The answer to your question is apparently not. Check this poll: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20021010/pl_nm/iraq_usa_poll_dc_1 Bush has basically backed off accusations of an Iraq/9-11 link and no longer suggests that Saddam might already have nukes. In the poll, 62% favor military action. The poll also states that 86% believes that Saddam either has nukes already or will very soon and that 66% believe he was involved in 9/11. Even Bush no longer makes these claims and still there are more people who believe these now-refuted claims than there are people favoring military action. Frankly I don't think the problem is too few voters -- I think it's too many. Even when I don't agree with posters on this BBS, I am impressed by the close attention they pay to current events. When it comes to the electorate though, I am sorely disappointed. In virtually every single election, the American people complain that they don't get better choices. They get what they deserve. I've given up hoping this will ever change. As for the Democratic Party, I've pretty much given up on them as well. Paul Wellstone's just about the only Dem of principle who I can get behind (Lieberman's an example of a principled Dem who I can't back). Bill Clinton's New Democrat movement pretty much sapped the party of ideology in favor of electability, which is the number one reason I've never liked him. Gore's recent speeches have impressed me greatly. I agree with the Freak that he's got nothing to lose. If he runs in 04, I hope he'll continue to believe he has nothing to lose. It brings out the best in him. Daschle and Gephardt are disappointing, but while Republicans rise to leadership positions by staking out principled-but-fringe positions, Dems rise to leadership by playing moderate and doing everything they can not to offend. It works with most people. For me, I am nothing so much as offended by it.
I think this is a case of ideology. As haven pointed out, more people identify themselves as centerist or slightly left of center but the affiliations with groups or ideologies can be all over the map. As you move right of center there is far less deviation from core values and beliefs. In general, a moderately conservative person will likely have an easier time identifying with a right wing Christian than a moderately liberal person would have identifying with a radical environmentalist, for example. The core values held by conservatives actually narrow as you get further from the center where as the opposite is true with liberals because of the divergence in liberal viewpoints and ideologies. Some environmentalists don't get along with Union workers, for example. LULAC and the NAACP don't always see eye to eye on issues. By the same token, demographics weigh in heavily. Conservatives generally come from a much narrower demographic with the most common attributes including caucasion, middle to upper middle class, suburban, white collar and Christian. Chances are, the CEO of a corporation living in a wealthy neighborhood outside of Orlando could easily share ideologies with a middle class accountant living in the suburbs of Dallas. On the other hand, the demographics of Dems are all over the map. They include the very poor, the very rich, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, white collor management, blue collar industrial, urban, suburban, rural, you name, it. For example, Iowa is a stronghold of Democrats yet it is over 90 percent white and nearly 75 percent rural. Michigan, a largely urban, blue collar industrial state with a sizable African American population is largely democrat. California is mostly democrat and it has a wide range of diversity from the super rich to the very poor. As a result, it is hard to get the various different kinds of democrats to agree. Wealthy east coast liberals might have a hard time understanding the plight of a poor African American family living in the south, for example. The bottom line is that Democrats, while larger in numbers, are often not as singular in their message. I know that when I worked on campaigns that went after democratic voters, the messages could vary widely depending on the audience. When I spoke to a blue collar union group about the arena, they had different concerns than the Montrose or Heights Democrats for example. It's just a different way of approaching things.
And I'll pull out the "popular vote has never elected the President, the electoral college has" trump card. So what?
Here's a column from the NY Times today. As a Dem, it pains me to admit some of this is right on the mark. It's the War, Stupid By FRANK RICH As soon as President Bush rolled out his new war on Iraq, the Democrats in Washington demanded a debate, and debates they got, all right. There was the debate between Matt Drudge and Barbra Streisand about the provenance of an antiwar quote she recited at a party fund-raiser. There was the debate about whether Jim McDermott, Democratic Congressman from Washington, should have come home from Baghdad before announcing on TV that we can take Saddam Hussein's promises at "face value." There were the debates about why Al Gore took off his wedding ring, why Robert Torricelli took a Rolex, and why Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson took noisy offense at so benign and popular a Hollywood comedy as "Barbershop." But as for the promised debate about Iraq, it became heated only after Congressional approval of the president's mission was a foregone conclusion. Though the party's leaders finally stepped up, starting with Mr. Gore, most of them seemed less concerned with the direction of the nation in 2002 than with positioning themselves for the White House in 2004 (or '08). They challenged the administration's arrogant and factually disingenuous way of pursuing its goal, then beat a hasty retreat to sign on to whatever fig-leaf language they could get into the final resolution. (Mr. Gore, after his Sept. 23 Iraq speech, dropped the subject altogether.) Even at their most forceful they failed to state their qualified, Bush-lite case for war with anything like the persistence, eloquence and authority of Chuck Hagel, the Republican Vietnam War hero. Speaking with almost mournful resignation from the floor on Wednesday, the senator was naked in his doubts about what lies ahead. "We should not be seduced by the expectations of `dancing in the streets' after Saddam's regime has fallen," he said. That Democratic leaders added so little to the discussion is attributed to their intimidation by the president's poll numbers, their fear of being branded unpatriotic and their eagerness to clear the decks (whatever the price) to return to the economy, stupid, before Election Day. None of these motives constitute a profile in courage; no wonder George W. Bush was emboldened to present himself as the new John F. Kennedy in his Iraq speech on Monday night. Agree with him or not, the president does stand for something. He led, and the Democrats followed. The polls, far from rationalizing the Democrats' timidity, suggest they might have won a real debate had they staged one. Support for an Iraq war is falling, with the dicey 51 percent in favor in the latest CNN/USA Today survey dropping to a Vietnam-like 33 percent support level if there are 5,000 casualties, as there could well be. But even so, the Democratic leaders never united around a substantive alternative vision to the administration's pre-emptive war against the thug of Baghdad. That isn't patriotism, it's abdication. Perhaps more than he intended, Tom Daschle summed up the feeble thrust of his party's opposition on "Meet the Press" last weekend when he observed, "The bottom line is . . . we want to move on." Now his wish has come true — but move on to what? The dirty secret of the Democrats is that they have no more of an economic plan than they had an Iraq plan. Nor do they want to dwell on Iraq and the economy in the same breath. No one really knows how many billions are needed to pay for both the war itself and the years to follow of shouldering what James Fallows in The Atlantic calls "The Fifty-first State," post-Saddam Iraq. The Democrats are in lockstep with the president in refusing to say that we will have to sacrifice anything to pay these bills, because that would mean 'fessing up to the unpleasant truth that either domestic spending will have to be cut or taxes will have to be raised. The economic rant the Democrats offer instead is the safely generic one they've used in war and peace, regardless of the state of the economy, since the Reagan years. As befits a clownish approach, it is all too fittingly presented this election season in the form of a cartoon — a now notorious ad in which Mr. Bush is depicted pushing Social Security recipients in wheelchairs to their doom. It's a funny example of its "South Park" genre, and we do get the point: Privatized Social Security accounts could hurt Our Seniors. As indeed they could. But such accounts are likely less imminent than a Saddam nuclear attack; even Republican ideologues are running away from them in this economic environment. The real wolves at the door today are rising unemployment and falling consumer confidence, a cratered stock market that may soon be mirrored in the real estate market and . . . well, every Democratic candidate (and most American voters) can recite the litany. But in the words of Fritz Hollings, a Democratic senator so old that, like Robert Byrd, he sometimes commits the political sin of speaking the truth: "Our problem is the Democrats whine and whine. Everybody knows what the trouble is. The question is, `What's the solution?' " The solution seems to be the same as that for Iraq — call for a debate and pray. Here is what Richard Gephardt had to say last week: "I have asked the president for nine months to have a summit on the economy to try to figure out a new economic game plan for this country." On Thursday Mr. Daschle asked for Congress to extend unemployment compensation and help bail out teetering budgets in the states (without saying where the money would come from), floated the whimsy that Mr. Bush might replace all his economic advisers with Clinton administration alumni and, yes, again called for an "economic summit." This kind of visionary leadership and a tin cup will get an unemployed American another presidential economic conclave of fat cats in Waco. You might think that Mr. Gore, who has much to gain by showing political spine, would seize the moment. But fresh from his Iraq oration, he trotted out an economic address that offered only the familiar recitation of woes, followed by a few boilerplate bullet points largely remaindered from the 2000 campaign (including, of all musty Gore golden oldies, a plea for maximizing Internet bandwidth). Like his party's Congressional leaders, he conspicuously avoided suggesting any kind of rollback of the Bush tax cut that now looms over the nation's economic future like the sword of Damocles. Pressed in a subsequent Q/A to take a stand on this fiscal elephant in the room, Mr. Gore said: "This is the time when we ought to be making some tough choices and reassessing what parts of the plan work and don't work." Far be it from him to offer his own reassessment at a time of national crisis. With or without his wedding ring or beard, the current new Al Gore is the same old Al Gore who fudged tough choices on issues like gun control and the death penalty during the 2000 debates. As if to complete the picture of Democratic bankruptcy on what is supposed to be its signature issue, the party's chairman, Terry McAuliffe, was sitting in the front row for Mr. Gore's talk. No one is a more brazen role model for pseudo-populist hypocrisy at a time when corporate corruption has undermined fundamental American faith in the integrity of capitalism. Forever decrying the crooks of the dot-com bubble, Mr. McAuliffe has made millions (all legally, of course) from his serial insider's status at two telecom companies, Global Crossing and Telergy (where he was a director). While both subsequently went belly up, costing many Americans their jobs, their retirements or both, he was long gone when those non-insiders took the hit, much as Mr. Bush was at Harken. In Washington, the main question about such Democratic fecklessness is: How will it play on Nov. 5? Is the economy so bad that despite everything, the party might hold onto the Senate and retake the House? I have no idea, and, I suspect, neither does anyone else in a punditocracy that with near unanimity erroneously predicted a G.O.P. sweep during the impeachment midterms of '98. But we're not in the frivolous 90's any more, and as we hurtle into war a better question might be: Do the Democrats stand for anything other than the next election? As Congress prepared to sign off on the war resolution Thursday, Mr. Daschle sounded relieved, predicting that Americans would start brooding over the economy "once we get this question of Iraq behind us." Behind us? Given that he just signed on to a policy that by the C.I.A.'s estimation may increase the likelihood that a ruthless foe will attack us with biological and chemical weapons, you have to wonder just what America he is living in.
This is a very ineresting thread. As as aside I wonder why those who claim to not have any hint of an ideology, who decide each issue on the basis of neutral fact finding would not be very critical of the Republicans in Congress who apparently all vote and think alike in Congress on many issues that a lot of Americans are split on. I would argue that we need a wider range of opinion in Congress, not less, if all people are to have their viewpoints heard. 1) I'll try to find it, but are there any polls showing what % of Democrats back the rush to war? I suspect it is a definite minority. This raises the interesting question of why the DEmo congress people vote that way. 2) I buy the more diverse demographic argument as a possible reason for the more diverse voting pattern of the Demos. However, when you take such factors as the average American is not the big boss, the owner of the compay or self employed or in the top tax bracket, you certainly can't say the Demo Party is composed of largely fringe groups. 3) As for as an economic program, the Democrats don't have an extremely comprehensive one, (nor due the Republicans)but I think the author was finding too much fault there. The economy was running pretty well and I think everyone including those on th board who are unemployed sort of recognize that. Gore ran on a platform of taking the once in a couple of generation surplus and using it to strengthen social security and provide for education and prescription drug benefrits for medicare recipients. This was a very important decision as it is very possible that this unique surplus will not be seen again in the lifetimes of those of us on this board. My own parents who are securely professional and retired are scrambling. After the HMO stopped drug coverage, my father has gone to the VA based on WW II service for the first time in his life to get prescription drugs, my mother has had to beg for mecrcy from the drug companies, who fortunately give breaks to middle class seniors who do vote and are sophiticated enough to work the system. I know I spent the measly $600, if I recall ,refund I got and it made no permanent impact on my life. It is a fact that an extremely disproportionate portion of the Bush tax cut went to the wealthy. Republicans did this same tactic of busting the budget through a tax cut to the upper income groups during the Reagan era, so that they can claim that there is never enough money for social programs. Noone ever argures (correctly) that we can't afford an army till we raise some more taxes. 4) The author is very right in that when you take the war track (needlessly) and you have gutless politicians, including Republican, who pretend that there is no need to raise taxes to pay for the war, you have destroyed the possiblity of social programs or what Bush used to call |"compassionate conservatism". The whole Demo agenda goes out the window when you take the war track unecessarily and people like Hiliary Clinton and Daschle, who know this, should be ashamed of their vote. 5) Only a Republican or perhaps Cheney's lawyer would argue that everyone should stop talking about Enron, Halliburton etc. and the Bush Administration. Unfortunately as the Demos take a substantial yet sginificanlty smaller amount of money from the drug companies, the Enrons and others you can't expect them to be too tough on the issue.
You're aware that tax receipts rose following Reagan's tax cuts, aren't you? What am I doing, asking a question like that.
A lot of Supply-siders make the argument that tax receipts rose during Reagan's years, and indeed they did, but not due to the tax cuts. As usual, there are some problems with the way they interpret the information and try to spin it for political gain. This approach was propounded by Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute (not impartial) who happens to be a former aide of Dick Armey. Here's the answer by Jonathan Chiat: Republicans were very certain about one thing in 1993. "Three hundred billion in new taxes," Newt Gingrich declared at the time, "is going to shrink the economy, put people out of work, lower tax revenues." Op-ed after fearful op-ed echoed this party line: higher tax rates would bring in lower revenues. Of course, just the opposite happened--the economy grew fatter, millions more went to work and revenues soared--and supply-siders haven't had an explanation. But on June 5 The Wall Street Journal printed the first effort by a voodoo economist—in this case, Stephen Moore, director of fiscal policy studies at the Cato Institute and former adviser to Dick Armey—to reckon with the inconvenient lack of a recession following the 1993 tax hike. It's just one measly op-ed, but it's worth dwelling on because it shows so clearly how an economic theory that continues to hold sway over the political system is completely impervious to data. Also, on a more ignoble level, it's rare that history repudiates a theory so utterly, and it's just fun to watch an intellectual apologist squirm. The daunting feat of historical revisionism Moore undertakes requires especially devious methods to torture the data. Moore, however, is up to the task. The first thing he does is change the question. Moore obviously can't argue that tax revenues dropped after 1993. Instead he notes that tax revenues rose, after inflation, just 21.6 percent in the 1990s, while they shot up 24.1 percent during the 1980s. "Total federal revenues grew at a slightly faster pace," he notes. While Moore tries to pass this off as vindication, it's actually a telling concession. After all, in 1993 Moore flatly predicted that Clinton's plan would "torpedo" the economy. Now he is reduced to merely arguing that it produced slightly less miraculous results than Reagan managed. But, even for this, Moore has to turn a few somersaults. Instead of comparing the rate of revenue growth under Reagan against the rate of growth under Clinton, he selects his years carefully. While the Reagan tax cuts began in 1981, Moore starts with 1982, a recession year. Since economic growth and tax revenues always shoot up quickly after a recession, this makes it look as if the natural results of the business cycle were actually the magic of Reagan's tax cuts. (Moore did not invent this trick; if you read nothing but the Journal editorial page, you would think that Reagan took office in 1982.) To further stack the deck, Moore starts the Clinton era in 1990. There's a certain fairness here, because Moore is trying to argue that tax increases lead to lower tax revenues, and there was a tax increase in 1990. The problem is, there was also a recession that year. So the "Reagan" years begin with the economy climbing out of a recession, and the "Clinton" years begin with the economy sinking into one. Pretty sneaky, huh? Well, that's not the half of it. Remember, Moore is trying to prove that lower income taxes bring in higher revenues. But, instead of comparing income tax revenues, he compares total tax revenues. That's not just income taxes. It also includes revenue from the payroll tax, which Reagan hiked. In other words, Moore uses the extra revenues brought in by Reagan's payroll tax hikes to hide the revenue lost by Reagan's income tax cuts. Rattling around in Moore's brain, somewhere, is the germ of a realization that something about his calculation is a tad unfair. So later in the essay he makes amends, sort of. "Even if we examine the path of only individual income tax collections over the past 15 years," Moore writes magnanimously, as if bending over backwards to be fair rather than correcting his own fundamental error, "the story is not much different." Here is where Moore is going to show us how income tax revenues, like total tax revenues, rose faster during the 1980s. This is the really beautiful part of his essay. It's worth quoting in full: "From 1982 to 1989 income tax receipts climbed from $298 billion to $446 billion--a 50 percent increase. From 1990 to 1997 the income taxes rose from $467 billion to an estimated $710 billion--a 52 percent increase." If you didn't just slap yourself on the forehead, read that passage again. And possibly again. Because Moore surrounds his numbers with ringing declarations of victory, it took me until my third perusal to realize that the Clinton-Bush number is higher than the Reagan number. Moore has repudiated his own point. Maybe he has failed to grasp the basic mathematical concept here: the number 52 is greater than, not less than, the number 50. Actually, it might be generous to call Moore ignorant, given the way he arrived at the 50 and 52 figures in the first place. Keep in mind that, when Moore compared total tax revenues, he rightly used the percentage increase after inflation. But when comparing just income tax revenues--which is the relevant statistic--he doesn't factor out inflation. Why not? Because inflation was higher under Reagan. Ignoring inflation makes the comparison look closer than it is in reality. If you take out the part of the increase that was due to inflation, income tax revenues from 1982 to 1989 rose just 16. 5 percent, while from 1990 to 1997 they rose 24 percent--half again faster. Hmm. I wonder why Moore forgot to control for inflation this time?
You're aware that tax receipts rose following Reagan's tax cuts, aren't you? What am I doing, asking a question like that. Of course, government spending rose during that period too. If the government spends $500 billion new dollars, it has to end up as revenue or wages for *someone*. Is it any surprise then that tax receipts would go up? The Reagan Era told us nothing about the effectiveness of tax-cutting / supply-side economics because both old Democratic strategies (government spending) and Republican strategies (tax cuts) occurred simultaneously.
I don't know what it is either but I think you may be surprised given the large Jewish presence in the Dem party. Hmmm....let's see. Most of my close friends are Republicans. NONE of us are in the top tax bracket...and only ONE is his own boss. I think your views on Republicans is a little skewed. Why am I not shocked? It's a BUSINESS CYCLE!!!!! What do you leftys have such a hard time with that concept? One of the worst times was under Carter...it wasn't HIS fault then and it isn't Bush's fault now. Ah yes....give give give...oh government take care of me. Make sure nothing bad ever happens to me. Make all of my choices for me. God forbid we'd actually have to make our own decisions and show some freaking self-reliance. That is a fiction. If you understand the tax cut and are still saying that then I'm going to accuse you of INTENTIONALLY misleading people (ie LYING). It was an ACROSS THE BOARD tax cut. Let's look at the math, shall we? If you make $1,000,000 a year before you paid $396,000. Assuming a cut of 5% you now pay $346,000. A huge cut in NOMINAL dollars. If you make $50,000 a year before you paid $16,667. Assuming a 5% cut (because it cut rates across the board) you now pay $14,000. A much smaller cut in nominal dollars but much more meaningful to the individual taxpayer. The NOMINAL dollars are where the Dems claim it's a tax cut for the rich. But they ignore the fact that EVERYBODY gets a cut. They also ignore the fact that the cut took THOUSANDS of the lowest income taxpayers off the rolls entirely. They now pay NOTHING. How is that a tax cut for the wealthy? To ignore those two FACTS is shameful. It is misleading. And yes I do think it is the wish of the Dems to mislead people and scare them into voting against the tax cuts. Look at all of your bills and car registration and everything else and see what % of your income every year goes to government...it's STAGGERING. But the Dems claim we aren't overtaxed.
You should know better than to argue with glynch! On this point, see my post above. What it boils down to is that the demographics of the GOP are more narrow than for the Dems. It is a product of ideologies and differences of opinion. As you get further to the right of center, the various differences between people get smaller. However, the further you get to the far left, the greater the differences become. Realize that anarchy and communism, two polar opposite political ideologies, both occupy the far left end of the political spectrum. Maybe a better question would be how many of your GOP friends are poor, non-white, urban-living, blue-collar union members? Maybe they are all those things, but that would be the exception rather than the rule. Chances are your friends are mostly white, white collar, middle to upper middle class individuals who live primarily in the suburbs. There isn't anything wrong with that. It is just the way politics tends to break down in America.
You have a point there. Most of my Republican friends do fit into that mold. On the other hand...some don't. For me...it boils down to economics. I don't believe that the government is an efficient user of resources. They squander resources in every possible way. Like I said in my post look at your papers...phone bills...receipts for stuff you buy...etc etc etc...you'll be FLOORED when you realize exactly how much of your money you fork over to the government every year.
Refman: I agree with you that government is inefficient. My general belief is that neither business NOR government should be trusted when it comes to money. Many of the corporate scandals are examples of why business cannot be trusted. When given the opportunity to clean up at a higher cost or continue polluting and risking the health of workers and the local community, industry overwhelmingly chooses the latter. Slave labor, child labor, sweat shops, migrant workers, lack of rights for employees and on and on are all examples of how business has often done what was right for the bottom line while ignoring what was right for people in general. It seems to me that neither the market nor the government has the ability to protect us from tremendous waste, scandal and destruction. In that sense, I'm not a big fan of big government any more than I am a fan of letting business do whatever it likes and limiting restrictions. Business, ultimately, is made of people and if we all agree that without laws, quite a lot of people would steal, cheat, kill, etc, than we have to believe that the people behind the businesses would do the same thing, particularly if it meant even a short-term gain, which is why I support restrictions on what business can and cannot do. At the same time, I agree there is tremendous waste in government whether it comes in the form of massive subsidies to industry, entitlement systems that have broken down or red tape gone crazy. It is a huge problem. The market does some things tremendously well. It does a terrific job of identifying what people want and delivering on that. In that sense, the government should take a cue from business. Just the other night I was saying that the best way to figure out how to prevent drug abuse would be to get drug user and non drug user focus groups and let marketing companies learn what makes them tick. If anyone can figure out the most effective message to stop drug use, it would be the groups who spend their entire lives dedicated to that pursuit. On the other hand, putting things like building roads, law enforcement, emergency services, education or support for the less fortunate in the hands of companies whose only interest is making a profit or generating a larger share of the market for its shareholders would be a HUGE mistake. The government does those things VERY well because it is not interested in what is best for the dollar so much as what is best for the citizens. Then there are issues that fall in the areas in between like healthcare. Too much government creates inefficiency. Too little government eliminates healthcare options for those who need it the most. In those instances, a broader approach that involves everyone working together is required. I'm not sure what the answer is. Most likely, there are a myriad of different answers for all the different problems that we face. The key is realizing that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Balancing the needs of people from a wide range of differing social and economic backgrounds is a tough job. However, I think that the answer lies somewhere in between the polar opposites as with most things. And we will struggle with the answers simply because we cannot always agree on what works. Like life, democracy is a balance.
I hate to beat a dead horse. ....Well, no let's be honest it can be fun to beat a dead horse occasionally. The funy thing is George Bush I called it "voodoo" economics and David Stockman the principle salemen later said it was a fraud. At the time Tip O'neil accurately called it a sneaky plan to prevent spending on social programs by breaking th budget. He was proven right. *********************************** Supply-Side 2 - Voodoo Revisited By Barry D. Bowen; Aug. 20, 1996 Supply-side economics captured the imagination of Ronald Reagan in 1979 and 1980. Cut taxes for the well off and their increased spending will fuel the economy, increase tax revenues, and the benefits will trickle down to the average family. Everybody benefits and the budget gets balanced in the process. Reagan's presidential primary opponent, George Bush, called this voodoo economics. Ronald Reagan, relied on supply-side theories in demanding a $400 billion dollar tax cut, in 1981. The tax cut was sold to the Congress by David Stockman, Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget. His supply-side team put together an alluring package of statistics and a "rosy scenario", which they said would unleash capitalist energies to pay for the needed tax break, a massive military buildup, boost the economy, and also balance the budget. The Reagan tax cuts and military build up were approved by a Republican- controlled Senate and Democratically-controlled House. They did not deliver the promised utopia. Instead, President Reagan's river boat gamble clobbered the federal revenue base, and set off a chain of annual budget deficits unprecedented in American history. The supply side gambit is responsible in significant part -- say most honest analysts -- for an increase in the public debt since 1980, of some $3 trillion dollars. Supply-siders like to blame the debt on a Democratic Congress, but that is a lie. First of all, the Republican's controlled the Senate until 1986. Second, every budget Reagan proposed included MORE spending than Congress approved. If Reagan had passed his budgets -- unaltered by Congress -- the deficits and the resulting debt would have been even larger. Even David Stockman, Reagan's budget architect, admitted the whole rosy scenario was a fraud (Triumph of Politics, 1987) -- an intentional supply side fraud
An addendum to the Reagan saga of failed supply side rhetoric, which is also relevant to the present. Most of the increased spending during the Reagan era was in the form of a massive increase in military spending,similar to what we are going to see with the occupation of Iraq.
You FAIL to understand the history around Reagan increasing military spending. He made the Soviets blink. The only way to beat the Soviets and win the cold war was to outspend them and force them into bankruptcy. That's precisely what Reagan did. I wouldn't expect you to acknowledge that pesky little detail.
From Frances Fitzgerald (2000), Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster: 0684844168). pp. 473-476: "No one in Washington foresaw the collapse of the Soviet system, but the conservatives were the very last to see that the system was vulnerable and that it was changing. In his memoir, published in 1990, Caspar Weinberger wrote that, 'In a world in which there are two superpowers, one of which has the governmental structure and military might of the Soviet Union, it is essential for our very survival that we retain the military strength we acquired in the 1980s....' And 'My feeling has always been that no general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union will be allowed to alter in any fundamental way the basically aggressive nature of Soviet behavior.' "Yet, as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed, conservative pundits began to advance the argument that the Reagan administration had played a major role in its downfall. Among others, George Will and Irving Kristol argued that SDI, Reagan's military buildup and the ideological crusade against Communism had delivered the knockout punch to a system that had been on the ropes since the early 1980s. A parade of former Reagan administration officials, including Weinberger and Richard Perle, came forward to assert that Reagan had known all the time that the Soviet Union was on its last legs and had aggressively foreclosed Soviet military options while pushing the Soviet economy to the breaking point. According to conservatives, the combination of military and ideological pressures gave the Soviet Union little choice but to abandon expansionism abroad and repression at home, and SDI was the key to this winning strategy. The Star Wars initiative had put the Soviets on notice that the next arms race would be waged in areas where the U.S. had a decisive technological advantage. "This argument contrasted sharply with previous conservative complaints about Reagan's embrace of Gorbachev, and it did not persuade scholars of the Soviet Union. Yet, since it is the inveterate propensity of Americans--or at least of American pundits--to relate the falls of sparrows in distant lands to some fault or virtue of American policy, it went against the grain to deny the argument entirely and to propose that the enormous military buildup of the Reagan years had no role at all in the demise of the Soviet Union. "Thus a vague and unexamined version of the conservative thesis entered the public discourse: SDI and the U.S. military buildup forced the Soviets to spend more than they could afford on their defenses and/or convinced them of the inherent weaknesses of their system. But the evidence for this proposition is wanting. "From 1983 to 1987 the Strategic Defense Initiative alarmed Soviet leaders because it threatened to reverse what they saw as the trend toward strategic stability and stable costs. Nonetheless, they did not respond to it by creating their own SDI program. That is, they continued their existing research programs on lasers and other advanced technologies, plus their existing design-work on space weaponry, but they did not mount an effort to test or develop SDI-type weapons. In addition they studied counter-measures to space-based weaponry, but since the SDIO never designed a plausible system, they had nothing specific to study, and their military spending was not affected. Between 1985 and 1987 Gorbachev spent a great deal of effort trying to convince the Reagan administration to restrain the program, presumably because he thought his own military-industrial complex would eventually force him to adopt a program of some sort to counter SDI, but by the end of 1987 the Soviet leadership no longer regarded SDI as a threat. "Then, too, the Soviets did not respond to the Reagan administration's military buildup. "As CIA analysts discovered in 1983, Soviet military spending had leveled off in 1975 to a growth rate of 1.3 percent [per year], with spending for weapons procurements virtually flat. It remained that way for a decade. According to later CIA estimates, Soviet military spending rose in 1985 as a result of decisions taken earlier, and grew at a rate of 4.3 percent per year through 1987. Spending for procurements of offensive strategic weapons, however, increased by only 1.4 percent a year in that period. In 1988, Gorbachev began a round of budget cuts, bringing the defense budget back down to its 1980 level. In other words, while the U.S. military budget was growing at an average of 8 percent per year, the Soviets did not attempt to keep up, and their military spending did not rise even as might have been expected given the war they were fighting in Afghanistan. "During Reagan's first term, some in the Kremlin were concerned that the U.S. might possibly be gaining a first-strike capability and might actually launch a nuclear war. This was, of course, the mirror image of the fears expressed in Washington in the mid-seventies. Nonetheless, though the strategic arsenals on both sides grew like Topsy in the 1980s, the strategic balance remained extremely stable. Without any spending increases, the Soviets continued to turn out and deploy strategic warheads at about the same rate the U.S. did. When the START I treaty was signed in 1991, the U.S. had deployed 12,646 strategic warheads, the Soviet Union 11,212--the numbers so large as to be almost meaningless in terms of deterence. "At the beginning of Reagan's first term, some conservative enthusiasts in the administration might have believed that the U.S. could spend the Soviets under the table in an all-out strategic arms race. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff never thought this, nor did the CIA, for the simple reason that Soviet spending on strategic weapons was a very small fraction of the overall Soviet military budget. According to one MIT expert, Soviet spending for the procurement, operations, and maintenance of its strategic offensive forces amounted to only 8 percent of its entire defense budget. In other words, had Gorbachev achieved the 50 percent reductions he was seeking at Reykjavik, he would not have made savings of any significance in terms of the Soviet economy. "What happened during the 1980s was that the Soviet economy continued to deteriorate as it had during the 1970s. The economic decline, of course, resulted from the failures of the system created by Lenin and Stalin--not from any effort on the part of the Reagan administration. Without Gorbachev, however, the Soviet Union might have survived for many more years, for the system, though on the decline, was nowhere near collapse. It was Gorbachev's efforts to reverse the decline and to modernize his country that knocked the props out from under the system. The revolution was in essence a series of decisions made by one man, and it came as a surprise precisely because it did not follow from a systemic breakdown. "At the time the American public understood this better than most in Washington--and thanks in large part to Ronald Reagan. Reagan had no idea what Gorbachev was up to, but he always described the world in terms of individuals rather than institutions and portrayed U.S.-Soviet relations as the personal relationship between two heads of state. His own officials considered this naive. But it was Gorbachev who changed the Soviet Union, and Reagan's 'embrace' of him as an individual was surely the most important contribution the United States made to the Soviet revolution..."
Quote: Gore ran on a platform of taking the once in a couple of generation surplus and using it to strengthen social security and provide for education and prescription drug benefrits for medicare recipients. Refman- "Ah yes....give give give...oh government take care of me. Make sure nothing bad ever happens to me. Make all of my choices for me. God forbid we'd actually have to make our own decisions and show some freaking self-reliance." That's pretty harsh Refman, picking on the retired elderly, school children, and poor and lower middle class people who can't afford regular health insurance. So you're saying the elderly who didn't work jobs with 401ks and don't get much help from their families should just stop taking social security and go back to work? Should children in bad neighborhoods who go to piss poor schools start working after school to make money and pay for private school? Should poor and lower middle class people neglect other responsibilities like their families and go to night school and get a better job so that they can get off of medicare? Whatever happened to "compasionate conservatism"(talk about an oxymoron)? Tell me how faith based orginizations are going to help the millions who fall into those categories? I just cooked up this little analogy, I hope it's original. Getting through life is like running the 400m track. Each lane is 1m wide and the distance around increases from the inside lane out. In a real race, the difference is compensated by putting the runners on the inside lane further back than the runners on the outside lane. In life, those adjustments aren't made. There are the privelaged few who actually start the race right in front of the finish line, or in some cases, those who never have to run the race at all(Dubya). There are regular folks who have different advantages and disadvanteges like the runners. I.E. people who can afford college, but aren't the smartest or the hardest working, and people who can't afford college but worked hard enough to get a scholarship. Then there are the people who who are only disadvantaged. Not only do they start further back than everybody, they also have to run in the outside lane. Govt assistance just moves these people up a little further, it doesn't put them on equal footing. I know people hate paying taxes, but if the govt was more efficient, then taxes wouldn't have to be raised. Also, think about the benefit of helping poor kids. If you help them so that they can go all the way to college, then they won't be poor as adults hence reducing the amount of people needing assistance. It's a long term goal that I support, considering I could never afford school, even A&M's low tuition, without financial aid. I grew up in Alief, so it's not like I'm from the ghetto, but we couldn't afford health insurance. Alief schools weren't so bad, but I went to private school, so I got a better more personal education than my public school counterparts. How did I afford private school you ask? Well tuition was, on average, $30 a month. The school was funded by charities like like the Shell Houston Open and from private donations. Sounds good, but the school can only support about 120 students total from grades 7th through 12th. Many of you might have heard of KIPP Academy here in Houston. It's the school that Dubya talked about during the Presidential campaign. That school supports less than 500 kids in grades 5th through 8th. They try and get studetns into prestigious private schools and partner up with a program called "A Better Chance" to pay the high tuition of these schools. My little sister went to KIPP and is now a Senior at Miss Porter's School in Connecticut. It costs a little over 30 grand a year, I'm not sure how much we pay, but it's not much. So that is about 600 kids in Houston who get help outside of Govt. What do we do the thousands of others? What about the Millions accross the country? I don't expect anybody's beliefs to change here, but I hope I at least explained why I support Democratic and Liberal policies except for abortion. I don't feel like explaining how I can be pro choice and anti abortion, maybe someother time.
