I have a serious question, and I'm curious why it hasn't been asked...

[jsbowden]

McCain's health care plan is a 5k tax credit.

My question is this:

How does this help families who are so poor they already don't pay taxes?

Seriously. Why hasn't one single reporter asked him or Palin this question? A five thousand dollar tax credit isn't going to give them the money to buy health insurance. We're talking about people who just worry about making rent and eating. And are the folks most likely to end up sick.

If someone has, and I missed it, what was the answer?

The rich stay healthy and the sick stay poor...
U2

Comments

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

No, this is a piece of general blindness. I personally stopped paying attention to "tax credit" promises about 1988 or 1992, I think, whenever it was that I figured what that actually meant. (Not much, to my bottom line.)

Obama's not immune, here-- he's got the an expansion of the child and dependent care tax credit on his platform, for instance. (More than that, but that's the only one I know of targetted specifically at the poor.) Clinton, if memory serves, monkeyed around with child tax credits, too, but I don't remember the details. Even attempts to expand the pool of people who benefit by this tend to affect relatively small numbers of people, and not the people at the bottom who aren't paying taxes.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I think this is where I point out that you have right and more right when it comes to politics. I've never seen this particular meme in the Swedish left, and our right would still end up to the left of your Democrats.

[prince-corwin.livejournal.com]

I like to think of it as you being left and even more left, over there.

[thette.livejournal.com]

Fair point.

Our right wing coalition had to lie blatantly and say they were in favour of the welfare system ("The _New_ Worker's Party", the biggest party in the coalition called themselves) to have a chance in the last election, so we do have pseudo-left and more left. Our political discourse is one where the concepts from the left are seen as good, but our right still manages to present traditional righty concepts (like lower taxes) in a positive light. The Social Democrats are the conservatives here, though some of the right, especially the Christian Democrats, are reactionaries.

Your political discourse is one where both parties use concepts and language from the right. (You even use the term liberal to mean left.)

[kjn]

Except that then you loose out on that the US political culture is heavily slanted to the right compared to most other industrialised countries (I'm excluding Japan and Korea) here, due to the single-party system they've ended up with), including a historical comparison with itself. In the late 19th century, eg, the political forces for social and labor reforms in the US were just as strong and as organised as anything in Europe.

Or to take a more recent example, compare Eisenhower's administration with the administrations from Reagan forward.