dagblog - Comments for "Obama is Magic!"

Sooner or later, Poland is

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:09:09 +0000

In reply to I like the whole list and

Sooner or later, Poland is coming home.

To America.

I love this one - great

Aunt Sam — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:13:15 +0000

In reply to Some big ideas that are

I love this one - great idea:

Open up 10% of the taxes you pay to be Earmarked for specific projects, which you get to choose from a pick 'em list. NASA versus Ballet versus Archaeology versus... the Afghan War. Ok, maybe not the war. But maybe. Anyway, start there with the earmarking, and see how it grows.

I like the whole list and

LULUDUDE — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 20:10:54 +0000

In reply to Some big ideas that are

I like the whole list and would naturally peck around the edges some. For instance, I would make the break points on the progressive tax somewhat higher but would also add one more at the high end which would be very, very steep.

The first of all those ideas to really grab me was the ten percent of tax that could be directed. I won’t even try now to list the ways I think that might be not only beneficial but highly appropriate and possibly even a thing which could be implemented. I hope that idea starts a conversation of its own.

I don't expect your last idea to get serious consideration for at least a few more years.

Some big ideas that are

Anonymous — Tue, 11 Sep 2012 19:27:19 +0000

In reply to Obama is Magic!

Some big ideas that are already out there....

- Come up with a fancy name for it, but then implement a nationwide Graduate Tax system that enables people to pay for their post-secondary education. Time to get out of this incredibly complex - and doubly costly - nonsense system of grants and student loans and collection companies and the banks and such. Set it up so you pay for tuition etc. through a tax on your future earnings. Study longer, or in more expensive programs or colleges, and that % rises. So, for instance, you might pay for your college tuition by having an income tax rate 2.5% above what it otherwise would be. Voila, the upfront cash barrier is eased... as is the difficulty of repaying loans when you're unemployed or in low-paying work.

- Elimination of the small business income tax. Completely.

- Creation of a national Green Energy Works company/utility that will pay for energy efficient retrofit work upfront, including solar installations and heat pumps and such, which expenditures will be repaid on the utility bill. Interest rates will be rock bottom, promotion will be enormous, and quality control standards high.

- Another education big idea is fully-fledged support to a national system of online learning that can produce formally-recognized diplomas and degrees. I call it the US-E, for the United States of E-merica. Cos that's cool.

- Open up 10% of the taxes you pay to be Earmarked for specific projects, which you get to choose from a pick 'em list. NASA versus Ballet versus Archaeology versus... the Afghan War. Ok, maybe not the war. But maybe. Anyway, start there with the earmarking, and see how it grows.

- Tax any and all income over $300,000/year at a minimum of 30%, any over $400,00 at 40%, any over $500,000 at 50%, any over $750,000 at 75% and then cap it.

- Bring in a Financial Transactions Tax.

- Knock some sense into a financial sector that is still bat-shit insane, and make the bastard owners take haircuts, don hairshirts and inhabit prison.

- Seriously, commit to sending the criminals in the financial sector to prison. That's a small idea, funny enough, just one we happened to have missed.

- Bring in a wave of Support for the Share-It economy. Auto-shares, house-shares, food-shares, energy-shares, cottage-shares, you name it.

- Tax the hell out of junk food. Start with pop. Work from there. Then put every single goddamn penny raised into locally-raised school food programs. Save the smart, hard-pressed parents time and money.

- Add a minimum of 3 new National Holidays. Full days off, no pissing around. Rua national poll on who they should be named after. Get the fanclubs of Elvis, Marilyn and James Dean competing.

- Open up full-scale job-sharing, flex-hours, reduced workweeks, sabbaticals and so on across the entire Federal Civil Service. Provide tax breaks to every organization that follows along.

- Raise the minimum wage, cut maximum hours and enforce it.

- Bring in a law stating that Corporations are not people.

- Repeal Citizens United and bring in public funding of elections.

- Raise standards in the Senate and House high enough to require the removal of numerous members from office. Start with David Vitter. Do not stop there.

- Introduce a nation-wide public automobile insurance program.

- Invade Poland.

These are all viable I believe, in some form or other, are all being done in some place or pother, and had they been given some major air-time, might have blossomed into doable, publicly-understood, Big Idea programs.

P.S. Please do not comment on this comment by telling me how these things were already tried... because we have to look forward, let bygones be bygones, and move on. etc.

Ryan Lizza: Obama Goes Vague,

artappraiser — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 06:36:30 +0000

In reply to Obama is Magic!

Ryan Lizza: Obama Goes Vague, September 7, 2012

.... It certainly might be the right strategic move. But there’s a danger in winning this way ....

ocean-kat, A big stimulus

Aunt Sam — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 17:15:37 +0000

In reply to I hated that line. I'm not

ocean-kat,

A big stimulus to put people to work rebuilding the infrastructure.

If done properly (and therein lies the issue) I just don't see the downside to this. Our infrastructure has some serious and even life threatening weaknesses in need of fixing. It would provide jobs and yes, deliver benefits to all segments of society.

What's the downside?

Of course, all are going to vote for the candidate who we believe to possess the same core values and views we hold dear.

"For Obama, the time for

PeraclesPlease — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 16:58:30 +0000

In reply to To me, your argument is too,

"For Obama, the time for selling big ideas starts after he's re-elected." You must love Romney then - the 'put me in, then I'll do great things and give you a plan' candidate.

" What happened to the FDR era "make me do it" spirit?" - it's bullshit. Presidents are supposed to lead, inspire, help find the cream of the crop. Sure, they don't do everything, but they consolidate the idea. What's this, put in Obama, and then tell him what to do? Wish I had that kind of top executive job - 'here are your instructions for first 100 days...

The President has to overcome adversity to get done what he wants to and has pledged to get done. Yeah, he might need some help but then he should ask for it, plead the case, wrangle, persuade, threaten, trick, whatever's necessary. Not just wait around for 330 million to step up - this ain't Godot.

To me, your argument is too,

DF — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 14:24:06 +0000

In reply to It's not about the yelling.

To me, your argument is too, ahem, vague on the specifics to entertain to that extent. Obama should apparently have some unnamed "big idea." He should be using his re-election campaign to sell said idea as loud and as hard as he can. Obviously, this poses some inherent risk to his re-election prospects. After all, if the idea were already known to be wildly popular, it would not need to be sold. Rather, it is likely that both candidates would already embrace said idea, no?

So Obama rolls the dice in a neck-and-neck election on selling his "big idea." Hopefully he's really good at making that sell, because if he's not we end up with President Romney. That sounds like a pretty big risk for an idea that is as yet unspecified.

To go one further, why is it necessarily Obama's job to invent and sell big ideas? What happened to the other 330 million brains in the country? What happened to the FDR era "make me do it" spirit? Instead, apparently the thing to do is lay the hefty task of grand sweeping vision solely on the one guy who has to play it right down the middle at present. It's pining for something grandiose, yet unnameable, and demanding it from the guy who isn't doing anything of the sort right now for obvious, pragmatic reasons. What's up with that?

For Obama, the time for selling big ideas starts after he's re-elected. Not sure why that isn't completely obvious to you and Brooks. Maybe if we could talk about a specific idea, we could actually look at whether or not Congress would support it. In absence of that, I'm forced to rely on recent history and say that they wouldn't support anything you might name. Selling a big idea as simple as you make it sound. For anything truly "big," you're going to need to not only shape national opinion on an issue, an issue that perhaps they've never even been introduced to before, but you're also going to need to put enough cooperative legislators in office to make it law. Obama's best possible contribution to something like that right now, especially with respect for an initiative with no name, is to become President for another four years.

Well, you probably could have

DF — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 14:04:06 +0000

In reply to I think that it's possible

Well, you probably could have knocked Obama over with a feather when he heard what Biden had done.

Even the lackluster

DF — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 14:02:48 +0000

In reply to O, why do you think that?

Even the lackluster Presidency of George W. Bush latched onto a "big idea" after his re-election, at least if policy that would have some seriously big impact is the criteria for a "big idea." I think his quest to turn Social Security over to Wall Street whole hog qualifies. Do you really think that Barack Obama has no idea what he might do during a second term if the opportunity presents itself? I get and appreciate that your argument is more about creating that opportunity through salesmanship, but nothing about that excludes this possibility. To insist on hard evidence for this seems a bit silly to me. Obama is smart, ambitious and has proved himself able to take a longer view than many of those around him in service of attaining his goals. To me, it seems far less likely that he has not one idea that you would grant is "big," though he has obvious reasons not to necessarily barnstorm over it right now. Dubya didn't run for re-election on reforming SS either.

Come to think of it, Dubya and crew were never really short on the "big ideas," were they? Trouble was that they had a slew of really shitty ones. Do we really need more "big ideas" right now or do we need to, much as I loathe the phrase in a post-Bush world, "stay the course"? The case for Obama now is basically the same as the case in 2008. The GOP policy mix proved to be disastrous on multiple fronts. The GOP solution was a purer, more concentrated form of that same mix. That didn't work. The Obama mix is not as potent as we might like, but we're getting some positive deltas from it.

The GOP solution has not changed at all in four years. Living in a world where the choice we've been presented with is right direction versus wrong direction, it seems to me that right direction is a big idea. There's no competition in the field of good ideas right now. There's insane and sane. That means, among other things, that sane doesn't have to work to hard to look good. That might not be as grandiose as we'd prefer at the moment, but that's the world we're in.