Dueling Democrats

too funny. they have a cicular firing squad? guys, they havent existed in reality for almost 20 years. they blame everyoine BUT themselves for their failures. they continue to created fantasies to explain their failure. the election was “stolen”. like children. if they actually do dither with junk like minimum wage and claim that in this day and age, that that represents anything other than sheer sillyness, they will be a laughingstock. if they really DO try to impeach or shut down terrorist surveillance, they’ll become more than silly and funny, they’ll become dangerous. and will be the 21st century version of ‘whigs’ even faster. good luck. funny site you got. just for kids though right?

What is really funny is how “liberals” suddenly became “progressives”. At what point did somebody say “Maybe if we call ourselves progressives people won’t realize it’s us”? And how is rehashing the failed socialist policies of the last century “progressive” in any way? The New Deal was 70 years ago, the War on Poverty was 40 years ago. Some of that worked, a lot of it didn’t. If you’re going to keep beating the same old drum, it’s disingenuous to call yourself “progressive”.

What a ridiculous article. To summarize, the message to be learned from this election, win or lose, is that the Democratic party needs to be MORE liberal--I mean, “socialist"--I mean, “progressive”. It amazes me how willfully ignorant “progressives” are when it comes to their lack of understanding of why a vast majority of Americans repeatedly reject “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party” in national elections. Either David Sirota is simply an intellectually dishonest partisan hack, on par with Hugh Hewitt on the right, or he’s a delusional ignorant whackjob who only associates with other delusional ignorant whackjobs. Either way, the “Democratic wing of the Democratic party” is as much a joke and as dangerous as the “Republican wing of the Republican party.”

The Democratic party does not understand the it left it’s true grassroots base decades ago. I was a party stalwart since 1972 when I voted for McGovern from Na Trang as a 19 year old Draftee and I saw the Party march farther and farther Left untill I could not stand any more and bolted.  The Leadership of the Party today would be called Leftist by even such Legends as Humphrey and JFK.  Real people in America don’t agree with the Liberal Elites of LA and New York.  If the Party were in the hands of people like Harold Ford or Joe Liebermann it would be in power already.  The Democrat Party represents the Faculty Lounge not the factory floor today.  Pelosi and crew will ruin America and poison the memory of the once great Democrat Party for all time.

The hope for the Democratic party today is in its young new moderate members. Unfortunately, the current leadership is comprised of everything and everyone that’s wrong with the Democratic party...Pelosi, Kennedy, Rangel, Shumer, Kerry, etc. Until these dinosaurs cycle out of politics, the party will continue to be a joke. Let’s just hope they don’t spoil the good new leaders waiting in the wings. If they were smart and actually cared about their party and their country, they would stand aside now. Needless to say, I’m not holding my breath. The party leadership is far too arrogant and ignorant to recognize that their day has passed.

I have to strongly disagree with the conservative posters above. The basic New Deal-Great Society reforms are more popular than ever.
We need a Living Wage as well as a minimum wage and we need a strong increase in the latter. Study after study has disproved the conservative contention that increases in the minimum wage cause
increased unemployment. You might take a look at the Economic Policy
Institute website and also Dollars & Sense website for the extensive list
of empirical studies debunking the laissez-faire ideological claims and
not just on the minimum wage. The fact is that the conservative revolution has run its course and the people are ready for a strongly
progressive alternative. Liberal had different meanings over the generations and progressive is a more accurate reflection of where
many of us stand today. As far as the “moderate” wing of the Demos goes, it is precisely under the DLC tutelage that the Dems lost Congress and most of the state legislatures. Clinton was great for himself and a disaster for the party. The idea that Pelosi is a wild liberal is nonsense if you talk to her constituents out here, she has been pro-war, mindlessly pro-Israel to the extent of discounting the Palestinians entirely, she has been beating the China war drums for decades
and she is hostile to impeaching Bush. Which is way overdue.
Schumer is no great progressive either particularly on foreign policy,
ergo for Rangel. Kerry caves in this week for no reason at all.
Joe Lieberman will be lucky to get reelected Senator, he has no
national future in the party and has been an absolute albatross for
his endorsement of Bush’s lying war. The idea that opposing Bush’s
totally illegal fascist policies is shutting down terrorist surveillance is
absurd, Bush creates more terrorists every minute of the day. The
above comments were all posted by rightwing Repugs who are terrified
of the beating they are going to get in a few days. They have a right to
their views but any progressive Democrat who paid any mind to them
is a loser. The problem really is all the pro-war Dems recruited by Rahm
Emanuel to run this year. I’m glad they will replacing Repugs but we
could do a lot better. The very idea that this rightist trend since 1976
is inevitable or desirable or sustainable is absurd.

If Democrats somehow manage to seize a mid-term loss from the jaws of victory in 2006, the DLC will undoubtedly again fabricate a storyline that blames it entirely on progressives.

My comments on the above quote are not directed at the chances of either Party winning or losing on November 07, but on the presumption, by the author, of the blamelessness of “progressives”.  The many comments in this article about progressives make it clear that the author considers contemporary progressive policies as virtuous, beneficial, and pacific, as well as blameless.  We need to look closely at these assumptions. 

Progressivism has a long history in the USA, dating to the reform movements of the early Twentieth Century that were rooted in the excesses of industrialization and social change in post-Civil War America.  Robert LaFollete, Governor of Wisconsin, was a prominent and successful proponent of progressive principles, as was Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.  Roosevelt’s second foray into presidential politics was as nominee of the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party, which he lost.

WWII had it’s own (necessary) excesses, including an alliance with the Soviet Union against a perceived greater threat, nazi Germany.  FDR’s Vice-President during much of the war was Henry Wallace, a remarkable personality who was an accomplished agricultural expert and businessman, something of a mystic, and a political naif who openly flirted with communism under the cover of the WWII alliance with the Soviets. 

During the 1944 presidential race, Wallace became a political liability because of his leftist viewpoints, and FDR dumped Wallace for a little-known political hack named Harry S Truman; it was an inspired choice.  When FDR died soon after the election, Truman grew into the office and set the course of American values and resistance to collectivist (principally Soviet communist) aggression in the post-war years. 

Meanwhile, Wallace ran on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948 with open communist support; he lost big time, winning only a few electoral votes in (where else?) New York and California.  It was during this time that Hubert Humphrey made his political reputation by leading the effort to purge open communists from the DFL Party in Minnesota; HHH went on to become a Democratic Party stalwart in the fight against communism during the Cold War.  In the same time frame, Ronald Reagan was actively fighting communist infiltration of Hollywood and California politics.

The political label, “Progressive”, was little used after Wallace’s defeat in 1948 because of the taint of communism, and has only been recently revived.  Meanwhile, anti-communist and bi-partisan Democrats were among the leading political personalities of the post-war era: JFK, LBJ, Humphrey, and Scoop Jackson.

The twin Democratic Party disasters of the Vietnam War and the Great Society programs led to an economic low growth/low productivity scenario, resulting in seventeen years of economic stagnation, culminating in the Carter Catastrophe. 

So, how did the collectivists identify themselves after the term “progressive” fell out of fashion, amidst more social turmoil?  They tagged themselves as “liberals”!  But the liberalism of the enlightenment and of the American Revolution was not the same liberalism of the anti-war demonstrators, from 1970 to the present date; in fact, it is the polar opposite.

“American radicals and socialists began calling themselves `liberals’.” - F.A. Hayek, 1960.

Now we have a situation were the collectivists have tainted and degraded the term “progressive” circa 1948, tainted and degraded the term “liberal” currently, and now are back to calling themselves “progressive”.  Have they no memory?  Do they think we have no memory?  If they just called themselves “communists” everything would be perfectly clear, only then they would never win another election; the American electorate has a long history of rejecting collectivist positions, exhibiting admirable enlightened self-interest. 

The author of this article spends much time and effort delineating (and favoring) the “progressive” Democrats from the moderate Democrats, which is a valid distinction: there is less difference between moderate Democrats and Republicans than there is between moderate Democrats and communists.  But there are powerful, if declining, progressive forces that strive for a communist victory: Old Media, academia, George Soros, Hollywood.

Fortunately, Old Media is in terminal decline, old professors from the 1970s are dying off, George Soros has pissed away millions of dollars in losing efforts, and who pays attention to Hollywood?

So, in the off chance that the Dems actually take either, or both, Houses of Congress, they are still confronted with insuperable internal divisions.  The American people are not going to elect a bunch of communists (by whatever label); Wallace, McGovern, and Mondale proved that. 

And changing the label of your political preference really does not solve the left’s dilemma: “A rose by any other name ... “

And communists by any other name are still corrupt, inefficient murderers.  Just look at the Soviet Union.

The only thing scarey about this election is the number of high-ranking Jihad leaders that very much want the Democrats in power.  This interview piece of Jihadists at the World Net Daily is simply astounding -

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52747

Yes this site might lean conservative, but these are the words of the terrorists themselves.  So, answer me this.  If Bush’s policies were “creating terrorists” and otherwise furthering their cause, why wouldn’t the terrorists want to keep with success and endorse Republican policy of staying in Iraq?  Why would they want Democrats in power?

Having such evil people so clearly endorse one political party over another I’m sure is unprecendented in American politics.

Scorp, you need to skip the Ayn Rand trash novels and the Birch Society meetings and read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History Of The United States. Collective social action came into being because the problems
created by industrial capitalism overwhelmned the society and brought us to the brink of revolution in 1932. The New Deal saved what could be saved of capitalism while jettisoning the unworkable laissez faire baggage. Western Europe and Eastern Asian tiger states are successful examples of socialism. We don’t need to bother with the
old USSR red herring which is your shabby little way of trying to tag all progressives with the Commie label.
I already rebutted hyjinx on another thread, Bush creates more terrorists
in Iraq and Afghanistan every day. Both wars are UNWINNABLE.
There is no evidence Osama is backing the Dems. The real issue is
will the Dems close down this unwinnable war.

Mike -

Ayn Rand?  John Birch?  How utterly quaint!  Where did you dig those up, from the 1960 DNC talking points?

If you have been asleep all this time, you have a lot of catching up to do; allow me to help you.

I do not do Zinn or Chomsky for practical reasons.

I know there is a large body of “scientific” analyses of social and economic factors that seek a just distribution of material wealth; the ideas are quite appealing, even seductive.  But apply you scientifically calibrated brain to the world tell me one little socialist country that has ever worked to the good of the people?  SU? China? Vietnam?  North Korea?  No, no, no, and hell no.

“Western Europe and Eastern Asian tiger states are successful examples of socialism.”

Never been to Europe or SE Asia, I take it. 

Eastern Asian tiger states are corrupt kleptocracies. 

Western Europe is dying.  Europe has been in a severe recession (10% unemployment, zero growth) for the last fifteen years.  In the Lisbon Accords in 2000, the EU pledged to match American productivity by year 2010.  Six years along, Europe has made no progress whatsoever toward achieving this goal.  The native Europeans are not even reproducing themselves.  As the European population ages with few young people in the pipeline, perhaps the “youth” in the banlieues will stop burning cars long enough to get jobs and earn enough to pay the pensions of the retired Europeans.  Or not.

But even if your examples are weak (ludicrous), there are strong political and economic movements afoot that show a lot of good old capitalist progress. 

Three of the fastest growing economies in the world are Chile, Ireland, and Estonia.  All three were economic disaster cases twenty-five years ago, before they started practicing democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. 

India is a democracy but has always followed a socialist model, making exactly zero social and economic progress for fifty years.  Now India has adopted free markets and is taking off like a rocket.  Japan is the second largest economy in the world but has also been stagnant since the collapse of the Japanese bubble fourteen years ago.  But PM Koizumi recently freed up the economy by relaxing state controls, and Japan is perking up sharply.  Then there is China.  China has endorsed economic freedom, but left it coupled to a politically repressive state.  Lots of luck.  China is sort of like teaming a north bound horse with a south bound cow to pull your wagon.  I see trouble. 

So, why is it that nations that practice democracy, the rule of law, and free markets grow and prosper, and socialist states stagnate and die, if not actually becoming murderous criminal enterprises?

Socialists have an abiding, almost religious faith in their absurd little ideologies that have NEVER worked in practice.  Before you can share the wealth, you have to generate wealth, and socialists do not generate wealth, they only consume wealth.  President Johnson’s Great Society included the Welfare Program.  In twenty-five years, the Welfare Program cost six trillion dollars ($6,000,000,000,000), roughly equivalent to the national debt.  The only lasting result of the Welfare Program was the near total destruction of black families in America; since women and children were not eligible for welfare if there was a man of the house, men had a strong financial incentive to make themselves scarce, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said would happen before the Welfare Program was enacted.

Wealth works much better as investment, rather than being subject to confiscation by taxation.  Investment creates factories, jobs, and goods, resulting in productivity and wealth.  But investment is near zero in Western Europe (much less the old Soviet Union) because of excessive tax rates.  Airbus is getting tax subsidies to build civilian aircraft to compete with Boeing, but Airbus is locked in a destructive bureaucratic downward spiral, subsidized by European taxpayers. 

After you create wealth, then you can work out equitable distribution of that wealth.  But socialists confiscate wealth, which is like eating your seed corn or killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Ronald Reagan is the only graduate economist ever to have graced the White House.  Consequently he understood the virtues of investment and the evils of taxation, and used his knowledge to restore American growth and productivity after the long years of stagnation after Johnson and Carter mishandled the economy.  Clinton promptly screwed it up again, not only giving us the biggest tax increase in history, but allowing the dot.com Bubba Bubble to develop and collapse into recession in his last year in office. 

Now the Dimocrats are bragging that they are going to raise taxes again.  When President Bush lowered taxes in the middle of the Bubba Recession, unemployment went down (now at record lows), productivity went up, and tax receipts increased to the highest level in history.  If the Dimocrats succeed in raising taxes, you will see this process reverse, with lower investment, fewer jobs, fewer goods and services due to lost productivity, and lower tax receipts.  If the Democrats hold office long enough, we will return to the stagnation of the 1970s, which is caused by the same statist policies that have done so much damage in Europe and Japan in the last fifteen years.

And being a socialist, you think that this is the correct state of affairs.  You do not understand that the only periods of sustainable growth in the USA in forty years were the products of Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

By all measures of human wellbeing, mortality, childbirth,
longetivity, old age security, lower crime, better education, less pollution,
sustainable unemployment insurance, literacy, culture----western Europe and Scandinavia are light years ahead of the USA, so are the
East Asian Tiger States, which are even more socialist and have central planning, unlike Europe. I’ve been abroad twice, what kind of a dumbbell would assume I’ve never travelled because I don’t agree with
his imbecilic rightist Limbaughisms ????? The New Deal and democratic socialism have worked MUCH BETTER THAN UNREGULATED CAPITALISM. IF A MOTOR MOUTH LIKE YOU WOULD
EVEN TAKE THE TIME TO READ ROBERT KUTTNER’S EVERYTHING
FOR SALE OR JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH’S MANY EXCELLENT BOOKS YOU MIGHT ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING ! CHOMSKY
AND ZINN ARE FARTHER LEFT AND VERY SCARY TO A FRIGHTENED LITTLE RIGHTIST LIKE YOURSELF.
Ronald Reagan WAS NOT A COLLEGE GRADUATE, HE WAS NOT AN ECONOMIST OF ANY SORT AND HE PRODUCED THE MOST MASSIVE DEFICITS IN US HISTORY PRIOR TO THE CURRENT IMBECILE.
All those prosperous European and Asian welfare states practice the rule of law much better than we do under Bush’s fascist Patriot Act, he has now undone habeas corpus for the first time in US history.
The Democrats never said as a bloc they were going to raise taxes
on everyone, they need to repeal Bush’s excessive tax cuts for the top
1% of the population so we can fund needed programs precisely because the market doesn’t take care of everything.  The market doesn’t
work in health care, medicine, public health, civil rights, worker safety,
food & drug safety, police, prisons, law courts, roads & highways, the
space program, national defense, global warming, water, ocean &
air pollution to name some major areas.
The greatest period of sustainable economic growth was the EIGHT YEARS UNDER BILL CLINTON AFTER HIS TAX INCREASE. WE HAD A NET GAIN OF MANY JOBS.
IN BUSH’S FIRST TERM WE HAD A NET LOSS OF JOBS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE HERBERT HOOVER ! REAGAN’S FIRST THREE YEARS WERE IN A RECESSION THAT VERGED ON DEPRESSION, SAME WITH BUSH 1 FOR HIS WHOLE TERM. THE DOTCOM COLLAPSE HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH CLINTON BUT WITH THE AYNRANDISH SKY’S THE LIMIT MORON MENTALITY GENERATED BY HYPERCAPITALISM.
OVER 80% OF INDIA’S POPULATION STILL LIVE IN POVERTY.
CHINA STILL HAS A GROWTH RATE OF 9-10% A YEAR.
We should have such troubles ! Most capitalistic jump start economies
have been fascist dictatorships like Pinochet in Chile. Argentina and
Brazil economies collapsed following the IMF-World Bank free market
models and they had to elect leftists to get them back on track.
Most of the JFK-LBJ years WERE YEARS OF THE GREATEST PROSPERITY IN US HISTORY WHEN MORE PEOPLE MADE IT INTO
THE MIDDLE CLASS THAN AT ANY OTHER TIME IN US HISTORY.
THE US ECONOMY STARTED GOING SOUTH UNDER NIXON.
SOCIALIST COUNTRIES THAT HAVE WORKED, DENMARK, FINLAND, NORWAY, SWEDEN, HOLLAND, BELGIUM, GERMANY, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, FRANCE, ENGLAND, LUXEMBURG, SINGAPORE,
SOUTH KOREA, JAPAN, CHINA, COSTA RICA, SOUTH AFRICA UNDER APARTHEID WHERE MOST HEAVY INDUSTRY WAS GOVERNMENT OWNED, THE TVA, MEDICARE, SOCIAL SECURITY, NATIONAL PARKS
& FORESTS, USPS, ETC., HERE IN THE USA.
For about 50 years state socialism DID work in Russia, it stagnated
after 1970 and has gotten much worse under capitalism. Population
decline is true for whites worldwide INCLUDING HERE IN THE USA.
You can’t blame that on socialism. I’d rather live in any west or north European city than the third world jungles we have here in the USA.
“Welfare” never cost anywhere near “six trillion dollars” that is an out
and out lie that you heard on Limbaugh’s misinformation show. Welfare
was never anywhere near 1% of the Fed budget. Now Pentagon-Corporate welfare which keeps capitalism afloat, that is more like
30 trillion dollars since WW2. Actually you do need to read Chomsky
on how the US has never had anything approaching pure capitalism.

Read The American Conservative magazine and ex-Reagan Treasury official Paul Craig Roberts on the antiwar.com website to find out how
global capitalism has damaged the US economy AND society.
Check out ZNet and Michael Albert’s work on Parecon for economic alternatives to capitalism. Check out Robin Hahnel’s new book on
Economic Justice & Democracy strongly criticizing capitalism.
See Bowles and Gintis’ Capitalism and Democracy. They are exact
opposites deeply antithetical ideas, actually all of the US Founders
opposed democracy. Capitalism was not around at the time.
Check out Dollars and Sense magazine, the Left Business Observer
and the Commondreams.org website. READ SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T PANDER TO PRECONCEIVED PREJUDICES FOR A
CHANGE !
I knew Rand, read her entire corpus plus Mises, Reisman, Hayek,
Friedman, Rothbard, et al, everyone on the Right. I know those arguments backwards and forwards and DO NOT REQUIRE LECTURES FROM TEENAGERS WITH PEACH FUZZ.
Stop listening to Limbaugh and other rightist shock jocks and try to
do some serious study for a change. Spare us the canned GOP talking
pints, people aren’t buying it any more as the elections showed.
By the way, the Dems did not promise a tax increase for everyone but
only for the top 1% who excessively benefitted from Bush’s cuts so
that we can continue to decently fund needed services.
Ok enough on this. Your ignorance is only exceeded by your arrogance.
Don’t bother trying to push those GOP talking points again, the voters have now wised up to them.

One of the most salient points that Chomsky makes is that there is no
relationship between democracy and capitalism except one of total antagonism. There is nothing more totalitarian than the modern corporation where you typically have no rights at all and here in the
USA can be dismissed at will. Originally corporations were charters granted to do good, not just licenses to print money. The whole rationale of the corporation is to evade individual responsibility
and this is a major government intervention only recognized by
the Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists. The Objectivists, conservatives
and so-called libertarians go along with it. Like rent control, the
landlords howl about that but say nothing zoning and land use planning
which is a much more extensive government intervention, because it
boosts their property values by limiting the supply. Morons like Rush
defend HMOs which are a joint Nixon-Ted Kennedy creation but say
nothing the AMA cumbersome licensing procedures which limit the
supply and boost the income of current practitioners. I’m not saying
I favor unlicensed doctors but typical rightist hypocrisy. The USA is not
a peaceful country, we have troops or treaties or pacts with 107 countries last I read. WW1 crusade for “democracy” led to Versailles
Treaty, Hitler and WW2, that led to Communist filling the vacuum in
1/3 rd of the planet, that after the Commies called it quits, we have
the new enemy, militant Islam, whom we subsidized in Afghanistan
and brought to power in Iran by our support of the fascist Shah for
26 years. After Islam, what’s next ? Martians ? Venutians ? Moonians ?
Oh by the way, Scorps (?) the military is the most socialistic, collectivistic, regimented part of the government, which is why your
friend Rush avoided it along with Hannity, Cheney, etc. Well, Rush did
have a large boil on his massive behind..........

Scorp asks tell me one little socialist country that has ever worked to the good of the people?

Canada!

You forgot Canuckistan in your list, Mike ; )

But Scorp asked for a little socialist country wheras Canada is quite large so he will probably scoff at my answer.

Thanks, David. And that was a LARGE omission on my part, my apologies.

Happy to help out! No apologies necessary but thank you anyways.

Again, thanks, David. Nice to meet reasonable people here.

Reasonable is my middle name. Either that or Unreasonable .
I forget which sometimes.

Mike -

If ignorance is bliss, you must be ecstatic. I love it when leftists come up with demonstrably false, easily provable nonsense.

Let’s consider some of your most verifiable errors/ exaggerations/ lies/ whatever:

“Welfare" never cost anywhere near “six trillion dollars” that is an out and out lie that you heard on Limbaugh’s misinformation show. Welfare was never anywhere near 1% of the Fed budget.

The $6 trillion dollar figure made the news several years ago, and received a lot of comment at the time.  The high cost/negative benefit results of welfare were a factor in Clinton’s agreement to end welfare; welfare was costing vast sums with no positive benefits and lots of serious negative results, including destroying black families.

Since that time, the United States has “invested” $7.95 trillion (in constant 1999 dollars) in programs that provide cash, food, housing, and medical and social services to poor and low-income Americans. By contrast, the cost to the United States of fighting World War II was $3.2 trillion (also in 1999 dollars). The cost of the War on Poverty has been more than twice the price tag for defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation.

http://www.newcoalition.org/Article.cfm?artId=263

And I have never listened to Rush Limbaugh in my entire life, though I have read a couple of articles based on his programs.

Ronald Reagan WAS NOT A COLLEGE GRADUATE, HE WAS NOT AN ECONOMIST OF ANY SORT AND HE PRODUCED THE MOST MASSIVE DEFICITS IN US HISTORY PRIOR TO THE CURRENT IMBECILE.

So, Reagan studied economics and graduated from Eureka College in 1932, according to Columbia University Encyclopedia, Houghton-Mifflin Encyclopedia, Thompson-Gale Legal Encyclopedia, and the Eureka College home page.  If you are certain that these reference works are in error, you can probably get your fifteen minutes of fame by bringing this to everyone’s attention.  Or not.

The most massive deficits in USA history were in WWII, when the national debt went to over 120% of GDP.  Pearl Harbor was on December 7, 1941, and during the first six months of 1942, the USA wrote purchase orders and service contracts for the war effort totaling more than the annual GDP.

http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2005/01/national_debt_b.html

Each time the Democrats foul up the economy, the Republicans have to repair the damage.  Repairing the world’s largest economy is expensive.  Not repairing the world’s largest economy is infinitely more expensive, like the Carter Catastrophe.  What to do?  Reagan and Bush 43 correctly took on debt in order to create jobs, growth, and productivity.  Tax receipts are now at record levels because Bush lowered tax rates.  I realize this does not agree with your socialist ideology, but there it is, spin it as you will.

Economies can get out of balance in several ways, and an out-of-balance economy always has personal, social, and national costs such as unemployment, loss of tax revenues, and lack of growth.  That is why it is such a tragedy and such an irony when Democrats set out to help “victims” and create worse problems for the people they are trying to help.  Every single recession in the USA since President Johnson resulted from Democratic mismanagement of the economy (usually from raising taxes) except one; Chairman Greenspan was afraid of the return of inflation after the Carter Catastrophe and raised interest rates too high for too long, costing Bush 41 his re-election in 1992.  “It’s the economy, stupid!” But it wasn’t, it was the Fed.  You do not seem to have a grasp of important things, like economics, but Google up the recession at the end of President Bush 41’s term and refresh your memory if you are in doubt.

The economy during the Great Depression was certainly out of balance, and stayed out of balance for the first eight years of FDR’s Administration.  When FDR was re-elected to his third term, the unemployment rate was still 17%, and if the New Deal had any effect, it was not obvious from the economic results. 

But then a funny thing happened when we went into massive deficit spending at the start of WWII; the unemployment rate dropped to 2%, the lowest on record.  At the time, there was a fierce debate at the end of the war whether the Depression would or would not resume when the fighting ceased.  But the economy was on a firm footing after WWII, due to the massive investment (much of it transferable to civilian use), payoff from the huge R&D;effort from the war years, and jobs, jobs, jobs that kept the economy humming right along and tax revenues that were sufficiently high to pay off much of the war debt.  Does this tell us anything?

Early in the JFK Administration, economic growth slowed but there were some new economic thoughts and understandings about the economy, and how it works.  With the advice of economists (Galbraith), JFK proposed tax cuts to raise tax revenues, and this was actually done in 1964 after his assassination.  Voila!  Tax cuts really did increase tax revenues, at least within the range where the USA tax rates were operating.  Are we starting to see a pattern?  (Actually, this phenomenon was first observed and reported in the fourteenth century by ibn Khaldun, and Democrats still don’t understand it!)

The national debt continued to be paid down until about 1968, when, unfortunately, LBJ got us deep into Vietnam AND the Great Society, with no plans on how these new obligations would be paid, much less the remaining debt going back to WWII.  There followed seventeen years of stagnation, including three recessions, culminating in the high unemployment, low growth, ruinous inflation, and devastating interest rates of the Carter years.  Carter actually suggested (in his crisis-of-confidence malaise speech) that the USA had reached some sort of plateau, and the best thing for the USA to do was to accept it’s social and economic limits on the domestic front and negotiate the best deal possible with the Soviets.  This was just ten years before the Soviets collapsed from corruption and inefficiency!

So, Reagan became President and quickly solved the economic problems (and the Soviet problem) with our old friend, the massive deficit.  Tragedy is when people can’t find work, as under Carter.  Tax cuts provide investment capital to build plants and offices where people can work, as under Reagan.  Workers pay taxes; the more workers, the more taxes.  Is this too complicated for you?

The greatest period of sustainable economic growth was the EIGHT YEARS UNDER BILL CLINTON AFTER HIS TAX INCREASE. WE HAD A NET GAIN OF MANY JOBS.

The New Deal and democratic socialism have worked MUCH BETTER THAN UNREGULATED CAPITALISM.

Ummm, no.  The DJI was flat-lined from1965 to the end of the Carter Maladministration.  It picked up sharply early in Reagan’s first term from the tax cuts, and barely had a blip in the Greenspan Recession in 41’s term of office.  It continued up smoothly during Clinton’s first four years, and then jumped sharply higher.  Too sharply.

Clinton’s major tax increase in 1993 had the effect of reducing investment capital, but the effect was delayed by the defense savings at the collapse of the Soviet Union.  (Reagan’s doings, not Clinton’s.) But the thing that really kicked off the economy was the Bubba Bubble.  In 1996, the Dow was at 6000 and Greenspan warned about “irrational exuberance” in the markets.  By year 2000, the Dow was at 12,000, and the NASDAQ had come for nowhere to over 5000.  Millions of people wasted billions of dollars on dot.com stocks and it was fun while it lasted, but sustainable?  No, it was not.  I suppose from your point of view this was “UNREGULATED CAPITALISM” but the only two people on earth who could have applied a little regulation to this incipient disaster were Greenspan and Clinton.

Do you know anything about economic bubbles?  Ver-r-r-ry interesting, as the little German used to say.  Dutch Tulip, Mississippi, South Sea, Great Depression, Japan 1991?  Things get wildly out of control during a bubble; prime Tokyo real estate was going for $40,000 per square meter in 1990, and the Imperial Palace grounds were valued at more than the entire state of California.  Then the bubble bursts, as it always does, and things do not go back to normal, at least not for awhile.  The effects of the 1991 Japanese Bubble are just now being brought under control fifteen years after the fact due to Koizumi’s recent reforms.  We were blessed to have President Bush apply the proper corrective actions, and our recovery from a very hazardous bubble was swift and sure, with the unemployment rate only rising to 6.1% and quickly falling to near historic lows.

So, in year 2000, Clinton’s last year in office, the NASDAQ dropped from over 5000 to under 1000, the DJI peaked and started down, and two quarters in 2000 had negative growth.  This is quite typical; when the markets crash, recessions normally start within six months.

So, why are you talking about “sustainable economic growth” in the Clinton years?  No bubble economy has ever survived for very long, and always causes considerable damage, as in Japan.  But the crash of the Clinton Bubble was fortunately caught early on by Bush, and what could have been another Carter Catastrophe was quickly corrected, leaving you leftists babbling incoherently about economic matters you know nothing about. 

You made a bad mistake studying all this leftist crap; it left you with a befouled brain.  You need to study some real economics.  Then maybe you will understand why the USA growth rate has been around 4% a year recently, and why the Bubba Bubble, seductive as it was, was terrible from a long-term economic view point, and why Europe is chronically afflicted by unemployment, low growth, inefficiency, and corruption.

I don’t know whether to be flattered or insulted by your reference to “PEACH FUZZ”.  I have worked three years in Europe, five years in Saudi Arabia, and three years in East and Southeast Asia.  I will just ignore it, along with all the rest of your nonsense.

Mike –

The Democrats never said as a bloc they were going to raise taxes on everyone, they need to repeal Bush’s excessive tax cuts for the top 1% of the population so we can fund needed programs precisely because the market doesn’t take care of everything.

And you propose to fund needed programs by restoring tax rates to Clintonian levels for the top 1% of the population?  You are cutting a wide peel off a small potato, boy.

Marvelous article by Robert Samuelson in Newsweek this morning.  Samuelson is a rational author and columnist in the moonbat MSM Newsweek.  Addressing your tax cuts for the rich, Samuelson says that restoring Clinton-level taxes for the “top two income tax rates” (personal income tax and capital gains) will not do what you think it will.  (I think the top two income tax rates include about 6% of the population.) Samuelson says of the repeal of tax cuts for the top two tax rates:

In fiscal 2007 and 2008, federal revenues would increase $42 billion and $63 billion, estimates the Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:LK4mcAFfc4cJ:www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.p pdf+tax+receipts+historical+graph&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8#2

Meanwhile, according to the CBO, total federal tax receipts increased by $98 billion in 2004 and by $274 billion in 2005, fueled by those very tax cuts that you want to repeal.  Tax receipts now are greater than they ever were during Clinton’s wildly inflated and distorted bubble economy.

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:LK4mcAFfc4cJ:www.cbo.gov/budget/historical.p pdf+tax+receipts+historical+graph&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8#2

You don’t know a thing about economics or anything important.  Nothing personal, but I think you socialists are insane.

Scorp, you are simply a liar.
Welfare never cost ANYWHERE NEAR SIX TRILLION DOLLARS AND I
CHALLENGE YOU TO DOCUMENT THAT FIGURE.  It never ran anywhere near 1/2 of 1% of the Federal Budget, I’m talking about AFDC
here. Social Security and Medicare are NOT welfare but entitlement programs that all of us pay for and benefit the middle class more than anyone.
Robert Samuelson, no relation to the distinguished MIT economist Paul Samuelson, is a rightwing hack, this would be like quoting from Liar
Limbaugh himself, his opinion and two bucks will get you a ride on the bus.
We had much higher economic growth in the 50s under Ike when the top rate was 90% than we have now. So much for your knowledge of
economics. Even restoration to the Reagan era top rates of 39% would
balance the budget and enable us to adequately fund social programs.
The NASDAQ wasgreatly overinflated to begin with because of the unsustainable dotcom boom, I was in the industry, I know ,but in fact
it never went below 1,000 under Clinton. It might have under Bush AND
Bush was the first President to preside over an economy that created
no net gain of jobs during his first Administration.
Only in the last year has the economy been growing at close to 4%, actually closer to 3%, and I have FORGOTTEN more about economics
than you will ever know.
Regardless of how many countries you claim you have been to, you are
a shallow, extremely stupid person. 
The USSR collapsed two years BEFORE Clinton’s modest 1993 tax increase. Again, your wrong. Is it hard memorizing all the Repug talking
points, “Scorp” or whoever you are today ?
I was alive in 1968 and the economy was booming till 1973 under NIXON it started with serious contraction. We did have inflation under LBJ because he wouldn’t raise taxes enough to pay for Vietnam War and it continued under Nixon but no serious recession until 1973.
Under the New Deal the economy had greatly improved by 1936, which
is why he was reelected in a landslide of all but two states, Maine
and Vermont. It took a dive in 38 but with war preparations picked from
39 on. His programs SAVED COUNTLESS MILLIONS OF LIVES.
More to follow.

Samuelson is clearly wrong about the level of income that is lost to the treasury under Bush’s tax cuts favoring the richest 1%, Clinton’s
five trillion SURPLUS was turned into six trillion dollar DEFICIT by Bush
AND IT ALL HAPPENED AFTER BUSH’S TAX CUTS.
“Scorp”, that is known as cause and effect.
Bush never"caught" any bubble early as you typically stupidly assert
because 1) the highest economic growth in US history over EIGHT
YEARS was not a bubble and 2) We were in a no job growth mode
till 1995, LAST YEAR, dummy. Under the GOP.
The 7.95 “trillion” figure is aboslute bullshit. Again, I challenge you to document your Big Lie here. You just got it from your usual lying ultra-Right sources and never verified it. The costs of so-called “defense”
spending, i.e., totally unnecessary Pentagon-Corporate America WELFARE spending is at 40 TRILLION since since WW2. It might
be closer to 100 TRILLION because just under the Bush imbecile alone we have spent close to 7 TRILLION in “defense” and war spending. All of it absolutely unnecessary as the Soviets & the Chinese Commies
were NEVER a MILITARY threat to the USA anymore than Lbya or
Iraq or Iran or Panama or Cuba or North Vietnam or North Korea
or Chile under Allende or Haiti or Somalia or Indonesia or a hundred
countries where we unnecessarily intervened in since 1940. The only
result of the “Good War” was a Commie takeover of a third of the world
just as our war for democracy in WW1 led to Versailles, Hitler, Lenin
takeover in Russia.
By the way, you pinhead, I’m a LEFT libertarian, not a Democrat, they
are as pro-war, pro-Israel and pro-military as the GOP morons.

Oh, did you forget to mention that Federal tax receipts dropped proportionately in 2001, 2002 and 2003 after W’s tax cuts for the very rich largely and did you forget that we had a huge SURPLUS under Clinton and since then every year huge DEFICITS under Bush ?
The only question is the SIZE of Bush’s deficits.
“Scorp” or “Rush” or “Trailer Trash” I’ve forgotten more about economics, political science, history, philosophy, psychology,
art, literature, culture, etc., than you’ll ever know.
Better get that trailer’s heating working, bubba.
I’m always available to administer another public ass whipping.

See the Reuters news story in the www.scotsman.com of November 9
regarding the annual UN Report on the best places to live measuring
per capita income, healthcare, life expectancy, literacy, educational opportunities and the all around environment.
Norway was first for the fifth year followed by Iceland, Australia, Ireland
and Sweden. USA was lagging in 8th place and I was shocked it was that high ! On infant mortality US is #22 !
Sorry, “Scorp” another devastating body blow to your rightist policies and many lies.

“scorp” check out the latest online edition of The American Conservative, you can buy it too in stores.
See the long piece by a former National Review trustee Austin
W. Bramwell, his farewell obituary for the US conservative movement.
It’s an eye opener ! Happy reading.

Mike -

Oh, boy!  I got me a live one.  You are grossly ignorant of the things you address, and you shout your ignorance from the rooftops. 

Welfare never cost ANYWHERE NEAR SIX TRILLION DOLLARS AND I CHALLENGE YOU TO DOCUMENT THAT FIGURE.  It never ran anywhere near 1/2 of 1% of the Federal Budget, I’m talking about AFDC here. Social Security and Medicare are NOT welfare but entitlement programs that all of us pay for and benefit the middle class more than anyone.

I quite agree that we are not talking about Social Security and Medicare, but AFDC was not the only item in the Welfare Program.  From Wikipedia:

The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youths develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, the first summer jobs established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; the Food Stamps program; the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children.

Now, if you go to the Federal Budget Historical Tables, which are appended to the Annual Budget document each year, you find these classifications:

600 Income Security

604 Housing Assistance
605 Food and Nutrition Assistance
609 Other Income Security

I did a quick total on these three sub-items and came up with very close to $2 trillion between 1967 and 2000.  And this does not include the Community Development, education, health, legal services, or job programs that were also a part of the war on poverty.  So, there is your documentation, and I eagerly await your apology.  And while you are at it, you have not yet apologized for your bonehead statements about President Reagan’s educational qualifications. 

The NASDAQ wasgreatly overinflated to begin with because of the unsustainable dotcom boom, I was in the industry, I know ,but in fact it never went below 1,000 under Clinton.

Of course, and I do apologize for the misstatement.  The NASDAQ peaked on 10 March 2000 at 5048.62, and dropped to 2322.78 on 20 December of that year.  But if you were in the industry, did it alarm you that the NASDAQ lost over half it’s value in nine months?  Did you lose your job? Did you blame Clinton?  Particularly since the DOW also peaked and started down in the final year of the Clinton Administration, and the budget surplus was falling like a rock.

The two most recent federal surpluses before the Clinton administration were $301 million in 1959 and $3.242 billion in 1968; small potatos, way back when.  When President Reagan solved the Carter Catastrophe, he cut taxes and implemented tax reforms that drove up the deficit.  The payoff was fast; in 1985, the Reagan deficit peaked at $221,227 billion and then was driven down by high employment, low inflation, low interest rates, rapid growth, and high tax receipts.  Just as Reagan predicted, and just as Kennedy had accomplished earlier in a similar economic scenario.  The fly in the ointment was Greenspan’s raise of interest rates in 1988, because he was afraid of reigniting the Carter Catastrophe.  Greenspan’s interest rate hike drove up the deficit to a peak of $290,321 billion in 1991, but when the interest rates were normalized, the effects of the Reagan reforms kicked in again and a steady drop of the deficit resulted for a decade.  In 1992, Bush 41’s last year in office, the decline in the deficit was well established:

1991 -$290.321 billion
1992 -$255.051 billion
1993 -$203.168 billion
1994 -$163.952 billion
1995 -$107.431 billion
1996 -$21.884 billion
1997 +$69.240 billion
1998 +$125.610 billion
1999 +$236.241 billion
2000 +$128.236 billion
2001 -$157.758 billion
2002 -$371.585 billion
2003 -$412.727 billion
2004 -$412.727 billion
2005 -$318.346 billion

Now, you seem to think that Clinton had something to do with the surplus that occurred in his last four years in office.  But what exactly was it that he did?  Tax increases take investment money out of the economy, resulting in lower growth, lower employment figures, and lower tax receipts.  So, the massive Clinton 1993 tax increases did not promote growth.  Were there any other government policies under Clinton that might have affected the economy, favorably or unfavorably?  No, there were not.  Can you even name a Clinton budget policy during his term of office?  The only notable event during this time period was the growth of the dot.com Bubba Bubble.  The higher the Bubble rose, the greater the cash flow.  But Bubbles are dangerous when they burst, as they always do.  And the rise and fall of the Bubba Bubble coincided exactly with the unprecedented rise and fall of the NASDAQ and the DOW.

Do you think it is a coincidence that the NASDAQ declined over 50% in Clinton’s last year (2000) and the surplus also declined, by almost 50%, in the same year?  Why did the GDP growth go flat in Clinton’s last year if his economic policies were so good?  If Clinton’s policies were “sustainable” (your term), why did GDP stop growing and the markets fall so radically?  All before Bush was elected, of course.

Notice that after Reagan’s tax cuts and after Bush’s tax cuts, the deficit, after initially rising, soon began to fall.  The same thing happened after the Kennedy tax cuts.  This is planned, unlike the Bubba Bubble.

And then there is this little gem:

Clinton’s five trillion SURPLUS was turned into six trillion dollar DEFICIT by Bush AND IT ALL HAPPENED AFTER BUSH’S TAX CUTS.

This is why I think you leftists are insane.  You say any damnfool thing that you think makes your point, without regard to fact or logic.  You have just said that the national debt swung by $11 trillion dollars ($5 trillion surplus to $6 trillion deficit) after Bush’s tax cuts.  But $11 trillion was the entire GDP in Bush’s first years in office.  (Now it is well over $13 trillion.) Bush’s entire tax cuts amounted to $188.1 billion a year, so how did $188.1 billion in tax cuts result in an $11 trillion dollar swing in the national debt?  Talk about leverage!

I have FORGOTTEN more about economics than you will ever know.

I.  Don’t.  Think.  So.  You have just demonstrated that you are economically illiterate, and I will put my MBA up against your stupidity any time.

oh gosh scorp. this has way too much fun. poor mike is a hoot. i am starting to think he is a plant though. noone can actually believe, in defiance of easily located fact and logic, the things he says he believes. they are funny though. maybe its a put-on. here’s one little table i always send people too when this whole “clinton surplus” fantasy world gets “discussed” (as an aside, i often wonder how you can discuss something that is provable to be a myth in less than 30 seconds, but i digress).  this is the actual to the penny “national debt”: forever; just go look and then we can summarize it in two sentences:
http://www.publicdebt.treas.gov/opd/opdhisto4.htm
it has never gone down, it increases every year. if there was a surplus it would decrease. it didnt, we havent.
i wont get into the “fuzzy math” usgov uses for ITS accounting of course and the unfunded (and unrecognized) liabilites that actually make this table “wrong” becomes they have understated “expenses”. another issue. important, but not germain to the dissection of poor mike. 

another good one, national debt as percentage of GDP. ever go to negative? that would imply a surplus right? if its a postive % then its a deficit!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:National_debt_as_a_%_of_gdp.jpg
and it clearyl shows that it did increase thru mid 90’s, sl;ight decline in late 90’s (no surplus though) and of course hasd crept back up; in wartime.

i cant wait for poor mike to come back. we’ve been zinn’ed and chomsky-ized already. we’ve had the name calling, the ranting, the socialist pseudo-intelecttualism. oh and limbuagh name about 5 times so far. god, what next? will all these facts in oppostion to his fanatsy world make him change his tune? or go further off the deep end? my vote: the latter. and cant wait to see it in print. peace out!!

ya know what esle is funny: scorp has made fun of poor mike, and basically said he is wrong and crazy, and pointed out why with facts. poor mike calls scopr a “liar”; and then makes up stories about how scorp listens to the right wingnuts and also states incorrect facts with no references. funny how the left cant argue the points, but always seem create fantasies, personal in nature, and then attack the person as opposed to presenting facts and logic. lots of emotion, short on thought. full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. hows come that is??

theres this thing called projection in psychology...its very enlightening i think, vis a vis poor mike.

Fred -

Yes, you see a lot of defense mechanisms displayed by leftists, including projection, rationalization, negativism, deceit, ritual, displacement, identification, reaction formation, and daydreaming.

Identification with absurd, obscene little misfits like Chomsky and Zinn would be hilarious, if there were not so many overstressed, incapable personalities in the world who do so.  Fortunately, the American people address this problem about every thirty years or so, and then firmly reject it.

The disturbing thing right now is that Europe, where the Enlightenment began, is now rapidly falling under another primitive, violent philosophy, and the EUnucks seem powerless to help themselves.  I fully expect that we will have to go rescue the Euro dumbasses again, for the fourth time in a century.

Which makes the USA somewhat collectivist itself.  Maybe we ought to let the little dumbshits just become fine, upstanding memebers of the caliphate (those that survive) and not worry about it on this side of the Atlantic.  Na-a-a-a-ah.

Your figures from Wikipedia don’t add up to support your claim.
Furthermore, Wikipedia isnotoriously unreliable as anyone can post
anything there.
The figures came from the Federal Government’s Office of the Budget.
In 2000 Clinton was running a huge surplus which was projected at
five trillion over the next few years. Bush converted that in a six trillion
dollar deficit. End of debate.
Good writers can write concisely and to the point. Bad writers like you
under the scorp and fred aliases take up a lot of space to say nothing.

Reviewing yet again the wordsalads of scorp and fred, they appear to be
written by the same person. Standard conservative assertions in place of solid arguments, name calling and resort to ad hominems.
If you don’t like being compared to Limbaugh then maybe you should come up with something besides his stale retread GOP talking points.
The rest of us need to ignore you little rightist trolls and put forth alternative ideas for a progressive agendas. Peeing matches with
skunks are a waste of time.

Mike -

Sheesh, Mike, what a Densan you are!  I have made no claims.  All I have done is present facts.  You are the one that claimed the facts were wrong, citing invalid evidence or no evidence at all.  Let’s have a review of the bidding here.

Some time ago, George Will had an article mentioning that $6.6 trillion had been spent on welfare, to no, or bad, effect.  At the time I read up on this rather startling figure, and satisfied my curiosity about the background of this number.  You are a leftist and question the source of data, with no thought for the accuracy or value of the data, but George Will is an impeccable researcher and journalist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301756. .html

I cited the $6 trillion figure from memory, making the point that money invested produces jobs and goods, but taxes are always consumed, and you can’t share the wealth if you are not producing any wealth. 

So you said:

“Welfare" never cost anywhere near “six trillion dollars” that is an out and out lie that you heard on Limbaugh’s misinformation show. Welfare was never anywhere near 1% of the Fed budget.

Where is your evidence for this farcical statement?  I cited New Coalition data (adjusted) that agreed fairly closely with the Will article:

Since that time, the United States has “invested” $7.95 trillion (in constant 1999 dollars) in programs that provide cash, food, housing, and medical and social services to poor and low-income Americans. By contrast, the cost to the United States of fighting World War II was $3.2 trillion (also in 1999 dollars). The cost of the War on Poverty has been more than twice the price tag for defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation.

http://www.newcoalition.org/Article.cfm?artId=263

So, then you called me a liar and “challenged” me to prove the validity of the cost of welfare.  Okay, so I listed all of the component parts of President Johnson’s welfare program as described in Wikipedia, and I was able to document $2 trillion from the federal budget documents, not including the Community Development, education, health, legal services, or job programs.  The budget documents do not break these programs out as separate items, but the identified costs and the unidentified costs are well within the range of the Will and the New Coalition data.

So, your response:

Your figures from Wikipedia don’t add up to support your claim.  Furthermore, Wikipedia isnotoriously unreliable as anyone can post anything there.

The figures (from the federal budget) do not have to “add up”.  All they have to do is disprove your idiotic claim that “Welfare” never cost anywhere near “six trillion dollars”, and I have done so, in the Will quote and the New Coalition quote, backed up by the available federal budget data plus extrapolated values for Community Development, education, health, legal services, and job programs. 

I am well aware of the limitations on Wikipedia data, but what I have quoted seems fairly straightforward.  If you can present evidence that Community Development, education, health, legal services, and job programs were not part of the Poverty Program, I will be glad to consider it.  Otherwise, fuck off.

The figures came from the Federal Government’s Office of the Budget. In 2000 Clinton was running a huge surplus which was projected at five trillion over the next few years. Bush converted that in a six trillion dollar deficit. End of debate.

Ummm, no, on several accounts.  By 2000, the surplus was falling like a rock, down $108,005 million in one year. 

Trillions of dollars of surpluses and deficits do not magically appear and disappear.  If Clinton had some brilliant economic policy that could produce trillions of dollars in surpluses, what was it?  How did it work? 

Clinton enjoyed the magnificent benefits of the Reagan tax cuts and tax reforms; he had no need for economic policies and programs, and did not enunciate any such policies and programs.  Having run on a platform of more tax cuts, Clinton immediately instituted one of the largest tax increases in history, which historically reduces long-term tax receipts.  And then he sat on his ass and let the dot.com Bubba Bubble develop.  Yes, there was a lot of cash flow, jobs, tax receipts, and “irrational exuberance”, but making long-term projections based on short-term phenomenon is not smart.  Bubbles always crash, and the Bubba Bubble started a nasty fall during Clinton’s last year in office.

The federal surplus was:

1997 +$69.240 billion
1998 +$125.610 billion
1999 +$236.241 billion
2000 +$128.236 billion

Year 2000 was Clinton’s last full year in office, but the surplus fell by almost 50% that year.  Why did it fall?  For that matter, why did it go up, since the most recent previous surplus was in 1968?  How do you think we could ever achieve a “$5 trillion surplus” with the surplus falling like crazy in year 2000?  The only thing that caused any exceptional economic activity in Clinton’s last term was the Bubba Bubble, and that was not an economic policy, it was a disaster.

You can make up all the BS arguments with all of the phony, unsourced
“figures” that you want but the bottom line is that we had eight years of
the greatest sustained growth in US history under Clinton and the first four years of Bush were a total flop, the first time since Hoover that an
Administration had NO NET JOB GAIN.
End of discussion.
You haven’t presented ONE FACT. They are merely the rightwing lies
that motormouths like you have spread for 50 years. Check out every Federal Budget from JFK to the present, AFDC or Welfare was never anywhere near 1%. The other programs that you list were started under
LBJ and quickly defunded due to Vietnam. The overwhelming portion
of welfare spent by the government is Pentagon Corporate Welfare
of the kind that subsidized your trailer park behind in various foreign
countries.You are the living embodiment of the old saw about “lies
and statistics.” You haven’t got a life and so it’s all Clinton’s fault.
Well the voters finally saw through that and bounced your little
rightys out of office. While the Dems are no great progressives this election was a repudiation of Bush, of his war, war tribunals, gross
attacks on habeas corpus, illegal unlimited wiretapping, fomented anti-Arab racism and Israel First foreign policy. We don’t need to debate with you, you lost and you have nothing to say but the same old recycled
rightist laundry list of lies. Check with the Office of The Budget and you
will see that Clinton had 5-6 trillion dollars in surplus, a fact acknowledged by the GOP at the time. Bush in contrast has converted
Clinton’s surpluses into 5-6 trillion of debt. They do 5-10 year forecasts,
these were all in the five year cycle. It doesn’t matter if Clinton’s last
surplus was 50% of the year before because that is still 50% MORE
than Bush ever did. In fact, the Bush MORON is gloating that this year’s
deficit will “only” be 247 BILLION. Half of what was predicted.
I’d rather have the Clinton record of half the surplus than half the deficit. 
Also one further reason not to engage with you is that Clinton was no liberal much less a progressive and why should we conduct the debate
on your lying rightwing premises ????????
The Reagan tax cuts were LONG gone by the time Clinton came in AND
WHY DIDN’T THEY HELP BUSH ONE IF THEY WERE SO “MAGNIFICENT” ??????????????? IN FACT BUSH ONE WAS FORCED TO RAISE TAXES BECAUSE THE REAGAN TAX CUTS WERE
SUCH A DISASTER. IF HE NEVER BENEFITTED FROM THE REAGAN
TAX CUTS, HOW COULD HIS SUCCESSOR CLINTON ?
IN FACT, REAGAN PUT THROUGH A MASSIVE TAX INCREASE IN BOTH
1983 AND 1986. SO MUCH FOR YOUR HERO !

I worked in the internet industry for a decade before, during and after
the boom and it a classic case of irresponsible capitalism of the kind
that we had in the 20s which led to the Stock Market crash. Clinton
has nothing to do with it other than going along with that AynRandian
fool Greenspan while he helped to inflate the economy and encourage
this get rich quick mentality.  It was no different from the boom AFTER
the first three years of Reagan’s Depression except that it was longer lasting and more widespread. For the first time since 1973 when the
economy started to fall down under Nixon did the US worker actually
gain in net income. However, Clinton was a conservative Democrat
and pushed NAFTA, globalization and a generally rightist economic program under the aegis of Wall Streeter Richard Rubenstein and
Lloyd Bentsen before that. This is why arguing with a rightwing buffoon
like you is a waste of time, “Scorp” and what kind of a coward would
hide behind that sort of pseudonym ?
We need this board to debate future progressive policies, not to defend
DLC-Blue Dog Dems against even more reactionary Repugs. The Dems NEED to become a left party, they are not that now.
Thanks to the various New Deal controls put in by FDR we have never
had a repeat of the Great Depression and as long as people refuse
to go along with moronic GOP schemes to privatize social security and
weaken Sarbanes-Oxley, we never will.
Go back to Rush with your stinky tail between your legs and tell that
dope taking, draftdodging coward that you just lost another one !
Get a life, dude.

Readers may want to check out the current online edition of The American Prospect edited by Robert Kuttner.
Kuttner’s rebuttal of Milton Friedman in Cant and Recant is a good read.
As is Harold Meyerson’s The Right’s Denial on the absurd rightist thesis
they didn’t lose the last election !  Right before the election the rightist motormouths were yelling to the skies that the Dems were Bolsheviks
and had to be defeated at all costs. Then afterwards the new Party Line
came down, “well, it makes no difference. it’s all blue dogs anyway.”
The NRA is using that line, they spent tens of millions backing the
GOP candidates, ALL OF WHOM LOST, and then they said it didn’t matter. Sure, we believe you !
Also see Kuttner’s great book “Everything For Sale’” a cogent defense of
the mixed economy against market fundies.

poor little “scorp” aka whattheheck aka texass independent aka redhorse aka hyjinx aka fred, hasn’t gotten his talking points from the big fat rushkie yet........how sad.
Or did the heater in your trailer go out again ?
Let us know if you require donations...............

George Will’s figures were totally unsourced, false and invented. It is
exactly the kind of nonsense I would expect a neocon hack like Will to
spout. His latest is that the massive repudiation of the GOP is not a
repudiation of conservatism ! Lots of luck on that one, George !
Why were the more conservative GOP candidates drummed out by
more liberal Democrats then ? Even the DLC-Blue Dog Dems are to
the left of the people they defeated. Will has to be factoring in Medicare,
Medicaid and Social Security to get that 7.95 trillion (!) figure. Otherwise
it just doesn’t add up. You can check all the budgets on a year by year
basis going to 1965, as an example, and you will see that the specific
Great Society programs don’t add up to anywhere near a trillion dollars,
much less 7 or 8 trillion ! If you take foreign aid, which is welfare for
large US banks & corporations, the space program, veterans benefits,
the interest on the national debt alone just since Reagan, the Space
program and other examples of Pentagon Corporate America welfare
to Boeing, general Dynamics, Halliburton, et al, they dwarf all the petty
welfare programs combined. You have to look at the whole context of
the Budget including the secret CIA, NSA, DIA, et cetera, budgets and
the welfare state we have is very largely a corporate welfare state for
the undeserving rich and powerful. Clinton abolished the pitiful Federal
AFDC program a decade ago and millions more have sunk into poverty
because he did and after a few years the crime rate started to reexplode.
Bush 2 is the biggest of all the big government Presidents in history, dwarfing FDR and LBJ. His Medicare drug program is so confusing that
no one can follow it, there is a large doughnut hole in the payments
after a small amount of charges are incurred and it could end up bankrupting a program that millions depend on.
On Reagan see “Reagan:An Autopsy” by Murray N. Rothbard on the
rightwing libertarian Lew Rockwell and Ludwig Von Mises Institute
websites. RR was another Big Gov Prez and a lying hypocrite.
Rothbard penned this obit back in the 80s at the end of Reagan’s failed
Presidency. Even from an intelligent rightist viewpoint your GOP talking points lies make no sense.

Mike -

You, Sir, are without a doubt the dumbest little stumblefart that ever presumed (or pretended) to address the subject of economics.  I can well believe that you accept and admire the ridiculous inanities of Zinn and Chomsky, and that you endorse their destructive and malevolent arguments.

You can make up all the BS arguments with all of the phony, unsourced “figures” that you want but the bottom line is that we had eight years of the greatest sustained growth in US history under Clinton and the first four years of Bush were a total flop, the first time since Hoover that an Administration had NO NET JOB GAIN.  End of discussion.

Phony unsourced figures?  Phony?  Unsourced?  Figures?  Phonyunsourcedfigures?  The United States Government produces kajillions of bits of data, and you think I make up Phony. Unsourced. Figures. when the real figures are readily available?  Just how fucking stupid are you?  I can well believe that you are too dumb or too lazy to look up simple data, but don’t project your ignorance and weaknesses onto other people. 

http://www.data360.org/dsg.aspx?Data_Set_Group_Id=52

Since you seem incapable of thinking your way out of a wrapping of wet tissue paper, I must advise you that you have to scroll down to find the “phony unsourced figures”, as you term them.  If you need any other info I referred to, I can produce that also.  Alternatively, there is this marvelous little system called “Google” that gives you all kinds of interesting information, with a minimum of effort.  If you would take a few minutes to learn how to use Google, you would not appear half so stupid. 

The bottom line is that we had eight years of the greatest sustained growth in US history under Clinton. 

Well, no, as a matter of fact.  The growth started in 1985 after the Reagan tax cuts and tax reforms (and after seventeen years of no-growth that followed the LBJ guns-and-butter fiasco that devastated the USA economy, followed by the tender ministrations of that son-of a-bitch CARTER).  There were two interruptions to the smooth, steady growth that followed after Reagan repaired the US economy: Greenspan raised interest rates in 1988 because he was afraid of reigniting the Carter Catastrophe, which caused the economy to slow, and then Clinton raised taxes and ignored the development of the devastating dot.com bubble, which caused the economy to soar, but not in a sustainable manner, as you put it. 

I am probably making a mistake to do this, given your low level of comprehension of res economica, but you might profit from studying the graph of the long-term DJIA.  The Dow tells us much about the state of the economy, and indicates periods of stress and of overheating. 

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^DJI&t=my

Notice that after the irregularity of the Depression and WWII, the Dow, and the economy, went into a period of trending upward growth.  President Kennedy took office in 1961, and was concerned about his economy, which at that point was irregular and falling.  Kennedy advocated tax cuts to increase tax receipts, which was a novel idea at the time.  Regardless, it worked like a charm and growth resumed, as you can see, starting in 1963. 

Then LBJ escalated the war in Vietnam AND started the Great Society, with no thoughts on how to pay for these programs.  Look at the graph; the result was seventeen years of stagnation.  LBJ started it, Nixon did not know how to fix it, and Carter made it worse, when inflation and interest rates went into low orbit, along with the unemployment rate.  Carter actually stated that the economy was at a terminal point, and we would just have to make the best of it, since there would be no improvement.  Old Europe and Japan both have recently gone through fifteen-year periods of stagnation, low growth, and high unemployment, similar to what the USA experienced starting in 1965.  Koizumi introduced reforms in Japan recently, and the Japanese economy is starting to snap back.  Not so, Europe, which is going nowhere fast. 

Note the rising growth on the DJIA graph from 1950 to 1967, and then the flat-line from 1967 to 1983.  The 1950-1967 line represents healthy growth.  If you extend the rising 1950-1967 line on up, you have a triangular area below the projected line and the flat line.  This triangular area represents lost jobs, lost productivity, low growth, and lost tax receipts.  The line should have continued moving up in1967, instead of suffering seventeen years of stagnation. 

But as soon as President Reagan cut taxes and installed tax reform, the economy took off like a rocket, and growth resumed.

Clinton implemented no economic legislation or policies that affected the surplus/deficit, other than the poorly thought-out tax increase in 1993.  If you think that he did, tell us what those policies or laws were, and how they worked. 

Clinton did ignore the rise of the dot.com Bubba Bubble, but that was not an economic policy.  The effects were devastating.  Looking again at the DJIA graph, there was a smooth growth curve from 1988 to 1995 (healthy growth), when the DJIA turned sharply upward.  1996 was the year that Chairman Greenspan complained about the “irrational exuberance” in the markets, but neither Greenspan nor Clinton did anything about it.  The Dow was at 6000 when Greenspan made his comment, and topped out at over 12000 in Clinton’s last year, just four years later.  But by then we were on a collision course with disaster.  Extending the 1988-1995 healthy growth line, you notice the large bulge above it.  This represents the overheated markets, and all the distortions that resulted.  These distortions had to correct, as they always do. 

From the graph, you can see that the DJIA basically flat-lined in 1999 and 2000.  Two quarters in year 2000 had negative growth.  The surplus dropped $108.005 billion between year 1999 and year 2000, and dropped a further $285.994 billion between 2000 and 2001, creating a deficit.  But the Bush tax cuts in year 2001 were only $75.8 billion.

I know you like to pretend that Bush caused the deficit, but just exactly how did a $75.8 billion tax cut in 2001 cause a $285.994 billion swing in the deficit that year?  And why do you insist that Clinton’s surplus was “sustainable”, when in his last two years you can see that it was falling apart?

At any rate, after the economy started to fall apart under Clinton, Bush rescued it, and healthy growth has resumed.  I have enjoyed all the dumbass Dimocrat politicians screwing up my economy that I care to.

Mike -

Clinton’s five trillion SURPLUS was turned into six trillion dollar DEFICIT by Bush AND IT ALL HAPPENED AFTER BUSH’S TAX CUTS.

Of all the dumbass comments you have made on this site, the above may qualify as the dumbest, but the competition is fierce.  The statement makes absolutely no sense in any rational context, but I suddenly realized that considering rational context is not valid when dealing with you.  I refer you again to the long-term DJIA:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=^DJI&t=my

If you extend the 1995-1999 trendline from the Dow readings and if you extend the 1995-1999 federal surplus figures, why, yes, the lines go up for infinity; why stop at an arbitrary $5 trillion surplus?  If you extend those lines far enough, there is no reason to think that the federal surplus would not reach quadrillions of dollars.  This is the danger of making long-term projections from short-term data. 

But wait!  The Dow went flat in mid-1999 and continued sideways and down.  The surplus went way south in Year 2000 (Clinton’s last year) and extremely way south in 2001 and subsequently; did Bush’s $75.8 tax cuts in 2001 really cause the federal income balance to drop by $285.994 billion in that same year?  No, of course not.  The collapse of federal revenues corresponded exactly with the collapse of the Bubba Bubble.  You claim to have experienced the collapse of the Bubba Bubble, but you obviously learned nothing from the experience (or before, or after).

Projecting the Dow from data in Clinton’s last eighteen months in office brings us back to a no-growth situation, such as LBJ created in 1965.  Projecting the federal balance from Clinton’s last year in office brings us endless deficits. 

And then, to compound your error, you project the first three years of deficits in the Bush Administration into a $6 trillion federal debt.

Wait, wait, wait!  The federal deficit is now dropping like a rock, just as Bush predicted when he implemented the tax cuts.  Projecting the Bush falling deficits out for a few years, we may actually see a $5 trillion surplus. 

Now, don’t you feel stupid?

President Kennedy took office in 1961, and was concerned about his economy, which at that point was irregular and falling.  Kennedy advocated tax cuts to increase tax receipts, which was a novel idea at the time.

It might have been novel in the aftermath of the First World War when Keynes invented it, but by the 60s it was economic dogma.  Military Keynsianism has ruled the economy since, and including , the Second World War.

MM -

It was also novel in the fourteenth century when ibn Khaldun first noted the phenomenon.  Regardless, Kennedy’s support for the idea generated fierce debate at the time (it is sort of counter-intuitive), before the idea was actually implemented shortly after Kennedy’s death.  The results of the Kennedy tax cuts were spectacular, until LBJ wandered off course.

Arthur Laffer popularized his graphic representation of the device as the Laffer Curve in 1974, and it again generated controversy before being voted into law in the Kemp-Roth Tax Reforms in Reagan’s first term.

Despite Kennedy’s successful use of the tool, some Democrats fought strenuously against Reagan’s use of a proven device, but others gave Reagan enough votes to pass the Reagan tax cuts.

Fifteen Senate Democrats voted for Bush’s 2001 tax cuts, but leftists almost unanimously oppose tax cuts and deny that they effect the desired result.  For these leftists, I can only attribute their behavior to a failed triumph of ideology over rational thought.  (cough) Mike (cough)

On a more cerebral note, serious economists seriously debate the optimum point on the Laffer Curve; the subject is not readily amenable to experimental investigation.  Regardless, there have been three recent stabs at deficit financing to promote economic growth and tax receipts, and all three efforts (Kennedy, Reagan, Bush 43) have achieved rapid turnarounds, high employment, high productivity, and increased tax receipts.  LBJ mismanaged the economy to destroy Kennedy’s effort, Clinton raised taxes and allowed the Bubba Bubble to develop which damaged Reagan’s excellent results, and Charlie Rangel claims that he is going to eliminate Bush 43’s efforts.

I have mixed feelings about Rangel’s jabbering.  Both Reagan and Bush received significant Democratic support for their tax cuts, meaning that at least some Democrats are not as dumb as the Democratic Party platform makes them sound.  So Rangel probably will not succeed in eliminating the tax cuts, but there will be some ongoing Rangeling.  And then there is the trade-off.  If Rangel and the Democrats do succeed in eliminating Bush’s tax cuts, there will be a lot of unemployed people.  But the upside would be the death of the Democratic Party, which would be a tremendous advantage to the world.  Rangel and the Old Democrats should just revive the name of the Know-Nothing Party and quietly fade out of existence.  The remainder of the Democrats should rally around a new name, one without the moral burdens and rational inadequacies associated with the current Democratic Party.

And everyone and every Party should demand reduced spending by the Feds, but that will be the next great domestic development in the ongoing excellent American adventure.

Scorp, there’s an old phrase that attorneys use during depositions when
the opposing counsel keeps reassserting the same contested point,
it’s called “Asked and Answered.” I doubt you’d be man to use the thuggish tone you display here in person because your teeth would be residing in the interior of your stinky asshole.
On the deficits you have to look beyond one year, in fact after Bush’s tax cuts there were deficits in the 400-500 BILLION RANGE. Clinton’s surplus only shrank his last fiscal year and it was still 254 BILLION MORE THAN BUSH HAS EVER HAD. The CBO does forecasts on a general five year basis and factoring all the Clinton surpluses he was
still running a 5-6 trillion dollar surplus at the end of his term. Bush is
running AT LEAST a 5-6 trillion dollar deficit over the same time range
and that is factoring in this year’s projected deficit of “only” 254 BILLION
dollars. The GOP at least since Reagan has not been the party of fiscal responsibility. As a Ph.D holder in economics & philosophy with post-graduate training to boot, I really don’t need your browbeating nonsense.
I’ve read ALL sides, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Reisman, Von Mises, Kirzner,
Friedman, Hayek and Rand on the Right, Samuelson & Galbraith on
the Center and the Radical economists on the Left. Have forgotten more
Marx and more Adam Smith than you ever knew.
The reason for Bush’s huge deficits is that he radically cut revenues
and radically increased SPENDING AT ALL LEVELS INCLUDING NON-
“DEFENSE” SPENDING. See The New American, The American Conservative, Lew Rockwell.com and the Ludwig Von Mises Institute.com, JUST FOR RIGHTWING SOURCES THAT LOATHE BUSH
AND THE GOP FOR THEIR BETRAYAL OF EVERY CONSERVATIVE PRINCIPLE.
Your assertions are totally unsourced Wikipedia bullshit. I have given
several refs and reading recommendations, you haven’t squat.
NO SERIOUS ECONOMIST BELIEVES IN THE LAFFER CURVE, IT IS WHAT GEORGE BUSH, SR CORRECTLY CALLED VOODOO ECONOMICS.
WE STILLL DON’T HAVE A BOOM UNDER BUSH, THE GROWTH IS LARGELY IN LOW PAID SERVICE SECTOR JOBS AND DURING HIS
FIRST TERM HE WAS THE FIRST PRESIDENT SINCE HERBERT HOOVER, ANOTHER GOP MORON, TO HAVE NO NEW NET GAIN JOBS. CLINTON HAD EIGHT YEARS OF THE GREATEST JOB CREATION SINCE THE POST-WORLD WAR TWO BOOM.

In fact Clinton has actually had consistently FIVE HUNDRED BILLION MORE IN SURPLUSES THAN BUSH BECAUSE BUSH HAS CONSISTENTLT RUN SURPLUSES IN THE HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS
SINCE HE CAME IN TO OFFICE. SO MY STATEMENT THAT CLINTON DID 254 BILLION MORE THAN BUSH EVER DID IS WRONG, CLINTON HAS DONE AT LEAST 500 BILLION MORE THAN BUSH HAS EVER DONE.
The actual figures don’t lie. Bush has been a total failure and the folks in
Ohio and many other states where his policies have flopped miserably
know this, we have lost one-third of ALL industrial jobs since Bush came to power. Paul Craig Roberts, Reagan’s #2 at the Treasury has consistently documented this on many websites including the Rockwell
& Mises ones referred to above plus antiwar.com and Roberts has flat out correctly labelled Bush as a Nazi both for statist economics and his
total assault on the Bill of Rights.
Again, Pat Buchanan has consistently documented the failure of Bush’s
economic policies in The American Conservative. And several books as
well as his newspaper columns and TV talk shows. There is also a recently departed associate of Laffer’s who did the same for years, when I recall his name, I’ll post it here.
Kennedy did not radically decrease the tax rates while radically increasing defense and all other spending. Reagan and Bush did both
but especially Bush as he has only vetoed one bill during his entire term ! And that bill had nothing to do with spending.
Jude Wanninski (ck spelling) is the Laffer associate who co-invented
Reaganomics whom I was referring to above.
We are not seeing ANY surplus under Bush. Why would I feel stupid ?
The only question is the size of the deficit. Since neither wants to cut
spending and the GOP is THE big spending party there is going to be
“no excellent American adventure” you moron.
On the limited Reagan growth after 1984, not 1985, it paled in comparison with the growth after the moderate JFK tax cuts and the
tremendous economic growth under LBJ which did not turn inflationary
until 1968. Nixon radically INCREASED DOMESTIC SPENDING AND PROGRAMS CONTRARY TO THE USUAL MORONIC PROPAGANDA
BY GOP MORONS LIKE YOU AND THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF NIXON-FORD THE ECONOMY STARTED TO TUMBLE BIG TIME.
Of course the Reagan tax cuts did not prevent the economic depression under Bush 1 which was the greatest since the 30s EXCEPT FOR REAGAN’S FIRST THREE YEARS AND OF COURSE BUSH 2 ‘S
FIRST FIVE YEARS.

Nixon was elected on a phony promise to end the war, he greatly expanded it and somehow his failure’s were all LBJ’s fault !
Explain that one, idiot ! He could have pulled out of Vietnam but
he expanded the war into Laos and Cambodia. He could have decided
not to introduce OSHA, EPA, et al, but he created and expanded them.
Your “history” is absurd. You are one of the stupidest partisan assholes
I’ve come across in ages. You give LBJ no credit for the JFK tax cuts,
you assert that Clinton was going to run huge deficits even though he
NEVER did nor WAS PROJECTED to, he laud Bush 2 FOR THE WORST
ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE SINCE WW2. Even the vaunted 4% growth
after FIVE SOLID YEARS OF RECESSION HAS NOW BEEN REDUCED
TO 3%. All economists agree that this is the weakest recovery ever
with the weakest job growth for a so-called recovery period that has ever
existed. You overlook the fact that Carter was a conservative Democrat
and in his last two years greatly increased “defense” spending while
back on social spending which is why Ted Kennedy challenged him
in 1980.
Of couse fifteen Democrats voted for Bush 2’s tax cuts, many of them are on the same corporate payroll as the GOP. I explained to you last
time that this went way beyond Dem-Rep politics which are mostly sideline circus diversions for partisan imbeciles like you and mean
ZIP in the real world.
Reagan greatly INCREASED taxes in his 1986 tax reform act sponsored by the big GOP tax increaser Bob Dole and eliiminated
do many loopholes that it was ONE OF THE BIGGEST TAX INCEASES
IN US HISTORY. ERGO FOR REAGAN-DOLE MASSIVE 1983 TAX
INCREASE (THAT ONE WAS NOT CALLED A “REFORM” ACT).
Oh, did dope addict Rush “forget” to mention these two massive
tax increases under Ronald McDonald Reagan ????????
See “Reagan:An Autopsy” by the rightwing economist Murray N. Rothbard and you can download all 12 pages on the lewrockwell.com
website, just punch in Rothbard on Reagan.
Happy reading, little conservaturd !

LBJ never wandered off course, he kept JFK’s tax cuts but would not
seek a tax increase to properly fund the Vietnam War. He thus cut his
own Great Society programs and lost the war on poverty. JFK never
gave any indication of pulling out of Vietnam and he in fact increased
defense so-called spending but not as much as Reagan nor were
his tax cuts as deep or irresponsible. In the first five years of Ike’s
term, we had the greatest growth in US history with the highest tax rates
in US history, which stemmed from WW2. So the tax cuts automatically
equal growth is a lie. It’s more complicated and nuanced than that.
In fact after WW2 we had an incredible growth despite high tax rates.
The fact is that under Reagan and Bush 2 overall receipts dropped
for years and in Reagan’s case ONLY increased after he put through
two huge tax increases in 1983 and 1986.
“Scorp” you not only are an economics ignoramus but you are actually
STUPID when it comes to history.
After Clinton’s modest increase of only the very top tax levels to Reagan era rates the economy took off.
Under capitalism we have periodic booms and busts regardless of which party is in EXCEPT THE GOP ONES ARE ALWAYS WORSE AND
USUALLY MUCH WORSE. The GOP unsustainable boom of the 20s
LED TO THE WORST DEPRESSION IN US HISTORY.
The Dems got us out partly thanks to WW2 which the pro-Hitler GOP
opposed but also due to domestic stimulus. Federal Deposit Bank
Insurance, Social Security, the SEC and the minimum wage are all
legacies of the New Deal which the whole nation. LBJ’s Medicare
and Civil Rights Acts, opposed by Goldwater and the whole GOP
rightwing at the time, also benefitted the country. The southern Demsd
who voted against civil rights ALL BECAME REPUGS and are the backbone of the GOP now which has largely become the party of
white southerners.

The Dow is only indice of the economy and not the best one because
it is largely a swindle and many companies are not going public.
In fact thanks to the largely but not exclusively GOP Enron scandal
many companies are going private to avoid Sarbanes-Oxley, whicj
legislation passed despite a GOP Congress and which Bush signed.
It was necessary but will put a crimp in much corporate crookedness
as well as having some undesirable effects on growth.
The GOP has never cut spending nor repealed any major New Deal-
Fair Deal-New Frontier-Great Society programs despite all their bombast about “socialism” for over seventy years ! Why not ? They
had Congress in 1946-48, 1950-52, the Senate from 1980-86
and both houses from 1994-2006.
In fact when you want to disparage the incredible growth under the Dems you refer to bubbles, ok but the same logic could be applied
to the GOP years too. The bubble is inherent in the capitalistic system,
the only question is when it will burst, Clinton’s was the longest, eight
years before the burst. Again, he was no great liberal or any sort of
leftist or progressive and most lefties recognized that.
Low taxes are not the end all and be all of society anyway. It DEPENDS
on what the taxes are being used for, if for medicare, health, education, old age security, stock market regulation, labor laws, OSHA, conservation, child welfare, infrastructure, etc,., then taxes CAN be
a good thing. If for war and bombs it is a total waste, there is no lasting value or longrange benefits as we can see from the endless list of enemies since WW1. Bush’s absurd crusade for Arab democracy has
brought Hamas and Hezbollah to power ! Brilliant, eh ?

Bush 41 is Bush, Sr and there was no high productivity or great economic growth under him. Bush 43 is the current smirking moron
and his policies during the first five of his six years to date have been
a total failure. The current growth is very soft, we are stll losing more
high paying jobs than we are gaining, we are still being deindustrialized
and we are still outsourcing even white collar jobs now overseas.
Your absurd ASSERTION that every party should demand decreased
spending makes no sense because 1) No party has done so or will do
so, they have things they want to fund and 2) there are good reasons
sometimes to increase spending or maintain spending.
By the way, our stupid insane “rescue” of WW1 led to Versailles Treaty
which led to Hitler which led to WW2 which led to the Cold War which
led to the Islamic Revival. People in Europe say you can take your US interventions and stick them up your not so clean southern orifice,
“scoop.”