply continue to accumulate because, well, why not? But it is no longer the primary motivating factor, and it no longer has any real connection to the material circumstances of their life. Certainly, as a rule of thumb, it is fairly safe to tax people to within a three-fold measure of earnings they are capable of disposing of without too much fair of it crippling the productive capacity of the economy.
In economics, this concept is captured in the concept of “elasticity.” The effect on the productive impetus of the most wealthy by any marginal reduction in their income that does not come close to affecting their real or foreseeable material circumstances is highly inelastic. Some things, in fact, do not respond to market signals, because market signals are overridden by other forces. Extreme wealth is one such force.
OK, if the upper 5% gets too close to some sort of middle class earners (certainly not even close to the upper quintile), let’s use 4%. Or3% Or……
I do know that it is the upper 2% that represent virtually all increase in income during the Bush administration. Those damned lying statistics, you know about average wages going up. Well, not for the average worker. It went north to the folks who already can’t figure out how to spend it all.
Military spending and education spending with the caveat that they get vouchers.
True, needed infrastructure investment.
Are oil workers taking more than their pickup trucks back to Texas? According to the Rifle Telegram, Garfield County has the highest rate of cattle rustling in the state. http://www.citizentelegram.com…
Since July 1, nearly 450 head have disappeared from GarCo. In the Divide Creek area south of Silt, one of the heaviest concentrations of drilling in the county, 145 cattle were reported missing. At $500 to $800 value per animal, ranchers are being hard hit (again).
Sure, nature has something to do with some of the losses and maybe a few desperate families have taken advantage of a handy cow or two. But is it just coincidence that as the oil workers leave Garfield, so do the livestock?
Is it mostly female cows “disappearing?”
.
female bulls ?
male cows ?
.
I’m not a rancher. (I was not aware it was bulls & cows – thanks.)
.
eunuch cattle.
fewer behavior problems.
.
Young ladies.
And if heifers are young ladies, what are the young men?
.
The terms I’m familiar with may be just colloquial usage, but a head of cattle born male is usually called a “calf,” and then is castrated before it qualifies to be called a “bull.”
If it is in that lucky tiny percentage that gets to keep its gonads, after a year I’ve called them “young bulls,” but with the measures taken today to scientifically control breeding, maybe “lucky” isn’t appropriate, either.
.
plus:
Cattle is neutral and plural, so you can’t say, “There’s a cattle in the road!” Cow, if you really don’t know, is technically acceptable in that situation.
Mommies (usually of at least two calves) are cows.
My great grandfather owned a dairy farm, so I’ve been rudely corrected since my see-n-say misled me.
and even I knew all of this cattle-lingo! Of course, I was a big “Bonanza” fan growing up….
She’s the new executive director of the Susan B. Anthony List. The group will try to defeat members of Congress who support abortion rights.
It’s a non-issue to two thirds of American voters. My guess is that at best they might swing a seat or two. No, leave it at one.
Iowa’s Supreme Court unanimously upheld the right of gays and lesbians to marry, making them the third (current) state to fully embrace equal marriage.
So goes Iowa, so goes the country?
First Barack Obama won the caucuses and now this. Thanks Hawkeyes!
I am very proud of my home state today. A extremely well-written and well thought out unanimous decision by the ISC.
With the Democrats in control of the Leg., it will be at least 2013 before the bigots could possibly get a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Go Hawks!
http://www.burlingtonfreepress…
The House is 5 votes shy of a veto-proof margin. 11 Democrats voted “no”, and it’ll be seen whether or not 5 of them switch their votes to “yes” (provided all the current “yes” votes stay put).
The Hawaii House passed civil unions (go mom) but the Senate, which is almost entirely Democratic (2 Republicans) voted to not vote on it.
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Friday, April 3, 2009 — 8:51 AM ET
—–
Jobless Rate Hits 8.5%; 663,000 Jobs Lost
The unemployment rate reached its highest level in a quarter-century after 663,000 jobs were lost in March, the 15th consecutive month of job losses.
Figure real world un/under/employment at 17%.
Now, a quarter century ago…..hmmmmm, oh, I see, another Republican disaster. Another Democratic administration mopping up another Republican’s spilled poo-poo.
Obviously, although Obama is in power, we are experiencing the Bush economy still. Since Clinton created about 250,000 jobs a month, so we are talking about a 900,000 net difference. Negative, of course.
Nice piece from Politico on Obama’s pollsters Paul Harstad and Joel Beneson, apparently one of them is from Boulder:
“Harstad, based in Boulder, Colorado, specializes in Midwestern races, and has worked for Obama since his 2004 Senate bid. He polled the crucial Iowa caucuses.”
Pretty cool to think that all of Obama’s policies and strategies are shaped by numbers collected from our own backyard. Or at least put together here.
$250 special one-time dividend, payable to beneficiaries of record as of November 2008. Payment date is no later than 5/31/09.
The VA is burning through $700 million taxpayer dollars with this. Social security is doing a similar thing.
those lazy good for nothing vets, always asking for a hand out. What’d they do to deserve a little extra dough, right? Surely we taxpayers don’t owe them anything.
[/snark]
Seriously, where did you hear this?
Some right wing “Making shit up for America” show?
Anyone know if Ward Churchill has finished spending his damages award yet?
arguing that forcing a member card is a violation of free speech.
So anyway, he got both those candy bars.
There was never any doubt in my mind that once PBS was moved by the Republicans to corporate sponsorship instead of full public funding, their content would inevitably grow to reflect the viewpoints of the people who wrote the checks.
It seems that insurance company investments are paying off in the healthcare debate. While this Frontline piece does address corporate abuses of their clients, the journalist who worked on it says it was altered to reflect insurance company interests, according to Russell Mokhiber, editor of Corporate Crime Reporter:
Last year, former Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid made a great documentary for the PBS show Frontline titled “Sick Around the World.”
Reid traveled to five countries that deliver health care for all – UK, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Taiwan – to learn about how they do it.
Reid found that the one thing these five countries had in common – none allowed for-profit health insurance companies to sell basic medical coverage.
Frontline then said to Reid – okay, we want you to go around the United States and make a companion documentary titled “Sick Around America.”
So, Reid traveled around America, interviewing patients, doctors, and health insurance executives.
The documentary that resulted – “Sick Around America” – aired Monday night on PBS.
But even though Reid did the reporting for the film, he was cut out of the film when it aired this week.
And the film didn’t present Reid’s bottom line for health care reform – don’t let health insurance companies profit from selling basic health insurance.
They can sell for-profit insurance for extras – breast enlargements, botox, hair transplants.
But not for the basic health needs of the American people.
Instead, the film that aired Monday pushed the view that Americans be required to purchase health insurance from for-profit companies.
And the film had a deceptive segment that totally got wrong the lesson of Reid’s previous documentary – Sick Around the World.
During that segment, about halfway through Sick Around America, the moderator introduces Karen Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the lead health insurance lobby in the United States.
Moderator: Other developed countries guarantee coverage for everyone. We asked Karen Ignagni why it can’t work here.
Karen Ignagni: Well, it would work if we did what other countries do, which is have a mandate that everybody participate. And if everybody is in, it’s quite reasonable to ask our industry to do guarantee issue, to get everybody in. So, the answer to your question is we can, and the public here will have to agree to do what the public in other countries have done, which is a consensus that everybody should be in.
Moderator: That’s what other developed countries do. They make insurers cover everyone, and they make all citizens buy insurance. And the poor are subsidized.
But the hard reality, as presented by Reid in Sick Around the World, is quite different than Ignagni and the moderator claim.
Other countries do not require citizens buy health insurance from for-profit health insurance companies – the kind that Karen Ignagni represents.
In some countries like Germany and Japan, citizens are required to buy health insurance, but from non-profit, heavily regulated insurance companies.
And other countries, like the UK and Canada, don’t require citizens to buy insurance. Instead, citizens are covered as a birthright – by a single government payer in Canada, or by a national health system in the UK.
The producers of the Frontline piece had a point of view – they wanted to keep the for-profit health insurance companies in the game.
TR Reid wants them out.
“We spent months shooting that film,” Reid explains. “I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn’t want to change it.”
h/t C&L
First, taxpayer funded 80% coverage. Still not exactly “free” as everyone says, but, well, about 80% there. (Also annual deductibles and monthly fees deducted from Social Security benefits.) FAR from “free.”
Second, “Medigap” insurance for those who want it. Currently about $1500/yr/person. BUT the Medigap insurance policies are strictly defined so that a buyer has true apples to apples. Further, strictly regulated as to purchasing (no underwriting, no cherry picking) and it cannot be canceled for any reason other than non-payment.
was to offer ANOTHER rebuttal to the “left-wing media” meme. It’s clear that even PBS has been influenced by corporate America, and that most important of commodities…..information, is being withheld, thus keeping the public ignorant. The societal costs of this ignorance is enormous.
…the plastic cups in the bathroom are in a sanitary sealed baggie.
In Chicago for a convention and this is a hotel where you expect to see a chalk outline on the floor from the person who was previously shot in the room.
If you stand in right spot in the Brown Palace near the 17th Street door, and with the light shining just right, you can see an extremely slight indentation in the concrete based floor.
It’s from someone who jumped from the 8th floor. I don’t remember when.
Then there’s the guy who passed out in his bathtub with the hot water running…parboiled himself. Actually cooked him.
I actually left off a few of the real gory details in order to keep Pol’s dialogue elevated……