First things first, my many thanks to Mark Block, Fred Dooley, Erik Telford, and Americans for Prosperity for this opportunity. I can now tick off a couple more items on my “must do” list. Now that I’ve done that, and gathered as much reax as I could find, it’s time to try to put my thoughts in some semblance of order, and take the long view.
It is a big shame that Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson didn’t make themselves available to the bloggers and the press, and not just because we never got sound up on Bloggers’/Press Row. I wanted to see those two, especially Thompson, operate outside the safety net of a prepared speech and expected questions. To a lesser extent, I have the same complaint about Mitt Romney, though by that time, all the “real” media and almost all the bloggers had departed the Row. While Steve (no, NOT me), Fred and Leslie would’ve put up good questions, I know I wouldn’t have. While John McCain also was not available to the bloggers/media, that was more of a question of logistics (there was no place for Bloggers’/Media Row in the Hart Building).
Speaking of those questions, while the press dominated the Q&As with Ron Paul, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee, the bloggers brave enough to ask questions (see above) did come up with some land mines. Paul definitely detonated one with Fred’s question (the 9th and last one).
The biggest limitation was that lack of audio up in Bloggers’ Row. Part of it was the fact that we had radio shows broadcasting live from the room all day (that’s the source of all the extraneous noise on my audio from Paul, Brownback and Huckabee), though it was never fixed or fixable. About the time I would catch up on blogging, I found myself too late for the afternoon session going on at that point. I made it worse by perpetuating the vicious cycle because the Wi-Fi didn’t make it all the way up to the room and the Mayflower charges an arm and a leg for wired access.
I mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again; if anybody has extended audio/video from the main hall or the afternoon sessions (yes, I know all about the Defending the Dream YouTube channel), I would like it.
Enough gripes; on to the candidates. Giuliani does indeed know his audience, and knows how to destroy the clock (I’ll get back to that). Paul is a 69-percenter (and that’s on the college 70%-to-pass scale); there’s a lot that I can relate to, yet the big negatives are completely insurmountable. Brownback doesn’t quite light my fire, though his prop of choice was great. Huckabee doesn’t know the first thing about federalism, and he’s too wedded to a national sales tax. Thompson would be a runaway in an earlier time (say, 1988 or perhaps as late as 1992), but he has some baggage. If I could ignore Romney’s past (especially on health care), I could warm up to him; unfortunately, I can’t.
On to the BIG controversy, at least for the Paul-nuts – the “silencing” of their man. That’s one of the reasons why I want the extended audio/video; I want to accurately time how long everybody got. I do know that all of the candidates ran over, and that Giuliani, who went first, went over the longest.
Mitigating that is the fact that the “minor” 3 all spent time with us bloggers and the media, while the “big” 4 (including McCain) did not. Even before one adds in the 3 stations that Paul did interviews on, he got better than 20 minutes of microphone time. I wish I had been better with the mike, but I’m still learning with that new piece of equipment as I picked it up earlier in the week and didn’t have a chance to find out its limitations.
Even with the problems in Bloggers’ Row, that was a blast. I got to meet a bunch of great people, some all-too-briefly, see some pros at work (no, I’m not talking about the press in the center of the room), and find out how at least some of the candidates handle less-than-scripted questions. If I weren’t so quiet,….
Other than missing the “working” sessions (note to self; pay for the ‘Net in the room next time so you don’t burn the “working” sessions catching up on blogging), it was simply an awesome time. Fred and I even got in some sightseeing on a foggy Saturday. Saturday, though he headed back to the hotel early. I will say that 1 hour in the Air and Space Museum is not nearly enough. Those pics will be up tomorrow.
“Too wedded to the national sales tax”? Brother, you’re missing the forest for the trees. It’s ALL about the system of taxation! The income tax system keeps the people divided and ensures continued manipulation through social engineering powered by tax favors and recissions. Wake up, Junior.
URL edited 3:17 am 10/7/2007 – Do not use TinyURLs.
[…] Thompson, operate outside the safety net of a prepared speech and expected questions source: DAD my react, No Runny […]
I beg to differ, Ian. It’s about the level of taxation, and FairTax does NOTHING to stop that. Indeed, at the level that is required to replace all the other taxes (
23%30%), it would open up the black market like never before.I don’t suppose you want the Detroit River militarized, do you? In order to keep the suddenly-cheap Canadian products from being smuggled across like they were during Prohibition, you’ll need a literal army there.
Differ away, steve. The primary problem with the income tax system is its socially-engineered tax code (which relies on taxing, and thereby using, businesses to hide consumer taxes in higher prices, while providing a “straw man” against which to pit “workers”), and its increasingly steepened progressivity, which work together, synergistically, being “nurtured by certain of those of the political class whose main interest seems to be to have one segment of society purchase and pay for a captive and dependent constituency.” Indeed, it’s time for radical surgery. If the “meltdown” spoken of by Dr. Kotlikoff is true, then scrapping the tax code and enacting a more visible national sales tax (a/k/a “FairTax”) is something that must happen, and soon!
By the way, because the FairTax removes the 22% tax/compliance costs embedded in products:
Prices after FairTax passage would look similar to prices before FairTax – not “30% higher” as opponents contend – competition would see to it. So, the FairTax rate (figured as an income-tax-rate-non-comparative, sales tax) on new items would be 29.85% (on the new, reduced cost of items because business isn’t taxed under FairTax – thus lowering retail prices by 20% to 30%), or 23% of the “tax inclusive” price tag – this is the way INCOME TAX is figured (parts of the total dollar).
The effective tax rate percentages, that different income groups would pay under the FairTax, are calculated by crediting the monthly “prebate” (advance rebate of projected tax on necessities) against total monthly spending of citizen families (1 member and greater, Dept. of HHS poverty-level data; a single person receiving ~$200/mo, a family of four, ~$500/mo, in addition to working earners receiving paychecks with no Federal deductions) Prof.’s Kotlikoff and Rapson (10/06) concluded,
“…the FairTax imposes much lower average taxes on working-age households than does the current system. The FairTax broadens the tax base from what is now primarily a system of labor income taxation to a system that taxes, albeit indirectly, both labor income and existing wealth. By including existing wealth in the effective tax base, much of which is owned by rich and middle-class elderly households, the FairTax is able to tax labor income at a lower effective rate and, thereby, lower the average lifetime tax rates facing working-age Americans.
“Consider, as an example, a single household age 30 earning $50,000. The household’s average tax rate under the current system is 21.1 percent. It’s 13.5 percent under the FairTax. Since the FairTax would preserve the purchasing power of Social Security benefits and also provide a tax rebate, older low-income workers who will live primarily or exclusively on Social Security would be better off. As an example, the average remaining lifetime tax rate for an age 60 married couple with $20,000 of earnings falls from its current value of 7.2 percent to -11.0 percent under the FairTax. As another example, compare the current 24.0 percent remaining lifetime average tax rate of a married age 45 couple with $100,000 in earnings to the 14.7 percent rate that arises under the FairTax.”
Further, per Jokischa and Kotlikoff (circa 2006?) …
“…once one moves to generations postdating the baby boomers there are positive welfare gains for all income groups in each cohort. Under a 23 percent FairTax policy, the poorest members of the generation born in 1990 enjoy a 13.5 percent welfare gain. Their middle-class and rich contemporaries experience 5 and 2 percent welfare gains, respectively. The welfare gains are largest for future generations. Take the cohort born in 2030. The poorest members of this cohort enjoy a huge 26 percent improvement in their well-being. For middle class members of this birth group, there’s a 12 percent welfare gain. And for the richest members of the group, the gain is 5 percent.”