hmm are you sure you knwo what 'fair' means?

Fair is when you treat people equally. If a store charged someone else $3 for chocolate milk but they charged you $6, would you consider that fair?

No. Equal is when you treat people equally. Fair is when you treat someone or something in a way commensurate to the context of the situation.

If you want fair and equal to be the same, it sounds more like you should be advocating for a true Utopian-style communistic society.

Funny, since you're advocating for unregulated laissez-faire capitalism in the other thread.

I don't want to make people the same, but I think people should be treated equally.

Most of the corrupted political people in the US constantly confuse the terms "fair" and "equal", and a few other adjectives that I will not mention here so as not to start a flame war.

KW deserves to be flamed, it be "fair" since he's an idiot of mass proportion...

No, that's your interpretations of the words. Political terminology is esoteric to the core. Is affirmative action fair or equal? It's part of an equal right that follows from an equal opportunity, except it's basing the standard of equal on past occurences that don't necessarily correlate to current practice.

In the literal sense of the words, you're right, fair and equal, are entirely different terms. But in a political context, you're wrong because you can interchangably use them.

Back to the point at hand, Pres. Obama's tax policies are neither fair or equal in my humble opinion. Really, I'm most concerned that he will raise taxes on dividends and justify it by saying some folks are paid in dividends. While some are paid that way, it will kill fund performance and hurt a ton of people's retirement incomes in a way that's not easily repairable.

Moving right along, my bigger worry is will either candidate address the burdensome debt issue and i do believe it's an issue given the aging population with their expected entitlements. The answer to this, I think, is unfortunately no. So aside from voting on smaller ticket items, I don't think I will get what I want from this cycle or closeby election cycles.

*neither fair nor equal

Or is also correct. Note the words are being used adjectives. I am saving this pristine moment.

*Note the words being used are adjectives.

Not that this is a reason to necessarily vote for Pres. Obama, but if either candidate is going to take on the debt and the big entitlements in the next four years, I'd put money on Pres. Obama having a much better chance simply because I think it's really hard to try to push through, for instance, Social Security reform if you know you've got another election coming.

However, the same could be said for Romney in 2016 were he to win in November as opposed to whoever would run for the Democrats then.

I'm torn on how to handle the debt. On one hand, I feel it's better to spend short-term and help stimulate the economy (if it can be done more effectively than the previous stimulus was), which could also help rebuild a lot of the infrastructure of the country.

On the other side, there's the "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste" ideology. If we don't deal with the deficit now and we spend our way out, if things get better and we, hypothetically had a 5%+ GDP growth year and tax revenues went up and everything started looking peachy again, would the general public forget about the deficit and bristle at entitlement reform?

I'm definitely someone who's torn on these issues, because ultimately, I'm not against government being used as a tool to try to help out those who need it. There's always abuse of this, and of course that abuse should be punished when it's found, but I'm okay with the idea that some people are receiving benefits for sitting around doing nothing when they could while I work for my income and don't do much better than they do collecting, because I assume more people that really need the help are helped than the abuse.

At the same time, when you see those individual cases, it is infuriating, and for that matter, without significant and consistent growth of our GDP, I just don't see how the big three of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid can continue on as they are, and that's before you look at programs like welfare and all the other silly programs out there.

The only time I really get irritated about cuts is when they're obviously politically motivated and that they're not really about helping the deficit. I think it might have been Rand Paul, but someone went after NPR and PBS a year or two ago because they believed taxpayers shouldn't be paying for such things. If THAT'S the first cut you're making, you're not trying to work on the deficit. You're trying to shut down the funding for two stations are primarily left-leaning when it comes to political programming. If those cuts were suggested AFTER other bigger cuts, I'd give the person far more credit.

Anyway, I'm not even sure I'm talking about whatever I started talking about now, and this is probably pretty long now, so I should probably just hit "Submit Message" and move on.

And I wanted to check on this before I posted on a grammar issue but I've found nothing that suggests you would use neither/or for adjectives. Unless this is one of those weird exceptions and I'm just not privy to it, Assassin is right. It's neither/nor.

If you can find a reputable website to show otherwise, I'd actually like to see it, as I teach this type of stuff and if there's an exception I'm unaware of, I'd like to know. :)

But of course, this is off topic from the main point.

No sense worrying. Even Assassin's grammar is wrong sometimes. (See the neither/nor versus neither/or discussion above).

You have an interesting point about a second term President without fear of re-election. However, I would opine that most big ticket items historically occur in the first 100 days of most administrations. Moreover, President Obama is unlikely to have a Democratic Congress by his side at any point in the next four years presuming he wins.

I'm not entirely sure Romney would be much different. He may streamline government operations some, but I'm not sure he will really touch the third rail entitlements spending.

asdfhslf

I just hope that if Obama wins a 2nd term that he has the political courage to try to push through some important reforms and that Congress, knowing that he can't run again, might actually be more willing to work with him to fix some stuff, a la Clinton in his 2nd term when it seems like some fluff finally got done.

boio

Clinton's two SCOTUS appointments, NAFTA, welfare-to-work, and truth-in-sentencing/judicial reforms all took place in his first term. (Sadly this did not include a balanced budget amendment as it was never sent to Clinton because it fell one vote shy in the Senate). I didn't find his second term to be all that impactful as it was marred by controversy and foreign affairs that were never really ironed out. I guess one could argue the supposed second term surpluses were a big deal.

I don't really think President Obama wants reform in the manner of reductions. He rejected the Simpson-Bowles Commission he appointed in favor of his own plan. However, perhaps with an eye to the future, he would change course seeking some sort of lasting legacy.