Well said, Comrade.

Evidence?

These are smart and insightfully funny quotes, some of them.

But they have been put in place much longer ago than our lifetimes.

The rich discovered they can buy people's votes with images, with things other than the proposals how to deal with issues. The rich funded the campaigns to make people vote the way the rich wanted. And make the people think they themselves, the people, voted how they wanted.

But they did not;they voted how the tv ads wanted them to vote, and the tv ads were paid by the rich.

Now there is a movement to cost-cutting, since the economy will be burdened with higher taxes, and the people realized: Hey, we can cut out the middle man.

Now the government and the people are dealing with each other directly, without the intervening of the fat cats who got their huge cuts in the deals they helped develop.

-----------------------

“The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”

This is happening now. Except for the "bribe" part which may or may not be true, only the course of history as it happens can tell us.

In the past the rich directed the votes, they got the government in their pockets. It is a horribly simplistic view, but let's imagine it's true.

No bribery there.

Lots of nepotism and manipulation for the good of only a few.

--

Now there is bribery, if it is going to turn out that way.

"We give you medicare if you vote for us". people bought this. Is this bribery?

It is bribery, if the government does not create affordable universal medicare. They bribed the populus to give more money, for less in return.

But what if the government indeed creates affordable universal medicare? Is it still bribery?

I mean, sure, the congress and whatnot can still vote wage increases for its members. But they bought the votes with a promise, which if they keep, then it's a straight contract, between the people and the government: "Give us more money, and we give you this very valuable thing in return, medicare."

This is not bribery. This is a proposal for a contract.

The people accepted the contract offer.

Now if the government keeps its promise, then there is nothing briberish about this.
------------------

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." -- Banjamine Franklin.

This is a completely false way of looking at it.

People pay taxes to get services distributed in ways that are equitable like dishing out the law, or to create equilibrium, or are equalizing, like taking some money from the rich, to give to the poor.

Army budgets are equitable, subsidies to universities are equalizing. That's so coz the army protects all in a nation, equally, but a university would only be available to the rich, if no equalizing by helping and finanially subsidizing poor but talented students happened.

So. If we pay taxes, and we get the tax money back... what's wrong with that? We pay the taxes, and we don't expect that taxes paid money to be buried away in a hole somewhere in a desert, but indeed we expect TO GET IT BACK IN ONE WAY OR ANOTHER. Taxes are monies that are supposed to be spent to serve and help the poeple.

Benjamin Franklin was a greedy, selfish, stomach-turningly stuck-up rich fat cat with no concept of what he was supposed to do with the money his government collected for him from the people.

In his view spending tax income money to equalizing or for equal services was stupid.

I really don't know what he thougth the government was supposed to do with the tax income.

Too bad he is not around to answer that now personally.



The governement and their entire operation is mandated to help people. To return the tax money in form of services or even in form of hard cold cash, in the government's efforts to equalize and to keep equally beneficial the services of the govermnent to all, to help individuals help themselves, and to protect the people; it is its mandate also to keep order, by issuing rules of the game, to make so that resources that companies and people need, when they run scarce, they can be accessed by those who need it most.

This is what government should do with the tax money. Creating universal affordable healthcare is not a bribery, it is not paying people off in exchange of votes. It is going to be, instead, an equalizing sort of service; it will be equally dished out to all who need it, and it will equalize the accessability for all people.

Mitt Romney is evidence enough and a fine example of someone who will work the system while off shoring jobs and his income and not supporting the system that has been so very good to him.

The party of greed is dead. good riddance.

what?
Me worry?

replaced by the Unions Of Greed!
Imagine,the Unionized Jobs Obamacare gonna provide!
Why,the Dollars will roll into the Union-Bosses Pockets like mad!

Once again evidence please.
An opinion is not fact.

Your lack of information is not my fault.


Mitt Romney's private equity firm, Bain Capital has been revealed to use obscure techniques to avoid paying U.S. taxes by using Cayman Islands-based funds according to recently leaked documents.

Over 900 pages of private audit and finance records from Bain were made public on the website Gawker today and offered up tantalising glimpses of the labyrinthine methods the Republican presidential candidate employs to pay less tax.

Some of the financial statements note the creation of 'blocker' funds, with statements on one noting that it 'intends to conduct its operations so it will not be subject to United States federal income tax or withholding tax.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2192880/More-tax-woes-Mitt-Romney-leaked-documents-uses-offshore-investment-funds-called-Blockers-avoid-taxes.html#ixzz2BqDdjsQf
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You realize he lost the popular vote and there are more registered democrats than republicans. The electoral college does not show the country's views but popular votes do. So yes he has a divided country and yes he knows it.

HU?

(UPDATE (2): As of Noon on Friday, with nearly all votes in, Obama assuredly will win the popular vote, leading Romney by a count of 61,173,739 or 50.5% to 58,167,260 or 48.0%. At this point, a few final votes are being counted and then all that's left is for the results to be officially certified.)http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/who-won-the-popular-vote-2012_n_2087038.html

I am fine with rep party dying. Let them be replaced with libertarians. Tax the rich? Oh you mean that group that pays the highest percentage of taxes already? Don't believe me? Then here is the tax foundations website with charts for total tax returns.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0

Your top 1% already have 36.7% of the total tax burden and you want them to have more? So you think that over 1/3 of our countries taxes being paid by 1/100 of the country isn't good enough?

All the while the democratic congress is spending us in the the ground the past 6 years. I saw a post someone made of facebook that could solve our deficit problem. Make a law that states if we have a deficit of over 3% of our GDP then all sitting congress men can not be reelected. There, problem solved.

Ok so i didn't look since thursday. Either way you consider a 2% margin of victory for the current president undivided?

http://mises.org/daily/5773/In-Praise-of-the-Capitalist-1-Percent

The protesters in the Occupy Wall Street movement and its numerous clones elsewhere in the country and around the world chant that 1 percent of the population owns all the wealth and lives at the expense of the remaining 99 percent. The obvious solution that they imply is for the 99 percent to seize the wealth of the 1 percent and use it for their benefit rather than allowing it to continue to be used for the benefit of the 1 percent, who are allegedly undeserving greedy capitalist exploiters. In other words, the implicit program of the protesters is that of socialism and the redistribution of wealth.

Putting aside the hyperbole in the movement's claim, it is true that a relatively small minority of people does own the far greater part of the wealth of the country. The figures "1 percent" and "99 percent," however exaggerated, serve to place that fact in the strongest possible light.

What the protesters do not realize is that the wealth of the 1 percent provides the standard of living of the 99 percent.

The protesters have no awareness of this, because they see the world through an intellectual lens that is inappropriate to life under capitalism and its market economy. They see a world, still present in some places, and present everywhere a few centuries ago, of self-sufficient farm families, each producing for its own consumption and having no essential connection to markets.

In such a world, if one sees a farmer's field, or his barn, or plow, or draft animals, and asks who do these means of production serve, the answer is the farmer and his family, and no one else. In such a world, apart from the receipt of occasional charity from the owners, those who are not owners of means of production cannot benefit from means of production unless and until they themselves somehow become owners of means of production. They cannot benefit from other people's means of production except by inheriting them or by seizing them.

In the world of the protesters, means of production have the same essential status as consumers' goods, which as a rule are of benefit only to their owners. It is because of this that those who share the mentality of the protesters typically depict capitalists as fat men, whose plates are heaped high with food, while the masses of wage earners must live near starvation. According to this mentality, the redistribution of wealth is a matter merely of taking from the overflowing plates of the capitalists and giving to the starving workers.

Contrary to such beliefs, in the modern world in which we actually live, the wealth of the capitalists is simply not in the form of consumers' goods to any great extent. Not only is it overwhelmingly in the form of means of production, but those means of production are employed in the production of goods and services that are sold in the market. Totally unlike the conditions of self-sufficient farm families, the physical beneficiaries of the capitalists' means of production are all the members of the general consuming public who buy the capitalists' products.

For example, without owning so much as a single share of stock in General Motors or Exxon Mobil, everyone in a capitalist economy who buys the products of these firms benefits from their means of production: the buyer of a GM automobile benefits from the GM factory that produced that automobile; the buyer of Exxon's gasoline benefits from its oil wells, pipelines, and tanker trucks. Furthermore, everyone benefits from their means of production who buys the products of the customers of GM or Exxon, insofar as their means of production indirectly contribute to the products of their customers. For example, the patrons of grocery stores whose goods are delivered in trucks made by GM or fueled by diesel oil produced in Exxon's refineries are beneficiaries of the existence of GM's truck factories and Exxon's refineries. Even everyone who buys the products of the competitors of GM and Exxon, or of the customers of those competitors, benefits from the existence of GM's and Exxon's means of production. This is because GM's and Exxon's means of production result in a more abundant and thus lower-priced supply of the kind of goods the competitors sell.
"The physical beneficiaries of the capitalists' means of production are all the members of the general consuming public who buy the capitalists' products."

In other words, all of us, 100 percent of us, benefit from the wealth of the hated capitalists. We benefit without ourselves being capitalists, or being capitalists to any great extent. The protesters are literally kept alive on the foundation of the wealth of the capitalists they hate. As just indicated, the oil fields and pipelines of the hated Exxon corporation provide the fuel that powers the tractors and trucks that are essential to the production and delivery of the food the protesters eat. The protesters and all other haters of capitalists hate the foundations of their own existence.

The benefit of the capitalists' means of production to non-owners of means of production extends not only to the buyers of the products of those means of production but also to the sellers of the labor that is employed to work with those means of production. The wealth of the capitalists, in other words, is the source both of the supply of products that non-owners of the means of production buy and of the demand for the labor that non-owners of the means of production sell. It follows that the larger the number and greater the wealth of the capitalists, the greater is both the supply of products and the demand for labor, and thus the lower are prices and the higher are wages, i.e., the higher is the standard of living of everyone. Nothing is more to the self-interest of the average person than to live in a society that is filled with multibillionaire capitalists and their corporations, all busy using their vast wealth to produce the products he buys and to compete for the labor he sells.

Nevertheless, the world the protesters yearn for is a world from which the billionaire capitalists and their corporations have been banished, replaced by small, poor producers, who would not be significantly richer than they themselves are, which is to say, impoverished. They expect that in a world of such producers, producers who lack the capital required to produce very much of anything, let alone carry on the mass production of the technologically advanced products of modern capitalism, they will somehow be economically better off than they are now. Obviously, the protesters could not be more deluded.

In addition to not realizing that the wealth of the so-called 1 percent is the foundation of the standard of living of the so-called 99 percent, what the protesters also do not realize is that the "greed" of those who seek to become part of the 1 percent, or to enlarge their position within it, is what serves progressively to improve the standard of living of the 99 percent.

Of course, this does not apply to wealth that has been acquired by such means as obtaining government subsidies or preventing competition through protective tariffs and other forms of government intervention. These are methods that are made possible to the extent that the government is permitted to depart from a policy of strict laissez-faire and thereby arbitrarily reward or punish firms.

Apart from such aberrations, the way that business fortunes are accumulated is by means of the high profits generated by the introduction of new and improved products and more efficient, lower-cost methods of production, followed by the heavy saving and reinvestment of those high profits.
"All of us, 100 percent of us, benefit from the wealth of the hated capitalists."

For example, the $6 billion fortune of the late Steve Jobs was built on a foundation of Mr. Jobs having made it possible for Apple Computer to introduce such new and improved products as the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad, and then heavily saving and reinvesting the share of the profits that came to him......................

more at the link!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No answer

who won the popular vote,,,,,OBAMA

62 mill to 58 mill

and yes, the country is as divided as it has ever been, looking back upon the past three elections and the equal 'division' that occurred in those elections,,,

Paul Ryan.

The quote about "voting themselves money" cannot be found anywhere in Franklin's writings and is considered a misattribution for now, not having been heard before 1988. I have read a LOT about Franklin and to me, it doesn't sound like his style of speaking. The contempt it expresses for ordinary people also doesn't fit (IMO) with his philosophy. Wux, I really hope that your rant against Franklin was either a joke or was simply ill-informed. He certainly had failings, but greed wasn't one of them.

But this is off topic, so I'll let it go. It's just that Franklin is one of the people I admire most in history, and mainly for his character.

It is paraphrased from Aristotle's "Politics".

Yea I already commented on that if you looked like 1 more line down. And he still never commented on what I wrote about taxes.