T_J, not like you don't know this, but... making fun of the name LaVaughn accomplishes what, exactly? It helps your point how? These are rhetorical questions, as we know the answer. You continue a miraculously-accepted reputation here for race baiting. ---- The tax-and-spend rhetoric for democrats is beyond surreal now. Look at budgets from 1980 onward and tell me what party cares about reigning the nation's spending. It's just incredible that there are still people who subscribe to this thinking. rhester thinks it is hopeless in any case, but even he, you'd think, might look at 1992-2000 budgeting and vote accordingly. If you just look at the data, GOP leadership starting in 1980, apparently decided that bankrupting the government would be the surest way to eliminate all entitlement programs. I think that's still the gameplan. Spend like crazy, cut taxes, and all of social security, medicare, and welfare... poof, once we can't borrow money anymore. ---- PS -- my parents, Texans and Bush voters, told me this morning they voted absentee for Obama. They are white people in their 70's. My dad's a vet and avid hunter. Both college educated but no advanced degrees. I was a little surprised, but I think they just hate Hillary that much.
http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/ Here is a link and I selected parts, then highlighted parts of those. This is from a far right source as well. It is clear Obama missing 1/3rd of the votes slanted his rating because he averaged 13th most liberal/87th most conservative the previous two years. You also have to view this in context. This is within the senate, and based on bills portions of bills actually being voted on (how many tax increase bills are out there, bills to allow gays to marry, bills to open the borders, etc). There are not many liberals in the senate, most democrats there are center-left to appeal to wide demographic base (since only only like 20% of the US population defines themselves as Liberal vs about 40 moderate and 40 conservative, hard to win a senate seat with the Liberal pitch). Now there are quite a view more liberals in the house where candidates only have win a district--you might even find some self described socialists and others in favor of gay marriage for instance--they are not too many of those if any in the senate. Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., was the most liberal senator in 2007, according to National Journal's 27th annual vote ratings. The insurgent presidential candidate shifted further to the left last year in the run-up to the primaries, after ranking as the 16th- and 10th-most-liberal during his first two years in the Senate. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., the other front-runner in the Democratic presidential race, also shifted to the left last year. She ranked as the 16th-most-liberal senator in the 2007 ratings, a computer-assisted analysis that used 99 key Senate votes, selected by NJ reporters and editors, to place every senator on a liberal-to-conservative scale in each of three issue categories. In 2006, Clinton was the 32nd-most-liberal senator. In their yearlong race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama and Clinton have had strikingly similar voting records. Of the 267 measures on which both senators cast votes in 2007, the two differed on only 10. "The policy differences between Clinton and Obama are so slight they are almost nonexistent to the average voter," said Richard Lau, a Rutgers University political scientist. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the only other senator whose presidential candidacy survived the initial round of primaries and caucuses this year, did not vote frequently enough in 2007 to draw a composite score. He missed more than half of the votes in both the economic and foreign-policy categories. Overall in NJ's 2007 ratings, Obama voted the liberal position on 65 of the 66 key votes on which he voted; Clinton voted the liberal position 77 of 82 times. So yes I have no problem at all with Obama calling himself independent, moderate, or center left. but the guy certainly isn't an extreme liberal within the US political spectrum (I think center-left is most descriptive), let alone within the spectrum in 1st world democracies more broadly (I would call him dead center for this).
What politician ever got elected on an austerity plank? Julius Cesar's first act was to give the mob money. B-Bob as much as we agree as the board geezers I have to say that the Clinton year's budgets balanced because he had the extreme luck of being elected right when the most disruptive innovation since the industrial revolution was sweeping the nation and world. Money was being created at a exponential rate. It fueled new companies, allowed established older companies to grow their incomes through efficiency, started the housing boom etc. etc. But now, information technology is becoming ubiquitous; a maturing market that by definition doesn't produce vast new wealth. So I have no illusions that an Obama presidency can produce anything like the Clinton miracle. If there is a market miracle out there, I think it would be using tax incentives to unleash alternative energy technologies. We need to incentivize the competitors of Big Oil and take away any tax advantages they have now. But the transition is going to hurt consumers so it would take all of Obama's political capital; and that assumes he receives enough popular vote to have a mandate.
Its true Clinton got lucky but don't discount that part of the reason for the huge internet boom was that in 1993 Clinton made the decision to have the last budget that seriously tackled the deficit. A decision that in the words of Bob Kerrey might've doomed his presidency. That budget though gave Greenspan the confidence to lower interest rates and help fuel the boom to follow. The problem we have now is that the Fed and Bernake have given up on looking at fiscal soundness in regard to interest rates. I would put that as part of the reason why we aren't seeing much benefit from low interest rates.
