Tag Archives: mccain

Congratulations to President Elect Obama and to … America!

Posted on by
7

John McCain is now conceding the election with an eloquence that would have benefited his campaign, noting how historic this election has been for America.

CNN has projected what has been clear for several days now – Barack Obama will win the US Presidency,

With this decision we leave behind a two year campaign – the longest transition of leadership in the history of *any* democracy, and we enter a new and potentially transformative time for America. We face some of the greatest challenges in the history of our proud Democracy, but working together we can overcome them all.

Obama for President

Posted on by
641

Although I’m a political junkie I’d hoped to try to stay  objective  in a race I knew would be clouded with the usual nonsense of our American democratic experience where marketing and the politics of personal destruction *always* trump an intelligent discussion of the issues.   However I’ve been especially alarmed by the very personal and deceptive attacks on Obama’s character and personal history.   Thanks to some huge comment streams this blog has become mostly political for the past week so I should let readers know where I stand.

Barack Obama for President.

Like Christopher Buckley I’m normally a small government low tax fiscal conservative, but also like Buckley I think more than anything right now the country needs a “first class mind” in the oval office.  The world faces the greatest fiscal crisis since the great depression, and global terrorism remains a critical threat around the world.   Perhaps the John McCain of the 1990s would be a good man for the job now, but that John McCain is not running for President.

Obama, unlike any other prominent American leader, will send a signal to the world that the USA remains both the shining beacon of prosperity we have always been but also is asserting an entirely new approach to internal affairs – an approach characterized by flexibility, compassion, and intelligent reflection rather than the knee jerk ideological responses that have compromised our reputation and standing in the global community for much of the past 8 years.

Obama is the right choice for these challenging times despite some flaws.   I’ll keep hoping that the economic challenges will force Obama into more realistic ideas about how the economy and personal responsibility.    I hope Obama will soon come to realize how the national debt and deficit are ticking time bombs that pose a  greater than the current looming financial crisis, and work hard towards a balanced federal budget.

But trumping those concerns for me is that the country will benefit from Obama’s ability to galvanize support and bring people together.  Some will choose to fight Obama and to continue the smears and personal attacks, but in the same way that approach has failed in the campaign I hope that approach fails with America as we move forward to the great challenges that we all must face together, like it or not.

The future is uncertain and potentially very perilous.   Major changes and challenges are coming at us with each passing day.  We need inspired new leadership.

Obama for President.

Anyway … the cooler logo should win this thing

Obama and McCain click ads throttled by Google?

Posted on by
1

This just in from the Google click advertising confusion department.   It appears Google is severely throttling the number of clicks they allow to  publishers  for the key terms “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”.  I don’t understand why they’d do this unless perhaps it relates to election advertising laws?    That does not make sense to me because it seems we would have heard about this, so my second thought was that they might have agreements with the campaigns for exclusivity but … I’m not seeing Obama or McCain PPC ads on Google.
I was playing around with the costs to bid and run keyword campaigns for “Barack Obama” and “John McCain”, surprised to see that Google does not appear to be running those terms or terms like “vote”.
Using a cost per click maximum of $100.00 and a daily budget of $250,000.00 I should get a huge count for those terms, yet the Google predictor only shows I’d get about 102-128 clicks per day for Obama and 118-149 for McCain at an average costs just above a dollar per click.
Not that is not 118 *thousand* which might make sense, that is a paltry hundred and change clicks at a cost of about 100 per day.   Why wouldn’t Google allow a bigger campaign?

Debate about Joe the Plumber could not get any dumber

Posted on by
56

Of Plumbers and Presidents

The inane stupidity of the “Joe the Plumber” discussion tells us a lot about how out of touch the campaigns and media are with America, and frankly how little most Americans seem to understand about small business taxes. After listening to CNN’s Lou Dobbs’ take on the situation and hearing McCain say he’s out to help the Joe the Plumbers (implying his tax plan would do more to help plumbers than Obama’s, which is false and almost certainly a campaign lie) I had to challenge the economically senile statements of these two rich guys and chime in with the truth.

My take is that neither left nor right wing seems to be making sense about all this. Joe the Plumber is relevant to the current debate because he is representative of some middle income Americans who make ballpark of 40-80k per year, would actually benefit in the short term from Obama’s tax plans, but don’t share Obama’s sensibilities about how to run country or the idea that even greater levels of deficit spending than McCain is proposing are a good idea.  It’s OK for Joe to be for McCain, but if he thinks that is to his tax advantage he is mistaken.

Here’s a better authority than me – Nobel economist Paul Krugman in NYT writing about the plumbing income issues.

So, with average plumbers making about 47k clearly he’s *currently* better off under Obama’s plan if taxes are what we are talking about. But what if he buys the business?

Details are not all that clear but it appears the business Joe wants to buy has 2 plumbers. Let’s assume they also employ one office person and one helper. Even assuming they can bill those plumbers at $100 per hour, the helpers at $50 and everybody works a full 2000 hours per year (this is very unrealistically high work hours for this type of biz – half this would be closer to normal). But even optimistically the biz probably pulls in about 500k per year.

Assuming that employee benefits and payroll taxes are about *half* the billed rate to the two plumbers employees we have 250k labor expense for workers. Add 30k for the office staff and another 50k for advertising, building, insurance, and more (it’s probably twice that, but I’m being very generous to McCain supporters here).

Revenues 500k – Expenses 330k = Taxable income 170k

So even if he buys the joint Joe the Plumber won’t be making 250k. Sure a few plumbing businesses with several workers might be making that, but the small business guys McCain claims he represents would likely be better off under Obama’s tax plans. Most are are mom and pops making far less than 250k.

Lou Dobbs and some McCain folks have *idiotically* asserted that a lot of *plumbers* make 250k. If you believe this there is only one word for you: Stupid. Plumbers rarely bill at over 100 per hour and there are 2000 hours in a year – do the math because even if they have zero expenses they don’t make 250k and those who think they do are really math and business savvy challenged (e.g. Lou Dobbs who has NO business talking business).

Average plumbing salaries in Ohio are under 50k per year – similar to what teachers, police, fireman make.

To me it is sort of pitiful how folks who will pay *more* under McCain are defending his tax plan because they just don’t understand business taxes. It’s fine for a plumber to support McCain but it’s misinformed to think Obama’s the big bad tax man for the middle class.

Joe is not a small business – in fact he’s not even a plumber. He was (probably wrongly) thinking that if he bought the plumbing place he worked for he’d have trouble paying Obama’s taxes, and Obama foolishly just assumed that was true.

Joe may want to vote for McCain if if NON TAX issues like abortion and gun rights are paramount to him and there are many other reasons Joe the Plumber might want to vote for McCain.

Taxes, however, are NOT one of those reasons.

Caveat: There are some capital gains tax issues that complicate a really good analysis of all the details here since they’d come into play much later and it’s not clear to me how either plan would treat sale of small businesses even assuming the plan was still in effect when they were sold.

Caveat 2: Taxes and prosperity are tricky. Some think that taxing the rich inhibits economic development to the degree it reduces *everybody’s* prosperity. e.g. if his job is lost Joe the Plumber makes nothing.

McCain to Obama: Suspending Campaign – Let’s Work Together!

Posted on by
14

Over at President Picker blog I also gave my take on the amazing decision from John McCain to suspend his campaign, pull out of the Friday Presidential Debate, and head to Washington to work on the fiscal crisis which is looming very large.

On balance I think this is probably a sincere move by McCain, though it would seem to me that if he *really* wanted a fully non-partisan approach he should have negotiated this surprise action with Obama.    I think I’m cynical enough to think the McCain campaign saw this as an opportunity to dodge some bullets while at the same time doing the right thing in working on the fiscal crisis – a problem either Obama or McCain will immediately inherit as they rise to power in January 2009.

Now, Obama is left looking like a follower if he simply accepts this huge change to the campaign plans or looks disinterested in the crisis if he refuses.    This is a strategically untenable position which is why Obama, in my view, needs to counter-propose something along similar lines and McCain needs to accept.  This balances the political advantages and brings us back to solving the second greatest economic challenge in US history.