And you can't outsource these jobs! We need electricians, plumbers, carpenters--all jobs that pay very well. I think teaching kids to be more entrepreneurial would go a long way as well, because we are moving towards an economy that is going to depend on that mindset.

As much as I have advocated vocational training, the downfall is in the placements. I am leaning more towards companies (public and private) sponsoring courses/degrees at colleges, vocational training and school partnerships, as well as internships. For example, there is an acute shortage of trained electric linemen. So my company set up a vocational school to do just that. Employers know what they need, they can't depend upon educational entities to meet their needs. Now if we can solve the single biggest problem in healthcare : the shortage of physicians...

Some news on what Obama will say on his address.

Obama to call for tax increases on wealthy in State of the Union address | Fox News

Enslaving?


Why?

By this question, I mean this has no chance of happening from just a political standpoint. Is it just to push the rhetoric?

Starting point for negotiations.

Any thoughts on the SCOTUS gay marriage cases? It looks like we'll finally get a direct resolution. The questions presented are:

1) Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?

2) Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

This, plus trying to change Dem messaging going forward.

Honestly, I'm no fan of the cuts as they are too gimmicky for me. I love the financial transaction tax. Something needs to be done so that skimming isn't the country's biggest industry.

The speech will also call for higher taxes on the wealthy.

I don't mind tax cuts (I'm a Fair Tax/consumption-tax guy, but that's another debate), but they won't mean anything unless you have spending reforms/cuts to go along with them. The financial transacition tax...I'm all for it. The thing I like about it is that it's gets the public markets back to it's original purpose, and not a scheme based on high-frequency trading and algorithms, and it's almost like a consumption tax--not forced.

What is the change in the message going forward with this? Hasn't this been the message all along?

Obama's message. Why earn it when you can just take it?

That's an interesting way for a conservative to frame tax cuts.

Always the argument. Always. It's always ok if money moves up from the bottom, never for it to move down in any fashion.

Money begets money. When you have it, you can make it easy to take from those who are trying. When you don't, you're pretty much fucked.

Obama already moved that bracket from 15% to 24% under this same argument just a couple of years ago. Did that not have any positive effect? Because all I keep hearing about is how much the people in that tax bracket are bunch of selfish assholes. So if it didn't, what good will this do? We move it to 28% and then what? We like those rich people now? Of course not. It's an easy steal, which is my point.

The cap gains rate will still be lower than the top rates on earned income and this will return the rate to the level during the great socialist Reagan admin.

Ronald Reagan = theft from the wealthy!

Oh trust, me, I understand why that was placed in the article. But how is Hillary supposed to top this 28% tax that Obama just handed out? 33% in the first term. 38% in the second. Am I right? And the Democrat that takes her spot? 43% in the first term....48% in the second? Am I right again?

No. We liberals will only be happy with 110% tax rate!!!!

DEATH TO CAPITALISM!!!

Exactly my point, nobody has an answer to this, but it's an easy steal.

There's no point in having a rational discussion when your argument is 28% will inevitably lead to 50% and the death of the American economy. If you want to discuss why 28% is clearly worse than 20% I'll listen. Personally I think capital gains should be at or close to the rates on earned income.

But none of this will happen, so neither of us should spend too much time on it.

What confuses me is there is no focus on real spending reforms and cut. Government can't, and shouldn't keep spending like a drunken sailor and trying to take care of every little need/

If half of Americans don't pay any federal income taxes, once credits kick in (which can pay back more than what people paid in), and the top 10% of income earners paid over 70% in federal taxes, with the to 20% paying 93% of all federal income taxes, how do you continue this argument?

"Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent...pay negative 9 percent."

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101264757#.

I guess the question is, and it's more philosophical, is should government--one that is about democracy-treat everyone the same in terms of "fairness"? With all of the credits available, should government be about playing favorites with all of these credits? Yes, we need to get lobbying and donations out of politics (and both sides aren't willing to do this), and introduce the financial transaction tax to reward investment and not gambling, but that's half of the battle.

Didn't we have the same argument and you have the same point when we went from 15% to 24%? The only real solution is a flat tax--and I understand the problems associated with that-but benefit is that it affects all voters each and every time. Not just Democrats picking on Republican voters and vice-versa...although, as you pointed out, looks like Reagan picked on his own voters too.

You can't ignore other taxes. The federal system is still progressive, but when you look at all taxes it isn't anything like what you point out for income taxes.

I'll agree that the difference between marginal and effective rates should be narrowed.

You can continue it by pointing out the growing gulf between the haves and the have nots. Fairness is more than just absolute numbers. Before the reductions in the top income tax rate in the early 1980s, the top 0.1% of wage earners received 8% of the total income. Now that figure is 18%. Meanwhile the bottom 20% of wage earners had their share of the total income drop by 1/3rd.

Money is like oxygen to the economy. You have to keep it circulating.

Would you apply this to all forms of income or just earned income?

The problem with a flat tax is that when you add state and local taxes you'd end up with a fairly significantly regressive tax system. The income tax is the one place where progressivity balances the system.

I've bolded the parts to help people better understand what you are talking about here. :)


Tax rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I'm not sure, what I would like is a vision for taxes needed and apply it fairly across all spectrums. And this may need an honest discussion of what services we can provide as a baseline. I'm okay with less taxes for the poor and more for the rich, but I'm not a fan of Democrats hiking Republican taxes and Republicans hiking Democrats taxes.

When it comes to taxes, philosophically, our political extremes are clearly not in the best interest of our nation.

Pres. Obama seems to finally be embracing his liberal side to some degree. He is proposing a series of tax breaks for the middle class, paid for by closing tax loopholes and increasing taxes on the very wealthy. Of course, he only proposes this after the Democrats lose any control in Congress and, therefore, his proposals will have no chance whatsoever of even being debated, let alone enacted.

If he were serious about this, he would have proposed it when the Dems had some power in Congress. As it is now, it is empty rhetoric and red meat for the Daily Kos crowd.

Both parties have abandoned the middle class in favor of their wealthy donor class. At least the Republicans admit that. The Dems still lie about who they are and what they represent.

Apparently part of the cost is going to be covered by taxing 529 college savings plans. What a load of crap.

Nothing in here about Obama's state of the union address.

Is that a sign of FOFC's decline or the lame duck-ness of his presidency?

Best moment is when the President zinged the Republicans when he said he won't be running for office anymore and they cheered him. Then he told them he won them both :) R's stop cheering.

It really didn't matter too much what he said-Repblicans won't allow him to fulfill any of his promises or plans except through executive action, and they are looking to find a way to take even that away legally.

And then to rub it in, Boehner announced that the Israeli PM would be speaking to Congress next month...telling the President minutes before-not asking, telling. So that PM can tell Americans how wrong the President's plans for Iran are...which is exactly the way The R's see it.

So in other words, just another day in Washington.

A sign of the times. I streamed Transparent that night and checked blog reactions later that night.

Also, the Patriots played a football game with footballs that contained less air than normal. So that kind of [pun]took all of the air out of the room.[/pun]

{shrug}

I haven't watched one in years, in part they seem to be made even more pointless by how much of their content is out there days ahead of time.

Well, to kick off the new season the republicans canned a bill they were going to vote on because they could not agree amongst themselves. The vote was on an anti-abortion bill that they had previously passed last session that went nowhere because of the same reasons it did not advance today. So, in other words, business as usual no matter what Obama says. If he proposes a tax cut, they'll oppose it because they want the credit. The tone of his speech was actually not as fiery as Fox News suggested, but rather scrap the shit they can't agree on (i.e. Healthcare) and do something on the stuff where they may be common ground.

Yeah I don't see the point in watching them. They are all available online. Most of the speeches are filled with "feel-good" soundbites and overly rehearsed.

Blah blah middle class hurting...blah blah working two jobs. He doesn't give a shit about most of that stuff and certainly isn't going to change anything.

I was reading something yesterday about the history of the state of union addresses. Amazingly, the state of the union always tends to be "strong" if you listen to these speeches. Has there every been a president who said that the state of union sucked? I know Jimmy Carter had a pretty negative one.

Edit: Ah, here's the list I was looking for:

Why is the State of the Union Always 'Strong'? | Acton PowerBlog

Reagan started the "strong" gimmick, everyone has followed it since then. And good 'ole Gerald Ford keeping it real, things were "not good" in 1975

Wants to tax withdrawals on 529 contributions which are already post-tax contributions. Good luck with that.

529 college plans: Just for the rich? - Yahoo Finance

It may already be post-tax contributions, but the 529s have special tax breaks to begin with. Before 2001, withdrawals from 529s were treated as ordinary income. It is literally a tax loophole (as are tax breaks for employer sponsored health care). You may think its a good loophole, but its a loophole, none the less.

So I don't think this would pass, and even if it did, it would likely only be for new accounts and deposits made after the bill passed.

But let's say it passed against all accounts. Would you rethink retirement accounts like Roth IRAs? There's a lot more money to tax in those.

I'd think you'd want to keep Roth IRA's as incentives to investment for retirement - the income limits allow for taxing those who may have less need for incentivizing investment.

I suggested eliminating this to some liberal-leaning people a while back at a get together, and they were outraged at such a suggestion. It doesn't bother me that it's not taxed or taxed--just that it is a tax break that plays with the insurance/health care costs.

I'm not necessarily opposed to eliminating the filibuster for SCOTUS, but the incredible hypocrisy of Alexander's quote is shameless.

I get that Bibi needs to do what he thinks is best for his country but I don't understand the rationale for being so disrespectful to a sitting president. He could have told Obama that he was coming at the invitation of the GOP regardless of any Obama objections, why hide it?

There's probably been some earlier incident where he thought this was payback.

Netanyahu snub takes relations with White House to a new low - CNN.com

Netanyahu's been disrespectful of Obama since day one. This isn't out of character.

Boy, you'd think it would take more than four months for this statement to look bad. From the President last September.........


Today, the U.S. Embassy in Yemen has basically told everyone they're on their own and to exit ASAP.

Obama Tonight: Yemen and Somalia Are Models of Success (!) | The Weekly Standard

Yemen's previous government is obvious not our partner on the front lines anymore... since, you know, they've been overthrown in a coup. Sooo... what's the big deal?

Well, to be fair (lol) he was probably saying things like that in 2006 when the words "nuclear option" first entered the lexicon. It's just that after 2008, the filibuster was a useful tool to try to prevent President Obama from appointing "liberal" judges.

Now they're looking ahead to 2016 and going "we have the House and the Senate and everything's going to be Republican forever let's get rid of the SCOTUS filibuster."

It's a dangerous play. If you look at the 2016 Senate map, Republicans have 24 seats to defend, including one in Vermont, one in Wisconsin, one in Illinois, one in Ohio and one in Pennsylvania. None of those are certain to flip, of course, and Wisconsin in particular has been weird. They voted Johnson in over Feingold in 2010, then voted to re-elect Barack Obama and to elect Tammy Baldwin before voting to re-elect Scott Walker. Don't ask me to predict whether the Democratic Party in this state will be able to evict Johnson from office.

The point is, it's a Presidential election year. All five of those states voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and 2008. Yes, Ohio and Pennsylvania are swing states, Vermont's kinda independent-minded, and Wisconsin, as I said above, has been fucking weird the last six years or so. But those states represent opportunities all the same.

The Republican nightmare? Nuking the SCOTUS filibuster and then waking up on November 9, 2016 to a Democratic President-elect who also has a 52- or 51-seat majority in the Senate. Yes, there'd be time to re-impose the filibuster because OH SHIT WE LOST but it's just as possible that the incoming Democratic Senate says 'nope. you made that bed, fuckers. We'll be removing the SCOTUS filibuster again.'

That's a move I'd expect to see from the Republicans if their candidate for President won the election in 2016, not just because in 2015.

The pattern seems to be Democrats are strong in Presidential election years, making Johnson vulnerable in 16. Then again, WI Democrats have been putting up some weak candidates. Ron Kind is about the only name I can think of that would be a good bet to unseat Johnson. I'd say Kind was the only person that could've challenged Walker but he is smarter than I am and knew Walker was beating anybody that was put out there.

Kind would probably get some crap from the netroots in the primaries for having voted to weaken the Wall Street reforms, though.

Here's the thing with Johnson, though: does Wisconsin really have wood for Walker, or is he just benefiting from the timing of his three elections (two off-year, one in June of a Presidential year)? That matters, because if Walker's electoral success in Wisconsin is built on an actual base and not just the off-year malaise of the Democrats, he could have coattails for Johnson if he wins the Republican Presidential nomination.

If it's just that Walker got elected in 2010 when Democrats were pouting about Republican obstructionism, avoided recall in 2012 because the election was in June and not November, and got re-elected in 2014 because it was another down midterm for Democrats, then Johnson is probably in trouble next year.

Either way, Wisconsin is goofy and until/unless a Republican Presidential ticket emerges that doesn't have Scott Walker on it, I won't feel comfortable predicting what Wisconsin is going to do in 2016.

IIRC, Wisconsin's basically a red state except for Madison & Milwaukee. If key voting blocs (young people in Madison, poor people in Milwaukee) don't turn out for the Democrats, the state easily goes Republican. lungs - correct me if I'm wrong here.

When you have big concentrated pockets of votes you can easily handle elections if your GOTV is good (see: Obama 2008) or crater if they stay home en masse, which they are more likely to do as homogenous voting blocs (see: 2010 & 2014).

My perception is that the filibuster has become little more than a tool for parliamentary games, at this point. When was the last time it was used to stop legislation for actual ideological purposes? I don't think they even used it for the last actually unqualified SCOTUS nominee (Miers). I could be wrong, though, so correct me if I am.

Given that, the non-partisan part of me (yes, it's small), says just eliminate it (even if just for SCOTUS, on top of federal judgeships) and get on with business. This back-and-forth "will they, won't they" is just annoying and counter-productive.

I suppose the partisan part of me says keep it so Democrats can block truly unqualified candidates, but I think even the GOP (I'll probably regret this) won't let someone like Miers through in the future. And as much as I dislike Roberts and Alito, they're qualified, and you win the Oval Office you get to put those guys on the bench.

Basically. Far north along Lake Superior tends to be blue but the population is pretty low. Western Wisconsin between Madison and the Mississippi River is the bellweather region. Obama took every county along this corridor while in the governor election only a few counties went blue. Racine and Kenosha also went for both Obama and Walker.

The Milwaukee suburbs up through Green Bay and the rural central parts of the state are pretty solidly red. That region just sent Glenn Grothman to the House for pete's sake. I think if JimGA gets to know Grothman, he'd probably rank among his more liked House Reps :)

edit: Forgot to say Sack is absolutely right about the Walker coattails in a Presidential year if he's on the ticket.

Madison and Milwaukee are also two of the three biggest cities in the state though, and the overall state population isn't terribly large. Saying that if you exclude those two cities (when cities tend to be Democratic strongholds), the state is pretty solidly Republican?

Shit, son, that's probably true of most states in the country. "If Democratic blocs don't turn out in Los Angeles and San Francisco..."