Romney to pick VP tomorrow morning (Sat.)

[Frequent Flyer]

Originally Posted by Bonhomme Richard

I agree, that's my thinking too. That being said, I'm excited about the pick. Pawlenty or Portman would have been too milquetoast, Rubio would have been too obviously pandering to minorities. Ryan is a smart, serious guy. Romney/Rubio, based on serious intellectual policymaking alone, make Obama/Biden look like rank amateurs.

Just wait and see how that dastardly Obama campaign, the thugs from Chicago begin the attack machine.

Most Hispanics live in deep blue states. So Rubio wouldn't have won those states for the ticket, any way.

However, Ryan can win wisconsin for the ticket. And that's huge.

[AlbanyJet]

...then there's the conventional political wisdom, that I've been hearing since yesterday, that the VP selection neither adds nor detracts from the Presidential candidate.

Even in this case.

[Warfish]

Originally Posted by Frequent Flyer

Most Hispanics live in deep blue states.

Texas has over 9 million, 2nd in total pop and 2nd in % of population.

You may want to recheck your source. Cali is #1, sure, but many States have more than enough to sway a close election.

For example, VA (a formerly Red shifting blue swing state) has over 600,000 or ~8% of the population. In a State as equally divided as VA, that 8% can easily shift the balance if it goes stringly one way or the other.

Not saying Rubia was the right choice, per se. We'll see how the Hispanic vote plays out come election day. But it's very possible (R) loses both VA and FL directly because of it.

[Frequent Flyer]

Originally Posted by Warfish

Texas has over 9 million, 2nd in total pop and 2nd in % of population.

You may want to recheck your source. Cali is #1, sure, but many States have more than enough to sway a close election.

For example, VA (a formerly Red shifting blue swing state) has over 600,000 or ~8% of the population. In a State as equally divided as VA, that 8% can easily shift the balance if it goes stringly one way or the other.

Not saying Rubia was the right choice, per se. We'll see how the Hispanic vote plays out come election day. But it's very possible (R) loses both VA and FL directly because of it.

Rubio doesn't make or break you in Texas. That's why I didn't mention it.

Yes, Texas has a large hispanic population, but they are conservative (must have something to do with Texas culture I guess).

Florida Hispanics are primarily conservative as well.

the states I was referring to are Cali, NJ, NY and Illinois. The increase of Hispanics in VA is probably and increase in illegals, hence the movement to clean the voter roles of non-citizens in those states (and why the dems are fighting it tooth and nail). All Rubio would have done would create a 24/7 ****storm unleashed by the moonbats about pandering to Hispanics.

Ryan > Rubio.

[sackdance]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

Tax reform Simpson Bowles the only real plan that has any bipartisan finger prints on it.

Please review, Winston:

Sept, 2011: Erskine Bowles says Ryan budget “sensible … honest, serious”

I wonder what Erskine Bowles says now. Oh, look - Romney’s tax plan would hit middle class, miss the deficit

I started reading Bowles words, but passed when I read: You must have a balanced plan that reforms the tax code in a progressive, pro-growth manner ... Progressive & Pro-growth. Like oil and water.

[Winstonbiggs]

Originally Posted by sackdance

Please review, Winston:

Sept, 2011: Erskine Bowles says Ryan budget “sensible … honest, serious”

I wonder what Erskine Bowles says now. Oh, look - Romney’s tax plan would hit middle class, miss the deficit

I started reading Bowles words, but passed when I read: You must have a balanced plan that reforms the tax code in a progressive, pro-growth manner ... Progressive & Pro-growth. Like oil and water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/op...=1&ref=opinion

Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan

By DAVID A. STOCKMAN

Published: August 13, 2012

PAUL D. RYAN is the most articulate and intellectually imposing Republican of the moment, but that doesn’t alter the fact that this earnest congressman from Wisconsin is preaching the same empty conservative sermon.

Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse.

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

Indeed, adjusted for inflation, today’s national security budget is nearly double Eisenhower’s when he left office in 1961 (about $400 billion in today’s dollars) — a level Ike deemed sufficient to contain the very real Soviet nuclear threat in the era just after Sputnik. By contrast, the Romney-Ryan version of shrinking Big Government is to increase our already outlandish warfare-state budget and risk even more spending by saber-rattling at a benighted but irrelevant Iran.

Similarly, there can be no hope of a return to vibrant capitalism unless there is a sweeping housecleaning at the Federal Reserve and a thorough renunciation of its interest-rate fixing, bond buying and recurring bailouts of Wall Street speculators. The Greenspan-Bernanke campaigns to repress interest rates have crushed savers, mocked thrift and fueled enormous overconsumption and trade deficits.

The greatest regulatory problem — far more urgent that the environmental marginalia Mitt Romney has fumed about — is that the giant Wall Street banks remain dangerous quasi-wards of the state and are inexorably prone to speculative abuse of taxpayer-insured deposits and the Fed’s cheap money. Forget about “too big to fail.” These banks are too big to exist — too big to manage internally and to regulate externally. They need to be broken up by regulatory decree. Instead, the Romney-Ryan ticket attacks the pointless Dodd-Frank regulatory overhaul, when what’s needed is a restoration of Glass-Steagall, the Depression-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking.

Mr. Ryan showed his conservative mettle in 2008 when he folded like a lawn chair on the auto bailout and the Wall Street bailout. But the greater hypocrisy is his phony “plan” to solve the entitlements mess by deferring changes to social insurance by at least a decade.

A true agenda to reform the welfare state would require a sweeping, income-based eligibility test, which would reduce or eliminate social insurance benefits for millions of affluent retirees. Without it, there is no math that can avoid giant tax increases or vast new borrowing. Yet the supposedly courageous Ryan plan would not cut one dime over the next decade from the $1.3 trillion-per-year cost of Social Security and Medicare.

Instead, it shreds the measly means-tested safety net for the vulnerable: the roughly $100 billion per year for food stamps and cash assistance for needy families and the $300 billion budget for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor and disabled. Shifting more Medicaid costs to the states will be mere make-believe if federal financing is drastically cut.

Likewise, hacking away at the roughly $400 billion domestic discretionary budget (what’s left of the federal budget after defense, Social Security, health and safety-net spending and interest on the national debt) will yield only a rounding error’s worth of savings after popular programs (which Republicans heartily favor) like cancer research, national parks, veterans’ benefits, farm aid, highway subsidies, education grants and small-business loans are accommodated.

Like his new boss, Mr. Ryan has no serious plan to create jobs. America has some of the highest labor costs in the world, and saddles workers and businesses with $1 trillion per year in job-destroying payroll taxes. We need a national sales tax — a consumption tax, like the dreaded but efficient value-added tax — but Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan don’t have the gumption to support it.

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends. The crony capitalists of K Street already own more than enough Republican votes to stop that train before it leaves the station.

In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

David A. Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy.”

My own view every tax deduction should be eliminated bare none, rates should be progresive but not punitive, Corporate tax rates should be slashed, subsidies eliminated, defense needs to be slashed the social safety net maintained for the truly poor and disabled and the big banks broken up. None of that will happen and since it won't I support Simpson Bowles because at least it's a start in the right direction and it's bipartisan. Failing that I wouldn't mind seeing us revert back to the 86 tax reform.

[palmetto defender]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/op...=1&ref=opinion

Paul Ryan’s Fairy-Tale Budget Plan

By DAVID A. STOCKMAN

Published: August 13, 2012




David A. Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985, is the author of the forthcoming book “The Great Deformation: How Crony Capitalism Corrupts Free Markets and Democracy.”

My own view every tax deduction should be eliminated bare none, rates should be progresive but not punitive, Corporate tax rates should be slashed, subsidies eliminated, defense needs to be slashed the social safety net maintained for the truly poor and disabled and the big banks broken up. None of that will happen and since it won't I support Simpson Bowles because at least it's a start in the right direction and it's bipartisan. Failing that I wouldn't mind seeing us revert back to the 86 tax reform.

Breaking up big banks will make every American bank inferior from a competitive standpoint to at least 20-30 European and Asian banks. No thank you.
Next: Break up American oil? Walmart? Boeing? Pfizer? Coke?
Strength in size.

[Winstonbiggs]

Originally Posted by palmetto defender

Breaking up big banks will make every American bank inferior from a competitive standpoint to at least 20-30 European and Asian banks. No thank you.
Next: Break up American oil? Walmart? Boeing? Pfizer? Coke?
Strength in size.

I guess you need to be big enough to bring down the entire financial system and be bailed out in order to compete? That's not competition.

[palmetto defender]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

I guess you need to be big enough to bring down the entire financial system and be bailed out in order to compete? That's not competition.

Wells Fargo got bailed? Goldman? JP Morgan Chase?
Nope.
Lehman didn't get bailed. Just died.
Rules yes. Destruction of a system- no.
There are numerous companies bigger than the banks. Destroy them too?
If not, why not. Uniformity.

[Trades]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

I guess you need to be big enough to bring down the entire financial system and be bailed out in order to compete? That's not competition.

The problem wasn't their size it was the lack of accountability caused by the "too big to fail" concept. If failure was an option as it should have been then the high risk activities would most likely been tempered.

[Winstonbiggs]

Originally Posted by palmetto defender

Wells Fargo got bailed? Goldman? JP Morgan Chase?
Nope.
Lehman didn't get bailed. Just died.
Rules yes. Destruction of a system- no.
There are numerous companies bigger than the banks. Destroy them too?
If not, why not. Uniformity.

Why not they aren't using FDIC deposits to make money, they arent going to the Fed window to borow it.

The banks are being bailed out now at the expense of savers.

[palmetto defender]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

Why not they aren't using FDIC deposits to make money, they arent going to the Fed window to borow it.

The banks are being bailed out now at the expense of savers.

GM and Chrysler (not even an American comapany) got major bucks.
Solyndra? A few other green com[panies? Mostly boondoggles BTW.

[Winstonbiggs]

Originally Posted by palmetto defender

GM and Chrysler (not even an American comapany) got major bucks.
Solyndra? A few other green com[panies? Mostly boondoggles BTW.

I certainly don't support that but it's chicken **** compared to what the banks got and what they are getting now in terms of Fed policy.

[piney]

I'm wondering if the thought process is that Romney himself will appeal to the IND and angry DEM voter and Ryan gets the base out there voting.

Romney is basically a moderate Republican, which in today's political discourse means he is either a RINO communist if you're from the right or a right-wing fascist if you're from the left.

I wonder if this could help Romney go center-right during the debates and general election with the impression that Ryan will be the conservative focus.