Summations Only

...and the first 5 links are about the Bain story. What aren't you seeing, here?

How would the economy be "ten times bigger than it is" without ten times as many dollars to circulate, and where would that extra 900% quantitative easing come from, if not from the very government whose monetary and fiscal policies you think cause inflation? But we want demand. Economies are driven by demand. The recession was caused by a one trillion dollar shortfall in demand, due to an enormous amount of money (which had been converted into home equity) completely evaporating from the economy. We're still a trillion dollars behind from catching up to where we should have been if the recession hadn't happened. So? We're not at the point where we need production. We didn't have a supply shock; we had a demand shock. There's plenty of unused productive capacity in the American economy precisely because of the shortfall in demand.This isn't, honestly, all that difficult to understand. Demand is the environment for business. You don't go into business because you're rich; you go in because there's a demand for what you propose to sell.

No, they're not. Look how many of these stories are from the last three days: https://www.google.com/search?q=bain+romney+polling&hl=en...And look how it's killing Romney in the polls: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/Nate Silver gives Obama a 75% chance of re-election if the election were to be held today; 65% by November. Oh, ye of little faith!

And also lucky, and also lived in the right culture where the technologies were available to enact that vision. If you came up with the idea for Facebook in 1776, you were basically fucked, right? Really? I see plenty of business owners who ascribe their success purely to their own hard work, recognizing no contribution but their own, in order to justify evading taxation. Money is what it's all about - when you say "I built my business with no help from anybody" its in order to go on to say "therefore, taxing me is punishing success."It's as stupid as when Craig Nelson recently said "I've been on food stamps and welfare. Anybody help me out? No." You mean, besides with the food stamps and welfare? Well, that's sort of the question, are businesses paying their fair share? Recently the CEO of Corning, Susan Ford, complained to Congress that corporate income taxes are too high. Corning paid a Federal income tax rate of 0%. That's right, they paid nothing. Actually they got money back, so they had a net tax rate of -0.2%.Less than nothing is too high? Corning is hardly alone in that; Two-thirds of American corporations pay zero Federal income tax whatsoever.Fair share? I don't see it.

That you can't say "I did it all by myself" and shirk your responsibility to the common good. No, they're implying that they got theirs, Jack, so everybody else can fuck off and die.I mean, you've got conservative economists like Greg Mankiw literally making the case that taxing people, especially the successful, is flat-out immoral. (A), you've got to tax the well-off because that's who has money, and (B) the declining marginal utility of money makes a strong mathematical case that taxing people who have much is a lot more effective (and moral) than otherwise, because the well-off get much less use out of every marginal dollar. But to even have the debate on those terms ignores the fact that the well-off owe us for their success, due to the enormous social contribution to the infrastructure that made that success possible.

I'm going to pull a total Romney on this and take credit for it.

"Up" is the margin favoring Obama. http://election.princeton.edu/...08/01/a-bad-july-for-romney

They should go unfed.

Buz, your examples of "despotism" never seem to hold up to inspection, so what are we supposed to be "ignorant" about? Obama had Seal Team Six killed? That never happened. Czars? "Czar" is just a media term for a kind of executive branch advisor, usually one subject to Senate approval, and at any rate Obama has less of them than the last guy - as though the number of advisors a President had was a measure of "despotism."The truth is, you call Obama a Kenyan Muslim usurper with a fake birth certificate for no reason besides the fact that you're a Republican and he's a Democrat, and those are the worst things you can think of to say about him. It's like the way you think the Clintons had Vince Foster killed. But the fact that you'll wholeheartedly endorse the most outlandish, fairy-story conspiracy theories provided the subject is a prominent Democrat and you're hearing the theory from a Republican is just another example of your intellectual inability to assess an argument independently of your opinion of who is making it.

Well, wasn't it? Isn't that the point of government, to do these sorts of "public good" projects that promote economic, community, and business development?And when a business reaps a substantial profit in a marketplace that only exists because of public investment, don't they owe the public something for that? Otherwise you're defending a system of socialized risk and privatives reward.