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"most electable" = will change his tune when necessary to get more votes.
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.c...sman-handicap/“I don’t claim to be the perfect candidate,” Newt Gingrich told a South Carolina radio station last week, as he settled into his role as the latest not-Romney in the Republican race. “I just claim to be a lot more conservative than Mitt Romney and a lot more electable than anybody else.”
It’s a plausible line, evoking William F. Buckley Jr.’s often-quoted admonition that right-of-center voters should support the most electable conservative in any given race. But is it accurate? Not if you judge candidates on their record, rather than by their affect. By that standard, the most electable conservative remaining in the Republican race is probably Jon Huntsman...
...But his salesmanship has been staggeringly inept. Huntsman’s campaign was always destined to be hobbled by the two years he spent as President Obama’s ambassador to China. But he compounded the handicap by introducing himself to the Republican electorate with a series of symbolic jabs at the party’s base.
He picked high-profile fights on two hot-button issues — evolution and global warming — that were completely irrelevant to his candidacy’s rationale. He let his campaign manager define his candidacy as a fight to save the Republican Party from a “bunch of cranks.” And he embraced his iden y as the media’s favorite Republican by letting the liberal journalist Jacob Weisberg write a fawning profile for Vogue.
This was political malpractice at its worst. Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him, but they need to think that he likes them. Imagine a contender for the Democratic nomination introducing himself to liberal voters by attacking Planned Parenthood, distancing himself from “left-wing nutjobs” and giving a series of interviews on Fox News, and you have the flavor of how Huntsman’s opening act was perceived on the right. The substance mattered less than the symbolism, which screamed: I want your vote, but I don’t particularly care to be associated with your stupidities.
"most electable" = will change his tune when necessary to get more votes.
random capture. will check. love your use of the plural.
Westminster Abbey
There's some truth to that but besides that Huntsman is running a campaign with no substance, at least none that I've seen him articulate. I saw the Colbert interview Scott posted and several others and they have all been the same. I'm John Hunstman and I'm reasonable but not followed up with any substance. It's just a variation of Rick Perry's I'm Awesome campaign. If I dig deeper I find alot I like about him but he's doing a horrible job articulating it.
i would never have guessed. looks like a sea monster in renaissance garb devouring a seafaring vessel. very cool nonetheless.
I'm just short of 100% positive that the Simpson-Bowles plan that Huntsman's advocating was just going to lump cap gains in with ordinary income and tax it all at the single rate. IOW, "getting rid of cap gains" meant getting rid of the separate tax rate for that form of income, not making all that income tax-free.
Taxing it at the same rate as other income seems like a no-brainer to me, but I admit to an incomplete understanding of everything that falls under capital gains.
Thanks for the clarification.
Who is against such a plan, other than super-rich people?
the 19% of Americans who put themselves in the top 1%, for starters
The only situation that I can think of that might get complicated for an average individual would be gains related to selling your house. As an example, what do we do with Grandma and Grandpa who bought their house in 1960 for $30,000 but 50 years later it's worth $300,000? Probably not a good idea to just hit them with $270,000 worth of income for the year and expect them to come up with a $60,000 tax bill the following April.
Tax accountants and brokerages?
Yeah, I think CC brought that up a while back, and it's a valid concern. Two solutions I could see:
1. Collect tax from home sales at the point of sale. So if they sold for a $270K gain, they receive $210K. That way they don't have to find the money later.
2. The better option, separate income from home sales under a different tax rate.
I was thinking something along the lines of getting to spread out that tax liability over several years, but taxing at point of sale would be a lot simpler.
Would be a pretty tough pill to swallow to see 20-something percent of your equity instantly vanish though. Even worse than that one day a year us non-escrowing Texans have to cut that check for property taxes.
I think solution 2 would cause another housing bubble.
I think the existing exemptions for selling a homestead can and should still apply, though I'm not sure of their upper-limits. That upper-limit should be adjusted to reflect "non-gynormous mansions"
I don't know about that. From what I've been reading I think these guys are actually advocating completely repealing the cap gains tax.
How these republicans pander to the ultra rich and garner a single vote from people making less than 200k per year is beyond me. Maybe one of the resident middle class conservatives can explain their thought process.Welcome to the season of jobs plans. GOP presidential hopeful Jon Huntsman offered his last week. President Obama will propose his before Thursday night’s football game. But today is GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s day. And at least when it comes to tax policy, he veers a bit to the left of the new Republican orthodoxy.
To be sure, for someone hoping to win the party’s presidential nomination, he says nearly all the right things: He’s in favor of small government, less regulation, a Cons utional amendment to balance the budget etc. etc. But on tax policy, Romney strays off message a bit: Sure, he’d extend the 2001/2003/2010 tax cuts. But while many of his opponents would eliminate all taxes on capital gains and dividends, Romney would zero out taxes on investment income only for the middle class.
How heretical is this? Well, even Obama has proposed a zero capital gains rate for small business owners—many of whom Romney would also exempt. And Huntsman, considered the most moderate of Romney’s challengers, said he’d eliminate investment taxes for all.
Romney’s plan is interesting because, as it happens, relatively few middle-class households report capital gains, and those that do generally pay only a pittance.
For instance, the Tax Policy Center estimates that households making less than $50,000 pay an average of less than $10 in taxes on investments. That’s no surprise since most have no gains, and those few who do have been paying at a zero rate since 2008 (if you’re in the 10 or 15 percent brackets, gains are generally tax-free).
Even those making between $100,000 and $200,000 pay an average of just $400. And most of them would likely be better off if Congress extends the payroll tax holiday than if it eliminates their investment taxes.
The real beneficiaries of a zero rate on gains are the highest-income taxpayers. Those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (who have an average pre-tax income of nearly $7 million) would enjoy a $350,000 tax cut thanks to such a change. As my colleague Bob Williams noted in a recent Tax Vox blog, 15 percent of people in that rarified income group make two-thirds of their money from gains. In current Republican parlance, they are the “job creators” who will pour that higher after-tax income into new American jobs.
That’s why former hedge-fund operator Romney will surely disappoint those in the GOP who argue for a zero rate on capital for all. For instance, in the initial version of his fiscal plan, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI)would have eliminated all taxes on gains, dividends, and estates and repealed the corporate income tax (which he would have replaced with an 8.5 percent value added tax). By that standard, Romney is, well, practically Obama.
This leaves us with the always-flexible definition of “middle-class.” Even though the median household income in the U.S. is just $50,000, Obama defines middle-class as anyone who makes $200,000 or less. Romney appears to be using the same definition.
Will cutting investment taxes for middle-income households boost the short-term economy, as Romney claims? It is hard to see how. The extra ten bucks that goes to a typical family making less than $50,000 sure won’t create much new demand. The better question is whether extending a zero cap gains rate to higher-income (but not super- high-income) households would encourage more investment in the short run.
I suspect small business owners these days are worrying a lot more about making payroll than the promise of future tax-free gains. As for those of us who’ve been tossed around in the gut-wrenching swells of the stock market over the past few weeks, it will take a lot more than a zero gains rate to encourage another leap into those waters.
http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Ta...t-with-the-GOP
That article you posted does make it sound that way. If that is truly what they're proposing then what a ridiculous idea. Maybe not so bad if you're strictly talking about the lower income brackets and maybe small business owners, but for CEO's cashing in stock options? NFW.
I thought that a married couple selling a house they have lived in for at least 24 consecutive months can be sold without paying taxes on the first 500,000. I do not work in tax law but that was my understanding from tax class like ten years ago. I think that an individual gets $250,000.
But I am pretty sure you have to reside within the home for 2-5 years.
That's correct. Or at least it was as of 5 years ago when the wife & I moved. Primary residence only.
BUMP
Please run
Seems intelligent,moderate, experience outside of politics and govt, so he doesn't have chance with the Repug crazies, extremists, retrogrades, govt destroyers.BUMP
Please run
He's the man we need to speak up tbh
Plus, he's an LDS fringe cultist. Southern Baptist racists and evangelical crazies not gonna go for him.
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