Do you agree with John Edwards when he says this?

"Something is wrong with our country when a billionaire
investor pays a lower tax rate on his dividend check than
his secretary does on her overtime," said Edwards, who
held town hall meetings at Nobis Engineering in
Concord and an evening town hall meeting in
Manchester. "George W. Bush has pushed tax cuts that
reward his friends for being wealthy but leave an even
higher tax burden on Americans who work hard for a
living."

(from http://www.johnedwards2004.com/)

Buffett's one of the few good ones. George Soros is, too, I think... although he had dealings with one of Shrub's early oil ventures (Harken or Spectrum7 or something), but pulled out.

the mega-gazillionaire set, which is why I'm upset that he's become an advisor to Ahh-nold's "campaign."

nt

on two different stations. They look good.

Using his famous courtroom argument style are the best things he's got going for him right now. He needs to make use of those things to the hilt if he's going to make some real inroads.

I still see him as more VP material--but DARN GOOD VP material!:D

B-)

any sensible person would.

there's one "no" vote.

isn't sensible, since there's one "no" vote.

The main thing is that we need someone who understands and respects the Constituion. Although I don't agree with all of Edwards's votes, I think he does.

for states to compete, economically, with each other. It's about have a playing field on which the game of commerce is governed by the rule of law. The constitution is mostly about giving people enough rights so that states can't prevent other state citizens from contributing to the economy. The constitution totally anticipated that states would try to out-compete other states. I think a lot of people miss this big picture. As interpretations of rights guaranteed by the contstitution evolved, any new rights granted had to flow down from this paradigm -- and one of the more difficult expansion of constitutional rights was step to deciding that citizens within states and viz their state were guaranteed the same rights that they were guaranteed viz other states and the federal government. Furthermore, there's only one right that you're guaranteed viz purely private actors, and that's that they can't enslave you.

Now, if you read the EU 'constitution', they take this notion of allowing everyone to contribute to the economy by ensuring competition on a level playing field right down to the citizen-level, rather than the state level. Of course, the EU sees the same problem the colonies saw in the possibility of nations doing things to compete unfairly with other nations, so it has written in those protections. But they also see that the core of the notion that fair and free competition drives liberal progressive (and very wealthy) economies is the idea of economie competition on a personal level, so they've gone right down to the essence. The must have seen the difficutly the US Constitution has in extending these rights down to the individual level, and they must have said that they don't need to hold up progress and growth the way the US Supreme Court has through the influence of conservatives.

I suspect that the authors of the US constitution probable didn't envisage the degree of mobility the population has reached due to technology, and the extent to to which American's have a national identity (rather than state identity) due to the power of ideology in America, so they probably didn't anticipate that inter-State competition would wane and that all the ideals about free and fair competition, to be protected, would have to be granted to individuals as individuals rather than individuals as citizens of states.

This reality hasn't escaped Europeans. And that's why, when compared to the US constitution, the laws of the EU really up the liberal ante, and really grant individuals great freedoms and rights.

When I hear Edwards talk about empowering individuals, and tipping the ballance to favour individuals a little more, and private corporations a little less, and when I listen to him talk about economic empowerment, I think that he does get what the constitution is about.

In case you missed it, it was posted somewhere a couple days ago.

It takes off from what you're saying and explains why the European business model is more productive and providing strong competition and possibly/probably overtaking the US model.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030901&c=1&s=hutton

However, there were things about education that I'd challenge. I think the big problem with education isn't that it costs some very rich kids alot, but that it costs poor kids too much. I think financial aid IS the central problem. In fact, in the UK, kids who go to Oxford pay exactly the same tuition as kids who go to a polytechnic, yet Oxford and Cambridge get something like half the public education funds, and its graduates have 10 times the career opportunities and earning potential, and its students tend to schew wealthy, and could probably afford higher tuition. So, what you have is poor kids subsidizing the better education and brighter futures of well-off kids. It isn't right.