Hope For Our Political Process

As we wrap up a week of playing “what if” scenarios with some of the presidential candidates, we thought we would share a few brief thoughts.

There is no way to truly do justice to any particular candidate or their views in a blog post of a few paragraphs. Rather, we attempted to summarize what we thought were key points as they relate to investors in order to facilitate a discussion. Some of the comments were fantastic discussion points that brought in multiple points of view, clarification of candidate’s platforms and even citations of informational resources.

It is encouraging to us that in our sound bite culture, there is still an undercurrent of the population that desires a more thorough examining of the candidates and the specifics of their proposed solutions to our economic problems.

The civility of the comments was exemplary and a welcome surprise. Civil disagreement is one of the fundamental building blocks of a democratic republic. It forces thoughts and ideas to be verbalized, challenged and honed. We applaud the audience that cares enough about their country to invest the time to share their perspective and add to the discussion.

Some thoughts based on the comments we received:

We believed we would have to reject comments designed to pick fights and detract from the discussion. As it happened, only one comment was rejected. It was rejected solely for being self-promotional without adding informational value.

It is clear that the internet is marshalling forces concerned with our monetary policy and the way in which we are taxed.

There were no comments, as of this writing, for either the Obama or Clinton posts. Perhaps the posts were drowned in the sea of media coverage following Clinton’s recovery in the New Hampshire primaries.

Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee received the most comments. How much of this might have to do with the specificity of their proposed economic and tax reforms?

Stay tuned--we’ll be covering some additional candidates next week.