GOP attempting to purge 1 in 7 black voters from voter rolls

[AggregateDemand]

Why don't you just get even with Republicans by passing registration and I.D. laws so their constituents have a harder time voting?

[AggregateDemand]

Because constricting voting is morally reprehensible?

So are taxes, but that's never stopped Democrats from raising rates and expanding taxable transactions.

[AggregateDemand]

Haha, taxes are immoral now?  Ohh, Republicans.

The Founding Fathers identified government as a necessary evil.

[AggregateDemand]

Well, of course that's how AggregateDemand actually thinks, but, much as with his homophobia, I'm perversely interested to see what his on-paper excuse is.

I'm not sure how balancing economic/social privileges between married and unmarried citizens could be construed as homophobia, but I'm sure you have a good explanation (hah!).

Regarding taxation, you don't have to be part of the muh-founding-fathers-demographic, nor do you have to be particularly well-educated to understand the concept of dead-weight economic loss.

[AggregateDemand]

Nor, I submit, do you have to be a revolutionary socialist to understand that deadweight loss may in many instances be an acceptable price to pay for living in a society.

You're not making a legitimate argument. If the cost is acceptable, the economic gains will outweigh the economic losses, and opportunity cost will be minimized. What you're arguing is that you reserve the right to substitute basic mechanisms of economic accountability with your own conscience and limited-understanding. The result is free-enterprise that is powerful enough to make people filthy rich, and a government that is dumb enough to make people destitute.

The Enlightenment was a rebuke of monarchy. Monarchy is the manifestation of individualism run amok. To classify the Enlightenment as an individualistic conceit is to misunderstand everything about it. Sovereign individuals leads naturally to democracy. Protecting the democratic process is not an immoral attack on the individual. The contrary, in fact.

[AggregateDemand]

Comparing taxes to voting restrictions, are we?  Even if we accept the premise that taxation is a 'necessary evil', we wouldn't be able to say the same thing about voting restrictions; no, we just call that evil.

Non-citizens are not allowed to vote, and citizens are not allowed to vote more than once in the same election. Are those restrictions really a moral crisis?

[AggregateDemand]

Unfortunately, the more off-the-wall they get in their political statements this year, the more the polls seem to go in their favor.

It's what they say in secret that counts. Senator McConnell has said that he wants a return to the shyster economy of Dubya. If we get it again, then mark my words -- we all but ensure ourselves another speculative boom like that of the Double-Zero Decade that may be over some different object than real estate, but that will implode at least as severely.

Face it, people -- you can't time the market to buy cheap and sell just before things go sour and then live well off the money that you secrete under a mattress so that you can live like a sultan during a hyper-deflation.

It would help if you understood the political economy of "Dubya".

Obama is expanding SNAP and Medicaid as well as raising taxes on the "rich", who are actually just high-income working class, which is an important distinction to make because raising their taxes has higher dead weight loss than raising cap gains on the genuinely wealthy. The individual mandate is creating a part-time economy.

Republicans don't like the economic inefficiency associated with funneling money into bureaucracies, and then empowering the bureaucracy to buy products on behalf of people (or restrict their choice). Instead, they would give refundable tax credits, preferably in the form of EITC to lower-middle working class. Republicans also hate productivity restrictions.

Democrats are buying votes just like they did in the LBJ days. There is no underlying economic premise and no hope for populist economic gain. As Krugman pointed out, the policies are a wash, at best, and we should be thankful that ill-conceived economic policy has not thwarted natural market corrections.

[AggregateDemand]

All of this is, of course, irrelevant to the fact that constricting voting is morally reprehensible.

You know as well as I know that enforcing citizenship restriction and single-vote-per-election are critical for a functioning democracy.

Whether or not Republicans are actually achieving these goals is open to interpretation, but attacking the underlying premise is a fool's errand.