I am not adverse to ‘bottom-up,’ as long as it’s a rational implementation. I find it galling that Wall St. gets bailed out for failure whereas a small business is taxed for success. I don’t think that people understand the amount of risk that’s undertaken in trying to grow a small business. There should be some reward for taking that risk in the first place. That the W-2 wage earners making three figures below an arbitrary threshold should get a tax cut just blows my mind.

Here’s something BO said about the ‘bitter clingers:’

And because Democrats haven’t met them halfway on cultural issues, we’ve not been able to communicate to them effectively an economic agenda that would help broaden our coalition.

Jackass. See — the rights of women and gays are ‘negotiable’ just so that Democrats can get more votes. It’s as unprincipled as his phony soak the ‘rich’ appeals to the upper middle class.

The McCain platform doesn’t work for me on economics (I don’t think we should be talking about *any* tax cuts — we will not grow our way out of this) or social issues, ugh. However, I’ll give McCain/Palin credit for consistency. My contempt for Repubs has flatlined, while it’s growing in leaps and bounds for the Dems.

If it were ’socialism,’ then ‘95% of you’ wouldn’t be getting a tax cut. As I mentioned above, I find no justification for a W-2 employee 175K getting a tax cut while it is incumbent on a sole proprietor with a $200K “profit” to ’share the wealth.’ It’s not socialism, it’s just cynical.

Get back to me with a graduated obligation to contribute to the common good, and I’m happy.

For example, the elimination of a capital gains tax on start-ups. How many start-ups are selling profitable business assets? And what defines capital gains for the typical small business structure? It just comes across as muddling around.

No. He is unconvinced that Obama should be the decision-maker on how to spread the wealth around instead of “Joe the Plumber”, the one who took the risks in the first place to grow the business and is the actual job-producer, not Obama.

It’s not like your net “profit” is a constant, or even guaranteed, year-to-year. Remember that your “profit” is alrady defined to a large degree by the tax code — one that tells the small business owner (sole proprietor is the most common structure) to compute a self-employment tax (2 * FICA) BEFORE taking any kind of deduction to personal income for health insurance. A deduction, not a credit.

This $200K “profit” is used in part to insulate against a down year — a risk the govt partner is not taking.

It simply doesn’t make any sense to me that a civil servant making $150K/yr (commonplace where I live) in salary, along with (untaxed) benefits like health insurance, etc is not called upon, likewise, to “share the wealth.”

The idea is provide jobs that pay well enough so more households can afford

Then the risk needs to be pooled as well. It shouldn’t be on JtP’s shoulders while his employees aren’t even billed an additional nickel for the common good, so that Mr. Obama doesn’t lose any votes. In other words, I would agree with you as long as BO’s programs were truly progressive — they are not.