heywood on 19/9/2012 at 10:30

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To be fair, that is consistent with the Obama position. Obama says he wants to keep the Bush-era tax cuts for lower and middle class families, and he defined the upper threshold for middle class to be $250k/year household income. In an ABC interview, Romney said "No one can say my plan is going to raise taxes on middle-income people, because principle number one is (to) keep the burden down on middle-income taxpayers." When pressed, he defined middle-income as up to $200-250k/year per household. So both candidates are consistent with each other in defining the upper limit on middle class/middle income. The difference is that the press didn't make any issue of it with Obama but the AP tried to make a story of it with Romney and everyone ran with the AP story painting Romney as out of touch.



I don't think it's hypocritical. I suspect that the non-income tax payers in the South are disproportionately black and Hispanic and are overwhelmingly Obama supporters. But they are outweighed by the even larger number of social conservatives who tend to vote Republican.



You could see after the early primaries that the Republicans were never going to win this election. Romney was the obvious nominee from day one and the most electable candidate the Republicans had. If the tea partiers were smart, they would have gotten behind Romney early on so he could focus on the general election, in return for getting their people into his cabinet. Instead, they put up a futile anybody-but-Romney fight through the primaries, forced him to tack to the right, and painted him into a corner. They got a Paul Ryan VP pick for their efforts, but poisoned Romney's bid for the general election, so in the end their opposition will be futile. I don't think any other Republican candidate could have done much better. Since 2010, the base of the Republican party has gone hardcore and it's presently impossible to pitch a big enough tent to win the general election while keeping them in it.

And I wouldn't lose sleep over that if Obama didn't turn out to be such a spineless disappointing useless fuck. The US needs another FDR or Lincoln but has a Carter.

heywood on 19/9/2012 at 12:02

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Your reading comprehension sucks

DDL on 19/9/2012 at 13:48

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Heywood (assuming that was directed at me)



Now depending on how you read that, it could either be that he defines the 200-250k bracket as "middle", or that 200-250k is the approximate value of the top end of "middle" income.

Either way, though, it seems to be clear that 100k is NOT middle to Romney, so we're looking at somewhere upward of 100k for the LOWER bracket of middle income (and I would consider 100k a year to be quite a lot, personally).

DDL on 19/9/2012 at 14:20

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(http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-george-stephanopoulos-and-mitt-romney/) Transcript!

It's about a third of the way down (depending on how your browser decides to format it, admittedly).

Apparently 75% of US households fall between 25k and 100k a year, so the outright "no" to 100k being middle seems....worrying.

(of course it's entirely possible that the upper bracket of the US earn SO FUCKING MUCH that the mean income is in the 200k range while the median is 50k, but I'd imagine the median to be the more voter-relevant value, here)

(plus to work out a mean income you'd need to actually get figures for that upper bracket, and they often seem reluctant to provide those :p)

Stitch on 19/9/2012 at 14:42

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Economics is exactly why you should vote for Obama. Loaning ourselves money at historically low interest rates isn't exactly the biggest concern given the size of the recession we were dealing with.