The Stanford Roundtable - What Makes A Great Leader?

 
YouTube featured this video that's over 90 minutes long, but worth every minute of it. It's of a speaker conversation held at Stanford University's Maples Pavilion called "The Stanford Roundtable" and featured Historian David Kennedy, professor emeritus, Kavita Ramdas, CEO Global Fund for Women, U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Los Angeles, Stanford President John Hennessy, Associate Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Carly Fiorina, former head of HP, and Jeff Raikes, CEO of the Gates Foundation.

Inspite of the fact that Florina represents the McCain / Palin campaign and Anthony Kennedy is a conservative Supreme Court Justice, the event was not partisan.  It was essentially about what great leaders are and what we need as a leader in the next President of The United States.

McCain's no economist, he's confused about Obama's tax plan - and apparently his own, too!

Senator Obama’s plan will not raise taxes - it WILL provide a bigger break for middle class Americans than Senator McCain’s plan. As numerous outside observers agree: McCAIN’S claims that Obama will raise taxes are “WRONG,” “FALSE,” “MISLEADING”

Do you trust factcheck.org? That' s one of many sources cited in the article McCain’s claims that Obama will raise taxes are wrong.

It’s misleading to tag Obama for something that was built in to the Bush tax cuts. Remember that they are set to auto-expire - that's the law Bush signed.

Senator McCain has announced that he would balance the budget by 2013.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that the unified budget deficit will be $443 billion in 2013 assuming that expiring tax cuts are extended. To balance the budget in that year John McCain would have to pay for all of his campaign proposals plus cut another $443 billion of spending. To give a sense of why this pledge is not credible, cutting spending by $443 billion would require:

• Cutting Medicare by 81 percent OR

• Cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid by 33 percent OR

• Cutting non-defense discretionary spending – which pays for education, veterans, air traffic control and justice – by 79 percent

And these spending cuts would be on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars of spending cuts Senator McCain needs to pay for his existing proposals including: increasing defense spending, cutting corporate taxes, eliminating the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), and a small tax cut for middle class families with children (a total of $125 for middle class families with 2 children and $0 for 101 million households who do not qualify). The New York Times has estimated that Senator McCain’s budget plan “will add $200 billion to $300 billion or, depending on his voluntary tax system, even more” annually to the deficit.

Without these offsets and spending cuts, the McCain budget would leave a deficit of at least $650 billion to $750 billion in 2013 alone. No wonder so many Republicans are now reporting that they’ll vote for Barack Obama in November.

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