Sixty-five percent of Americans say the Nov. 6 results gave Obama a “mandate” on his proposal to raise tax rates on income over $250,000 and “to get it done.” Forty-five percent of Republicans agree.
The election “was basically a referendum that wealthy people could and would pay more,” said poll respondent Jim Johnson, 66, of Littleton, Colorado, a retired telecommunications executive and a Republican who voted for Mitt Romney. “It was perfectly clear. That was Obama’s stance throughout the election.”
Poll respondent Gerald Watts, 75, of Lake Quivira, Kansas, a retired engineer and another Republican who voted for Romney, read the election results the same way.
“Every time we listened to him on TV, he’d start talking about raising taxes on the rich — every news conference, every time he went up in front of a group,” said Watts. “He didn’t want to talk about anything else.”
Now is the time when we dance…
Via Sullivan.
scav
Now there’s a cliff. Ha,
JohnK
Slashing earned retirement and medical benefits for old people to continue a 4,6-percent tax cut for the fabulously wealthy is so popular! It gives republicans a boner for their war on Christmas.
ruemara
I wasn’t sure we had an election, since it seems the only consequence has been the world’s longest Republican temper tantrum.
kdaug
Amused watching millionaire TV hosts trying to wiggle around the fact that, yeah – we’re talking about you.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
The hilarious thing about those two quotes is that all of us know that’s not all Obama talked about. But FOX news ran “raising taxes on the rich” so much to scare it’s viewers that they think Obama won on that promise alone. So Obama’s mandate is in part due to shitty reporting by FOX. Karma.
JGabriel
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Bloomberg News:
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I wonder why?
Annie Lowrey (aka Mrs. Ezra Klein) @ NY Times:
The massive rise in equality is not cause by globalization and skill-based tecnnological change.
It’s caused by rich business owners keeping the productivity & profit gains of the past 30-40 years to themselves instead of sharing them proportionately, and the decimation of the regulations and unions that compelled that sharing.
It’s that simple.
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Forum Transmitted Disease
Dead on. The only quibble I’d have with your statement is that the companies that do this aren’t owned by individuals, they’re publicly traded and most of the money stolen from the employees is going to stockholders (the rentier class) and the C-level officers, many of whom take home money and stock options that a traditional business owner wouldn’t be able to dream of, much less get paid.
JGabriel
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Forum Transmitted Disease:
Yep.
I tried to modify it to owners and executives after posting, but the FYWP editing function wasn’t working. And by “owners”, I did mean the rentier class.
.
Upper West
Um — I was expecting a video . . .
amk
Hey look, miitbot finally wins….
Sarah, Proud and Tall
@Upper West:
Is it not working?
Forum Transmitted Disease
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: No, it isn’t. Some other things seem to be borked, and I get an error message in about the last eight posts after I post – which I’ll post after I post this.
Shit’s all fucked up in here.
nominus
Good article outlining corporate welfare in the professional sports world:
sportsonearth.com/article/40595178/
Forum Transmitted Disease
My entire last post shows up as this:
The problem’s pretty obvious, but someone actually needs to fix it. Apparently Cole can’t see it, and apparently it plays out differently on different browsers.
I’m using Win 7, Opera 12.11, if that helps.
Upper West
@Sarah, Proud and Tall: Just audio. Perhaps videos is NSFW?
Mr Stagger Lee
Hell for the last four years average Americans were on a austerity program, millions are still on austerity, and the rich with their incomes shooting up like a diabetics blood sugar at a Kristy Kreme,has the cheek to say Americans have to sacrifice? As Mallory Knox would say in Natural Born Killers
“Fuck You”!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, in far too many such companies the C-level officers have decided that merely crushing their employees wasn’t good enough, they had to rip off the shareholders too, by hollowing out and looting the company. These folks give parasites a bad name, because most parasites have evolved sufficiently to not kill the host organism.
Ben Franklin
It’s pretty definitive numbers on this one too….
Sixty-four percent of those surveyed in a national Gallup Poll do not want the federal government enforcing federal anti-marijuana laws in the states — Washington and Colorado — that have recently voted to legalize possession, growing and sale of small amounts of cannabis.
blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2012/12/10/national-poll-feds-should-respect-washington-pot-initi…
Decrease Mather
I have to say, the scale on that graph is a little misleading. Obama’s approval has only increased by a few points, and it’s not like 54% is some theoretical max.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ben Franklin: Then those 64% need to contact their congresscritters and get those laws repealed. Paraphrasing a Supreme Court Justice from a while back: Ignoring a law does not repeal it.
Jennifer
Site’s borked for me, too. I keep getting a bad script message, and then when I posted in the last thread, I got the same garble that Forum Transmitted Disease is seeing…and it wouldn’t allow me to edit.
Jennifer
Site’s borked for me, too. I keep getting a bad script message, and then when I posted in the last thread, I got the same garble that Forum Transmitted Disease is seeing…and it wouldn’t allow me to edit.
feebog
We should be talking about raising marginal rates for those making over a million a year to 50%. That’s in addition the the 39.6% over 250K. And even that rate would only slow the inequality, not reverse it.
Villago Delenda Est
@ruemara:
This.
And it is far from over.
Villago Delenda Est
You know, once a post is no longer editable, the warning message goes away.
So perhaps the problem lies in the editing system somewhere?
mikej(droid)
@Villago Delenda Est: I posted the fix last night. Add one line to the wp-config.php.
From reading their fora,half the internet broke when wp auto updated.
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): That’s up there with renaming HRC “Obamacare”, even the GOP of the’30s wasn’t dumb enough to rename Social Security “Roosevelt Retirement”
MattF
Yet another example of the WaPo missing the point:
washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/12/13/the-republican-brand-problem/?hpid=z3
Short version: Poll shows Americans think a lot of negative things about Republicans, WaPo political reporters Cillizza and Blake conclude that Republicans have a ‘brand’ problem.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques: I doubt Hillary liked being called Obamacare either. :)
@MattF: I guess we know who recommended that Blackwater change its name.
Amir Khalid
@Enhanced Mooching Techniques:
I must have missed this one. When did the Republicans rename Hillary?
Villago Delenda Est
@MattF:
I’m not surprised that those two airheads came to the conclusion (as the GOP brain trust will) that the problem lies in marketing the turds the Rethugs are trying to sell to a public that still has a functioning sense of smell.
Punchy
I’m getting a “BAD SCRIPT” message here too. No me gusta.
Ben Franklin
Smoking that cornsilk again……….dollar for dollar trade-off $Trillion hike for ceiling/$trillion from entitlements.
Sounds fair, heh.
thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/272623-corker-introduces-bill-trading-entitlement-cuts-for-deb…
Bobby Thomson
Heh.
Yes, they do. Good thing you’re leaving the exchange to the feds.
I really don’t think that dumbass realized how this would sound.
Ash Can
@Forum Transmitted Disease:
@JGabriel:
I’m having a hard time understanding how shareholders are looting the companies. The way shares work is that people pay money directly to the company to purchase shares. This money is presumably used by the company to grow its operations, and the value of the shares increases only if the almighty market says it should. Shareholders gain wealth only by selling those shares at a higher price, and that money comes from whomever is taking the shares off their hands, not the company — except in the rare cases of companies buying back their own shares, or paying dividends to their shareholders (which only a very few kinds of companies do on a regular basis). In fact, as Left Turn in ABQ says above, the shareholders can and do get ripped off along with the workers, when managements loot the companies themselves, take off, and leave everyone else hanging.
Having said all that, however, I hasten to add that trouble happens when very large shareholders decide to throw their weight around. These shareholders can essentially blackmail company management to do their bidding, with the threat of dumping all their holdings and tanking the stock value. Once again, though, this doesn’t involve cash transfers directly from the company to the shareholders.
TooManyJens
Time to call your Senators — it looks like support for filibuster reform is fading as our delicate flowers ponder whether to strike a deal with the Republicans that, I can only assume, would let them block 98% of Senate business instead of 99%.
washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2012/12/13/is-filibuster-reform-at-risk/
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@MattF:
This obsession with ‘Branding!” has been going on since the election. “Hey, they won’t eat from this bowl of shit we’re serving anymore! Maybe if we put a Coca-Cola logo on the bowl, they’ll come back!”
It’s as if the dotcom mentality has so permeated our culture, that the Very Serious People can now only think within this framing.
El Cid
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This is so utterly bizarre — people somehow think that the second point is not causally related to the first point.
One of the most successful methods of finance & capital having disempowered workers and undermined benefits has been their ability to write ‘trade’ agreements which allowed them to shift production and costs as they wished in manners specifically written to empower that ability and to disempower any intention of preserving any part of ‘trade’ which had to do with increasing domestic development of ordinary people (here or abroad).
Good lord, do people honestly think that the forces of capital weren’t thinking long term when forcing through series of ‘trade’ agreements entirely written by and for the interests of capital?