Transfer payments -- social security, earned income tax credits, student aid, subsidies of various sorts -- are redistributive mechanisms. Mere progressive taxation is not ipso facto redistributive.

Obama is proposing more than just progressive taxation. He's proposing an increase in transfer payments under the guise of "tax cuts." He says that 95% of tax payers are going to get a tax cut. He intends to do this through use of the income tax system and through the tax credits. That is, he intends to make transfer payments funded by higher taxes on high income individual.

He won't officially cut non-income tax taxes. He is rather directly transferring income via the income tax system from one set of tax payers to another.

That HASN"T been going on forever -- though it did start under the Reagan adminstration and was accelerated under the Clinton adminstration.

I'm all for earned income tax credits. They were a great tool for reducing poverty and closing the gap between the rich and poor.

But sometimes lefties act as if mere progressive taxation is the same as income transfers. THey are not at all the same.

Obama hasn't been very honest about this aspect of his approach, frankly. And it shows how vapid our public discourse is that we can't even discuss policies like this open, honestly, and systematically. Rather everywhere you turn, there's misleading and distracting spin and distraction instead of honest debate.

It makes me want to move to another country, sometimes, and wash my hands of everything American.

It suggests that Dems are hypermotivated and Republicans are demoralized. In particular, look at how the numbers are affected by the likely voter filter.

The pool of registered voters is 37% democrat, 31% repugnant, and 32% Indies. But the pool of likely voters is 41% dem, 28% repugnant, and 31% indie. (but I'm not sure I'm interpreting this right because I'm taking % of weighted rather than % of "effective" likely voters)

This suggests that if Dems stay hypermotivated and Repugs stay demoralized, then Dems will win by a large margin. For sure, I can't see anything that could possibly dampen the enthusiasm on our side. But I'm not sure that this poll has the level of enthusiasm on the Repugnant side correct. I would therefore take this poll with a large grain of salt.

UNWEIGHTED WEIGHTED
Total Respondents 1152
Total Registered voters 1046 1010
Registered voters – Republicans 326 287
Registered voters – Democrats 391 411
Registered voters – Independents 329 312

*Effective Likely Voters 771

*Every registered voter is included in the likely voter model, and is assigned a probability of voting, which is used to calculate the likely voter results. The sum of these probabilities is the effective number of likely voters.

Your ability to engage in double think is impressive. When a similar number -- something like 32% -- said that Ayers connection made them less likely to vote for Obama, you said that that was terrible news for the McCain campaign.

Here's what you said about that:

These numbers, buried in the internals of a new Fox News poll out today, are the first time a national poll has tried to gauge the impact of Barack Obama's association with William Ayers. And the numbers are pretty bad for McCain:

There has been some discussion of Barack Obama's relationship with the former radical activist William Ayers. Because Ayers is linked to plots to bomb the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol in the 1970s, and because Ayres recently said he wished he had done more, some people say Obama's association with Ayers calls into question his judgment. Does Obama's connection with Ayers make you less likely to vote for him for president or does it not really make a difference to your vote?
Less Likely 32%

No Difference 61%

Strikingly, the numbers are worse for McCain among independents: Only 29% say the Ayers association makes them less likely to vote for Obama, and more than twice as many -- 64% -- say it makes no difference. The data suggests that the vast majority of the respondents saying it makes them less likely to vote for Obama are Republicans, who probably wouldn't have supported him anyway.

Probably what you suggested about Ayers is true of the 34% who cite Palin as their number 1 concern about McCain, don't you think? That is, probably most who have this as their #1 concern are dems who are not going to vote for McCain in any case.

If so, why is this a big deal, really, or any kind of remarkable finding?

Now I admit that It could be some of those 34% are people who might otherwise vote for McCain. If they don't vote for McCain just because of Palin, then that's a noteworthy finding to be sure.

But we would need to know that before we could decide if it was a big deal. Wouldn't we?

Also, the fact that fewer people are worried about McCain continuing Bush's policies would seem to suggest that the Obama campaign may have failed at mission 1 -- tying McCain to the Bush legacy.

Finally, Palin does still has some time to win over folks to her and McCain's cause. If some of that 34% is (a) still persuadable and (b) reluctant to vote McCain only because of her, then that could give the repugnant some potential to move voters by getting Palin out there in ways that place her in a more favorable light.

The election will be decided not by people like us -- who actually believe certain things and not others and try to base those beliefs on reason, argument, evidence and logic -- but by people whose pseudo belief-like states of mind are as shifty as sand under your feet.

I think you're engaging in a little wishful thinking and also attributing too much substantive content to the thinking process of your average undecided or persuadable voter, especially in the italicized passage below:

And consider McCain's frequent evocation of Joe The Plumber. This attack from McCain was clearly labored over heavily by his aides. But it fell flat for a very simple reason: It didn't change the basic underlying policy disagreements between the two men. It didn't change the fact that people agree with Obama's solutions to our economic crisis, and reject McCain's ideas. In the face of that overwhelming reality, the constant evocation of Joe The Plumber just came across like a stunt.

Even if you were to lay out Obama's and McCain's policies side-by-side, but without identifying whose has proposed which policy, I doubt that your average voter could say: (a) which policies were proposed by whom or (b) which policy would be more effective.

The people who will actually decide this election -- and I'm not talking about the 40+ % that each side had locked up from the day the nominations were won -- are mostly clueless about matters of policy. They are responsive to tone and style -- despite the fact that they always say they want details -- more than anything else.

The idea that Obama has this thing won because people "agree" with Obama's approach to the economic crisis and reject McCain's approach is, unfortunately, laughable.