Indulge me.

[kellinator]

For those of you who are planning to vote for Bush in November, would you please tell me why? Preferably a reason a little more nuanced than "Kerry's an asshole"?

Note: You're not going to change my mind on this. If the past four years haven't changed my mind, a fifty-word comment sure as hell isn't going to do it.

I'm just trying to understand. Right now nothing scares me more than the thought of four more years of Bush, but I know there are people I like and respect who disagree for whatever reason, and I want to know why, so I can at least try to understand.

No flaming. If I'm too slammed to post my DragonCon pictures (coming soon!), I'm sure as hell too busy to play referee. Play nice, folks.

Comments

[sujata.livejournal.com]

Democrats should be allowed to run things? Surely you jest!

the reason democrats should be allowed to run things is that they think goverment can do things better than profit motivated private enterprises, which is demonstrably false

Of course it's false. We need look no further than Enron and Halliburton to see that business efficiency and ethics is far superior to government's handling of anything.

education can be delivered better and more inexpensively by the private sector, but Kerry & his ilk prefer to spend still more money on a broken system that yields no results

Precisely. Polls in the 1970s indicated that the majority of Americans felt public schools were doing a good job, and prepared people who wouldn't be going on to college to earn a good living with only a high school education. But of course, the 1970s were the latter part of the Dark Age. We know now that outsourcing jobs that don't require a college education is a good thing, and No Child Left Behind has revealed that our public schools (even those that were celebrated by their states as models of excellence) are abyssmal failures that only vouchers to attend private schools can remedy.

And no, it doesn't mean anything that in areas where vouchers have been implemented, there are now calls to eliminate the requirement that children receiving vouchers be from lower-income households. There's no insidious plot here to divert public school funding to send well-off kids to private schools. It may be that there's a plot here to destroy the public school system altogether, but if so, that's just what we need. (See above regarding public schools being abyssmal failures.)

and social security is going to require huge tax increases if it isn't fixed now

Indeed, that is a problem. But how to solve it?

Certainly not by increasing anybody's taxes. Not even by restoring the taxes on the rich that were cut by giving away the budget surplus built to guarantee the survival of Social Security.

Oh! I've got it! Let's just do away with Social Security, and replace it with private retirement accounts. We'll allow people to deposit, say, up to $30,000 per year tax-free. That none of the poor and over half the middle-class doesn't even earn that much per year isn't a problem, really; it's high time those freeloaders learn how to save and invest.

Now, what will we do with the payroll tax that we imposed (on the wage-earning poor and middle class) to fund Social Security...? *ponders* Oh, hell, let's keep it. That one, we might even raise. With Social Security gone, we can use the revenues from the payroll tax to afford still more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.

Who can then, in theory, use that capital to produce more, with increased production creating a gazillion new jobs... Just like they've been doing throughout the first three years of the Bush administration!

;-)