mspencer82 post=18.73091.783890 said:
I honestly don't get the rabid hate that liberals have for Palin. "She scares me." "That woman should be shot." "She makes me so angry." I didn't know a Republican in a skirt could be so terrifying. Maybe it's all transference, maybe the one you really hate and mistrust is Tina Fey.
At this point I don't know who I'm voting for. McCain wants fewer taxes, but we all know what that leads to. Obama wants to improve the healthcare system, but we all know what that will lead to. Both have plans to help the economy and create jobs, but those plans always involve cutting jobs and making the economy worse.
Really, if I heard the words "change" or "middle class" much more this election I'm going to go insane, because those are the subjects politicians know the least about.
There is hate because the Democrats consider blacks', Hispanics', and women's votes to be owned by the Democrat Party; comparatively few white males vote Democrat. Therefore any minority or woman running for high office on the Republican ticket is a huge potential danger to the viability of the Democrat Party and must be destroyed. We saw the same thing with Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal. So far on Palin the only thing to stick (of the many charges made against her by the media wing of the Democrat Party) has been her inexperience, that she's "not ready" to be president. Which is hilarious considering that the TOP of the Democrat ticket is a man whose signal accomplishment in the State Senate is a bill expanding coverage on an existing program and whose signal accomplishment in the US Senate is yet another Senate ethics bill which never even made it to a vote, but you go with what you have, and on Palin what they have is relative inexperience.
I think socialized medicine is a given, and the longer we wait probably the harder it's going to be. The big reason all the corporate money goes to the Democrats is health care - they want the government to move the cost of health care onto the public dime (like every other major industrial country) to make themselves more competitive with foreign corporations. And it won't be all bad, assuming we can cut predatory litigation out of the picture. The areas where socialized medicine fails are the major expenses (look at the waiting times to get an MRI in Canada or the UK versus the USA) and in expensive end-of-life and therapies with low odds of success. Socialized medicine lets older people, and other people who have slight odds of survival, die and spends that money on better care for the young, which in many cases actually seems to increase overall longevity. Money for new drug research will take a major hit, but if it is managed correctly, managing the cost of medicines by regulation rather than competition, the hit need not be terribly bad because so much of research money goes into producing competitive drugs rather than new drugs. So overall poor people will fare much better, the middle class hopefully not much worse, and I suspect the very rich will do just fine as well. The people who really get hurt with socialized medicine are the elderly, those with serious but very rare diseases, and the very sick who need very expensive care for even a small chance of survival. Plus at this point we can start socialized medicine with an advantage most nations didn't have - we already have huge stocks of the very expensive medical diagnostic equipment that socialized medicine finds so hard to fund.
Cutting taxes increases government revenue. Period. Even Barack Obama admitted that when he recently said he might have to postpone letting the Bush tax cuts expire to keep the economy going. The argument for raising high income taxes is for fairness - liberals believe it is worth taking a hit in revenue to punish high earners in order to flatten the income curve.
