[quote=@SleepingSilence] I guess the only real thing I can say in defensive for Obama. (and Bush.) Is it's a lot damn harder being president than people think it is...Other than that, the whole "they are both stupid" argument is preposterous. Yeah, Bush got "C'S" Yuk yuk. At Yale, a prestigious college where you most likely would never be accepted into. I suppose a lot of reasons why people "hate" them are quite poor and invalid reasons. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2148744/Did-Obama-worse-grades-Bush-New-evidence-reveals-college-class-got-lower-SAT-scores-Dubya.html Or things like Ted Cruz is Canadian, or Obama had Muslim parents. That kind of meaningless B.S. But, what is politics without stupidity? I mean if you believe that, I understand why you support him. I can't really confirm or deny speculation. [/quote] [quote=@SleepingSilence] [@Vilageidiotx] Mmm. I don't believe you though. *wags finger* You shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. My roommate is also very closely related to a small business in the area and he always tell me in board meetings he goes to how much they get screwed over. But I has a feeling this won't get too much farther. Because I'd like to pretend I'm too busy to discuss politics because they can become quite tedious to discuss. :P Also god dammit I didn't want these too STILL be about politics. Lol. Quick, someone change the subject. XD [/quote] Hey now, ain't gettin away that easy. I said i'd answer it when I have time and I have time now. The article can be broken down into two major points: That people who own businesses don't like paying taxes, and that businesses in fact pay taxes. The idea that this is ruinous to the economy is taken for granted and at no point supported by really anything meaningful. If there is red tape that is truly useless, then fine, get rid of it, but the idea implied by this article that all regulation and taxation is useless is silly. If it is true that labor laws and environmental regulation is keeping a business from hiring people, then good riddance to those businesses. Nobody is owed success in business. If you cannot pay a proper wage to your employees, and you cannot run your business without doing damage to the nation or the world, then you shouldn't be running a business. As for the myth part, or more specifically the myth that big business uses regulation as a way to keep small business down, there are a lot of holes in that idea that it simply cannot hold water. First though, let's point out that the thinktank that contributed the article you posted was created by the owner of HomeDepot. Keeping in mind that is the sort of people propagating this myth, we can go forward into busting it. The problem is this; if a large business is willing to push regulatory legislation, we have to assume they have the resources to take the losses associated with this legislation. If they are doing so to keep down small businesses, this means that they are both willing to take a loss in order to stop small-business competition, and that small businesses don't usually have the resources to thrive in a regulatory environment. So lets say that we take the regulation away. Smallmart and Bigmart can hire all the child labor they could ever want, and they can dump as much trash into the river as they ever could please. The problem is that Bigmart still presumably A: Has the resources relative to Smallmart that allowed them to comfortably take regulation in the first place, and B: Bigmart will still want to use those resources to force Smallmart out of the business. So in this circumstance, Bigmart can drop the price of the service just enough to take down Smallmart. They could also in theory poach labor from Smallmart by increasing wages, but I don't think this is how this is typically done, looking at Wal-Mart as an example of how a company kills small business. This is a round-about way of showing how, if you get rid of regulation, you get the same result of Smallmart closing down, but now Bigmart, unregulated, can do whatever they want to their employees and/or the environment. And if your don't believe a pricing out scenario can happen, then I only need point you to the most recent use of this tactic. Last year the American oil industry was booming. American oil pays higher wages than third world oil, and their methods are more complicated due to the location of American drilling sites. Third-world oil producing companies responded last year by dropping prices dramatically. This is why, during the holidays, prices were fucking amazing. The result was catastrophic for the American oil industry, that couldn't compete with the cheapness of foreign oil. As for Bush and Obama, I don't think Bush quite had it in him to be President. His personal history suggests an average dude born to a wealthy family. It is his personability that got him into the office, which itself wouldn't have been the biggest issue because he had something of a dream-team cabinet from the Neocon perspective. The problem is that he was faced with some of the biggest hurdles a President has had to deal with in recent memory. The problem is, he was basically a trust-fund kid. As for Obama, I didn't trust him when he was running. He came off like a machine politician; basically just a Clinton with more charisma. And I have disagreed with him on a lot of things. But there are a few things he has done that I genuinely respect. The biggest thing I respect him for is the thing he seems most reviled for; Obamacare. I say this as somebody is is paying for overprices healthcare thanks to Obamacare, but putting that aside, this is how I see that entire thing. Ever since mah boy Harry Truman, Dems have been trying to get us a universal healthcare, and they've been cut off at the chase every time. When it was Obama's turn, and he found himself unable (like so many Dems before him) to pass a completed form of universal healthcare, he said "Fuck it" and forced through a half-finished version. It's incomplete nature, specifically the lack of any public insurance, is why I am paying ridiculous amounts for a plan. But I have to admire how he handled it because of the situation he has created. Specifically, he's made it so the only way out is forward. If we fail to pass a public option, insurance prices will continue to be expensive. But if we try to dismantle healthcare, that'll mean taking people who have plans thanks to Obama care and unceremoniously dumping them. If they just get rid of that requirement for everyone to have health insurance, prices will skyrocket. To make that situation even better, Sanders is selling the progressives on a full-out Scandanavian system. Now that the price for healthcare in the US is doubly unreasonable, the call for a Scandanavian system could grow louder. Hell, my conservative family who do not like Obama seem also to be entirely soured on the insurance model by now. So what Obama has done is the greatest thing any politician can do for America; he's forced an issue hard to the left and cut off all decent opportunities for retreat to the right. And that I respect the fuck out of.