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Hello readers.  Do you all remember this post from March of last year about how the richest of the rich in our country were taking the lion’s share of all the country’s income?  That post includes charts that shows just how much of the country’s growth in incomes from 2002 through 2006 the top earners kept for themselves.  You might want to go back and take a look at those charts, but be warned – they’re not pretty.

And 2007 wasn’t any prettier.  Some new IRS data was released this week for 2007, and guess what?  The rich got even richer!  From BusinessWeek:

Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — The average income reported by the 400 highest-earning U.S. households grew to almost $345 million in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, Internal Revenue Service statistics show.

The figures for 2007, the last year of an economic expansion, show that average income reported by the top 400 earners more than doubled from $131.1 million in 2001. That year, Congress adopted tax cuts urged by then-President George W. Bush that Democrats say disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

Each household in the top 400 of earners paid an average tax rate of 16.6 percent, the lowest since the agency began tracking the data in 1992, the statistics show. Their average effective tax rate was about half the 29.4 percent in 1993, the first year of President Bill Clinton’s administration, when taxes were increased.

The statistics underscore “two long-term trends: that income at the very top has exploded and their taxes have been cut dramatically,” said Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington research group that supports increasing taxes on high-income individuals.

So next time you hear a Teabagger going all crazy about huge deficits and high taxes, you might want to recite a few facts from this article and some more from last year’s post about how the wealthy are grossly undertaxed.  Had they not received trillions in tax cuts from the Bush Republicans, we might even have collected enough to pay for the two wars that are still going on. 

For more about how today’s deficit problems are the result of the tax-law changes enacted under the Bush Administration, read this article on the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities website:

Some of President Obama’s critics and political opponents have launched a line of argument that Obama is mostly to blame for the large federal budget deficits projected for the coming decade and that his Administration’s role in swelling deficits and debt dwarfs that of the previous administration. [1] The critics cite what they present as proof: the fact that the deficit this year and in the years ahead will be much larger than the average deficits under President George W. Bush and that the increase in the national debt thus will be much larger under Obama than Bush.

But asserting that the deficits that lie ahead are primarily the result of policies enacted since President Obama took office is Orwellian. It stands truth on its head.

Republicans have never had any regard for the truth.  They’ve always twisted things upside down, inside out, and backwards; and they’ve almost always gotten away with it.  They get away with it because they own all the mainstream media outlets, or because the American people are uninformed and very gullible.  Or both.  This time, don’t let them get away with it. Spread some truth around.

Paul Krugman writes about the politicizing of federal budget deficits in today’s column:

To me — and I’m not alone in this — the sudden outbreak of deficit hysteria brings back memories of the groupthink that took hold during the run-up to the Iraq war.  Now, as then, dubious allegations, not backed by hard evidence, are being reported as if they have been established beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Now, as then, much of the political and media establishments have bought into the notion that we must take drastic action quickly, even though there hasn’t been any new information to justify this sudden urgency.  Now, as then, those who challenge the prevailing narrative, no matter how strong their case and no matter how solid their background, are being marginalized.

And fear-mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction.

This is the year that the Bush tax cuts expire, so the Republicans will use their scare tactics to convince people that raising taxes on the rich is the wrong thing to do, and they’ll probably even argue that we should lower the tax rates to stimulate economic growth, because everybody knows that more money in the pockets of billionaires creates jobs, right?  WRONG!

Obama has been making a point of placing blame for the deficit spending where it belongs – with the Republicans – and he has been pretty vocal about how their tax-cutting schemes have not worked in the past.  He has pointed out that they are the party that reduced federal revenue by trillions of dollars by cutting taxes for the super rich, and they are the party that handed a blank check to Bush for the funding two very long wars.  Obama should keep hammering on the Republicans about the deficit they created and he should be very firm with Reid and Pelosi about not extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich.

The Democrats in Congress should not be pressured by the deficit hysteria Krugman writes about.  Now is not the time to cut funding for government programs that are essential to stimulating the economy and getting us out of this recession.

President Obama must have read Paul Krugman’s January 18th column in which he wrote about how “Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter,” which led into:

Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks.

But he didn’t. Maybe he still dreams of bridging the partisan divide; maybe he fears the ire of pundits who consider blaming your predecessor for current problems uncouth — if you’re a Democrat. (It’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.) Whatever the reason, Mr. Obama has allowed the public to forget, with remarkable speed, that the economy’s troubles didn’t start on his watch.

Obama got the message:

Now, even as health care reform would reduce our deficit, it’s not enough to dig us out of a massive fiscal hole in which we find ourselves. It’s a challenge that makes all others that much harder to solve, and one that’s been subject to a lot of political posturing. So let me start the discussion of government spending by setting the record straight.

At the beginning of the last decade, the year 2000, America had a budget surplus of over $200 billion. By the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts and an expensive prescription drug program. On top of that, the effects of the recession put a $3 trillion hole in our budget. All this was before I walked in the door.

Now — just stating the facts. Now, if we had taken office in ordinary times, I would have liked nothing more than to start bringing down the deficit. But we took office amid a crisis. And our efforts to prevent a second depression have added another $1 trillion to our national debt. That, too, is a fact.

That’s a fact he needs to wield as a hammer far more often than he did during his first year in office.

I’ve been thinking about an article I read yesterday morning while skimming through the newspaper.  The story was about how the House voted to extend popular tax breaks like mortgage interest and sales-tax deductions.  It also mentioned how it was going increase the tax rate on income earned by hedge-fund managers from 15% to 35%. 

I’ve heard that hedge-fund managers made hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars every year, but I wasn’t sure how much, so I searched the internet and found this list.  The highest paid hedge fund manager in 2008 was James Harris Simon, who runs Renaissance Technologies Corporation.  He “earned” $2,500,000,000.  He paid a lesser income tax rate than I did and what I presume is much lesser than many of you readers did.  The next three highest paid managers on the list all earned over a billion dollars. 

Who is this guy and what does he do to make so much money?  He’s a mathematician.  He used to teach at MIT and Harvard, and he also did communicatioins research for the Defense Department.  He probably was compensated fairly well for those services, and his work was what we might call “productive.”  He educated people and he developed new mathematical theorems to improve science, and he probably helped the DOD in some way.

Over twenty years ago he figured out how to use his mathematical genius to develop “computer-based models to predict price changes in easily-traded financial instruments.”  Those models run on computers that buy and sell stocks and commodities all over the world.  His models must work extremely well if he can earn high profits for his investors and pay himself 2.5 billion dollars in one year. 

But what he’s doing is not “productive.”  It’s more like rape.  Instead of using his brilliant mind as a rocket scientist or an engineer of some sort, he’s basically using it to satisfy his lust for money by skimming billions of dollars off assets all around the world. 

And thanks to George W. Bush and his loyal cabal of Republican brown shirts, he has paid a lower tax rate than me since 2001.

What are the Republican congressmen saying about the House Bill?

Republicans called it a tax on investment.

“It is nothing short of a new tax on the various investments needed to start the new business and create economic growth,” said Rep. Dave Camp, the top Republican on the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.

Republicans hate taxes.  They love cutting them, and because they had been in power so long since Reagan was elected, they’d cut taxes on obscenely rich people from 90% during the Eisenhower era to just 15% for Mr. Simons and company. 

This whole idea that it’s wrong for the top 1% of earners in our country to be taxed at very high rates is one of the many reasons are country is so far in the hole.  These people are taking all the money and paying much less income tax than if all that money was spread amongst people who paid normal income taxes.

What if Mr. Simons was taxed at a rate of 90% like he would have been during the Eisenhower era?  How much would he have left to live on each year?  $250,000,000.  Oh… that’s too bad.  And could our government use the $2,250,000,000 that it would have collected every year?  I think so.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:  IT’S NOT WRONG TO TAX THE RICH!  Increasing the rate on hedge-fund managers from 15% to 35% is a step in the right direction, but they really ought to be paying well over 50%.

Ben Stein wrote a column about how it’s just not right to deny people health care but he’ll do it anyway to stop the uninsured people from mooching unearned luxuries from the rich.

A short while ago, I said in a public forum that while I did not doubt that in a society as rich as ours, no one should be denied health care, and that health care was a right, I still had some questions about the administration’s plan. This had been my feeling for all of my life, i.e., that health care was a right, and that if necessary, it must be paid for by the taxpayers if some people could not afford it.

Then, a letter showed up in my email from a man with the pen name of a famous Roman writer and thinker. The correspondent asked a few simple questions: Why should everyone be guaranteed free health care? And if we guaranteed to people goods and services they could not afford, where would it ever end? Where would it end short of assuming that everyone has a right to everyone else’s property and labor?

…

But do I want to have patients seeing masseuses? Do I want them to be able to see the same psychiatrists that billionaires see? What about a nose job? A plastic surgeon could make up a medical need for a nose job or even a face lift. Where does it end?

And that’s just the thin edge of the wedge. If a poor person deserves to have the same good things in life that a rich person has, does the poor person have a “right” to belong to a health club and spa? After all, a spa can make a person feel really good and stay toned. Why shouldn’t the taxpayers pay for a poor person to join a health club?

It’s a stupid argument built around fear:  If we give them basic health care, they won’t be happy!  They’ll come back asking for free massages, nose jobs, and an air conditioner in every room!  How dare they think they can get away with that.  Do rich people really want to take a turn down that path?   Certainly Not!  So it’s better to deny them explicit health care and tend to them in the Emergency Room, but only when things get really bad.

You see, Ben Stein feels awfully bad about them not having access to the care they need,  and he knows it’s the right thing to do to provide everyone with basic healthcare coverage, but he’s afraid that it won’t remain basic.

I can see where he’s coming from, I mean give everyone equal access to the basic services provided by the Police and Fire Departments, and the next thing you know they’re demanding their own Secret Service and armored vehicle convoys.   Give them food stamps so they can eat a little something while they are unemployed, and before you know it, there they are next to you at your favorite exclusive restaurant dining in their dirty denim. 

Ben Stein has seen where compassion leads, so when he arrives at the Universal Health Care fork in the road, he chooses the path that with the sign that reads “Status Quo,” because that path leads to where the rich stay healthy and get richer, and the rest of us get screwed.

I understand the theory of The Republican Road to Recovery (see below) and I know how it “works” in practice, because it’s been the economic doctrine of choice for most of the last thirty years.  The theory, also known as “supply side” and “trickle down,” is supposed to provide extra cash and capital to entrepreneurs who will in turn use their wealth to create jobs.  The people who get those jobs spend the money they earn on goods and services.  Their spending creates more demand for those goods and services, which in turn creates even more jobs.  The theory works great… on paper.  Kind of like last year’s Mariner team looked good… on paper.

The problem with the theory is that the very wealthy people at the top don’t practice what their party preaches.  They don’t “trickle” their new found wealth down onto the rest of us.  The rich have kept almost all of their tax savings for themselves.  And the jobs they have created over the past six to eight years have not raised the average American’s standard of living.  Average workers lost ground while those at the top saw their incomes nearly double.  The jobs that have been created are generating more and more wealth for owners of the companies, but most of the people they employ aren’t getting paid enough to keep up with the increased cost of living.

So the Republicans’ plan to give the super rich hundreds of billions of dollars in more tax cuts every year is about the worst thing we could do right now.  Historical data shows that their plan does not stimulate the economy.  All their recovery plan would do is provide billions of dollars to the already super-rich people who would use their tax savings to replenish their depleted investment portfolios.  Very little of “stimulus dollars” from tax cuts would go back into the economy. 

To reiterate what is in the post below, the average CEOs of Americas largest 800 companies would see a tax cut of $1,500,000 every year if the tax cuts outlined in The Republican Road to Recovery were implemented and Paul Ryan’s plan to eliminate the capital gains tax was enacted.  Now that’s what I call “redistribution of wealth,” but the redistributed dollars would be going to people who are already obscenely rich.

Here’s a chart I found a couple days ago on Open Left that shows how much bang for the buck different types of stimulus plans provide:

You can see from the chart that tax rebates work on about a one-to-one ratio.  People spend their lump sum payments, and it provides the economy with a quick shot in the arm.

The chart shows that permanent tax cuts are very ineffective at stimulating the economy and creating jobs.

You can see that government spending is very effective at stimulating the economy.  Why?  Because it creates both jobs and demand for things that people going through rough times, like many Americans are right now, would otherwise choose not to spend their money on.  It’s no surprise that the biggest bang for the buck comes from extending income support to people who lost their jobs for the obvious reason that they will spend every penny they get.  Infrastructure spending is also very effective because it creates employment and it improves productivity by rebuilding roads, bridges, schools, dams, water systems, electrical systems, etc. that must operate efficiently for our economy to prosper.

So my solution for stimulating the economy would be to extend unemployment benefits, and provide tax rebates for single payers making under $80,000 and joint filers making under $160,000.  To help pay for the government spending, I would immediately raise the top tax rate to 50% and then increase it again later if needed.  (That’s still a pretty good deal when you compare it to what the top rates were between 1932 and 1980.)   I would leave other tax rates as they are for now, but in two years I would raise the 28% bracket to 30% and the 33% bracket to 35%.

I would then dole out some money to the states for the next two years to help them with the demand for health and human services due to recession-caused unemployment.  I would also let them know they can’t rely on federal funds once things turn around in two years, so they better find a solution to their revenue problems between now and then. 

I would spend heavily on infrastructure repair, and I’d start right here Seattle!  I’d order up a construction crew to start boring the tunnel to replace the viaduct right away and another crew to reinforce weak points on the viaduct that will have to remain in place for the five or more years that it will take to complete the tunnel.  Then I’d hire a demo crew to tear the viaduct down.  And then I’d throw a huge party for the people of Seattle to celebrate the destruction of their city’s ugliest and noisiest road ever built.

There are projects like this all over the country.  There are old levees, old bridges, flooded roads, dilapidated schools…  We should spend the money to fix these things now.  The spending will create jobs and it will improve our productivity in the long run.

And that’s the HariKari stimulus recovery plan – Guaranteed to work.

Seriously, that’s what it says in the new GOP pamphlet released last week.

I scanned through it today and found the same tired old theories about how they are the party of low taxes and controlled spending.  It was really quite hilarious.  On page two I found how their plan:

CURBS SPENDING

•  
  • Limits the Federal Budget from Growing Faster than Family Budgets Instead of spending money on wasteful programs under the guise of “stimulus” and investments,” Republicans seek to ensure that the federal budget cannot grow faster than families’ ability to pay the bill.

And on page nine I found that the government would be collecting way less revenue because, you guessed it – they want more huge tax cuts for the rich!

Republicans propose a simple and fair tax code with a marginal tax rate for income up to $100,000 of 10 percent and 25 percent for any income thereafter, with a generous standard deduction and personal exemption.  Republicans would allow any individual or family satisfied with their current tax structure to continue to pay those rates, while dropping the two lowest rates by 5 percent to provide every taxpayer with a tax cut.  Republicans would also permanently fix the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) so that millions would no longer have to fear the possible imposition of a huge, new tax each year.

Yes, they want to CUT the top tax rates that are currently set at 35%, 33%, and 28% down to 25%.  That would give the super rich who currently pay 35% a 10% reduction on their income-tax bill, unless they fell into the category of those who are “satisfied with their current tax structure” who will choose “to continue to pay those rates.”  I wonder how many millionaires and billionaires would willingly pay more taxes than their greedhead associates.  Not many I bet…  

And as if the income-tax reduction isn’t enough, I’ve read they would also like to completely do away with the capital gains tax.  If they had their way, the very richest CEO’s among them would save an average of $1,500,000 every year, while the working class would see little to no reductions in their taxes. 

How much tax revenue would be lost under the Republican plan?  Citizens for Tax Justice says: 

The income tax proposals in the House GOP plan, which is presented as a fiscally responsible alternative to the President’s plan, would cost over $300 billion more than the Obama income tax cuts in 2011 alone.

So the Republican tax plan would reduce federal revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars a year that would be funneled into the pockets of their super-rich base and, you guessed it, the government wouldn’t be able to spend money on “wasteful” programs like schools, bridges, roads, alternative energy development, and health care to stimulate the economy.

Obama shouldn’t waste a nanosecond trying to reach out to these greedy vulgarians and their pissed-on tax plan.  He should do what he was elected to do:   Start changing things.  If I were him I’d start by telling everybody that the right thing to do at this time is to take back the hundreds of billions of dollars that the super rich pretty much stole from everybody else by RAISING their tax rate to at least 50% and using the extra revenue to rebuild our country.

Many of them really believe they should be paying higher taxes, and that they should be doing something with their excess wealth to make the world a better place. 

From Timothy Egan’s NYT blog:

Greed and Need

SEATTLE – There are plenty of rich people to hate these days, starting with Bernie Madoff, who will face a judge Thursday as well as the possibility of spending his remaining years in a cell where he can think about all the lives he ruined.

…

Bill Gates Sr. is 83 years old, six-foot-seven inches tall, with the kind of thin-haired crown that newborn babies and older men have in common. Though he looks like an avuncular conductor of a giant toy train set, he labors daily trying to give away one of the world’s biggest fortunes, that made by his son at Microsoft.

Senior, as he’s known, has a short, big-hearted book coming out next month, “Showing Up for Life,” which should be handed out to all those hedge-fund managers now filing for bankruptcy or otherwise wondering why their lives are so empty. His book is a sort of Last Lecture from the Greatest Generation, similar to the collected musings of Randy Pausch, who died last year of cancer at age 47.

…

Warren Buffett, who until the recent meltdown was the world’s richest man (Bill Gates is tops again), is a fellow far-sighted traveler, who has pledged the bulk of his fortune to senior’s care at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – the world’s largest philanthropy.

Consider one example of how that money changes lives: global deaths from measles have fallen from 750,000 to 197,000 in just seven years, in part because the foundation started focusing on vaccinations for such diseases.

Like all but the most fraudulent – or cautious – investors, Buffett has lost a pile on paper in the last year. He made news this week when he compared the current crisis to an economic Pearl Harbor. But he was more forgiving than many, saying that we may have to look beyond our anger at the crooks, legal and otherwise, who got us into this mess.

“The people who behave well,” he said in a CNBC interview, “are no doubt going to find themselves taking care of the people who didn’t behave so well.”

Read the rest here.

Today the wealthiest among us are complaining about Obama’s plan to let the Bush tax cuts expire in 2011, putting the top tax rate back where it was under Clinton at 39.6%.  The rich and all their blowhard mouthpieces are screaming about how Obama’s plans to use the increased revenue to pay for much needed infrastructure rebuilding, school buildings, education, and the expansion of healthcare coverage is “socialism” and a “war on the wealthy.” 

What they’re not saying or admitting to is that there hasn’t been a better time to be rich in this country than since just prior to the Great Depression when the top marginal income tax rate was 25%.  Since then the top rate has been as high as 94% and as low as 28% for a three-year stretch during the Reagan era.  It was above the current rate of 35% for seventy-two of the previous seventy-seven years.  Remember that “Socialist” Eisenhower era of the fifties?  The top marginal rate during his presidency was 91%. 

The rich are now entering their tenth year of Bush’s Low-Tax Party for his “base.”  They’ve been given hundreds of billions of dollars in the form of a 4.6% tax reduction on their earned income and a 5% tax reduction on their income from capital gains.  The money the rich received from these enormous tax breaks was supposed to somehow trickle down to the other 95% of us.  Wealthy entrepreneurs were ideally supposed to use those tax savings to provide increased benefits for the working class in the form of salaries and other benefits like healthcare and retirement plans. 

Well let’s take a look at how that “trickle down” action worked.  Here’s a bar chart from The American Progress Report publication titled Understanding Bushonomics – How We Got Into this Mess in the First Place.  The dark bars indicate 2002 levels of income and the light bars indicate 2006 levels of income.

The text on the chart reads:  “Between 2002 and 2006, real household income in the U.S. grew by 836 billion.  Fewer than 15,000 families got 25% of that Growth. … The 133 million households that make up the bottom 90% of American families divided only 4% of the nation’s income growth raising their average income from $30,354 to $30,659.”

Want another view of “trickle down” economics?   Take a look at this pie chart from the same publication.

The top 1% decided to keep 73% of our increased income for themselves.  The top 10% kept 95% of the income.  The bottom 90% got to share the remaining 5% of the increase. 

This is how Reagan’s economic model, embraced by Bush, works.  Now might be a good time to point out that Reagan at least showed some restraint.  When he lowered the top rate to 28% he raised the capital gains rate from 20% to 28%.  His thinking was that because the rich were getting such a huge cut in income taxes – from 50% to 28% – their capital gains should no longer be taxed at a lower rate than their earned income.  Bush, on the other hand, was so beholden to his base that he cut their income taxes and lowered the capital gains tax to 15%.  And the rich got way richer and the rest of us fell behind.  This system combined with the rapacious greed exhibited by “the haves” has led to our nation’s greatest gap of income inequality since before the crash of 1929. 

So when you hear some extremely wealthy person or one of their gasbag media mouthpieces whining about paying 4.6% more of their grossly inflated incomes to the U.S. government, remember these charts.  The rich took nearly all of the income.  They should be paying way more income taxes. 

Froma Harrop pointed out in her latest column that Republicans often remind us that even John F. Kennedy cut taxes.  But they fail to mention that he lowered the rate to 70%, which is 30 points higher than where it will be when the Bush tax cuts expire.  You think your hearing cries of socialism now?  What would you hear if Obama raised the top marginal rate to 70% again?  Or 91% as it was during Eisenhower’s time?

I’ll tell you what you’d hear.  Socialism!  Job killer! Communist!  War on the Wealthy!  Class War! 

Well screw them.  Even with those extremely high top-tier tax rates, the American economy prospered, and everybody’s incomes went up dramatically, not just for the top 1%.

Did I mention that all that economic growth and leveling of incomes took place during times of war?  That’s right…  During WWII the top tax rate was within the range of 81% to 94%.  During the Vietnam War the top rate ranged from 70% to 77%.  Over the entire Cold War, the rate started at 86.45%, went up to 92% and down to 28% right before it ended.  Presidents used to ask Congress to collect money to pay for the costs of waging wars.  Each generation was taxed to pay for the wars so that the next generation wouldn’t be overburdened with a previous generation’s war debt.

And what did our last “War President” do with tax rates while he waged his “War on Terror?”  His administration gave us the biggest tax cut in our nation’s history.  The tax cuts resulted in somewhere around 1.9 trillion dollars in lost tax revenue, and the lion’s share of those tax savings went to the wealthiest among us.

So you see, it has been an extremely good time in our history to be very wealthy.  If you were a wealthy person during the last decade, you saw your income double and your taxes go down.  What a deal!

Well all parties have to come to an end, and now it’s time for the greedy people at the top to start giving back some of what they kept from the rest of us.  Don’t feel sorry for them.   They don’t need your pity. 

We need their money.  We need it to repair our crumbling infrastructure.  We need it for new schools and better education systems.  We need it to build new energy-efficient transit systems.  We need it to make our population healthier.  We need it to invest in research to develop clean energy sources.  We need it for our country’s future. 

Investing this money now will help us recover from the current financial crisis, and spending it in ways that leads to lower energy use, and in ways that make all of us healthier and smarter will grow our economy and make us competitive again.  That’s how everybody wins.

The third presidential debate was best.  John McCain was sometimes spunky and sometimes fiery, and Barack Obama was cool, thoughtful and right as usual.

Their passion is a refreshing change from what we’re getting from the Current Occupant.  Bush now appears before the TV cameras to address the nation about the financial crisis and delivers his prepared statements in a stunted manner with all the enthusiasm of a disinterested first-grader just learning to read.  He doesn’t sound as though he believes a word he’s saying.  He doesn’t care.  When the mic goes off, you have to wonder if he looks over to Cheney and says something like:  “Are we done yet?  Can’t we just leave now?”

I thought the first two debates clearly showed the differences in the policies of the two candidates, and they both passionately conveyed their positions, but this one seemed even more spirited.

Maybe it was because of the talk-show like format.  I’ve always thought that McCain could best conduct his campaign from the guest chair of The Daily Show, but that can’t happen, so there he was seated as a guest alongside Obama with Bob Schieffer as host.  He’s not nearly as funny as Jon Stewart, but I think he did a great job as moderator.

On Negative Campaigning:  One of the most contentious parts of the debate was about their negative campaign ads.  McCain was shameful in his assertion that he always corrects the ignorant misinformed masses when they go too far.  What about his own running mate when she goes to far?  Terrorists?  One is misleading enough, but more than one?  Who as he met besides William Ayers?  For more on this topic, watch this Daily Show segment.

And when the Ayers issue was brought up in the debate, McCain asked the question that he and his pit-bull running mate have been asking their supporters for the past few weeks:

MCCAIN: Yes, real quick. Mr. Ayers, I don’t care about an old washed-up terrorist. But as Senator Clinton said in her debates with you, we need to know the full extent of that relationship.

Obama was ready with his response:

OBAMA:  So let’s get the record straight.  Bill Ayers is a professor of education in Chicago.

Forty years ago, when I was 8 years old, he engaged in despicable acts with a radical domestic group. I have roundly condemned those acts.  Ten years ago he served and I served on a school reform board that was funded by one of Ronald Reagan’s former ambassadors and close friends, Mr. Annenberg.

Other members on that board were the presidents of the University of Illinois, the president of Northwestern University, who happens to be a Republican, the president of The Chicago Tribune, a Republican- leaning newspaper.

Mr. Ayers is not involved in my campaign. He has never been involved in this campaign. And he will not advise me in the White House.  So that’s Mr. Ayers.

McCain insisted that there must be more to the story.  I think if there was, we would have heard about it by now.  So, can we move on?

On Health Care:  Obama clearly won this part again even though McCain explained his position way better than he has in the past.  His plan is just wrong for America, so he loses.  And Obama successfully addressed the lie that McCain keeps telling about Obama’s plan imposing a fine on small businesses that don’t provide health insurance for their employees.

On Taxes:  McCain told the same tired old lies about Obama’s tax plan, only this time he used Joe the Plumber to make his point.  The point was that it’s wrong for the government to “spread the wealth around.”  Oh really?  So it’s right for the government to cut taxes on rich corporations and the wealthiest five percent of our population while we’re in a never-ending war on a noun?  It’s right to not to collect taxes from those most able to afford them to pay for the war and the five trillion dollar debt run up during the Bush term?  McCain’s tax plan doesn’t add up.  He can’t further cut taxes on the rich and expect to make any headway on balancing the budget and paying down our debt.  It simply doesn’t make sense.  Anyone with any basic math skills can figure that out, so I think McCain knows it; therefore he’s just pandering to his wealthy base and to all the fools that think the rich are going trickle their enormous wealth onto the middle class.  It didn’t happen under Reagan, Bush I,  or Bush II, so it’s not going to happen under McCain. 

On Roe v.Wade:  Let’s go right to the transcript:

SCHIEFFER:  …Senator McCain, you believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Senator Obama, you believe it shouldn’t.  Could either of you ever nominate someone to the Supreme Court who disagrees with you on this issue? Senator McCain?

MCCAIN:  I thought it was a bad decision. I think there were a lot of decisions that were bad. I think that decisions should rest in the hands of the states. I’m a federalist. And I believe strongly that we should have nominees to the United States Supreme Court based on their qualifications rather than any litmus test. Now, let me say that there was a time a few years ago when the United States Senate was about to blow up. Republicans wanted to have just a majority vote to confirm a judge and the Democrats were blocking in an unprecedented fashion.

We got together seven Republicans, seven Democrats. You were offered a chance to join. You chose not to because you were afraid of the appointment of, quote, “conservative judges.”

I voted for Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg. Not because I agreed with their ideology, but because I thought they were qualified and that elections have consequences when presidents are nominated. This is a very important issue we’re talking about.

Senator Obama voted against Justice Breyer and Justice Roberts on the grounds that they didn’t meet his ideological standards. That’s not the way we should judge these nominees. Elections have consequences. They should be judged on their qualifications. And so that’s what I will do.

I will find the best people in the world — in the United States of America who have a history of strict adherence to the Constitution. And not legislating from the bench.

SCHIEFFER:  But even if it was someone — even someone who had a history of being for abortion rights, you would consider them?

MCCAIN:  I would consider anyone in their qualifications. I do not believe that someone who has supported Roe v. Wade that would be part of those qualifications. But I certainly would not impose any litmus test.

WTF?  He says the Supreme Court nominees “should be judged on their qualifications” and that he will do that, but he concludes with saying that they aren’t qualified if they have supported Roe v. Wade.  That’s not a litmus test?  Are you kidding me?

There’s plenty more to discuss about this debate, but I’ve got to close now.  I’ll conclude by saying that independent polls showed the debate was closer than the first two, but Obama won again.  He’s 3-0.

Watch and/or read the whole debate here.

Fact check here.