Obama in 2001, Wealth Redistribution, Warren Court

basso, you've said several times that in part your support for McCain/Palin rests on the emphasis they will place on helping the "special needs" population and that this is an important issue for you because of your autistic son.

Do you have any idea much it costs to educate "special needs" kids in the public school system?

Let me give you a little perspective. I was a teacher in Level 5 special education facility in Baltimore for a number of years. Our population included autistic kids. School districts from all over the region sent students to our school to get services they could not provide. This is mandated by law. At the time, the minimum amount that school districts had to pay for sending a kid to our school was about $30,000/year. Depending on the kid's issues their "tuition" paid for by their school district could be double or triple that.

Are you telling me that you oppose redistributing wealth from tax payers that do not have special needs kids, to those that do?

 

You’re around here a whole lot more than I am, so I’ll defer to your knowledge of him. I’m pretty sure that he’s paid by the Republicans to work message boards with this kind of propaganda, however. As you’ve noted, he has no core principles. He flip flops around changing his position to whatever the current Republican position is. He is almost always toeing the party line and pushing the current party spin on any given issue.

 

As I was corrected earlier, it's not distribution if it's going to corporations

 

I hesitate to get into a real discussion about the redistribution of wealth in this thread, but I think a couple of points might help those who are genuinely interested in it. I’m straining my memory back to my polysci classes but I do remember that the term was closely tied to the idea of the creation of wealth. In other words, it’s not about taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor. It’s about the equality of opportunity and how you can increase the size of the pie in the process. I believe it comes from analysing the wealth distribution in a society and finding, to use the current example, that whites are a lot wealthier on average than blacks. Unless someone believes that blacks are genetically less able to accumulate wealth then you would have to conclude that something is wrong with the system to produce this imbalance. What is wrong in this instance is a system that makes it difficult for many blacks to reach their full potential. There are different aspects to this issue but the bottom line is that if you can remove those obstacles and unleash that potential then more blacks will become more productive and start to accumulate more wealth, and you will increase the size of the economic pie overall. These newly empowered and wealthier blacks will spend their money and that will benefit everyone in that society, and with the barriers removed eventually there will be the same proportion of wealthy blacks as there is of wealthy whites. In other words, the wealth in society will have been redistributed on a proportional basis, and this will have been done naturally, based on merit. (This applies to any disadvantaged group, of course, including many groups of poor whites, but the issue of how this relates to blacks was raised earlier in this thread). For people like Basso and TJ, however, who want to preserve their privilege and continue to receive favours from their Republican friends, this is a bad thing. They’re not interested in a government that looks out for everybody. They are interested in a government that looks out for its friends, specifically them, at the expense of others.

 

Republican desperation:

1. Joe the "Plumber" spin. Dude wasn't even a plumber and Faux News completely hackjobed and cherrypicked what Obama actually said.
2. The "B" Girl. Hmmm, why did the McCain camp know certain details before they were released.
3. "Socialist" splice. More T_J self-ownage. McCain is sure looking good in Michigan!!!


Fear mongering at it's finest. Let's go in chronological order:
1. Crazy pastor - Used
2. Possible muslim - Used
3. Guilty of terrorism by association - Used
4. Fake birth certificate... he's not even american - Used
5. Socialist - Used
6. Communist - Palin started throwing it around, McCarthy is smiling somewhere.

I'm afraid of what crap comes out next.

Even Bill O'Reily said that Obama isn't a socialist. He said he was a populist.

 

Grizzled,

Thank you -- I had never heard a context for it. I've only heard it used in the political Robin Hood form we've heard lately.

 

This is about the government having too much power over the people not about partisan politics. Just argue the facts of this topic without labeling the opposition Republican or automatic McCain supporter.

Frankly I have been saying this for quite some time that Obama has radicals means of achieving his political and social agendas. However, his popular support among the general citizenry is blinded because these voters seek selfish benefits at the sake of others.

Obama's greatest shortcoming is his inability to distinguish between equality and justice which are both separate entities of the same system.

anyhow carry on with this proliferation of socialism and put an end to our country as we know it.

 

You do realize there are presidential elections every 4 years? If the majority of people don't like the current system or party in power, then it will act by voting. If Obama's administration ends up being too liberal or people discover some further agenda, you will see a swing back to the right.

This is not the American apocolypse. Lighten up Francis.

 

What are some of these radical means he has proposed?

 

Such drama queens. Marxist? Socialist? Communist? The fall of America?

1950 called, it wants its smears back.

 

Put an end to our country?

I have one abbreviation for you:

Y2K.

 

If I catch any of you guys in my stuff, I'll kill you

Actually, I do believe Sgt. Hulka says "Lighten up, Francis."

 

Oh, yeah? Well, 1999 called and it wants the Y2K hype back.

 

Oh, and 1917 called- seems the Bolsheviks wanted to make sure Obama received their support.

 

fixed

 

2000 called... Americans want their country back.

 

Radical means? Just the opposite. The sub-prime mortgage fiasco was radical, and it in essence acted as a way to redistribute wealth from poor people and regular taxpayers to wealthy bankers. People were given loans they couldn’t afford and that the banks new they couldn’t afford, and when it all came crashing down the tax payer and investors were left with the bill, and the bankers got rich. Is that the kind of redistribution of wealth that you prefer? What I see in Obama is someone who promises to bring back good capitalist principles, like a properly regulated banking system and a level playing field for all citizens to compete on fairly. The Republicans managed the economy very poorly, did favours for rich friends, and went into Iraq for very dubious and quite possibly self serving reasons. I think Obama promises to root out the corruption and self-serving, anti-capitalist, ways of the Bush administration, and to restore healthy capitalism for all Americans.

I think his greatest strength is that he cares about equality and justice, two things that became a casualty of the corruption in the current administration.

I guess that you don’t know what socialism means, and can I further infer that you don’t like capitalism? I would say that what Obama promises is a return to healthy capitalism and a healthy competitive environment, and an end to incompetent management of the economy and favours for friends of the Republican Party.

 

1980 called, it wants the Evil Empire back.

and 1985 called, it wants New Coke back.

 

The Republicans have more in common with the Bolsheviks than the Democrats do. The Bolsheviks were a minority even in their own party (in spite of the name) but they believed that they knew best and that they had the right to force their will on the party, and eventually the country, and I think there are a lot of parallels in that to what the neocons have tried to do in the US in the last couple of decades.

 

right?!?! There's no crying in politics!

very nice grizz