Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Gary Locke....A#1 Baboon!

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 01-28-2003, 10:14 PM:

I can't believe I just read this on the Yahoo front page.......
" In too many ways, our country is headed in the wrong direction," Gov. Gary Locke of Washington state said in the official response from Democrats"

Is this guy a kook? Yes! Is his state headed in the right direction......NO! Come on Gary, Get a life.......
Mark

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 01-28-2003, 10:20 PM:

Hmmmmm.....That guy should talk. He ran us into the hole and wants to tax our brains out with his (and the Legislature) "Tax and spend" philosophy.

As far as I am concerned, Locke is the one who is using "upside-down" economics.

I just wish we could get a job done without the damned political parties attacking each other with their [bs]

.

It does not seem to make any difference what it is....if the Republicans come up with an idea, the Democrats think it is [bs]

. If the Democrats come up with an idea, the Republicans think it is [bs]

, too.

That's why I vote for who I think will do the best job.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 01-28-2003, 11:15 PM:

The Democrats and Republican trade the same barbs over and over again and it is all nothing but rhetoric so they can grab as much power and pork money so they can get re-elected. Nothing new.

I see much of the government as a very large white-collar-welfare entitlement program. We have a federal tax code some 1,500 to 2,000 pages long (or it could be longer; I'm just going from memory) --and it is complicated primarily to keep an industry of government bureaucracy, tax accountants and tax attorneys employed. Many other government programs are similar. On top of that, it is one giant good ol' boys network.

Until the government applies some of the same rules to itself anyone running a small business has to endure, our standards of living are going to keep going downhill. The legal-insurance-medical industrial complex looks to speed that downhill slide.

The group health insurance policy at my work just came up for renewal in January. We get a nice 41% rate increase to pay. I guess the lawyers, insurance guys and medical administrators are all fancying some new $100,000 sports car that just came out. Too bad our political representatives won't step in to help in this madness. But then I can't afford to attend any of their $1,000-per-plate campaign fund-raiser dinners.

Posted by Ray Brown (Member # 1449) on 01-28-2003, 11:15 PM:

I caught some of that tonight on Fox News Channel. Read all about it here:
Gary Locke's Response

They must be desperate for somebody to give the response [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 01-28-2003, 11:18 PM:

I didn't hear his response but I do agree we are going in the wrong direction if Bush is giving tax relief primarily to the wealthy. Average folks are statistically far more likely to (often of necessity) spend the money and that would stimulate the economy. We are also headed in the wrong direction if we are adamant about starting a war when the case for it has not been made.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 01-28-2003, 11:25 PM:

As a joke goes about 5 different types of patients a doctor can operate on, they like the politicans best.

...Politicians are the easiest to operate on... There's no guts, no heart, and no spine... and...the head and butt are interchangeable."

Posted by Thomas Procyk (Member # 1170) on 01-28-2003, 11:38 PM:

quote:
As a joke goes about 5 different types of patients a doctor can operate on, they like the politicans best.

...Politicians are the easiest to operate on... There's no guts, no heart, and no spine... and...the head and butt are interchangeable."

HAHAHAHAHA! Thanks, Paul. That was a good one. [Big Grin]

=TMP=

Posted by Ken Layton (Member # 133) on 01-28-2003, 11:39 PM:

Gary Locke has done his best to make Washington state the most business UN-friendly state in the country. Boeing has eliminated 35,000 jobs already and even the famed Olympia (now Miller) Brewery is closing up shop after over 100 years of making beer (and it's just 5 miles from my apartment).

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 01-29-2003, 08:39 AM:

Steve said "I didn't hear his response but I do agree we are going in the wrong direction if Bush is giving tax relief primarily to the wealthy. Average folks are statistically far more likely to (often of necessity) spend the money and that would stimulate the economy. We are also headed in the wrong direction if we are adamant about starting a war when the case for it has not been made."
_______________________________________________________________

There are two ways of looking a that though.....Your way, and......the way I heard it told on a morning radio show this week which I thought was interesting.....I can't remember the economists name but he had some interesting thoughts.

"If they give the rich people the tax credits it will cause employment figures to increase....Overall, its the rich people that employ us.....the average Joe does not employ people.....Hence, more employment equals less people out of work. That means more people making paychacks which they can spend, and that makes for a more consistant, better overall economy. Getting a 1K refund, or credit is basically meaningless and for most people will be gone in the blink of an eye anyway."
Mark

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-29-2003, 10:21 AM:

"Giving the "RICH" a tax break" is a Demo buzz line. What the deal is, is that it gives those WHO PAY TAXES a tax break. The poor do not pay income tax. They get it all back because of the low bracket they are in. And in the case of some they get back more than they pay in (if any). I had an employee, who, because he had kids and wife who didn't have a good job, was able to get all of his tax money back. He also got another $2400 for being "The head of Household" I asked him how he could do that and he said he did it every year. I asked my accountant about it and she confirmed that it happens. He got real PO'd at the end of the next year as he'd been working for me for the entire year which had put him just barely into the next tax bracket and he couldn't get his $2400 bonus that year.
Here's the thing on tax breaks...
To get a tax break all you have to do is pay taxes.
If you want to consider anyone that pays taxes "RICH" be my guest, but us that have to "cough it up" on April 15th, will argue that point.
I guess it's a perspective thing

As far as our "illustrious" governor goes [fu]

[ 01-29-2003, 02:08 PM: Message edited by: Greg Mueller ]

Posted by Dustin Mitchell (Member # 372) on 01-29-2003, 11:58 AM:

Previous posters are correct that the reason the tax breaks are heavy to the rich is that the rich pay most of the taxes. Its just simply impossible to give much more income tax relief to the middle class and poor. Under Bush's proposed series of cuts, a family of four with a combined income of $40,000 a year (lower middle class) would go from paying about $1,500 in income tax a year to $45. This is accomplished not only by lowering the income tax rate but upping the child tax credit to $1,000. The child tax credit, for those who are interested in giving bush a fair shake ONCE in a while, is a very 'poor friendly' tax policy. If you are making $100,000 a year and have two kids, knocking $2,000 off your taxes is nice but isn't going to really be that big of a deal. If you are making $25,000 a year though and have two kids that is going to help A LOT.

But having defended the majority of the Bush tax plan I have to criticize part of it here; or rather the part that was left out. The poor and lower middle class may not pay much income tax anymore, but they pay a hell of a lot to SSI-social security. Twelve percent of every check (matched by employers) if I am not mistaken. Many people are paying more to social security than they are to income taxes. Now at first glance this might seem only fair, since they are supposed to be paying for their own retirement. Two things destroy that theory, however:

1) Income over $80,000 is not subject to SSI taxes
2) The money taken out paychecks does not go to a retirement account for the person whose check it was deducted out of. It goes to pay current social security to already retired people AND disability benefits to people unable to work AND death benefits to spouses and children, even if they are very young and haven't paid much into SSI yet.

The point? Social Security is a social welfare system, we might as well admit it. It needs to be better funded, and that funding can come from all that money that has never been taxed for it before (the $80,000 number I mentioned). The amount taken out of every check could be SIGNIFICANTLY reduced if all reported income was subject to SSI taxes, not just that under $80,000. Right now SSI is one of the biggest burdens on the poor in this country. Our social welfare system should not be funded almost entirely by the poor and lower middle class. Its just doesn't make any sense.

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-29-2003, 01:53 PM:

Although your $80k figure is true it sounds as though you are saying that a person making say $81k doesn't have to pay SS. Just to clarify... all persons (unless they have some sort of Corportation situation), pay SS on that first $80k of income. After that the feds figure you've paid your share and you don't have to pay on anything over the $80k (approx). So we all get bit for the first $80k.

Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 01-29-2003, 01:56 PM:

Bobby wrote:

quote:
I see much of the government as a very large white-collar-welfare entitlement program. We have a federal tax code some 1,500 to 2,000 pages long (or it could be longer; I'm just going from memory) --and it is complicated primarily to keep an industry of government bureaucracy, tax accountants and tax attorneys employed.

Exactly! Very well put. And where that leads can be seen in Germany. The country is ruined because we have too much bureaucracy and it eats up all the tax money. We should get rid of all that but then we would have much more unemployed. I also see those people as really being first-class wellfare recipients. The society has come to a dead end.
This "tax and spend" thing is very dangerous!!! It will only inflate the bureaucracy.

Posted by Dustin Mitchell (Member # 372) on 01-29-2003, 02:09 PM:

You are correct Greg, I apologize if I was unclear.

The point I was trying to make though still stands. SSI is no longer an individual retirement program. It hasn't been an individual retirement program for almost forty year now-since LBJ's Great Society programs in the 60's that greatly expanded what SSI did. It is not fair to set an arbitrary limit on how much income can be taxed for SSI purposes when the money is being used for so many more things than pensions. We either need to seperate the retirement portion of the program from its other aspects and find other sources fo funding for those other aspects or do away with the $80,000 limit. Hell, I'd be willing to compromise and make the taxation graduated so that you pay less on anything over $80,000 than below it. But something needs to be changed and quickly.

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-29-2003, 02:26 PM:

There was a proposed plan by which persons (of a certain age group) could voluntarily take up to 3% of their SS payment and invest it in the stock market. Even though it was for a specific age group (or less) and it was voluntary, by the time the news media got done with it, the headlines read "Bush wants to privatize SS".
I think it would be a great idea to allow tax payers to opt out of SS payments and into investment programs, IF THEY WANT TO. The down side would be that the people who didn't succeed with their investments would be whining (sometime down the road) and want the gov to support them anyway.
Many persons feel that it would be a lot better if the money the gov extracted from you were used for what they said they were going to use it for. It wouldn't be nearly so bad as what really happens to it.

Posted by Michael Gonzalez (Member # 593) on 01-29-2003, 03:58 PM:

Before someone states the obvious about why would anyone want to invest in the stock market espically given it's current state, it should be noted that although the stack market has it's ups and downs, you can take any thirty year period (since the markets inception) and see that the market has always gone up no exceptions.

Posted by Steve Kraus (Member # 476) on 01-30-2003, 09:36 AM:

TIME Magazine this week notes that only 26.4 of taxpayers collect dividend income and of those less than 2% receive nearly a third of all dividend income.

The thrust of the article, titled THE REALLY UNFAIR TAX is to question why we aren't eliminating the double taxation on Social Security & Medicare. In other words, change to a system where income tax is calculated after those two payroll deductions are taken (7.65% combined). This is something that would help everyone across the board.

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 01-30-2003, 01:45 PM:

Steve, something like that just could "fly". I agree, that might make it more fair to the taxpayers.

I wish something like that would be implemented at the federal level. As of now, Social Security tax and L&I tax anre non deductable. Maybe that is considered as part of the standard deduction, but paying tax on those items at both th4e federal and state level is unfair. Just my opinion.....

Posted by Robert Golding (Member # 746) on 01-30-2003, 09:49 PM:

All I can say is California Gov. has all of them topped. I would gladly send him your way.

Posted by Charles Everett (Member # 889) on 01-31-2003, 11:26 AM:

Or better yet, the ex-governor of Texas, now living in DC.

Posted by Gerard S. Cohen (Member # 994) on 01-31-2003, 02:23 PM:

We in New York State have problems with our governor as well

But I heard Gov. Locke's rebuttle speech, and I thought he came across very well on a personal level, especially when he spoke of having attained the office of Governor only a mile from the pittifully small room his grandfather lived in, only a mile away,when he arrived as a penniless laborer from China.

On a political, or international level, I think he was rather restrained, witholding opposition fire, perhaps because of the occassion, following a constitutionally mandated State of the Union speech.

Here is an editorial written by a British writer, that contains many ideas that COULD have been included:
[LINK button removed ?] [I'd prefer to link rather than paste.]

The United States of America has gone mad
by John le CarrÈ (spy novelist for the non-readers in the group)

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is
the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay
of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for
in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have
made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The
combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once
more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square
is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he
who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be
trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the
first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich;
its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of
unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to
be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN
resolutions.

But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are
riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told.
The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360
billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the
pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think
they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At
what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer’s pocket? At
what cost because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane
people in Iraqi lives?

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from
bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations
conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two
Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade
Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being
browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated
neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with
the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see
Saddam's downfall just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not
under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is
perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock
on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed
America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel
to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to
mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the
enemy, and d) a terrorist.

God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are
equal in His sight, if not in one another's, the Bush family numbers one
President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida
and the ex-Governor of Texas.

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto
Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the
Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the
Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive
with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so
on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God's work.

In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic
Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to
kill him. The CIA believes that somebody was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr's cry:
"That man tried to kill my Daddy." But it is still not personal, this war. It
ís still necessary. It is still God's work. It is still about bringing freedom
and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.

To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and
Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and
God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won't tell us is the
truth about why we're going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of
Evil but oil, money and people's lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on
the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him
get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't.

If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart's
content. Other leaders do it every day. Think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan,
think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.

Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none
to the US or Britain. Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, if he's still
got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America
could hurl at him at five minutes' notice. What is at stake is not an
imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of
US growth. What is at stake is America's need to demonstrate its military
power to all of us, to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North
Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home,
and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair's part in all this is
that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can't.
Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the
same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can't get out.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself
against the ropes, neither of Britain's opposition leaders can lay a
glove on him. But that is Britain's tragedy, as it is America's: as our
Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and
looks the other way. Blair’s best chance of personal survival must be that,
at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will
force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the
world's greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant's head
to wave at the boys?

Blair’s worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag us
into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there,
could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated
in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will
have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to
come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great
domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party of
the ethical foreign policy.

There is a middle way, but it’s a tough one: Bush dives in without UN
approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.

I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect’s
sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are
shared by all sane men. What he can't explain is how he reconciles a global
assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war,
if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship,
to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public
hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the
altar.

"But will we win, Daddy?"

"Of course, child. It will all be over while you’re still in bed."

"Why?"

"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly impatient and may
decide not to vote for him."

"But will people be killed, Daddy?"

"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."

"Can I watch it on television?"

"Only if Mr Bush says you can."

"And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do
anything horrid any more?"

"Hush child, and go to sleep."

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local
supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he’d finished shopping.

[NOTE: I think Mr le Carre fails to appreciate that Israel, the ONLY democracy in the Middle East, is fighting for its survival
---Gerard]

Posted by Greg Mueller (Member # 17) on 01-31-2003, 02:50 PM:

John le CarrÈ
[fu]

Posted by Paul G. Thompson (Member # 655) on 01-31-2003, 07:01 PM:

Yes, indeed Governor Locke came from a humble background. That's why I voted for him. When he was the King County Executive, I think he was the best budget writer in the business.

However, it seems as though he forgot where he came from, and it likewise appears that he has lost touch with the blue collar workers.

I think Governor Locke has failed to put a governor on state spending.