Republican candidates for 2012

• gut

  majorspark;915477 wrote:But I am curious as to what your thoughts are on Cain's "999" plan? I realize even if Cain were elected POTUS it would not stand a snowball's chance in hell. Many on the right including myself fear coupling a federal sales tax with the federal income tax and what it could morph into. But on the other hand I welcome idea the of simplifying the tax code and throwing off all the chains the feds use the tax code to many times unconstitutionally control our activities. Congress's power to tax is limited to their enumerated powers.

  Appreciate the kind words. In short, consumption taxes are considered superior in the sense of being more efficient and less a drag on the economy as opposed to that which taxes production (such as an income tax). Economists nearly universally agree with that.
  
  I appreciate and share your concern for giving the feds another source of tax revenue. You can't replace the income tax - Europe has found, generally, that you can't do much better than 19% on the sales tax. Get it too high, and the incentive to cheat, avoid or go black market is counter productive. However, since we've historically average around 18% of GDP regardless of the income tax rates, then the only way you can collect more is a fundamental transformation (like raising FICA, or a sales tax). So if we aren't going to cut federal spending to a hard cap averaging 18% of GDP, then you're going to need something like a sales tax.
  
  Lawrence Kotlikoff, who's research Fairtax is based on, doesn't really support Fairtax. He's on record, actually, as saying a consumption tax is the only way to make SS solvent.
  
  On top of that, a consumption tax is actually double-taxation of savings. I don't know what the math would be, but it's possible some accounting tomfoolery could make the debt look a lot smaller being offset by what is essentially deferred tax revenue (i.e. take 10% of all savings in the US and assume that some day the feds collect it as a sales tax when it is eventually used to buy stuff).
  
  I don't like all the govt entitlements and handouts. But from a purely objective perspective, we either reduce entitlement spending and handouts or we add a govt sales tax (maybe a VAT). We can't support this spending by soaking the rich and corporations more, and we can't sustain these deficits. They would love to inflate their way out of debt (if they could achieve achieve real inflation, which seems unlikely give global deflationary pressuers), but even that assumes you can balance the budget.
  
  I like that people are finally talking about a consumption tax, even if I don't like it for other reasons, because class warfare is not a practical solution. I do believe if you add, say, a 5% sales tax, that would be a fundamental change and it would add another 3-4% to that 18.2% of average GDP. The other major problem is the liberals will just destroy a federal sales tax with exclusions and rebates for the poor, and so you'll end-up with a base south of 50% of GDP instead of closer to 100%, which will then mean the 5% has to be much higher - 10% to the feds for your home mortgage or rent? If not, how about 15-20% to the feds for that new car you want?
  
  The good thing about a sales tax north of 10% like that, even if only on some purchases, is people will start screaming bloody murder over spending. The 40-50% that don't pay federal income taxes won't ignore paying 10% on their new car [lease] - twice, actually, on the car itself plus on the interest. Imagine the impact on buying a new home, and if it somehow applied to used homes where all else equal either the buyer will have to pay 10% more or the seller is going to take home 10% less.
• Cleveland Buck

  

  Plan To Return America To the Gold Standard Set To Be Offered at Washington
  
  Lehrman, One-Time Member of Reagan-Era Gold Commission, Foresees Five-Year Transition
  
  
  NEW YORK — The next big step in the gold standard debate is going to be taken next month at Washington, when one of the original members of the Reagan-era United States Gold Commission offers a five-step plan to return America to sound money.
  
  
  The architect of the plan, Lewis Lehrman, a businessman and scholar, will present his program in an address October 5 at a conference in Washington on the how to return to a stable dollar. He will outline a five-step program to return America to a gold-backed currency within five years.
  
  
  What is significant about the event is its aim of shifting the discussion to practical steps that could be taken to rescue the American monetary system. It comes as the value of the United States dollar has collapsed to record lows, sinking at one point this month to less than an 1,800[SUP]th[/SUP] of an ounce of gold. The value of the dollar has recovered marginally in recent days, but still lurks below a 1,600[SUP]th[/SUP] of an ounce of gold, a level that would have been nearly unimaginable — at least in policy terms — as recently as the start of President George W. Bush’s first term, when the dollar had a value of a 265th of an ounce of gold.
  
  
  “The stand-pat defenders of today’s paper-dollar system turn back every argument in favor of the gold standard by claiming that there’s no practical way to re-establish it,” says the editor of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, James Grant. “What Lehrman has done is to devise a practical and persuasive plan to do just that.” He predicts “the ball is now — or soon will be — in the paper-money court as it has not been for a long time.”
  
  
  In recent months, a growing chorus of serious observers have started to speak in favor of the restoration of a link between the dollar and gold. Some of them have been establishment figures, such as the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, who in November last year startled the debate by issuing in the London Financial Times an op-ed piece suggesting there might be a role for gold in a reformed monetary system.
  
  
  Since then a number of the nation’s most respected journalists — led most notably by Mr. Grant — have come out publicly for a return to the gold standard. Mr. Grant’s demarche came on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Several Republican candidates for president, ranging from Congressman Ron Paul to Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and Governor Perry, among others, have signaled that they view that the restoration of a sound dollar as being a component of returning America to the path of economic growth and full employment.
  
  
  Mr. Lehrman, however, is the first of the leading figures in the debate to step forward with a plan, which he is expected to lay out in the Washington conference on a stable dollar. The conference is being hosted by the Heritage Foundation think tank. Mr. Lehrman’s plan is elaborated on at length in a book his institute will publish next month called, “The True Gold Standard: A Monetary Reform Plan Without Official Reserve Currencies.”
  
  
  Although Mr. Lehrman was once a member of the United States Gold Commission, the plan he will announce next month has no official status. But when Mr. Lehrman was with the Commission, he co-authored with Dr. Paul a famous dissent, which made the case for gold and has been widely consulted in the decades since the Commission majority made its recommendation to continue with a system of fiat money, which in turn, advocates of stable money argue, culminated in America’s current travail.
  
  
  The first step Mr. Lehrman will speak of in Washington would be for America to announce the “unilateral resumption of the gold monetary standard” at “a date certain,” as Mr. Lehrman put it to earlier this month in a wire to The New York Sun. What Mr. Lehrman means is that the U.S. dollar would “be defined by law as a certain weight unit of gold” and the “Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the entire banking system” would be “obligated” to “maintain the gold value of the dollar.”
  
  
  Mr. Lehrman foresees a transition in which, on the date that Congress authorizes the resumption of unrestricted convertibility between dollars and gold, Federal Reserve Bank notes and American dollar bank demand deposits would be “redeemable in gold on demand at the statutory gold parity.”
  
  
  Step two in the Lehrman Plan would be the minting by the Treasury and authorized private mints of what Mr. Lehrman calls “legal tender gold coin in appropriate denominations, free of any and all taxation.” The taxation point is a key one. Currently, if the value of the dollar collapses while one is holding gold coins, one can be taxed when one spends those coins.
  
  
  That the act of spending exposes one to a tax is a controversial feature of the current system of fiat money. So intense have been feelings on the point that a movement to remove state-level capital gains taxes on gold coins has already begun in the states. Utah was this year the first to formally take such a step.
  
  
  The third step Mr. Lehrman will propose at Washington is an international monetary conference that would, as Mr. Lehrman sketches it, “to provide for the deliberate termination of the dollar-based official reserve currency system and the consolidation and refunding of foreign official dollar reserves.”
  
  
  He reckons that the international agreement to be negotiated would “inaugurate the reformed international monetary system,” or what he calls the “multilateral currency convertibility to gold, without official reserve currencies.”
  
  
  Step four would be the establishment by the conference of gold as “the sole means by which nations would settle residual balance of payments deficits.” The idea would be to designate gold, “in place of reserve currencies, as the sole official monetary reserve asset.” Once official foreign currency reserves were consolidated and refunded, Mr. Lehrman argues, “table exchange rates would result.”
  
  
  Finally, the fifth step would be that so-called “floating” and &#8220egged-undervalued exchange rates,” as Mr. Lehrman terms them, would go out of use, and the “reformed international monetary system would establish and uphold stable exchange rates and free and fair trade — based on the mutual convertibility to gold of major currencies.”
  One headwind Mr. Lehrman’s plan might face is any sign that value is starting to flow back into the dollar. In recent days the value of the dollar has risen somewhat, though not by a large amount in percentage terms. If the trend continues, it is possible it could take some of the steam out of the movement for monetary reform.
  
  
  This is one of the reasons momentum fell away from monetary reform at the start of the Reagan administration. Even while the Gold Commission was meeting, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the time, Paul Volcker, was putting in place the regime that defeat the great inflation into which the country had been plunged in the 1970s.
  
  
  The conference in Washington, however, is pursuing a strategy designed to get past the question of which way the dollar is moving at any given moment to the question of what many believe to be the paramount principle, namely the stability of the dollar in terms of gold. That is, its usefulness as a measure of value. Mr. Lehrman stresses that a true gold standard is as effective in preventing deflation as it is against inflation, a point that may become central, if the value continues to flow into the dollar.
  
  

  
  
  http://www.nysun.com/national/plan-to-return-america-to-the-gold-standard-set/87495/
  
  Fools. They just don't understand the modern world. Every dollar you print is worth just as much as the last one. There is no need to work anymore, just keep the printing press running.
• BGFalcons82

  

  Cleveland Buck;915765 wrote:Fools. They just don't understand the modern world. Every dollar you print is worth just as much as the last one. There is no need to work anymore, just keep the printing press running.

  Exactly!! I'm re-thinking my position. If we just print enough money and give it to those that need it most: the Greeks, the Italians, the Portugese, the UAW, the Solyndras of the world, the relatives of Nancy Pelosi ( http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/09/more-crony-socialism-obama-gives-737-million-to-pelosis-brother-in-laws-solar-firm/), SEIU, ACORN-derivatives, AIG, GM, Chrysler, AlGore, and anybody else that Obama deems worthy, then all of the ills of the world will be solved. It's so easy...where's that Geico caveman when you need him? :laugh:
• gut

  LOL. Gold standard is a dinosaur. Many predict massive deflation, which we've already seen a little deflation in Japan is nearly disastrous. But I can play this game, too. Although, who is Paul Krugman anyway? And just ignore his example, it's not REAL WORLD empirical evidence, just like Japan isn't, of what happens with deflation and/or a gold standard.
  
  
  
  September 7, 2011, 12:20 am Golden Cyberfetters
  
  Over the past few months a number of people have asked what I think of Bitcoin, an attempt to create a sort of private cybercurrency. Now Alexander Kowalski at Bloomberg News directs me to this Jim Surowiecki article on Bitcoin, which is very interesting.
  My first reaction to Bitcoin was to say, what’s new? We have lots of ways of making payments electronically; in fact, a lot of the conventional monetary system is already virtual, relying on digital accounting rather than green pieces of paper. But it turns out that there is a difference: Bitcoin, rather than fixing the value of the virtual currency in terms of those green pieces of paper, fixes the total quantity of cybercurrency instead, and lets its dollar value float. In effect, Bitcoin has created its own private gold standard world, in which the money supply is fixed rather than subject to increase via the printing press.
  
  So how’s it going? The dollar value of that cybercurrency has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment.
  
  But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin.
  
  Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years – yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation.
  
  And because of that, there has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
  
  So to the extent that the experiment tells us anything about monetary regimes, it reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression.
• BGFalcons82

  

  Ty Webb;911651 wrote:It's Offical:
  
  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204010604576593182650732322.html

  As Lee Corso would admonish you...NOT so fast - http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/christie_feels_the_urge_QYtocnZuH6ArN54eGisgyL
  

  [LEFT]Christie pals said the pol’s “mind-blowing” experience at the Reagan library in California Tuesday changed his thinking.
  “We need you. Your country needs you to run for president,” one woman pleaded after Christie’s moving speech there.
  
  Yet when the governor first arrived at the Reagan library, he was still telling his inner circle he was a definite “no” for a presidential run -- and planned to make that clear in his appearance.
  Something changed that night, sources said. Behind the scenes, sources said, the discussions about running took on a more serious and “surreal tenor,” as the encouragement from Reagan, Kissinger, Bush and others began to sink in.

  [/LEFT]
• jmog

  Man I hope he runs, I know he will take some hits for his change of heart, but he would be my first choice of all the GOP candidates.
  
  Give him Cain (or Paul) as a running mate and wow...nice ticket .
• gut

  jmog;915847 wrote:Man I hope he runs, I know he will take some hits for his change of heart

  Would stand in stark contrast to Obama, no? Maybe wanting to be POTUS isn't all it's cracked-up to be. Honestly, campaign manager or PR guy, perhaps even Press Secretary, seems to align better with Obama's desires and qualifications.
• Ty Webb

  

  Christie will get ripped to shreds by the Republican field and I doubt he makes it through the first four primaries with the shit he will take.
  
  Romney and Perry will gladly tear him apart.
  
  It won't be viewed as a change of heart......he will be viewed as a liar
  
  If he runs....the Republican's experience arguement goes right out the window
• fish82

  

  O-Trap;914296 wrote: It reminds me of a scene in the movie The Princess Bride. The giant approaches the gatekeeper and asks for the key. Said gatekeeper says, "Oh, I have no key." The giant is then instructed to tear off the arms of the gatekeeper, and suddenly, the gatekeeper remembers that he has the key!

  "Oh, you mean this key."
  
  Inconceivable. :laugh:
• gut

  Ty Webb;915878 wrote: If he runs....the Republican's experience arguement goes right out the window

  Yeah, I imagine the debate going something like this:
  Cain supporter: "But Obama didn't have any experience, either"
  Obama supporter: "Yeah, and look how that worked out....But this time it's different because Obama has 4 years of experience"
  
  
  Me, personally, I'm just anxious to see who I will be voting for, because I guarantee it won't be Obama. Well, I suppose if Jesse Jackson some how got the Republican nomination, THEN I'd vote for Obama.
• Ty Webb

  

  gut;915881 wrote:Yeah, I imagine the debate going something like this:
  Cain supporter: "But Obama didn't have any experience, either"
  Obama supporter: "Yeah, and look how that worked out....But this time it's different because Obama has 4 years of experience"
  
  
  Me, personally, I'm just anxious to see who I will be voting for, because I guarantee it won't be Obama. Well, I suppose if Jesse Jackson some how got the Republican nomination, THEN I'd vote for Obama.

  
  I'm not talking about Cain.....I'm talking about Christie
• QuakerOats

  Ty - we realize the left is scared to death right now .... about running against any of our candidates, announced or otherwise. So scared in fact, that many are calling for a democrat primary because they know that obama could probably not even survive that.
  
  Word of advice: don't waste your energy over the next year trying to defend the indefensible. This president makes Jimmy Carter look like George Washington; he is toast.
• BGFalcons82

  

  Ty Webb;915878 wrote:Christie will get ripped to shreds by the Republican field and I doubt he makes it through the first four primaries with the shit he will take.
  
  Romney and Perry will gladly tear him apart.
  
  It won't be viewed as a change of heart......he will be viewed as a liar
  
  If he runs....the Republican's experience arguement goes right out the window

  Au contraire:
  
  1. Of all of the R candidates in America, I would venture to state that Mr. Christie is in the top 1% of debaters. Nobody is going to "tear him apart". Nobody from either side. Ever see him respond to questions? He makes point after point in response in a thoughtful manner. He doesn't NEED a teleprompter. He also can speak the language without saying umm, uhhh, well, hmmm, uhhhhh, you know...like your guy does when left without his reading device.
  
  2. He has set it up perfectly as I've opined on here several times. He will be seen as having been brought in for the sake of the country. Watch the Reagan Library speech and the commentary. You'll see how it works.
  
  3. Your side can never play the "experience card" again. The current incompetent boob had ZERO experience in anything executive. ZERO in foreign policy. ZERO in business. ZERO is working with the other side. Perry nailed him in his ad last week....President Zero. Christie will have accumulated 3 years of being governor prior to winning in 2012. That's 3 more years than Barry ever had.
• jmog

  Ty Webb;915884 wrote:I'm not talking about Cain.....I'm talking about Christie

  Either way it obviously wasn't a problem for most of America when they voted in Obama who had all of 1 year of Senate experience to list under his resume.
• gut

  jmog;915945 wrote:Either way it obviously wasn't a problem for most of America when they voted in Obama who had all of 1 year of Senate experience to list under his resume.

  Watch the media conjour up some health concerns with Christie. There are more than a few who won't vote for him because he doesn't look "presidential". Yes, I have my doubts America will elect a fat POTUS.
• jmog

  gut;915952 wrote:Watch the media conjour up some health concerns with Christie. There are more than a few who won't vote for him because he doesn't look "presidential". Yes, I have my doubts America will elect a fat POTUS.

  Possibly, many historians believe that FDR wouldn't have been re-elected had TV been prevalent in those days and showing a President in a wheelchair.
• bigdaddy2003

  

  I did some research on Christie because I had heard about how great he was but I realized I had no clue what his real policies were. I have also heard Ann Coulter brag him up and I can see why to a certain extent but I was told he is for illegal immigration. I can't find it online but that doesn't mean it's not there. Anyone on here know his official position on the issue?
• Ty Webb

  

  You all realize Christie was never involved in politics other than being a county free holder (whatever the hell that is) before running for Gov of New Jersey right?
  
  He was a US attorney before running......how is he more experienced than President Obama? Please please explain that to me
  
  He was also a lobbiyist before becoming a US attorney
• Ty Webb

  

  Five things Conservative voters will hate about Chris Christie
  
  http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/09/chris_christie_flaws.html
• Ty Webb

  

  http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-christie-immigration-20110929,0,429016.story
• bases_loaded

  

  Ty Webb;916002 wrote:You all realize Christie was never involved in politics other than being a county free holder (whatever the hell that is) before running for Gov of New Jersey right?
  
  He was a US attorney before running......how is he more experienced than President Obama? Please please explain that to me
  
  He was also a lobbiyist before becoming a US attorney

  
  If you ask me, the country needs more first time politicians.
  
  The office of President should have someone with executive and/or leadership experience as well though.
  
  Christie has the executive experience(GOVERNOR of NJ) unlike Obama, that being said I don't want him.
• bigdaddy2003

  

  Yeah, after reading what Ty just posted I am glad he isn't entering the race. I don't understand why Ann Coulter is so infatuated with him.
• Ty Webb

  

  Has he announced either way if he is running or not?
• bigdaddy2003

  

  Ty Webb;916019 wrote:Has he announced either way if he is running or not?

  Yes, he isn't running.
• Ty Webb

  

  Where did you see that??
  
  Not calling you a liar....but everything I've seen is saying he hasn't decided yet