jerseyhoya wrote:Those numbers have nothing to do with campaign donations though. At least I don't think they do directly. A certain percentage of the lobbyist's salaries end up in campaign accounts I guess. PAC donations and everything is on top of that.

If corporations were allowed to make sizable or even unlimited donations to political campaigns, I'm not sure how that would influence spending on lobbying. Might go down, with more of that money pumped directly into campaigns.

jerseyhoya wrote:Gathering lobbying expenditures on a number of companies for work at the moment and building a database.

Anyhow, ExxonMobil spent $29,000,000 on in house lobbying last year. Twenty nine million dollars. Jesus Christ.

Inequality is also driven by the collapse of the two-parent household, which disproportionately affects the poor and working class, depriving them of the social capital they need to rise.

drsmooth wrote:I ordinarily find Douthat a reasonable voice, a wan glow of sanity in the reactionervative void.

But his NYT column today is - there's no other phrase for it - wrong on so many levels.

Let's pick just one clinker out of many from that piece:

Inequality is also driven by the collapse of the two-parent household, which disproportionately affects the poor and working class, depriving them of the social capital they need to rise.

He's talking about economic inequality here. There's not a hint of hesitation in his simplistic assertion; no sense that maybe, just maybe, the causal relationship is less unidirectional than he supposes.

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

traderdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

You aren't the only one. I cannot wait to hear the gibberish coming from Corzine on the 16th (although I'm sure Christie and Daggett will be offering sizable portions of gibberish as well).

TenuredVulture wrote:

traderdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

You aren't the only one. I cannot wait to hear the gibberish coming from Corzine on the 16th (although I'm sure Christie and Daggett will be offering sizable portions of gibberish as well).

It's been a long time since I've been on the ground during a NJ election. But my experience, while over a decade old, is that Republicans in statewide elections do better in elections then they poll. Whitman in 90, 91 and 95, and the guy who ran against Corzine in 2000 all come to mind. It's likely that this will be a low turn out election, which also helps Christie.

traderdave wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:

traderdave wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

You aren't the only one. I cannot wait to hear the gibberish coming from Corzine on the 16th (although I'm sure Christie and Daggett will be offering sizable portions of gibberish as well).

It's been a long time since I've been on the ground during a NJ election. But my experience, while over a decade old, is that Republicans in statewide elections do better in elections then they poll. Whitman in 90, 91 and 95, and the guy who ran against Corzine in 2000 all come to mind. It's likely that this will be a low turn out election, which also helps Christie.

A question from ignorance - why do you think it will be a low turnout election? I would think that the state of the State would bring people out in droves, especially since Daggett appears to be a somewhat viable 3rd party candidate at this point.

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

swishnicholson wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Corzine is winning. Daggett is up to 17%. Corzine getting reelected with like 39% of the vote is going to seriously grind my gears.

I'm a Daggett supporter, but when they substituted Steele for Daggett in the poll, Steele polled 12%, so his support seems pretty much "anyone but these clowns." Another poll I saw had 77% of potential voters never hearing of Daggett or having no opinion. I hope he buys some TV time with my 50 bucks.

TenuredVulture wrote:Americans for Prosperity called. I told them I wanted Canadian Style Socialized Medicine. I wonder if they'll call again.

The best parts of supply-side economics have been “completely integrated into mainstream economics,” Mr. Bartlett writes. “What remains is a caricature — that there is no problem that more and bigger tax cuts won’t solve.”

His conservatism starts with the idea that high taxes are no longer the problem, even if complaining about them still makes for good politics. This year, federal taxes are on pace to equal just 15 percent of gross domestic product. It is the lowest share since 1950.

As the economy recovers, taxes will naturally return to about 18 percent of G.D.P., and Mr. Obama’s proposed rate increase on the affluent would take the level closer to 20 percent. But some basic arithmetic — the Medicare budget, projected to soar in coming decades — suggests taxes need to rise further, and history suggests that’s O.K.

For one thing, past tax increases have not choked off economic growth. The 1980s boom didn’t immediately follow the 1981 Reagan tax cut; it followed his 1982 tax increase to reduce the deficit. The 1990s boom followed the 1993 Clinton tax increase. Tax rates matter, but they’re nowhere near the main force affecting growth.

And taxes are supposed to rise as a country grows richer. This is Wagner’s Law, named for the 19th-century economist Adolf Wagner, who coined it. As societies become more affluent, people demand more services that governments tend to provide, like health care, education and a strong military. A century ago, federal taxes equaled just a few percent of G.D.P. The country wasn’t better off than it is today.

Modern conservatism, Mr. Bartlett says, should therefore have two main economic principles. One, it should prevent government from getting too big. There is no better opportunity than health reform, given that the current bills don’t do nearly enough to slow spending growth. Instead of pushing the White House to do better, however, Congressional Republicans are criticizing any effort to slow spending as an attack on Grandma. They’re evidently in favor of big Medicare, just not the taxes to pay for it.

The second goal should be to keep taxes from being increased in the wrong ways. Supply-side economics is based on the idea that higher tax rates discourage work and investment, two crucial ingredients for economic growth. But higher taxes on consumption don’t have nearly the same effect as taxes on incomes or companies. If anything, consumption taxes encourage savings, which lifts investment.

An Associated Press-GfK poll says 56 percent of those surveyed in the past week approve of Obama's job performance, up from 50 percent in September. It's the first time since he took office in January that his rating has gone up.