The thing is Bush doesnt have to worry about reelection. I think his move to the neocon side was a campaign strategy. Bush himself is not a neocon, and I think in the 2nd term those issues will not be key issues, and he will focus more on balancing the budget through welfare reform, more tax cuts for everyone, and more emphasis on national security

607575[/snapback]

what welfare reform can he engage in? Welfare contributes very little to the defecit. If you mean undoing medicare and medicaid and social security, he sure didnt say that. But assuming that is the case, that is less moderate and very conservative economically. You cant affect medicare and social security too much, or at least enough to balance the budget, because of the elderly and baby boomers. So what do you do to medicaid? Scrap it? Assuming he even does that, how do you deal with the impending health crisis?

 

I think as a libertarian, your are being a little idealistic on that.

 

Will you accept sacrifices in military industrial complex as a libertarian?

The thing is Bush doesnt have to worry about reelection. I think his move to the neocon side was a campaign strategy. Bush himself is not a neocon, and I think in the 2nd term those issues will not be key issues, and he will focus more on balancing the budget through welfare reform, more tax cuts for everyone, and more emphasis on national security

607575[/snapback]

what welfare reform can he engage in? Welfare contributes very little to the defecit. If you mean undoing medicare and medicaid and social security, he sure didnt say that. But assuming that is the case, that is less moderate and very conservative economically. You cant affect medicare and social security too much, or at least enough to balance the budget, because of the elderly and baby boomers. So what do you do to medicaid? Scrap it? Assuming he even does that, how do you deal with the impending health crisis?

 

I think as a libertarian, your are being a little idealistic on that.

 

Will you accept sacrifices in military industrial complex as a libertarian?

607582[/snapback]

 

I think we should only spend militarily what is needed and unfortunately b/c of iraq we will need to spend more than what is favorable. There is no more arms race, so cut that spending as much as possible. But if you cut that a bit along with cuts in several social programs you can get pretty close to a more balanced budget. Especially if the economy continues on its current upward trend

There is no way to interpret the results as anything other than the country expressing a shift to the right. Forget the presidential election, look at the senate, house and governors races.

 

And no, Kerry didn't effectively fight off the liberal label. This election overwhelmingly on every level trended towards conservative control and conservative initiatives.

 

As a Democrat, you can sit there and deny reality, but you should of learned that ignoring reality won't make it go away. F_M, your thoughts are exactly whats wrong with the democrats. It's why they've run (and lost) 4 times in the last 25 years with a liberal candidate from Mass. How many times does it have to happen before the realization that it doesn't work?

 

Outside of Clinton the DNC has been nothing but a disaster for the last 30 years. Carter for 1 term, empty suits against Reagan, the loss of Congress, 3rd parties taking chunks of your vote, etc...

 

Time to recognize a change is needed. Heck, it's been needed for 3 decades.

607581[/snapback]

 

You think Clinton could have beaten the nation Bush faces? Cmon fish fillet..simply being from an area isnt going to do it. Gore showed that. If playing to anti-gay views is now considered being a moderate, then you might as well as the democratic party to become the GOP. What issues did Bush expose Kerry as a liberal on? What did he get to backfire on Kerry? In '88 it was crime but now it was social issues. And are you prepared to accept that a candidate that wants states to decide on gay marriage, opposes gay marriage, and doesnt want an amendment, is now considered an out of touch liberal? Thats the only issue he got killed on and its sickening that it was. What other issue is there? If you want to point to security, he failed to paint Kerry as weak. Kerry compensated enough on securty with economy. The X factor was the social conservatives.

The challenge that faces the DNC is how to unite the party. The republicans have done an excellent job mixing the "Christian Conservatives" and the businessmen. The DNC has the 'true' liberals and then labor. They have NOT been able to reconcile those two when the Republican machine attacks, because it is not a natural union. But what they should try is get out of the big cities and the northeast. Look for leaders more popular with Labor, and less with the liberals. The idea is that no way would a true liberal ever vote republican, and could in turn take away some votes from midwest states.

There is no way to interpret the results as anything other than the country expressing a shift to the right. Forget the presidential election, look at the senate, house and governors races.

 

And no, Kerry didn't effectively fight off the liberal label. This election overwhelmingly on every level trended towards conservative control and conservative initiatives.

 

As a Democrat, you can sit there and deny reality, but you should of learned that ignoring reality won't make it go away.? F_M, your thoughts are exactly whats wrong with the democrats. It's why they've run (and lost) 4 times in the last 25 years with a liberal candidate from Mass. How many times does it have to happen before the realization that it doesn't work?

 

Outside of Clinton the DNC has been nothing but a disaster for the last 30 years. Carter for 1 term, empty suits against Reagan, the loss of Congress, 3rd parties taking chunks of your vote, etc...

 

Time to recognize a change is needed. Heck, it's been needed for 3 decades.

607581[/snapback]

 

You think Clinton could have beaten the nation Bush faces? Cmon fish fillet..simply being from an area isnt going to do it. Gore showed that. If playing to anti-gay views is now considered being a moderate, then you might as well as the democratic party to become the GOP. What issues did Bush expose Kerry as a liberal on? What did he get to backfire on Kerry? In '88 it was crime but now it was social issues. And are you prepared to accept that a candidate that wants states to decide on gay marriage, opposes gay marriage, and doesnt want an amendment, is now considered an out of touch liberal? Thats the only issue he got killed on and its sickening that it was. What other issue is there? If you want to point to security, he failed to paint Kerry as weak. Kerry compensated enough on securty with economy. The X factor was the social conservatives.

607588[/snapback]

 

i disagree, i do think bush successfully painted kerry as weak

All I'm saying is it is what it is.

 

Complaining about it up and down all day long isn't going to help. The DNC need to realize that they must tailor their message to the masses, not try to have the masses tailor thier beleifs to the democratic ideology.

I think we should only spend militarily what is needed and unfortunately b/c of iraq we will need to spend more than what is favorable. There is no more arms race, so cut that spending as much as possible.

 

There is no way military spending will decrease in the next 4 years. Bush's attacks on Kerry were that he voted for some spending cuts before 9-11. How can Bush cut military spending while also running on the "we will take the war to them" agenda? There is still an arms race and 9-11 is feeding it. The war on terror for Bush is making sure our military is even more strong. That relates to the military industrial complex. This goes beyond Iraq. This goes to spending more than what is necessary on military. Clearly if proposing spending cuts in military can be taken as weak on terror, nobody will go for that.

 

cut in several social programs you can get pretty close to a more balanced budget

 

Like what programs do you propose to cut?

The thing is Bush doesnt have to worry about reelection. I think his move to the neocon side was a campaign strategy. Bush himself is not a neocon, and I think in the 2nd term those issues will not be key issues, and he will focus more on balancing the budget through welfare reform, more tax cuts for everyone, and more emphasis on national security

 

 

How do you balance the budget through tax cuts? Expecting increased productivity to make up for lost tax revenue has already been proven to be a false economic theory. Hell, even Reagan had to raise taxes a lot during his term as President just to keep his spending at a reckless level. Just because they weren't income taxes doesn't mean they still weren't taxes. You might as well expect to heal the economy with alchemy.

 

From http://www.quickchange.com/reagan/comments.html:

Phillip Schuman

 

Lawrence Kudlow is knowledgeable enough to know that the spin he has put on the Reagan legacy in this address is far from true.

 

He asks, evidently assuming his audience will not know better, that if supply side economics' tax cutting were NOT responsible for boosting economic activity so greatly, just as the Laffer Curve predicted, that tax revenues came piling in at greatly increased totals to the government, even at the lowered rates, just how did nominal revenues 'almost double' (about 83% up in nominal terms) and actually increase about 30% in real terms, over Reagan's 8 years in office?

 

Since he thinks no one knows a better answer, by process of elimination (or lack of alternatives), it must have been the promises of supply side to raise revenues by cutting the tax rates, QED.

 

Kudlow's claim is patently dishonest, because as a former Reagan Treasury official, he surely knows better. For starters, the Reagan Treasury policy people projected a dead loss of $750 billion in tax revenue from his tax cuts, not any increase at all.

 

Maybe Kudlow is genuinely so ill informed or forgetful about Carter's policies that he honestly didn't know, or had forgotten, as your other respondents have remarked, that it was Carter who appointed Volcker, and Carter who deregulated transportation, deregulated natural gas, and put in place the deregulation of oil prices, to be done over a several year period (with Reagan's policy simply accelerating Carter's deregulation timetable). Maybe he never saw the Stockman Office of Management and Budget report that calculated that the deficit one year would have been fully $80 billion smaller under the Carter tax and budget policies prior to Reagan's passing his own. Maybe he wasn't familiar with the Carter term reduction of the top marginal rate for earned income to 50% (the higher 70% marginal rate applied no longer to salary or wage income, but only to so-called 'unearned' income like interest income, royalties income, patent earnings, etc.). It is more polite to suggest Kudlow was simply ignorant, rather than deliberately lying about these facts, and maybe that's even the case.

 

But Kudlow must know that Reagan signed very substantial tax HIKES in each of his last 7 years in office, after the size of the deficits (over $100 billion per year, as far out as the eye could see, in Stockman's memorable phrase) became apparent.

 

The first tax hike came in 1982, when Sec. Transportation Drew Lewis convinced Reagan to raise the federal excise tax on gasoline by 12 cents a gallon, by telling him it wasn't really a tax at all, but a 'user fee.'

 

Also in 1982, then-Senate Finance Chairman Bob Dole authored a huge tax hike called 'The Deficit Reduction Act.' It substantially repealed the entirety of the ruinously profligate Reagan business tax breaks (grossly padded by Democrats as well, when Stockman said 'the hogs were really feeding at the trough'), including the accelerated depreciation schedules, the 'safe-harbor' leasing of tax credits, etc.

 

Later years saw Reagan raising the Social Security FICA tax rate by almost 50%, from 4.2% to 6.2%, but that wasn't the half of it. The increase in FICA tax was far greater than 50%. For, in addition to raising the rate by nearly 50%, the wage ceiling limiting how much earned income was subject to the FICA tax was raised tremendously. The maximum a high earner could end up paying in FICA tax actually went up to 500% of the maximum he could have paid under the previous rate and ceiling.

 

These two tax increases ranked at the time as the largest tax hikes in nominal (current dollar) terms in United States or world history. In real terms (using constant dollars) they remain larger than either the Bush $500 billion/5 year hike, or the similarly sized Clinton tax hike. And these two gigantic hikes in the Reagan years were accompanied in that 7 year stretch by at least one sizable tax hike per year, in the range of $30 to $50 billion each. Because payroll taxes were raised so much, and prior existing tax deductions like those for income averaging, and consumer interest on credit cards and car loans were taken away from the people, the average American was paying as high a percentage of their income in total federal taxation in 1986 as they were in 1980, before Reagan's tax cuts were enacted.

 

The St. Louis Federal Reserve branch, noted for its strong economic research activities, looked into the causes for the increase in federal revenue during the Reagan years. The tax hikes he passed each year from 1982 to 1988, together with the effects of inflation, accounted for **93%** of the increase in revenues, they found. Only **7%** of the increase could be traced back to 'dynamic' Laffer Curve effects of the tax breaks and their fostering of increased economic activity.

 

Nor did supply side policies result in the savings/investment boom its supporters said it would. Business investment rates fell 50% from what they were in the bad economic days of the '70s (from 3% of corporate revenues to 2% of revenues), and personal savings rates also plummeted. Consumer and business debt increased so dramatically that new bankruptcy records were set every year of even the Reagan recovery. The annual federal deficits soared so high that they exceeded the entirety of the plummeting private national savings available to finance them, requiring the sale of US national debt to foreign capital. Rather than some new surge of fixed capital investments in plant and equipment, US businesses instead shuttered, permanently closed and wrote off huge capital investments, in steel, automobiles, machine tools, and other major industries, permanently decreasing the workforce in those industries by millions of employees, devastating such rust belt industrial cities as Youngstown, OH, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc.

 

Under Reagan's fiscal and anti-union policies, US industrial workers went from the world's best paid in 1980, to 18th best paid in 1988. The average wage of a white high school graduate fell 30% in real terms during his term of office. Real wages averaged a nearly zero annual increase rate, coming in at very meager 0.2% per year for his 8 years. The net worth of the majority of Americans actually fell during the '80s. The numbers below the poverty line increased by millions, and the rate of poverty remained higher than Carter's worst year's figure until 1988, when it went below Carter's worst figure by barely 0.1%, before shooting up above Carter's figure immediately the next year.

 

Given that Kudlow so utterly misrepresents the '80s and '70s, it is no surprise that his analysis of the '90s economic boom as the result of Reagan's tax cuts of '81 is also utterly false. For, between the tax cuts of '81 and the boom years of the last half of the '90s were 7 years of Reagan himself raising taxes to counteract the revenue losses of his 1st year's cuts, Bush famously having to agree to a very large tax increase, and then, more famously still, Clinton having to do the same thing and about as much as Bush did.

 

In fact, to the contrary of supply side claims, '82 through '00 represent one historical example where a country appears to have TAXED itself into prosperity.

All I'm saying is it is what it is.

 

Complaining about it up and down all day long isn't going to help. The DNC need to realize that they must tailor their message to the masses, not try to have the masses tailor thier beleifs to the democratic ideology.

607592[/snapback]

 

When the masses have such a social conservative view, are you ok with that? I think some of you guys are not realizing the increasing power of the Christian right. Ask Arlen Spector.

Not to mention George Walker Bush got the highest amount of votes for any presidential candidate in history. :thumbup

All I'm saying is it is what it is.

 

Complaining about it up and down all day long isn't going to help. The DNC need to realize that they must tailor their message to the masses, not try to have the masses tailor thier beleifs to the democratic ideology.

607592[/snapback]

 

When the masses have such a social conservative view, are you ok with that? I think some of you guys are not realizing the increasing power of the Christian right. Ask Arlen Spector.

607598[/snapback]

 

 

It's better than having a liberal left country that's for sure.

I think its safe to say the Democrats seriously need to reaccess their situation.

All I'm saying is it is what it is.

 

Complaining about it up and down all day long isn't going to help. The DNC need to realize that they must tailor their message to the masses, not try to have the masses tailor thier beleifs to the democratic ideology.

607592[/snapback]

 

When the masses have such a social conservative view, are you ok with that? I think some of you guys are not realizing the increasing power of the Christian right. Ask Arlen Spector.

607598[/snapback]

 

It's not the Christian right. You know as well as I that the Chrisitan right isn't to blame for a crushing electoral defeat.

 

Republicans have proven that they are better able to reach out on an ideological level and bring voters into the fold. Democrats haven't.

You know the dems are in trouble when they can't carry a single southern state.

The underblown sense of proportion here is hilarious. And by the way find me figures on perot winning 15% of the vote b/c i dont remmeber a third party getting that many

607544[/snapback]

 

here you go.

 

1992 Perot won nearly 19% of the popular vote.

link

It's not the Christian right. You know as well as I that the Chrisitan right isn't to blame for a crushing electoral defeat.

 

 

I don't see how you can count a victory that hinged on 1 state as a "crushing" defeat.

The underblown sense of proportion here is hilarious. And by the way find me figures on perot winning 15% of the vote b/c i dont remmeber a third party getting that many

607544[/snapback]

 

here you go.

 

1992 Perot won nearly 19% of the popular vote.

link

608173[/snapback]

 

so then the reform party received matching campaign funds in 1996. Incrediible how that party self destructed even after receiving matching funds, maybe they shouldnt have run buchanan

It's not the Christian right. You know as well as I that the Chrisitan right isn't to blame for a crushing electoral defeat.

 

 

I don't see how you can count a victory that hinged on 1 state as a "crushing" defeat.

608231[/snapback]

I doubt FF was talking about fact that it was 'crushing' as in they dominated, but this is a huge loss for the democrats who thought they should have won the election. That is why it is crushing. Because it was such an important election. Kind of like you are up 3 runs in the 9th in game 7 of the World Series with Gagne in and you lose.