The Economics of John Edwards
Posted September 26th, 2007 by Da King
On John Edwards website, he says he wants to get rid of those Two Americas he's always talking about. The site says "Building One America will take strong, bold steps, not incremental steps and half measures. Edwards has proposed detailed plans to put Washington back on the side of regular families".
Okay. So what are these "detailed plans" ?
Here are Edwards' proposals to eliminate poverty and make schools better:
- Force every american to buy health insurance, and
have the government subsidize those who can't afford it.
- Increase the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour.
- Triple the earned income credit.
- Eliminate the marriage tax penalty
- 'Invest' in rural community colleges
- Create a new Labor Taskforce to oversee business
- Create a million voucher for low-income people to move into good neighborhoods
- Phase out housing projects
- 'Invest' in refurbishing decaying neighborhoods
- Create a new $500 tax credit for low-income people
- Expand the child care tax credit up to $5000 per year
- Subsidize bank accounts for working families (I have no idea what this means)
- Create a home rescue fund for borrowers that get behind on their mortgages
- Shed 'excessive' mortgage debt through bankruptcy
- Create a new Family Savings and Credit Commission to protect families from abusive
financial products
- Create a late charge penalty grace period for credit cards
- Cap interest rates on payday loans
- Encourage low or no-interest loans
- Create a million jobs for the poor
- Enact universal government preschool
- Shrink classroom size
- Pay teachers more
- Make curriculum more challenging (finally !, something that doesn't cost taxpayers or
the business sector money)
- Giving bonuses to middle class schools that enroll low-income students
- Double federal magnet school funding to attract middle-class suburban students to
high-poverty urban neighborhoods
- Create second chance schools for high school dropouts
- Enact a College for Everyone program to pay public-college tuition, books and fees for
students who agree to work part-time during their first year at a school
- Encourage father responsibility by increasing child support collections
by $8 billion over the next decade
- Fight teen pregnancy
- 'invest' in home visits by registered nurses to low-income parents
- 'invest' in family literacy programs
- enact the Employee Free Choice Act to increase union membership
And how is Edwards going to raise the trillions and trillions of dollars
required to do all this ? Well, let's go to his tax reform plan and find out:
Edwards will:
- Raise the capital gains tax to 28%
- Repeal the Bush tax cuts for the highest income people
- Keep the estate tax
- Crackdown on offshore tax havens
- Improve IRS service
- Audit corporations and wealthy people more
- Increase taxes on hedge funds, private equity firms, and executive pensions
Wow. I guess those million new jobs for the poor will all be government jobs, because this would be the biggest government increase since the Russian Revolution. When I think of the net effect of all Edwards' policies on our economy, one word comes immediately to mind: CATASTROPHE. Edwards' policies will increase the price of every good that every consumer buys, stifle investment, raise unemployment, drastically expand government spending, drastically increase government bureaucracy, make US business less competitive……….If you wanted to draw up a recipe to destroy the US economy, I doubt you could do much better than John Edwards has, unless your last name was Castro, or maybe Kucinich. Now I understand why Edwards pays $1200 for a haircut you can get anywhere in the country for $20. That adds up about the same as his economic designs for the rest of us. Keep your hands on your wallets, and don't elect John Edwards.
September 26th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I sincerely wonder if the Edwards campaign has ever given one thought to how much it will cost to implement his proposed program. I would say that they say you can buy lots of votes with promises and then after the election you can forget the promises since the Congress isn't going along with many of them.
It was nice to see that he does have at least one thing that won't cost any money. I do have my hand on my wallet and am hoping I don't forget to keep it there.
Is there a possibility that Edwards, Obama, and Clinton are managing to outpromise each other? It would seem that their people just don't understand what happens when you win an election and people start looking for the promises to get enacted.
The worst part of Edwards is that all his promises are for "poor" people and all the rest of us will get to pay to keep them going. Isn't that a very socialistic sounding program?
September 26th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
It's a good thing poor people don't vote!
September 26th, 2007 at 10:16 pm
The good thing is that Edwards doesn't have a snowballs chance of becoming President…..EVER!!
The bad thing is that "her" plan is almost as oppressive as his is, and she has a chance of winning the WH.
The only good thing about her winning is that she'd barely be able to make through her first term without getting impeached….or strung up from the nearest lamp post.
September 27th, 2007 at 7:03 am
Roy, you mentioned Obama, and yesterday I went to his website to see what his proposals were, because I was going to put them into a post also. I'm trying to get the actual policies of some of these candidates out, since the debates are about as disappointing as can be. I'm tired of hearing the nonstop Bush bashing, I want to know what these candidates are going to do. I discovered something I have long suspected about Obama, ever since reading his book. HE DOESN'T HAVE ANY SPECIFIC PROPOSALS about hardly anything. Ending the Iraq war is about the only concrete thing on his entire website. Absolutely everything else was nothing but generalities. At least I will give Edwards credit for making actual proposals, even though they scare the bejesus out of me. I will repeat again what I've said about Obama several times. His speeches sound good, until after about 15-20 minutes you realize he hasn't said anything. His website only confirms that.
Sunkl, you're right. Hillary is only marginally better than Edwards. They would both move the country in the wrong direction, as would most Democrats. Can you believe Hillary is considered the 'centrist' in that group now ? That only illustrates how far over the left edge the Dems have fallen.
September 27th, 2007 at 5:04 pm
Is this country moving in the right direction?
I'm not so sure anymore.
September 28th, 2007 at 1:35 am
Chris, do you mean that you are starting to think that left which becomes socialist soon is the direction to go?
Do you believe that admitting defeat in Iraq as Senator Reid keeps saying we must do is the right direction? If so how do we ever get any other countries to believe in what the US says about anything.?
September 30th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
"Overtime, the value of the minimum wage has been eroded by inflation. For example, the minimum wage fell about 29% in real terms between 1979 and 2003. It reached its highest purchasing power in 1968, when it was set at $1.60 an hour, or the equivalent of $9.12"
* Congressional Digest Forward, March 2007, Vol. 86 No 3.
Which means that businesses were paying to their workers almost as much, adjusted in dollars, in 1968 as they would pay at $9.50 in 2008. Yet paying workers so fair a wage in 1968 didn't destroy the economy.
Fiscal Policy data studying the effects of the minimum wage raise in New York State 2005 can be found at the link below.
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/2005MinimumWageIncrease~PreliminaryAssessment.pdf
An interesting article below about the effect of raising state minimum wages above the federal level. After campaigning against the raise in Washington State, the state’s major business lobby, the Association of Washington Business, is no longer fighting the minimum-wage law, which is adjusted every year in line with the consumer price index.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/11/us/11minimum.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Although I was curious about why you would object to cracking down on off-shore tax havens. Surely you wouldn't feel bad if someone with 3 vaccation homes and several sports cars finally had to pay his taxes? So he has to forgo new carpet on his corporate jet. Real tears?
October 1st, 2007 at 8:56 am
Omelas,
It is the net effect of all John Edwards policies that I think would be very detrimental to the economy of the country, not just the raise in the minimum wage alone.
However, the minimum wage increase that congress pushed earlier this year was offset by tax cuts to business, which made the increases more of a zero sum game, and also made me agree with them. I'd rather see the money go to the workers than to the government.
I also don't disagree with every single item on John Edwards policy list, ie, cracking down on offshore tax havens. I just wanted to list all his positions. I do think Mr. Edwards is being disingenuous in listing this as a significant revenue source, however.
I'm well aware of the 'tax the rich' mantra of the left, and actually, I agree with progressive tax rates up to a point. What I don't agree with is taxing people at so high a level that it hurts the economy, and therefore hurts the very people it proposes to help. The goal isn't to increase the size of government, the goal is to provide for the welfare of the people. Good, high paying jobs are the best way to ensure that. You don't get those by taxing the business owners and investment capital at oppresively high rates. Turning over ever more and more of our money to the government doesn't help us become anything but dependent slaves in the long run.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:10 am
Business and Personal Finance…
I couldn't understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting…
November 23rd, 2007 at 1:48 pm
I know Edwards is the best candidate there is for the Presidency. Just because the man has a nice haircut doesn't mean he is the devil. He hasn't been immoral , or corrupt as a Senator, as some others have been and still are. I say go ahead and give him a chance. Some one needs to help the poor people again. He is the only candidate Democrat or Republican who is will speak about poverity. The bible says in Mark.14:7 For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. He will be my choice for President and the Next President of the United States.