Why I?????m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

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_Analytics
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Analytics »

dartagnan wrote:Did you watch Michael Moore's film "The Corporation"?

I just got back from out of town and will post more tomorrow.

Haven't seen it. My thinking on this is influenced by this article I read a few years ago.

I look forward to your comments on this.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_dartagnan
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _dartagnan »

What has really killed jobs over the past two decades is technology. Everything is automated now. Hell, it freaked me out when I came back from Brasil and I was told by the woman at Kroger to "check myself out" at the counter. Computers are doing most of the work nowadays.

Haven't seen it. My thinking on this is influenced by this article I read a few years ago.


I saw it in Brasil, and it had Noam Chomsky discussing the personhood of corporations and how that came about.
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
_Who Knows
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Who Knows »

Analytics wrote:I don't think so; somebody in the 25% bracket is going to pay a lot less than 25% in income taxes.


I understand that, but that's not what a 'marginal tax rate' is (the rate you're taxed on the last dollar you made). I was just wondering if buffet was referring to marginal tax rates.

The main point of disagreement is whether the 35% income tax that corporations pay should be considered tax paid by the owners.


Yeah, my bad for not reading the whole thread where you guys went through this stuff already.

Have you guys discussed capital gains yet though? :)
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
_Analytics
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Analytics »

Who Knows wrote:
Analytics wrote:I don't think so; somebody in the 25% bracket is going to pay a lot less than 25% in income taxes.


I understand that, but that's not what a 'marginal tax rate' is (the rate you're taxed on the last dollar you made). I was just wondering if buffet was referring to marginal tax rates.

I thought "marginal tax rate" and "tax bracket" were the same thing. The "25% tax bracket" isn't the tax bracket where the marginal tax rate is 25% What is it then? (I honestly don't know. Turbo tax does my taxes).
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

-Yuval Noah Harari
_Jason Bourne
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Jason Bourne »

What I was more concerned about were the long term effects on stock growth, not short term since I still have lots of time.

The other answer is also quite useful. I doubt I'll even withdraw enough to put me in a high bracket. So if I understand correctly, Obama's plan wouldn't increase the taxes I'll pay on my nest egg as I withdraw since I won't be withdrawing enough?


If you want to read a rather gloomy prediction of what you stocks are going to do regardless of who is president I recommend the book Crash Proof by Peter Schiff.
_Jason Bourne
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Jason Bourne »

.[/quote]
I thought "marginal tax rate" and "tax bracket" were the same thing. The "25% tax bracket" isn't the tax bracket where the marginal tax rate is 25% What is it then? (I honestly don't know. Turbo tax does my taxes).[/quote]

I think marginal rate is the bracket you are in, what rate your next dollar will be taxed at. Average rate is actual tax divided by adjusted gross income.
_Who Knows
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Who Knows »

Analytics wrote:I thought "marginal tax rate" and "tax bracket" were the same thing. The "25% tax bracket" isn't the tax bracket where the marginal tax rate is 25% What is it then? (I honestly don't know. Turbo tax does my taxes).


It is.

Earlier though, you were referring to someone in the 25% tax bracket not actually paying 25% - which is correct. But, like i said their marginal tax rate would still be 25%.
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
_Who Knows
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Who Knows »

Who Knows wrote:Have you guys discussed capital gains yet though? :)


No biters? I'll go then...

in my opinion, you can't have a discussion about dividends, taxes, etc. without including the effects of capital gains. (which leads, in my mind, to being able to ignore the fact that dividends are 'double taxed'.) The 2 are inextricably tied together.

Are capital gains taxed twice too?

Let's take microsoft of the 90's as an example. They're hoarding boatloads of cash, yet pay no dividend. Why? because billy owns a ton of stock, and he'd rather pay his taxes on capital gains, instead of dividends. This was back when cap. gains rates were 15%, and dividends were taxed at ordinary income rates ~35%. Makes sense.

But note that dividends and PE ratios are inversely related. In other words, small dividend = higher stock price. No dividend = high stock price. High dividend = low stock price.

Billy would rather sell his stock and pay higher taxes on the capital gain, than hold his lower priced stock, and pay taxes on the dividend at a higher rate.

Today, the dividend rate and cap. gains rates are equal. So in Billy's mind, it's a wash for him (whether he 'pays' himself by selling stock or whether he declares a dividend.

Hopefully that made sense. My point being that you can't look at corporate tax rates when figuring your 'share' of taxes. Unless you're willing to say the same thing about capital gains. And I don't think anyone wants to go there. You have to look at dividends as isolated pieces of income. Just like capital gains.

:)
WK: "Joseph Smith asserted that the Book of Mormon peoples were the original inhabitants of the americas"
Will Schryver: "No, he didn’t." 3/19/08
Still waiting for Will to back this up...
_dartagnan
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _dartagnan »

Obama is the most intelligent candidate. Given their respective academic track records, this cannot be denied.

Here we go with the elitism again. It is patently absurd to insist academic record establishes intelligence. By your logic, George Bush is more intelligent than all of us. McCain's experience has to count for something. He has ten times the experience as Obama and his age has to also count for something in the wisdom department. Also, Obama refuses to release his transcripts, so you really don't know what he did in college. The fact that he didn't produce a single piecfe of scholarship for all of us to judge for ourselves, should be alarming. In 1981, Occidental's literary magazine published two of Obama's poems. Keep in mind that what follows, came from the mind of our next President:

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance ...

WTF??????

It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this a heavily edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico.

Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it charitably as "a fairly standard example of the genre." Of note, Politico observes that "the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later."
But then somehow, those few years later, this 33 year-old amateur with no paper trail beyond a hack legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes produced what Time magazine has called – with a straight face – "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

The public is asked to believe that Obama did this on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I don't buy this canard for a minute.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php? ... geId=76731

Obama is the better leader. If you compare how McCain and Obama ran their respective presidential campaigns, it is clear who had the steady hand.

Nonsense. By this logic George Bush is the better leader since he won both of his campaigns. The fact is, no candidate "runs" their own campaign and funding has much to do with a campaign's success. Obama has raised hundreds of millions, and outrageous amount.

Candidates hire campaign managers to formulate strategies and write up talking points based on polls and the rhetoric developed from the opposing side. Obama has a good one, McCain doesn't. Karl Rove is responsible for the Bush wins. McCain was counted out during the primaries and ran out of money. What did he do? He hit the town halls day after day and ended up surprising everyone by winning the Republican nomination. This is something he did virtually on his own, using his own tried method. This is why Obama rejected McCain's invitation to do town hall debates throughout their campaigns. He knew he'd never stand a chance.

Obama can just sit back in the limelight of the biased media coverage. He doesn't really have to do much of anything. There is certainly no evidence of "leadership" here. I said this last year, whoever is the democrat nominee will win because Bush was a republican. All Obama has to do at this point is to continue to be democrat and keep lying about the McCain Bush equation.
Obama has better judgment. Obama is the only presidential candidate who picked a qualified vice-presidential nominee. He’s the one who understands that we can’t afford the war in Iraq.

Laughable. Biden is the moron who said "jobs" is a three lettered word. He said Obama wasn't ready and he said he'd run on a ticket with McCain if asked. This is the moron who ranted on the first article of the constitution while totally mangling it. This is the moron who knows so little about Marxism that he had to respond to a legitimate question with indignation and then punished the journalist who dared ask him about it. Palin is hated because she is too perfect. She is bullet proof, so much so that the media has had to attack stupid things like her cloths and her sexuality. But at least she has a success story to tell if she were to die tomorrow. Her record is clear and impressive. Biden is a Washington relic, and old dog who can't learn new tricks and refuses to answer serious questions.
Obama ran a cleaner campaign. I used to really like John McCain, but his fear mongering tactics (e.g. pretending that Bill Ayers is an issue) have really turned me off.

Ayers is a legitimate concern and if everyone knew the extent of his relationship with Obama, he'd never stand a chance in the election. But because the elite media has downplayed it and acted as apologists on the matter, people like you assume there must be nothing there to be concerned about. It isn't "dirty" to simply note the man's lack of judgment by befriending radical extremists, for which there are many.
Palin reminds me of George Bush.

Now here the real reason for your vote comes to light. None of the previous nonsense was really it. It all boils down to your distate for Palin because she reminds you of Bush. Quite the intellectual reasoning Analytics. Too white, too Christian, too family oriented, and too "regular American."
Bush was a maverick Washington outsider who didn’t speak correct English and was going to bring good-old fashioned conservative values and common sense to Washington. I’m done with that type, thank you.

Nothing like stereotyping to justify a bad vote. Of course in any other context this would be considered bigotry. But white Christians in America can never be the targets or victims of bigotry. It is also laughable to consider Bush an "outsider." Good grief man his father was a former President. Everyone voting for "W" knew exactly what to expect.
Fiscal Responsibility. Obama has a specific plan for making Social Security solvent. He makes an issue of fiscal responsibility and is more willing to do responsible yet unpopular things in this area. McCain’s tactic of hacking at the leaves of earmarks, all the while maintaining a ridiculously expensive war and irresponsible tax cuts is something that we can’t afford.

You oversimplify McCain's plan in order to dismiss it. Removing earmarks is only one facet of his plan, not his plan altogether. McCain wants to get in there and cut all kinds of meaningless bureaucratic money-pits. Obama hasn't been in Washington long enough to know where the wasteful spending is, and he certainly will not be interested in making cuts where his democrat cohorts are the beneficiaries. McCain has a proven track record of saving the government money. He has a proven track record of cutting wasteful spending, whereas Obama's record is the antithesis to this.
Oh--and Mormonism. If Mitt Romney would have stuck to the values he expressed when he ran for office in Massachusetts, he’d totally be my guy in the election now.

It boggles the mind how anyone could choose Obama as a second runner up to Romney, based on economic reasoning! The guys are polar opposites.
I really don’t think America can afford a president who panders to the far-right the way he has lately, so unless he were to credibly go back to his more moderate self, then probably not.

LOL! Again, do you think Obama doesn't pander to the far left, or do you just find the far left more tolerable?
“All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it...Propositions arrived at by purely logical means are completely empty as regards reality." - Albert Einstein
_Jason Bourne
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Re: Why I’m Voting for Obama and Mormonism

Post by _Jason Bourne »


The facts that companies do in fact choose this structure and that they tend to do quite well prove that there are compelling advantages that offset the disadvantages.



Your post was good and interesting. One point though regarding the above. For a publically traded company the only choice on form they have is the one we are discussing-A C Corp. There is no other choice.
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