In all honesty I am shocked by your answers on a lot of these. It would be great if you did a seperate entry explaining why you "voted" one way or another.

Ok, if you were to get a cash gifts from a relative, someone is supposed to pay taxes on that. So why do we not have an estate tax? Doesn't seem fair.

Taxes are totally screwed up in many ways. Last year, John Kerry made something like $500,000, but he paid more tax than his wife who made something like $7,000,000. The Bushes made something like $600,000, but they paid more than the Cheneys, who made more than ten times as much. When I say more, I mean actual dollars, not just the percent.

I agree with Elyssa.

This needs some fleshing out for sure; don't increase CAFE standards? End the agriculture subsidies? Rely on SEC notifications to police underfunded pensions?

I'm afraid to say that some of these just make no sense. Leave CAFE alone and we'll need to at elast double the gas taxes to encourage folks to get rid of their V10 F350 dually used for a daily commuter. Hopefully you meant to say something like "get rid of CAFE credit trading, and raise CAFE 3% per year for the next 20 years." You would honestly sell out our environment in favor of having the choice to pollute?

Drop Ag subsidies? We would also need to open the markets up (e.g. Cuba) since the government regulates who and where (and how much) a person can sell their goods to (think: Tobacco). I'm guessing you didn't grow up on a farm...

And since when did pension information become a larger concern than yera-over-year returns and market share? GM, Ford, (and until recently) IBM and HP all have huge pension issues. What is causing concern at GM and Ford - pension worries or lack of sales?

Medicare/medicaid is actually very efficient compared to the private healthcare system. This applies both to drugs and general healthcare. We're wasting money by funding private systems that have the worst management in the industrial world. Medicare/medicaid is *by far* the most efficient healthcare administration in the country. When you factor in all the people involved in administration, I think it comes close to 50% of the healthcare cost. I don't know what that number is for Medica(re|id), but the internal administration cost differences are substantial (I vaguely remember numbers around 20% overhead vs 5% overhead).

Our healthcare system is a good example of what happens with private systems that aren't free market; consumers don't purchase their insurance (their employers do), knowledge is incredibly asymmetric, there are cartels controlling many portions of the system (including doctors), there's lots of conflict of interest, choice doesn't even make sense (who wants to make choices about providers when you are in an ambulance?), and basic moral standards mean that collective coverage *has* to exist on some level.

There's really no economic way to justify the current system, unless you think it's an economic good to support a system rife with leaches, and that those people have a right to keep government from interfering with their parasitic profits.

I get the conservative thing, but I don't see how you can't be in favor of universal health care. All the other civilized countries seem to be doing something right since they spend 5 times less than us per capita to keep their people alive. And skinnier, too.

More needs to be done to get some form of medical coverage to those who don't have it, but socialized medicine brings about a mess of other problems. It's already hard enough under most plans to see a specialist, usually involving referrals and long waits in an office... imagine if it took months. Imagine taking a day off from work, sitting in a waiting room all day, and still not getting to see a doctor. Imagine having to move to another country to get the treatment you need. (All true stories from various Canadian friends.)

Universal coverage should be the goal, but socialized medicine is not the way to achieve it.