It's The Joe Biden Appreciation Thread!!!

[BeardedOne]

Joe's always been a touchy-feelie kinda guy, but he did promise not to be a 'Throttlebottom' when he became VP.

[Stavros]

St. Jericho would banish him to the Isle of Mann...To be forever tormented with fiery pointy sticks shoved up his arse!

... the Isle of Man? That is harsh, cruel even.

[AshlynCreamher]

Russell bermanmar 9 2015, 6:56 am et

Is Joe Biden Running for President?

The vice president may be an afterthought in the race for the nomination, but unlike other top Democrats, he's visited all three early primary states this year.

There's only one prominent Democratic contender who has traveled to all three early presidential primary states so far in 2015. It's not Hillary Clinton. Nor is it Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, or even Martin O'Malley.

It's Joe Biden, who may be running the most under-the-radar White House campaign of any sitting vice president in modern times. Biden made stops in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina last month. The appearances were all ostensibly aimed at promoting President Obama's agenda, but as the old axiom goes, no politician visits any of these states by accident, and certainly not in the calendar year before primary voters head to the polls.

The 72-year-old, generally regarded as the nation's well-meaning but goofy (and occasionally creepy) grandpa, Biden has long been considered an afterthought in the 2016 sweepstakes. The assumption: He's not crazy enough to think he could take on Hillary, his good friend and former Cabinet-mate...is he?

To hear the vice president tell it, however, that's exactly what he'll be considering over the next several months. Unlike Clinton, Biden has never been coy about his interest in seeking the presidency for the third time since 1988. Asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos in January whether he might challenge the former secretary of state, Biden replied, "Yes, there's a chance." He said he views the 2016 field as "wide open" on both sides and emphasized that he doesn't need to make a decision on the race until late in the summer. Speaking in Iowa last month, Biden also notably embraced the idea—leveled as criticism by Republicans—that the Democratic nominee in 2016 would be running for Obama's third term. "I call it sticking with what works," the vice president declared.

At the same time, Biden has made no formal moves to set up a political organization or campaign committee, hire staff and volunteers, or raise the money needed to be a viable candidate. Friends and former advisers wouldn't speak on the record about a possible Biden bid, saying the vice president told his inner circle last year that he did not want to encourage public talk about a White House candidacy for some time. His office wouldn't comment for this story, either. Yet it's clear from his travel and own remarks that Biden has not dismissed the possibility of running. His friends and allies insist the vice president is neither delusional nor is he simply positioning himself as a back-up for the Democratic Party in case Clinton forgoes the race or implodes politically.

"I can tell you without any fear of contradiction, her decision will have no impact on his," Dick Harpootlian, the former state Democratic chairman in South Carolina, told me last week. A colorful personal-injury lawyer in Columbia, Harpootlian has emerged as Clinton's chief antagonist within the party in recent weeks. When he's not telling anyone who will listen that the scandal over Hillary's secret email system will torpedo her candidacy, Harpootlian has been talking up Biden as the party's best alternative.

"This is a guy who is more knowledgeable about foreign affairs than Hillary Clinton and John Kerry put together," Harpootlian said. He pointed to Biden's proposal nearly a decade ago to partition Iraq into three parts controlled by Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. It was derided by many in the foreign policy world, including the defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates. But with the rise of ISIS, Harpootlian argued it was prescient. "Think if we had done that where we'd be today," he said. "There would be no ISIS. There would be no al-Qaeda operating in Iraq. He was ahead of his time on that, and I think everybody today agrees he was right."

In a speech to the Human Rights Campaign on Friday, Biden also touted his decision to come out in support of gay marriage before Obama in 2012, a move that annoyed the White House at the time. Clinton didn't publicly embrace marriage equality... READ MORE...

[Jericho]

... the Isle of Man? That is harsh, cruel even.

What can I say?
I worship harsh, cruel...And sometimes, downright fukkin vengeful, goddesses!

[trish]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us...iran.html?_r=0

[dreamon]

[AshlynCreamher]

Joe Biden Gaffes:

@ 3:20 seconds Joe say's

We want to take money and put it back in the pockets of Middle Class People - if you make 250,000 or more - you're going to pay more. You have time to be Patriotic!

I once heard someone say:
"If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day, if you teach a man to fish he will eat for the rest of his life."


Currently our tax code is a transfer of wealth from the upper middle class to the lower middle class in the form of EBT (remember the fish a day story?) If you make more than 250k and pay 47% in taxes (that's nearly 125k) you could open a new Subway franchise that would imploy a dozen fulltime workers "but wait you have time to be patriotic!!!" Instead of creating jobs (teaching a man to fish) you can give half of your hard earned money to the government so the can (feed a man everyday)

Brilliant, just brilliant!!!

[trish]

...to the government so they can (educate the young, produce the best scientists, engineers, architects and doctors in the world, employ full time workers, service and maintain essential infrastructure). Yes...brilliant indeed. Welfare has been sharply constrained ever since Clinton's reform. Welfare has been sharply constrained ever since Clinton's reform. Nobody's eating for free (excepting a few alleged "job creators" whose offshore accounts grow while they play golf and cultivate a network of similarly wealthy and influential freeloaders). What's the alternative...trickle down? That's the system where people hold down three shit jobs on variable schedules, get no overtime pay for overtime work, and are given for their toil just enough money to buy a fish sandwich fried in grease.

[broncofan]

Simple economics says that to stimulate demand money should be in the hands of the people with the highest propensity to consume. People who earn less than 20,000 dollars a year will spend nearly all of their income whereas a person who makes a million dollars will have more than half sitting in low risk instruments. Having money in savings does not stimulate development on the supply side nor does it stimulate demand and thereby help businesses and their employees prosper.

Any sort of progressive tax system is going to be slightly re-distributive. Otherwise it would not be progressive at all. Warren Buffett said it best when he said basically that he knows not a single billionaire that has ever made a conscious decision not to develop or to invest based on a tax burden. Local tax burdens can cause a race to the bottom among competing jurisdictions, but the idea that a higher federal income rate will cause wealthy people to withhold development or investment activity is counter-intuitive.

There is simply no way to have a civilized society without some people who are at times unable to work. There is always a natural rate of unemployment, there are periods or restructuring. This is without taking into account disabilities people suffer that keep them out of the workforce in the short or long term. It would be wonderful if we could all be taught a trade and be self-sufficient, but if you think that's going to happen for 300 million people without any emergency situation ever taking a person out of the workforce temporarily or permanently you're not living on planet earth (I'm not suggesting you're an alien, a reptile or otherwise; it's an expression).

[broncofan]

but the idea that a higher federal income rate will cause wealthy people to withhold development or investment activity is counter-intuitive.

Actually, I have heard of developers only being willing to develop if they get a tax subsidy or tax credits for their development because a large project is only viable with government funding. But how close is that to the free market ideal? They are usually building something big in scale and it is considered a positive externality, like a stadium. People want sports teams and want to go to large stadiums and are okay with the government funding them.

But if something is a good investment in its own right, it does not make sense to forego investing because the profits will be taxed.

If you have a pure free market system it would eventually cannibalize itself (the customer base would reach a state of quasi serfdom). You would have such large barriers to entry in most profitable industry that the only way to make money would be to have large reserves of cash to invest. The worker would have very little bargaining power and opportunities to become an entrepreneur would be nil because of the power of economies of scale. There is also the issue of companies developing monopoly power, at which point they absolutely should be regulated because they can raise prices without suffering a commensurate loss in demand.

It's tempting to think everyone could become a fisherman (self-employed), but what if the only fish that were out there to catch required an organization of fifty people to catch? What if the fish you intended to catch had already been plucked from the waters by the thousands by industrial fishermen, leaving you, your fishing rod, and an empty pond? I absolutely believe in incentives to work and do well, but pure free market capitalism is not the American dream at all.