Florida Election Results Thread

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1. cassandra m says:

   January 31, 2012 at 9:24 pm

   Newtie is promising everything except a sack of Krugerrands if conservatives will elect him. It is the most pathetic display I have ever seen.

   Utterly delusional.

2. MJ says:

   January 31, 2012 at 9:38 pm

   Go Newt Go

3. puck says:

   January 31, 2012 at 10:30 pm

   I heard most of Romney’s victory speech on the car radio. He was ignoring Newt and going after Obama with a pretty good speech. Truthy as hell, but it sounded good. He actually promised to expand the military and balance the budget. Most people won’t appreciate the stupidity of that remark. Romney’s busloads of teen Mormons cheered. Plus, Newt may have some more surprises for Mitt.

   Just wait until Romney is nominated, and then all this talk about Romney being unelectable will be over with. The media will reset the clock as if the GOP primary never happened, and all of Romney’s wacky GOP economic theories will be given equal weight with real economics.

   One of Mitt’s themes was that unemployment hadn’t gotten fixed under Obama. Obama left himself wide open to that by extending the Bush tax cuts, thereby making sure no meaningful job recovery could begin. That one lapse alone could make this a close race.

4. Liberal Elite says:

   February 1, 2012 at 12:17 am

   Poor turnout… Really poor.

   There was an exit poll that also showed that 38% of the voters that did bother to show up didn’t like their limited choices.

   All this bodes well for Obama in the fall.

5. walt says:

   February 1, 2012 at 9:14 am

   Four years ago many said a Mormon candidate would be unelectable. Then a Muslim was elected President. And Romney certainly would not be the first rich President. Didn’t that fellow with the “New Deal” come in with a few sheckels? And you can’t forget Kennedy. And both rich Dems. How ’bout that?

6. Geezer says:

   February 1, 2012 at 9:24 am

   “Obama left himself wide open to that by extending the Bush tax cuts, thereby making sure no meaningful job recovery could begin.”

   That’s not actually the story. Failing to spend enough federal funds to stimulate the economy is why we have a tepid recovery. That spending does not depend on taxing the rich. Consider: Congress passed Medicare Part D and fought two wars, all on borrowed money. If we didn’t need to raise taxes for that federal spending, we didn’t need to raise it for stimulating the economy either.

7. Jason330 says:

   February 1, 2012 at 9:28 am

   If team Obama is good at one thing, it is beating Republicans in head’s up matches on election day. I think I’ll try to filter out the white noise from the media trying to turn this into a horse race and just see everyone at the post-election celebration party.

   Cheers!

8. socialistic ben says:

   February 1, 2012 at 9:30 am

   Im proud to have a muslim president!
   because of my ne pledges to myself not to argue with uneducated right wing troll-federates (new word)
   Im going to tell my fellow liberals about how i dont dislike rich people at all. I think wealth is awesome and i want some of it….. dispite my socialist leanings on issues like
   “should people make money by deciding to let someone die”
   or “is it worth pumping toxic chemicals into someone else’s drinking water so i can get a multi million dollar bonus”…… I think hard work should be rewarded.
   If you do an important job like fight crime, or put out fires, or educate children, or restart a stopped heart, you should make lot’s of money for the very important job you do for society. Conservatives dont see it this way. they see teachers, and cops, and fire fighters as public leaches (unless they can use the fire fighters heroics to sell a war) They think that however you make money is fine and dandy. Mitt Romney was born into wealth.
   He never has had to do a day of hard wrk in his life and he has never “risked” anything. Risk is making and investment that, if it doesn’t go well, you are in poverty…. lucky for most americans this “risk” is now called “not getting sick or injured”. Mitt Romney started out with so much money that he was even able to bet against his own investments so, if things went poorly, only the lowly workers got hurt and he got paid. People who are pretending to like him as a candidate have no argument for this. Romney has spent his entire life getting things handed to him, never facing any consequences, being rewarded for success AND failure. His Mormonism has nothing to with anything (not for me anyway) It’s a fun gag and a punch-line, but in the end I don’t think he is even that devout. He gives a lot of money to the church, so he gets a high rank.

9. puck says:

   February 1, 2012 at 9:33 am

   Geezer: Firing people is profitable and hiring them is unprofitable, and it has been that way since 2001, because of absurdly low investment taxes. Ask Mitt Romney.

   Under Clinton capital gains were taxed at 25% (later 20%), and dividends were taxed as regular income at 39%. That differential was a powerful incentive for executives to re-invest in their business rather than juicing the balance sheet and skimming off dividends. But Bush and Obama cut both rates to 15% – no more differential.

   The Bush tax cuts changed the hiring and growth philosophies of the “job creators,” which is why they gave up on creating jobs. They need to expire this year (the tax cuts that is, not the job creators).

10. puck says:

    February 1, 2012 at 9:58 am

    Also, a lot of the dislike for Romney comes from conservatives attacking him from the right and calling him too liberal. But in the general, nobody is going to be attacking from the right. It will be up to Obama to draw contrasts from the left. And the contrasts are not very sharp.

11. cassandra m says:

    February 1, 2012 at 10:03 am

    Firing people has been profitable for longer than 2001. You apparently missed the M&A bubbles in the 80’s and 90’s. The privileging of investment income over earned income wasn’t new in 2001. Those tax cuts wouldn’t have meant much more to recovery in this kind of a downturn — a good 30% of the stimulus was tax cuts and it didn’t add much. The only thing that expiring tax cuts would have meant was slowing down the rate of deficit and debt increase.

12. Geezer says:

    February 1, 2012 at 10:06 am

    Puck: Cass is right. The tax cuts have nothing to do with government spending, other than fueling Tea Party attacks of the vapors.

    Job creators are creating millions of jobs. Just not here. You make money by selling into countries with a growing middle class, not those with a shrinking middle class.

    If you were in business, would you rather cater to the shrinking American middle class or the growing middle classes in China, India and Brazil?

13. puck says:

    February 1, 2012 at 10:20 am

    I didn’t miss anything. Firing people wasn’t profitable in the 1990s, because then you could not maintain output to meet demand. But the 2001 cuts gave a more powerful incentive to fire people even if it meant bankruptcy down the road. See Romney, Mitt. It is no coincidence that Bain’s fattest years were in the 2000s.

    A 39% rate on dividends and a 25% rate on capital gains would have made the Bain story very different. The profit in gutting the companies would have been removed. It would have been cheaper to hire people and grow the companies instead.

    “The privileging of investment income over earned income wasn’t new in 2001.”

    Nobody said it was. It’s just that the 2001 cuts vastly increased the privilege of investment.

    Anyway I wasn’t talking about THAT privilege. I was talking about the differential between two different kinds of unearned income (capital gains vs. dividends), which was a 19% differential during the Clinton Boom, but 0% differential during the Bush/Obama years.

    Dividends are distributed out of profits and are payable the same year. At 39% personal tax rate, you think twice before distributing dividends. But at 15% it’s a no brainer.

14. puck says:

    February 1, 2012 at 10:24 am

    “If you were in business, would you rather cater to the shrinking American middle class or the growing middle classes in China, India and Brazil?”

    Given the current tax rates, I’ll take the new markets.

    But given the Clinton rates, I’d probably need to pay more attention to hiring people and selling product in the US, in addition to the new markets.

    Also, in the SOTU Obama did mention removing the tax incentive for offshoring jobs, and give the tax breaks for US hiring and investment instead. Let’s see if that gets turned into law or not.

15. cassandra m says:

    February 1, 2012 at 10:27 am

    It certainly was profitable — which is why two airlines could merge, keep up with the demand for travel AND let go rafts of people. In my own business, engineering firms were merging (and letting go people) like crazy. They weren’t just getting the demand, they were using their resources better to meet that demand. The difference in the late 90’s was that there was someplace (in the main) for those workers to go, so all of that productivity realignment was masked. But the people who made money from all of this new efficiency were the investors and owners — certainly not workers.

16. socialistic ben says:

    February 1, 2012 at 11:15 am

    “im not concerned about the poor” – mitt romney. i love it.

17. Jason330 says:

    February 1, 2012 at 11:19 am

    Guess who else doesn’t care about the poor….. voters. I don’t think Mitt made the gaffe here people think he made. As far as independents are concerned, Democrats are a bunch of brown skinned welfare cheats, and the wealthy white enablers of welfare cheats.

18. socialistic ben says:

    February 1, 2012 at 11:22 am

    ya know… i think you’re right. most people’s reaction to this is “well, IM not poor… and America means we should only be concerned with ourselves…. who who cares what he says about someone else. He isnt talking about me!” isnt that right generic Right wing Troll-federates?

19. auntie dem says:

    February 1, 2012 at 11:36 am

    Not to mention that poor people aren’t reliable voters. There are people working two or three jobs to make ends meet and getting to the polls isn’t on their Tuesday schedule. Or they have transportation issues. There are fellons who have lost their right to vote. There are those who don’t have proper ID in some states and won’t be allowed to vote this year. Our nation has a long history of finding ways to keep the poor from voting. If you compare demographics, wealthy districts have strong turnout and poor districts have very weak turnout. That’s not an accident.

20. Geezer says:

    February 1, 2012 at 11:38 am

    Puck: I don’t know where you’re getting this, but I find it wildly wrong-headed. First of all, the taxes you’re talking about are based only on what individuals pay, not the corporations themselves, which means you’re buying the unsupported notion that what “job creators” pay in personal income tax somehow affects their investment decisions in their corporations.

    The situation you describe holds no matter what the tax rates are: When the economy grows, businesses invest, and when it doesn’t, they don’t. The idea that the tax code, rather than the book value of a company, determines whether a business is broken up or invested in is just plain wrong. The particulars of any one company has far more to do with it.

21. Geezer says:

    February 1, 2012 at 11:50 am

    I agree with Jason. That was no gaffe. Auntie is right that poor people don’t vote; when they do, they vote for Democrats. He’s aiming for the middle class voters.