I wonder who Tex is supporting this go around
 

Maybe Cruz.

Early voting has started in Texas and I've already cast an anti-Trump vote.

I'm probably going to vote for Kasich. Which is what the pollsters would expect, given my high level of education.

I voted for Kasich.

I don't think we ever knew whom he supported any go round.

Trump's support is due to the that white males are dying in middle age increasingly fast from drug and alcohol poisoning and suicides. He is tapping into their anger.

I didn't have time for caucusing.

Trump supporters don't have jobs, and have time to caucus all day!

By the way, Tex softened his stance on immigration after being called to the high council.

Laughing out loud at Cougarboard. Ongoing whining about Dems being freeloaders and permanent welfare recipients. Now with Trump's success they are finally being exposed to the GOP's redneck wing.

The public discussion of public policy and what constitutes good government is usually at a childish level.

In trying to discuss this with anybody sensibly, I ask the following questions.

What are the basic principles of the candidate in terms of government, its role and of economics?

Is the candidate trustworthy?

Is the candidate experienced and competent?

The actual statements of the candidate on extraneous issues are irrelevant. All of the experienced candidates will say what they believe the audience wants to hear and how they want to hear it. Watch Hillary. She uses a Southerny accent in the South, a Midwestern one in the Midwest and tries to be polished in the Northeast.

Characterizing voters for different groups with broad, simplistic descriptions is inaccurate and not true.

imagine if it was Trump besting Romney. And what the meltdown would look like on CB.

I would not have thought this, but after Nevada, I now believe, absent something shocking to be revealed, that Trump's nomination is inevitable and unstoppable. It comes with a lack of unity within the party.

My family polled a bunch of professionals, good income earning and well-educated persons. The reasons for support include anger at their party for compromising with the Dems, anger over the exportation of jobs through free trade and the inability to win fights with the Dems. People don't believe the establishment candidates and don't like the inaction on immigration. They don't agree with Obama's take, which is solely linked to filling the Democratic Party coffers.

Republicans against free trade? Join the dems.

And do they forget that Trump is actually a democrat.

And that he favored immigration before he opposed it?

Tell these people to go F themselves because they are the ones ruining this country.

Well the GOP has lost all of the social issues and doesn't have any on the agenda which seem like winners.

Let's be against evolution. Yeah, that's a winner.
Let's continue to sound the drum against abortion. Another loser.
Gay marriage? Lost.


Immigration?


So now we battle over subsidized healthcare, subsidized college costs and taxing the remaining 55% of taxpayers who pay income tax to hell for an every expanding list of services.

Yeah, I agree policy trumps those other issues.

Unfortunately, aside from Hillary and Kasich (the two people connected to Clinton's budget), every plan put forward is fantasy.

Cruz/Carson: flat tax
Bernie: If there ever was a more whopper of a plan...
Rubio: Least regressive plan among the GOP, only cuts the top rate to 35%. But eliminates cap gains, inheritance tax. Fantastical.

welp, Kasich sure didn't win Texas.

I didn't expect Kasich to win in Texas. He was just the one republican I like best. The really important motivation for me was to vote against Trump. It was pretty clear Cruz was going to get the most votes. This site shows it by county, which is interesting. My county still gave it to Cruz, but at a lower percentage than state-wide.

http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/texas

Trump was third in Dallas county.

What makes you so high on Hillary's budget plan? I find her plan repulsive.

In terms of the Forbes Single Rate Tax, it would be a good plan if it were adopted but there is a lot of animosity toward a fair minded income tax structure. For some reason, progressives find it fashionable to say the top 25% which already pay 55% of the total tax burden must pay more. Really, how is that fair?

Rubio's is fantastical?

Additionally, Reagan showed you must start somewhere because you will always be negotiated down from where you start.

This is the only tax idea I like.

https://fairtax.org/about/how-fairtax-works-slideshow

I voted for Kasich. I wish he had a chance to win this nomination. Hard to see what the path is. Maybe he wins Ohio, and there is a huge bombshell re: Trump. But even then there are Rubio and Cruz in the way.

Well the theory is he wins Ohio and starts opening up in states more favorable to him. However, Trump has also scored in NH. I don't see how Kasich wins, but I would prefer him a lot more.

There is no Republican with a plan that can realistically balance the budget. Sanders' plan is poppycock, but that is par for course for the GOP.

Rubio will cut the top rate from 39% to 35%, give the middle class an even bigger cut, and collapse the tax brackets into only three. So far so good.

But then...eliminate the cap gains tax, inheritance tax, dividends tax...on his website I don't see any cuts that will pay for it. Maybe I missed something.

Cap gains is basically income from sitting on your bum. Why that shouldn't be taxed is beyond me.

The income inequality in this country is worsening. White males are dying from suicide and drug and alcohol poisoning at accelerating rates. That makes the vulnerable to demagoguery from the likes of Trump.

The glory days of Bill Clinton fiscal responsibility are over. Welfare rolls reduced by 60%, every decile of Americans saw income growth, Republicans and Democrats were in a deficit-cutting competition.

Many countries do not tax capital gains and the US rate is the fourth highest in the world.

http://taxfoundation.org/article/top...oecd-2011-2014

Capital gains are NOT income for sitting on your but, but the opposite, leaving capital in the system to fund new factories, buildings, and new businesses. Allowing capital funds to invest by having a low tax rate is reasonable and accepted generally throughout the world.

People who complain about the capital gains tax treatment are people who don't understand it or who don't have capital to invest.

Balancing the budget will occur by reshaping government employment and unfunded pension liabilities.

I'm sure someone is working his butt off "leaving" stuff.

I have real estate investments. They make money on their own.

Taxing capital gains lightly is a generally accepted principle everywhere, except in Denmark and Sweden where there is not tax they don't love.

Of all the candidates still standing, Trump is the most likely to cause the most damage to the country. Sanders can't get nominated, so that's moot. Hillary won't change anything from the status quo and is actually a little more moderate than Obama. Nothing would happen because there's a congress to block whatever she wants.

Trump could actually get the most done with help from the dems in congress along with a few stupid republicans. The problem is that what he would want to get done would be disastrous. It's tragic that his fanbase is too stupid to understand what his macho bombastic insults of other countries and threats of trade wars actully means: "If elected I will pass a 35% tax on the products you buy every day at Walmart."

If he talked trade policy in his speeches in terms that explained how his stupid ideas would affect their every day lives, he would have no support. Unfortunately most of his fans were skipping high school history and/or economics class to smoke behind the school on the day they talked about what "tariffs" are.

So is CB rabidly anti-trump?

I find that that A&M message board has a lot of pro-Trump sentiment.

I've heard it is. Mormons don't like Trump for whatever reason -- probably because they tend to be a little higher educated than the average, and Trump is not polling well in Utah. Purely for the entertainment value I'm kind of secretly hoping that draws Trump's attention at some point so he can hurl an insult toward mormons. That would be fun.

You must've been banned from the political category.

I think that may be due to the fact that capital gains is very elastic. People move their investments around easily.

Taxing income would be relatively more efficient because the rich have shown that their work behavior isn't sensitive to taxes rate changes.

First rule of public economics is to tax inelastic behavior.

If you pulled a Hitler speech from the 1920s and replaced the word "Deutschland" with "Amerika" and "Jews" with "Mexicans" or "Muslims" would you find any significant differences with a Trump speech? Hitler talked more about expanding Germany beyond its borders. Maybe Trump hasn't talked about that yet, I guess. But I'm sure Hitler would have been right at home back then with the idea of building a wall to keep the Jews out or keeping them from coming back into the country if they were to leave on vacation or something.

we almost made it to the third page w/o invoking Hitler.

This man has done nothing in his life to deserve to represent the US. Unfortunately we get the leaders we deserve.

He won't win the general if nominated. He will barely pick up a single vote from a non-Caucasian. The demographics of the US today don't work anymore for someone like that to win. The demos of those who elected Reagan would lose today. You can't offend everyone in America who isn't a crass, lower class white person with no better than a HS education and expect to win.

The media coverage makes it seem like Trump has 90% of the republicans in his back pocket now, but the truth is he barely cracks 35% in almost all states that have voted. He's lost 3/4 of the states so far where the primaries or caucuses are closed to non-Republicans, with a whole bunch of states like that coming up next.

The media keeps citing how he's winning in the polls in most of the states coming up, but it's hard to find anything very recent in most states. A poll taken in November is worthless now. On Saturday you have 4 states coming up, with all of them closed to those who are not registered Republicans. 3 are caucuses which tend to mostly attract hard core establishment types. Minnesota was one of those states last Tuesday and Trump took third. But it's not fun for the media to really talk about these things so they don't. The Trump juggernaut is a much more interesting story, so let's promote the narrative as much as possible.

But I think the idea of a brokered convention is more likely than a lot of people think.

Yes, I think we have seen peak-Trump already.

I get the sense that the wheels are starting to fall off this week for Trump.

Regular people, conservative movement people, and now finally the media are all finally shining a light on his scurrilous character.

Trump won 40% of the Hispanic primary vote in NV. I've seen plenty of non-Caucasians who intend on voting for him. It's crazy....but real. This makes no sense.

and women too. and "evangelicals".

40% of the 25 Hispanics who chose to caucus with the republicans. The rest had already gone to the. Dem caucus about a week earler to vote for clinton.