Lots of pundits are proclaiming that President Bush is vulnerable because of 50%-ish approval/re-elect ratings in polls, but don't forget that the Democrats have been campaigning against him for almost a year now and the Republican machine hasn't even started rolling yet. President Bush has over $150 million burning a hole in his pocket, just itching for a target. If that target turns out to be John Kerry, expect to see a lot more dirt shoveled up and many more embarrassing revelations.
Update:
And there's more. From 1970:
Kerry said that the United Nations should have control over most of our foreign military operations. "I'm an internationalist. I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."President Bush and the RNC must have stacks of this stuff to turn over to the media when the time is right.On other issues, Kerry wants "to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care." He also favors a negative income tax and keeping unemployment at a very low level, "even if it means selective economic controls."
I was just discussing this with someone last night. I wonder if Kerry taking over so early in the game is going to work against him.
So far it's mostly been a bunch of Democrats lining up to fire zingers at Bush, and there hasn't been much coming back at them. When Bush starts campaigning for real, there will be a serious hail of arrows.
Pretty soon he'll stop being the little darling he is right now, and the kid gloves will come off, both in the campaign and the media. It's going to be tough for Kerry to weather that storm until November.
Yeah, this is the lull before the storm. Once the RNC diverts its attention from mailing me letters with computer-generated signatures and turns to Kerry, I think the poll numbers will really begin to change.
This'll be an ugly election year. Maybe not as bad as 2000, though.
Although I disagree with almost all of what Kerry said in that quote from 1970, I do find the concept of a negative income tax to be interesting. If we have to have a social welfare net, might it be more efficiently implemented by folding the plethora of programs we have today into the income tax code? Seems like it would save a lot of administration costs and let us put a bunch of welfare bureaucrats back into the private sector where they belong.
KH: I don't even know what a negative income tax means. It certainly can't be negative for everyone, because where would the money come from?
My understanding of negative income tax is that welfare recipients are allowed to work part time, losing less welfare benefits than they take in from their job. The idea is to encourage welfare recipients to accept whatever work they can get, even if it pays less than their welfare check.
Xrlq: I don't see how that translates to "negative income tax", but ok, the name doesn't have to make sense. Is it similar then to the welfare reforms enacted in the 1990s?
My understanding is that a negative income tax refers to a tax system in which the tax rate on low levels of income becomes 'negative', i.e. if you earn a sufficiently low amount of money you start getting tax credits from the government. The basic idea was first floated by Milton Friedman in 1962.
There are apparently significant problems with the idea, as discussed in this article I turned up via Google:
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/NegativeIncomeTax.html
It seems that more experimentation was done with this than I had known, and that it didn't turn out too well. Then again, it isn't clear that the flaws were obvious when Kerry made his statements in 1970. In context, I don't think Kerry deserves to be dinged for supporting such a policy at that time, even if further research indicated it would be a bad idea.
KH: Oh sure, I wasn't knocking him, although the idea does sound dumb even on its face. We've gained lots of new economic knowledge in the past few decades.