Monday, December 17, 2007

For the Democrat Party Presidential Nomination, BwD endorses.... Dennis Kucinich???


Here’s another one of those Presidential match-maker interactive questionnaires to which we’ve become addicted. This one is cool because one can weight the importance of each of the 11 issues questions to suit one’s preference (…and oddly enough there are no abortion questions. Go figure.).

And proving the vagaries of these things, the highest scoring Democrat that this particular Dr. Neil Warren has fixed us up with is….. Dennis Kucinich. We’ll check ourselves in after this post. Honest.

Incidentally, Fred, Mitt and Sam Brownback run 1,2,3 on the Republican side.

One of the aspects, though, that throws a monkey-wrench into these polls is “how” you weight each of the issues. For example, “global warming’ and “health care” as stand-alone issues are not nearly important to us as “tax reform” or “immigration”. However, these issues being what they are and with the baggage that is attached to each of them has us very concerned because we fear the potential of these two issues being leveraged for more command-and-control policies being implemented at the expense of our liberties.

So we weighted the issues “prima facie” without consideration for the implications of each and the results above are what shook out.

Another wrench: We got an equal bump in the “tax reform” column for both Hillary and Fred Thompson though we merely favored a long-term solution of a “flat tax” over Fred’s preference to extend the Bush tax cut which we certainly favor in the short-term and which both are infinitely preferable over the “tax the rich (wink, wink)” schemes Hillary is advancing. It would appear they haven’t got the all-or-nothing algorithm worked out, yet.

And if these match-making services are being completely honest with us, they would be asking questions like, “How much would you hold it against a candidate that had an extra-marital affair?” or “What do you think of Mitt’s hair?”… and Fred’s lack thereof? Of course, those wouldn’t get asked but if you don’t think those “issues”, legit or not, get as much play as some of the issues questions contained therein with many voters, you’d be kidding yourself.

For whatever its worth, the people who took the poll like the Republican candidates more than the Democrat candidates. Though, if the comments are any indication, it looks like a possible case of ballot box stuffing by the Ronulans. They remind us of why we never became libertarians.

At any rate, these things are fun and have become our “toy” for the election season.

5 comments:

B-Daddy said...

The Ronulans are getting a reputation for ballot stuffing in straw polls and the like. Can't remember where I read it, but I saw where they had also been able to use perhaps unethical techniques to win the cell phone straw poll after a debate a few months back.

B-Daddy said...

So I took the poll and I can get Rudy, Ron, or Mitt to be number one depending on how I weight the issues. The one that has me stumped is global warming. As I posted earlier, I would like to see a carbon tax, but only if it is used to end the income tax. Being for a carbon tax puts me into AlGore fruitcake land, but I believe it could be made to serve the greater good. BTW, my dems are Mike Gravel or Chris Dodd, whoever they are.
Right now I am leaning towards Mitt, but I like the way Rudy handles himself in debates.

Road Dawg said...

Non sequitor, but to Bdaddy comment,

My world is comming to an end. Bdaddy is jumping on a carbon tax?!?!?! This doesn't violate every Libertrian principal???, especially when the justification appears to be ending another unfair tax.

The Globe is not warming, however climate change is real. OK, we need to be better stewards of the planet, but that starts with taxing the Chinese who are polluting, not enabling them with trade incentives.

Dean said...

I'll let B-Daddy handle this but I think the general mindset is that of a user-tax geared towards weaning us off of (Middle East) oil in return for an elimination of a punative, progressive tax that discourages upward mobility and only promotes living in Monaco next door to Led Zeppelin and the Beatles... hey, wait a minute...

At any rate, I'm certainly more in favor of that than the current state and definetely the threatened trend should the O-office fall into enemy hands.

B-Daddy said...

Dawg,
As I have posted previously, there are many reasons I want a carbon tax to replace the income tax. First, I think the pressure to "do something" is going to become irresistible. The earlier conservatives and libertarians go after a carbon tax and include dropping the income tax, the more credibility they will have. Second, a carbon tax will lower the equilibrium point on the supply and demand curve for crude oil, thereby reducing revenue for fascist leaning leaders in oil producing states. Finally, I really think that our production of carbon dioxide doesn't help matters with respect to global warming, even if the warming is not all man-made. It makes sense to make reductions in a way that won't wreck the economy. If global warming is a real threat, then we will need all of our resources to handle the changes it induces. As a result, it would be best to propose solutions that encourage the economic growth that is the creator (after The Creator) of wealth. This is very much a commons problem, but the commons has become the entire planet. If regulation is inevitable, better it be in the form of a predictable, uniformly applied tax, than the dead hand of capricious bureaucrats.