here's the truth about both candaites
July 9, 2008 | As gas and food prices soar and job losses mount, John McCain launched a new effort this week to reassure Americans that he has a plan to bring back economic growth. McCain spoke at a town-hall event in Denver Monday and will travel to the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania on Wednesday and Michigan and Wisconsin on Thursday and Friday to spread his economic message.
The economy has vaulted past Iraq and terrorism as the most pressing concern on voters' minds this election season, and both McCain and Barack Obama are trying to show they feel voters' pain. McCain has called for help for those facing mortgage foreclosures and has pledged to balance the federal budget by 2013. But the centerpiece of his economic plan is a tax-cut proposal more sweeping than anything envisioned by George W. Bush.
"The choice in this election is stark and simple," McCain said at the Denver town hall. "Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't. I will cut them where I can."
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But according to a respected, independent group of tax-policy experts, McCain’s plan would balloon the deficit and provide a windfall to the wealthy while affording only nominal relief to middle-class taxpayers. McCain has moved toward the Republican base on a handful of issues this campaign season, but his tax plan might actually shift the erstwhile deficit hawk to the right of the current president.
A 2004 study by the Congressional Budget Office found a full third of Bush's controversial 2001 and 2003 tax cuts went to the top 1 percent of earners. McCain's tax cuts would be more massive than Bush's, and appear to skew even more to the wealthy. President Bush touted his breaks as providing a boost for the economy, but some tax-policy experts credit Bush's tax policy with shifting the tax burden to the middle class, ballooning budget deficits, and contributing to a widening disparity in personal wealth.
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In addition to permanently extending Bush's tax cuts, the major features of McCain's plan include slashing the corporate tax, reducing the estate tax, giving companies a deduction on new equipment and increasing the child tax credit. McCain also wants to extend relief from the gas tax this summer and the alternative minimum tax (AMT), which has been hitting upper-middle-class families with higher tax rates in recent years.
McCain's most sweeping proposal is allowing taxpayers to figure their taxes under an optional alternative system. McCain's campaign hasn't fleshed out the details, but said it will offer a large standard deduction and an increased personal exemption.
To get a sense of McCain's ambition, his tax cuts would cost the federal budget as much as $4 trillion from 2009 through the end of 2018, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. That's eight times the size of the Pentagon's base budget this year. Bush's cuts would cost only $1.6 trillion if extended to cover the same ten-year period.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, the national co-chair of McCain's campaign, summed up the candidate's current thinking succinctly during a June interview on ABC's "This Week." Host George Stephanopoulos asked Graham how McCain's tax and healthcare policy compared to Bush's.
Stephanopoulos: "John McCain is calling for an extension or maybe even an enhancement of the Bush policies?"
Graham: "Yeah, absolutely."
The most in-depth comparison to date of McCain and Barack Obama's tax plans was performed by the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the center-left Brookings Institution and Urban Institute that is nonetheless staffed by both Republicans and Democrats -- co-director Eugene Steuerle was a deputy assistant secretary under Ronald Reagan -- and is known for its methodological rigor. Its 38-page analysis found that McCain's proposals would make the tax system even "more regressive" than permanently extending the Bush tax cuts of 2001 to 2006. McCain would accomplish this by following Bush's blueprint and then supersizing it: providing "relatively little" tax relief to low- and middle-income earners, while giving "huge tax cuts" to the highest income brackets.
The Tax Policy Center's computations show stark differences between the Obama and McCain plans in their relative impact on middle-class and high-income taxpayers. A middle-class family making $66,000 a year would see their taxes drop by $319 a year under McCain's proposal, while a wealthy family making $604,000 a year would see a cut of $45,000. By contrast, Obama offers the biggest breaks for taxpayers at the bottom and in the middle of the income spectrum, while imposing sizeable tax increases on some of the highest earners -- those making more than $250,000 annually. Under Obama's plan, the middle-income family would receive a tax break that is three times larger than McCain's -- $1,042. The wealthy family would see a tax increase of $116,000 a year.
McCain’s campaign did not respond to Salon's requests for comment, but McCain’s economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin called the analysis "misleading on the whole and wrong in some particulars" in a response on the Tax Policy Center’s blog. Holtz-Eakin’s main argument was the analysis did not give enough weight to the spending cuts that will offset McCain’s tax cuts.
McCain would likely be making any economic proposals to a hostile Democratic Congress, so his ability to implement new tax cuts is questionable. But observers on the right have offered praise for McCain's intentions anyway. Conservative anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist called McCain a "tax-increasing Bolshevik" in 2005, and slammed him early in this election cycle for balking at signing a no-tax-increase pledge. Now he lauds McCain. When asked by Salon if he preferred the McCain or Bush tax plan, Norquist answered quickly.
"The McCain tax policy is to continue the Bush tax cuts and add three more, so I prefer McCain," Norquist said. He paused for a moment and then added. "McCain's is bigger, better."
Now if people don't belive on the bush famliy here it is on bush and his family with oil
Ive got a significant strawberry." --spoken to reporters about injuries he received after narrowly avoiding flying debris when an out-of-control trailer overturned near where he was jogging.
Best known for: Governor of Texas who emerged as the Republican front-runner in the 2000 presidential campaign. In his first four months of fund-raising, he collected record-setting contributions of $37 million. His early platform included “compassionate conservatism,” the definition of which was intentionally vague.
Born: July 6, 1946 in New Haven, Connecticut, while his father, former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, was a student at Yale.
Family: Parents: George and Barbara Bush. Brothers: Neil, Jeb, Marvin. Sisters: Dorothy, Robin, (Robin died of leukemia at age three). Bush's father graduated from Yale in June 1948. His parents then moved the family to Odessa, Texas, and his father began work in the oil business. During the summer of 1977, Bush met Laura Welch in Midland at a dinner at the home of their mutual friends Joe and Jan O’Neill. They married just over three months later, on November 5, 1977. It was small service attended by their close friends and family. In 1981 their twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were born. They are named after their grandmothers. Their grandfather was the Vice-President of the United States at the time. The new Bush family lived in Midland, later moved to Dallas, and then Washington for a year when President Bush ran for President in 1988. Barbara and Jenna attend public school in Austin.
Education: Attended Phillips Academy prep school at Andover, then Yale from 1964 until 1968 and graduated with a major in history; played baseball during freshman year and rugby during junior and senior years; became a member of the super-secret Skull and Bones society, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather; later attended Harvard and earned a Masters of Business Administration in 1975. Bush was such a mediocre student that the dean of students at Andover was pessimistic about his chances of getting into Yale. The suggested that he have a backup option. Harvard Business school was a backup option that he had to take advantage of after the University of Texas law school turned him down. Harvard alums say the admissions process was somewhat mysterious. One of Bush's Harvard classmates was a circus barker.
Profession: In the West Texas energy business, George W. Bush started out researching who owned mineral rights. He later traded mineral and royalty interests and invested in drilling prospects. He had started his own oil and gas company by 1978, taking $17,000 from his education trust fund to set up Arbusto Energy (arbusto means Bush in Spanish). The company fell on hard times when oil prices fell. He made several attempts to revive the business, first by changing the company's name and later by merging with other companies. In 1983, Bush’s company was rescued from failure when Spectrum 7 Energy Corporation, a small oil firm owned by William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, bought it. Bush became chief executive officer. Harken Energy Corporation acquired Spectrum 7 in 1986, after Spectrum had lost $400,000. In the buyout deal, Bush and his partners were given more than $2 million worth of Harken stock for the 180-well operation. Bush became a director and was hired as a "consultant" to Harken. He received another $600,000 of Harken stock, and has been paid between $42,000 and $120,000 a year. By the spring of 1987, Harken was in need of cash. So Bush and his fellow Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc., an investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas (Stephens contributed $100,000 to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.) Stephens arranged for Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Bush’s company in return for a stock interest in Harken. As part of the deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken's board as a major investor. Stephens, UBS, and Bakhsh each had ties to the infamous, scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In 1990, Bush sold his remaining stock options and left the oil business. Writer Jack Colhoun revealed some details of that stock sale, referring to Bush by his childhood nickname “Junior”:
On June 22, 1990, George Jr. sold two-thirds of his Harken stock for $848,560-a cool 200 percent profit. The move was well timed. One week after Junior sold his stock, Harken announced a $23.2 million loss in quarterly earnings and Harken stock dropped sharply, losing 60 percent of its value over the next six months. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops moved into Kuwait and 541,000 U.S. forces were deployed to the Gulf.
"There is substantial evidence to suggest that Bush knew Harken was in dire straits in the weeks before he sold the $848,560 of Harken stock," asserted U.S. News & World Report. The magazine noted Harken appointed Junior to a 'fairness committee' to study possible economic restructuring of the company. Junior worked closely with financial advisers from Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Company, who concluded "only drastic action could save Harken."
A year earlier, in 1989, Bush prepared for his move from the oil business to the sports business when he helped assemble a group who purchased the Texas Rangers baseball team from Eddie Chiles. He and Rusty Rose served as managing general partners until Bush was elected Governor of Texas in 1994.
Career: Pilot in the Texas Air National Guard from 1968 until 1973. Attended flight school and flew F-102 aircraft with the 147th Fighter Wing, 111th Fighter Squadron of the Texas Air National Guard. Campaigned for U.S. Congress in 1978 in a large West Texas district that included his hometown of Midland. He defeated two opponents in the Republican primary, but lost in the general election to Democrat Kent Hance. After the election he went back to the energy business and built his oil company.
Bush was among the earliest financial contributors to the senate campaign of Phil Gramm in 1984. In 1986 and 1987, Bush worked on his father's presidential campaign as an adviser and speechwriter, moving to Washington in 1987 to work full time on the campaign. After the election he returned to Texas, then moved back to Washington in 1991 to work as an adviser on his father's re-election campaign. In 1994 George W. Bush defeated Democratic incumbent Ann Richards to become the 46th Governor of the State of Texas.
During his second four-year term as governor, Bush announced he was running for U.S. president. He had already been given the status of Republican front-runner in the 2000 presidential campaign. In his first four months of fund-raising, he collected record-setting contributions of $37 million.
Bush's first defeat came early in the campaign, however, with a big loss to Senator John McCain of Arizona in the New Hampshire Primary. After the sound defeat was clear in the state of New Hampshire, Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, was quoted congratulating McCain for winning, then oddly adding that the Bush campaign was prepared to win and beat McCain in all 50 states, although only 47 state contests remained. McCain skipped the Iowa Caucuses a week earlier, conceding that state to Bush. The razor-thin Bush win in the Alaska GOP Caucus was by a mere five votes over publisher Steve Forbes.
Now there's a reason Brack is travling to other countries in my opion and the reason why is apporval of the leaders there and not only that over a third of the world if not more hate americans in they seem to be giving him better approvel then they did macain and yes he traveled to them as well but they didn't like him as well and with that.What it could mean if he get's in office people should be more worried about this country being hated even more and also more countries wanting to do more attacks on this country and not only that everytime it come's close to election the two presidental candates do there share of going to other country's, democrats as well as republicans in also travling around the United States.
Abortion can be touche subject but here's my thoughts on abortion it should be allowed if a female is raped because thats going against there will. In other case through it should be illigal like for exemple somebody can't afford it they should give it up for adotion or if they had sex with somebody at free well and end up preganet then they should also give it for adopion so basically what I'm saying the only good for abortion is if somebody raped other than that there sould laws against somebody wanting an abortion without good reason.
Some democrats are against the borders being open and some arent in thats also true with republicans so when people say all democrats are for open borders that's not true because alot stuff like the borders being open as been going on for the past hundred years so there things that I agree with republicans on but there also things I agree with the democrats on like for exemple being against the war and sending the troops home but things I agree with republicans on like tighter borders but not all republicans want that in not all democrats want it so there's positive negetive things on both sides.
Another Issue that people have problems with is rising taxes which yes the democrat party supports it but without taxes there isn't money for stuff like the building of fast tracks which help save people with travling around town and also rising taxes does alot of good on nonprofit organzations that support the needy and disabled in also help the homeless in getting food and as well as people wanting to go to college or a trade school that can't afford it because of come from family's that live off of low income and yes republicans are against rising taxes but the only ones who get taxcuts are the rich which is people that don't have to work because have enough money they don't have to worry about work and also big business owners.
Immigrants flooding the job market is a terrible thing because for starters alot of them don't have green cards and not only that it has hurt alot of people in this country on jobs like for exemple it's cased alot of people to be jobless or work job's that don't pay as much because there are employers who would rather hirer them so they have people that can payless. In not only that they don't have to pay taxes on new vehicals plus they are put at the top of list for low income housing assiantance.
