Obama has been accused of being a flip-flopper for his dubious stands on NAFTA, gun control, FISA, and public campaign financing. I for one don't mind the flip-flopping, if you can call it that. Obama has always claimed to be a pragmatist, not an ideologue. Instead of clinging to very liberal positions to please a narrow base of hardcore activists, he has decided to take more practical positions that will appeal to democrats as well as independents and perhaps disgruntled republicans. If he keeps this pragmatic approach, I think he will get a lot done once he is elected president. Pols in Washington will hopefully learn to take on less partisan and more practical approach to their work as well.
I have always wondered if the taxes people pay correlate with the availability of social and economic programs and safety nets, not to mention the military programs that protect them. This idea comes in light of the notion that Europeans are highly taxed compared to their American counterparts, but they seem to have access to free (or almost free) education and health care while the US provides neither. The Europeans live and work at a more leisurely pace than Americans and they have the comfort of knowing that their government has put safety nets in case a disaster. The Europeans do a lot to ensure that all their citizens have comparable opportunities, and thus you are less likely to see a huge gap between the poor and the rich. Perhaps the lack of incentive to excel has stifled entrepreneurship and innovation in Europe to some extent. In fact, Europe has historically high unemployment rates than the US and the size of government there is significantly larger than that of the US....
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