Politics and the US Economy
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The Timeless Principles of American Prosperity
By Peter Ferrara on 7.28.10
We know, based on economic experience, theory, and logic, how to create another economic boom that will last 25 years, or a generation into the future. We achieved that in America from the end of 1982 to the end of 2007, with only two, short, shallow recessions that barely interrupted sustained, robust, economic growth. But that was not the only instance of success. Several times in the last 100 years, whenever the nation's economic policies adhered to the timeless principles of economic growth and prosperity, our economy has boomed. When it has departed from those policies, it has fallen into stagnation, or worse.
Moreover, as we will discuss next week, such booming economic growth is much more beneficial for working people and the poor than counterproductive, socialist redistribution to achieve equality of results. A booming market economy produces a much higher standard of living for working people and the poor. This is especially so when policies are structured to channel the flows of booming economic growth through working people and the poor, as we will explain. Economic experience, theory, and logic shows that outdated, throwback, socialist redistribution, by contrast, inevitably leads to lower standards of living, stagnation and decline.
America today once again desperately needs to return to the timeless principles of economic growth, to restore our traditional, world leading prosperity, and the American Dream. This should be the central argument and theme for this fall's elections.
A Hundred Years of Supply-Side Economics
Last year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute produced a brilliant, overlooked book that recounted the history of supply-side economics -- Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity, by Brian Domitrovic. As explained in that book, the roots of supply-side economics go back to 1913, when the national income tax and the Fed were first adopted. "For restraining the institutions created that year -- the income tax and the Federal Reserve -- is the essence of supply-side thinking," Domitrovic writes.
It didn't take long for trouble to brew. The top tax rate of 7% soared to 77% by 1918. Moreover, the income tax, sold as a tax on the rich, began to apply at just $1,000 in income (equivalent to about $20,000 today). In addition, during World War I, the Fed essentially doubled the money supply relative to the economy. Inflation consequently soared by 84% over the 4 years from 1916 to 1919. The Fed then slammed on the brakes, draining 60% of the excess money, and throwing the economy into steep recession as a result. Unemployment soared to 12%, 50% higher than in any previous recession.
Warren Harding, newly elected President in 1920, appointed the enormously successful Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon Secretary of the Treasury, with the duty of fixing the economy. Mellon adopted what became the supply-side economic formula. He slashed the top income tax rate to 25%, and the bottom rate from 8% to 1%, increasing the income level to which it first applied by 50%. Moreover, Mellon led the Fed to stop the money supply drain, return interest rates to standard levels, and devote itself to stable prices. The Fed would look to market price levels, particularly commodities, including gold, for its guide.
The result was the Roaring '20s, the greatest boom in American history to that point, essentially beginning the modern American economy. Real output galloped, stock prices tripled, real wages advanced with productivity increases, and prices were stable. "It was in the twenties that Americans bought their first car, their first radio, made their first long distance telephone call, took their first vacation," as Domitrovic quotes Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway.
Domitrovic explains, "The essence of supply-side economics lies in using the two levers of governmental economic leverage for the specific uses at which they are most adept. Monetary policy is capable of maintaining the price level. Tax policy is capable of spurring growth. The 'policy mix' of stable money plus tax cuts is the secret to escaping stagflation."
Tax policy spurs growth by reducing tax rates, as Mellon did. The lower rates spur incentives for productive activity, like savings, investment, work, business creation and expansion, and job creation, by allowing the productive to keep a higher proportion of what they produce. These incentives, moreover, apply to every economic decision with every dollar in the economy, at home and around the world in regard to the American economy, not just to the amount of any tax cut. Supposed tax cuts involving credits or rebates are just giveaways like welfare and other government spending, without the powerful incentive effects of rate cuts.
Monetary policy controls the price level because inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, everywhere and always caused by printing up too much money in relation to the demand for money. The one and only solution to inflation is to restrain money supply growth to equal money demand. Maintaining stable prices means also avoiding deflation by maintaining money growth to keep pace with money demand. The Fed should follow this policy by monitoring market prices, particularly the most sensitive prices such as commodities, including gold.
Monetary policy cannot be used to stimulate the economy because in the long run it just washes out in affecting only the overall price level, and not the level of real output. In the short run, trying to control the economy by monetary policy just adds to instability, sometimes grievously, causing booms and busts, bubbles and crashes. Keynesian economics is even more inept, because economic prosperity is not caused by increasing government spending and deficits, which are at best a wash, and more likely a drag, as the private sector would use the resources more productively and efficiently than central-planning government bureaucracies lacking market incentives for guidance.
These are the timeless principles of economic growth and prosperity.
Going Off the Rails: The Depression Keynesian Blunder
The Depression arose and worsened as America departed from these pro-growth policies. Instead of maintaining stable prices, the Fed allowed the money supply to decline precipitously, even while dollar demand was soaring as the world sought a stable store of value. This created ruinous deflation. Mellon's tax rate policies were also ruinously reversed, with the top income tax rate raised first to 63%, and then to 79%, with the lower tax rates raised even more in percentage terms. The Smoot-Hawley tariff added another tax burden that killed international trade. President Roosevelt tried to restore prosperity with soaring Keynesian government spending and deficits, which failed miserably as the Depression dragged on for over 10 years. By 1933, unemployment was at 25%, and GDP was down 57% nominally, 22% in real terms.
The Bretton Woods global monetary regime agreed to in 1944 essentially took Mellon's monetary policy focus on stable prices worldwide. The dollar was convertible to gold at $35, and all other currencies were convertible to the dollar at fixed exchange rates. As long as that was maintained, prices would be stable, as they were until overly expansive U.S. monetary policy caused the system to break down completely in 1971. Bretton Woods also essentially nullified Keynesian stimulus policies, as sustained high deficits for any country were inconsistent with the fixed exchange rates and dollar gold convertibility.
This price stability augured a 25-year, postwar, worldwide economic boom. Domitrovic writes, "There can be no mistake that in the high years of the Bretton Woods system, roughly 1950-70, the world economy established incredible feats. European and Japanese growth was sustained at a nearly 7% rate, and the United States (which had started at a higher basis) enjoyed long booms over 4%." Supply-side, free market, policies produced in particular the postwar German "economic miracle."
Kennedy's Supply-Side Economics
But with recessions in 1953, 1957, and 1960, a true economic boom was not restored in America until the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s. Kennedy was surrounded by Keynesians who were willing to support some tax cuts focused on stimulating demand. But President Kennedy himself had a supply-side understanding focused on tax rates, saying, "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates…. [A]n economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs or enough profits."
Domitrovic explains that in 1958 a young Robert Mundell, destined to win the Nobel Prize in 1999, first began to explicitly advocate the supply-side policy mix, first from his perch at the IMF, then as a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Domitrovic quotes Mundell as explaining that President Kennedy overruled his Keynesian advisors and "reversed the policy mix to that of tax cuts to spur growth in combination with tight money to protect the balance of payments," the exact supply-side agenda Mundell had been advocating, though Mundell disclaims having influenced Kennedy directly. Mundell continues, "The result was the longest expansion ever [up to that time] in the history of the U.S. economy, unmatched until the Reagan expansion of the 1980s."
Kennedy's business tax cuts were adopted in 1962, and the personal rate cuts in 1964. The top income tax rate was slashed from 91% to 70%, with the lower rates reduced by similar proportions across the board. The next year, economic growth soared by 50%, and income tax revenues increased by 41%! By 1966, unemployment had fallen to its lowest peacetime level in almost 40 years. U.S. News and World Report exclaimed, "The unusual budget spectacle of sharply rising revenues following the biggest tax cut in history is beginning to astonish even those who pushed hardest for tax cuts in the first place." Arthur Okun, the administration's chief economic advisor, estimated that the tax cuts expanded the economy in just two years by 10% above where it would have been.
The 1970s: Return to Keynesian Fallacies
The postwar boom ended as the liberal Johnson Administration abandoned the hugely successful supply-side policy mix. Federal spending started to soar in 1965, and President Johnson demanded and got a loose monetary policy focused on supposedly maintaining growth rather than stable prices. The tax increases started in 1968 with the 10% income tax surcharge, the alternative minimum tax, and increased capital gains levies, followed by bracket creep once inflation kicked in.
By 1969, 6.2% inflation resulted, along with the 1969-70 recession, and the economic miracle of stagflation had arrived, supposedly impossible under the doctrine of Keynesian economics. For the rest of the decade, Keynesian monetary policy kept trying to boost the economy out of decline, only to have to reverse course when inflation soared, causing the economy to fall into recession again. This resulted in further recessions in 1973-75, 1980, and 1981-82.
It finally came to an end when President Reagan explicitly abandoned Keynesian economics, and openly embraced the supply-side. He adopted 25% across the board income tax rate cuts, and then tax reform in 1986 that reduced the top rate from 70% in 1981 to 28%, with only one other rate of 15%. He bravely endorsed tight money through the teeth of the recession to stop inflation, which worked spectacularly. While prices rose 25% in just two years from 1979-80, annual inflation collapsed by half to 6.2% by 1982, and half again to 3.2% by 1983.
Reagan added deregulation to the policy mix, which reduced the cost burden on production, further stimulating it. The Reaganomics formula also included domestic spending cuts, which even with the defense buildup that won the Cold War without firing a shot, reduced total federal spending as a percent of GDP by 10% by 1989.
The results were so spectacular they astonished and surprised everyone, from opponents who wouldn't admit it, to the architects of Reaganomics themselves. Besides slaying inflation which most thought by then couldn't be done without destroying the economy, by the end of 1982 the economy took off on the above mentioned, 25-year economic boom, what Reaganomics gurus Art Laffer and Steve Moore have rightly called "the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the planet." These results have been recounted in this column several times in the past, and the complete story is too long to do it further justice here.
The Bush/Obama Great Recession
What needs to be recounted at this point is that the Great Reagan Boom ended when, again, the supply-side policy mix was abandoned. Soon after Bush was elected, the Fed returned to using monetary policy to stimulate and manage the economy rather than focusing on price stability. The loose monetary policy from 2001 to 2006 even kept real interest rates below zero for 2½ years during that period, which effectively subsidized excessive risk and leveraging. The result was the housing bubble, which created the financial crisis when it popped in 2008.
Equally promoting the bubble was the Clinton Administration/liberal Democrat "affordable housing" policies, creating the subprime mortgage market. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were dragooned to finance the bubble to its eventual scary dimensions. Reregulation forced banks to contribute more financing to subprime mortgages and the housing bubble as well, and further contributed to the crisis with mandatory mark to market accounting, and privileged status for the credit rating agencies that rated subprime mortgage backed securities AAA.
Spending also began to race out of control during those Bush years. Finally, when the crisis hit, instead of resorting to the supply-side tool of reducing tax rates to promote growth, the Bush Administration peculiarly reached back to the 1970s with a Keynesian government spending, tax rebate package in February 2008. Every one of the planks of Reaganomics had been abandoned at that point.
Barack Obama had personally supported every one of these steps leading to the financial crisis, going back to the Clinton era. Once elected President, he simply reupped every one of these disastrous policies multiple times. He led enactment in February 2009 of basically the same Bush/Keynesian stimulus of a year prior, only 6 times as large. He exploded government spending and deficits to record shattering levels. He embraced re-regulation with a vengeance. And starting next year he has scheduled sharp increases in every significant federal tax rate.
Following with such devotion the opposite of every plank of Reaganomics, we can only expect exactly the opposite results, as Art Laffer has so rightly predicted. The economic history of the 20th century as recounted above backs him up quite thoroughly.
Next week we will discuss in full detail how to avert this disaster, and restore for all traditional American prosperity and the American Dream that has drawn hundreds of millions to these shores over the last 400 years.
By Peter Ferrara on 7.28.10
We know, based on economic experience, theory, and logic, how to create another economic boom that will last 25 years, or a generation into the future. We achieved that in America from the end of 1982 to the end of 2007, with only two, short, shallow recessions that barely interrupted sustained, robust, economic growth. But that was not the only instance of success. Several times in the last 100 years, whenever the nation's economic policies adhered to the timeless principles of economic growth and prosperity, our economy has boomed. When it has departed from those policies, it has fallen into stagnation, or worse.
Moreover, as we will discuss next week, such booming economic growth is much more beneficial for working people and the poor than counterproductive, socialist redistribution to achieve equality of results. A booming market economy produces a much higher standard of living for working people and the poor. This is especially so when policies are structured to channel the flows of booming economic growth through working people and the poor, as we will explain. Economic experience, theory, and logic shows that outdated, throwback, socialist redistribution, by contrast, inevitably leads to lower standards of living, stagnation and decline.
America today once again desperately needs to return to the timeless principles of economic growth, to restore our traditional, world leading prosperity, and the American Dream. This should be the central argument and theme for this fall's elections.
A Hundred Years of Supply-Side Economics
Last year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute produced a brilliant, overlooked book that recounted the history of supply-side economics -- Econoclasts: The Rebels Who Sparked the Supply-Side Revolution and Restored American Prosperity, by Brian Domitrovic. As explained in that book, the roots of supply-side economics go back to 1913, when the national income tax and the Fed were first adopted. "For restraining the institutions created that year -- the income tax and the Federal Reserve -- is the essence of supply-side thinking," Domitrovic writes.
It didn't take long for trouble to brew. The top tax rate of 7% soared to 77% by 1918. Moreover, the income tax, sold as a tax on the rich, began to apply at just $1,000 in income (equivalent to about $20,000 today). In addition, during World War I, the Fed essentially doubled the money supply relative to the economy. Inflation consequently soared by 84% over the 4 years from 1916 to 1919. The Fed then slammed on the brakes, draining 60% of the excess money, and throwing the economy into steep recession as a result. Unemployment soared to 12%, 50% higher than in any previous recession.
Warren Harding, newly elected President in 1920, appointed the enormously successful Pittsburgh banker Andrew Mellon Secretary of the Treasury, with the duty of fixing the economy. Mellon adopted what became the supply-side economic formula. He slashed the top income tax rate to 25%, and the bottom rate from 8% to 1%, increasing the income level to which it first applied by 50%. Moreover, Mellon led the Fed to stop the money supply drain, return interest rates to standard levels, and devote itself to stable prices. The Fed would look to market price levels, particularly commodities, including gold, for its guide.
The result was the Roaring '20s, the greatest boom in American history to that point, essentially beginning the modern American economy. Real output galloped, stock prices tripled, real wages advanced with productivity increases, and prices were stable. "It was in the twenties that Americans bought their first car, their first radio, made their first long distance telephone call, took their first vacation," as Domitrovic quotes Richard Vedder and Lowell Galloway.
Domitrovic explains, "The essence of supply-side economics lies in using the two levers of governmental economic leverage for the specific uses at which they are most adept. Monetary policy is capable of maintaining the price level. Tax policy is capable of spurring growth. The 'policy mix' of stable money plus tax cuts is the secret to escaping stagflation."
Tax policy spurs growth by reducing tax rates, as Mellon did. The lower rates spur incentives for productive activity, like savings, investment, work, business creation and expansion, and job creation, by allowing the productive to keep a higher proportion of what they produce. These incentives, moreover, apply to every economic decision with every dollar in the economy, at home and around the world in regard to the American economy, not just to the amount of any tax cut. Supposed tax cuts involving credits or rebates are just giveaways like welfare and other government spending, without the powerful incentive effects of rate cuts.
Monetary policy controls the price level because inflation is too many dollars chasing too few goods, everywhere and always caused by printing up too much money in relation to the demand for money. The one and only solution to inflation is to restrain money supply growth to equal money demand. Maintaining stable prices means also avoiding deflation by maintaining money growth to keep pace with money demand. The Fed should follow this policy by monitoring market prices, particularly the most sensitive prices such as commodities, including gold.
Monetary policy cannot be used to stimulate the economy because in the long run it just washes out in affecting only the overall price level, and not the level of real output. In the short run, trying to control the economy by monetary policy just adds to instability, sometimes grievously, causing booms and busts, bubbles and crashes. Keynesian economics is even more inept, because economic prosperity is not caused by increasing government spending and deficits, which are at best a wash, and more likely a drag, as the private sector would use the resources more productively and efficiently than central-planning government bureaucracies lacking market incentives for guidance.
These are the timeless principles of economic growth and prosperity.
Going Off the Rails: The Depression Keynesian Blunder
The Depression arose and worsened as America departed from these pro-growth policies. Instead of maintaining stable prices, the Fed allowed the money supply to decline precipitously, even while dollar demand was soaring as the world sought a stable store of value. This created ruinous deflation. Mellon's tax rate policies were also ruinously reversed, with the top income tax rate raised first to 63%, and then to 79%, with the lower tax rates raised even more in percentage terms. The Smoot-Hawley tariff added another tax burden that killed international trade. President Roosevelt tried to restore prosperity with soaring Keynesian government spending and deficits, which failed miserably as the Depression dragged on for over 10 years. By 1933, unemployment was at 25%, and GDP was down 57% nominally, 22% in real terms.
The Bretton Woods global monetary regime agreed to in 1944 essentially took Mellon's monetary policy focus on stable prices worldwide. The dollar was convertible to gold at $35, and all other currencies were convertible to the dollar at fixed exchange rates. As long as that was maintained, prices would be stable, as they were until overly expansive U.S. monetary policy caused the system to break down completely in 1971. Bretton Woods also essentially nullified Keynesian stimulus policies, as sustained high deficits for any country were inconsistent with the fixed exchange rates and dollar gold convertibility.
This price stability augured a 25-year, postwar, worldwide economic boom. Domitrovic writes, "There can be no mistake that in the high years of the Bretton Woods system, roughly 1950-70, the world economy established incredible feats. European and Japanese growth was sustained at a nearly 7% rate, and the United States (which had started at a higher basis) enjoyed long booms over 4%." Supply-side, free market, policies produced in particular the postwar German "economic miracle."
Kennedy's Supply-Side Economics
But with recessions in 1953, 1957, and 1960, a true economic boom was not restored in America until the Kennedy tax cuts of the 1960s. Kennedy was surrounded by Keynesians who were willing to support some tax cuts focused on stimulating demand. But President Kennedy himself had a supply-side understanding focused on tax rates, saying, "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today, and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the tax rates…. [A]n economy constrained by high tax rates will never produce enough revenue to balance the budget, just as it will never create enough jobs or enough profits."
Domitrovic explains that in 1958 a young Robert Mundell, destined to win the Nobel Prize in 1999, first began to explicitly advocate the supply-side policy mix, first from his perch at the IMF, then as a Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. Domitrovic quotes Mundell as explaining that President Kennedy overruled his Keynesian advisors and "reversed the policy mix to that of tax cuts to spur growth in combination with tight money to protect the balance of payments," the exact supply-side agenda Mundell had been advocating, though Mundell disclaims having influenced Kennedy directly. Mundell continues, "The result was the longest expansion ever [up to that time] in the history of the U.S. economy, unmatched until the Reagan expansion of the 1980s."
Kennedy's business tax cuts were adopted in 1962, and the personal rate cuts in 1964. The top income tax rate was slashed from 91% to 70%, with the lower rates reduced by similar proportions across the board. The next year, economic growth soared by 50%, and income tax revenues increased by 41%! By 1966, unemployment had fallen to its lowest peacetime level in almost 40 years. U.S. News and World Report exclaimed, "The unusual budget spectacle of sharply rising revenues following the biggest tax cut in history is beginning to astonish even those who pushed hardest for tax cuts in the first place." Arthur Okun, the administration's chief economic advisor, estimated that the tax cuts expanded the economy in just two years by 10% above where it would have been.
The 1970s: Return to Keynesian Fallacies
The postwar boom ended as the liberal Johnson Administration abandoned the hugely successful supply-side policy mix. Federal spending started to soar in 1965, and President Johnson demanded and got a loose monetary policy focused on supposedly maintaining growth rather than stable prices. The tax increases started in 1968 with the 10% income tax surcharge, the alternative minimum tax, and increased capital gains levies, followed by bracket creep once inflation kicked in.
By 1969, 6.2% inflation resulted, along with the 1969-70 recession, and the economic miracle of stagflation had arrived, supposedly impossible under the doctrine of Keynesian economics. For the rest of the decade, Keynesian monetary policy kept trying to boost the economy out of decline, only to have to reverse course when inflation soared, causing the economy to fall into recession again. This resulted in further recessions in 1973-75, 1980, and 1981-82.
It finally came to an end when President Reagan explicitly abandoned Keynesian economics, and openly embraced the supply-side. He adopted 25% across the board income tax rate cuts, and then tax reform in 1986 that reduced the top rate from 70% in 1981 to 28%, with only one other rate of 15%. He bravely endorsed tight money through the teeth of the recession to stop inflation, which worked spectacularly. While prices rose 25% in just two years from 1979-80, annual inflation collapsed by half to 6.2% by 1982, and half again to 3.2% by 1983.
Reagan added deregulation to the policy mix, which reduced the cost burden on production, further stimulating it. The Reaganomics formula also included domestic spending cuts, which even with the defense buildup that won the Cold War without firing a shot, reduced total federal spending as a percent of GDP by 10% by 1989.
The results were so spectacular they astonished and surprised everyone, from opponents who wouldn't admit it, to the architects of Reaganomics themselves. Besides slaying inflation which most thought by then couldn't be done without destroying the economy, by the end of 1982 the economy took off on the above mentioned, 25-year economic boom, what Reaganomics gurus Art Laffer and Steve Moore have rightly called "the greatest period of wealth creation in the history of the planet." These results have been recounted in this column several times in the past, and the complete story is too long to do it further justice here.
The Bush/Obama Great Recession
What needs to be recounted at this point is that the Great Reagan Boom ended when, again, the supply-side policy mix was abandoned. Soon after Bush was elected, the Fed returned to using monetary policy to stimulate and manage the economy rather than focusing on price stability. The loose monetary policy from 2001 to 2006 even kept real interest rates below zero for 2½ years during that period, which effectively subsidized excessive risk and leveraging. The result was the housing bubble, which created the financial crisis when it popped in 2008.
Equally promoting the bubble was the Clinton Administration/liberal Democrat "affordable housing" policies, creating the subprime mortgage market. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were dragooned to finance the bubble to its eventual scary dimensions. Reregulation forced banks to contribute more financing to subprime mortgages and the housing bubble as well, and further contributed to the crisis with mandatory mark to market accounting, and privileged status for the credit rating agencies that rated subprime mortgage backed securities AAA.
Spending also began to race out of control during those Bush years. Finally, when the crisis hit, instead of resorting to the supply-side tool of reducing tax rates to promote growth, the Bush Administration peculiarly reached back to the 1970s with a Keynesian government spending, tax rebate package in February 2008. Every one of the planks of Reaganomics had been abandoned at that point.
Barack Obama had personally supported every one of these steps leading to the financial crisis, going back to the Clinton era. Once elected President, he simply reupped every one of these disastrous policies multiple times. He led enactment in February 2009 of basically the same Bush/Keynesian stimulus of a year prior, only 6 times as large. He exploded government spending and deficits to record shattering levels. He embraced re-regulation with a vengeance. And starting next year he has scheduled sharp increases in every significant federal tax rate.
Following with such devotion the opposite of every plank of Reaganomics, we can only expect exactly the opposite results, as Art Laffer has so rightly predicted. The economic history of the 20th century as recounted above backs him up quite thoroughly.
Next week we will discuss in full detail how to avert this disaster, and restore for all traditional American prosperity and the American Dream that has drawn hundreds of millions to these shores over the last 400 years.
Last edited:
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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I was in the Wright Church,
But it musta been the wrong pew...
__________________
"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy."
Milton Friedman
But it musta been the wrong pew...
__________________
"The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy."
Milton Friedman
RightField
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Try a Little Tenderness
Chris Christie, not the Tea Party, is the model for the Republicans.
The Wall Street Journal: July 30, 2010 - Peggy Noonan.
Back when the rather radical and ill-thought-through movement known as the John Birch Society—they thought, among other things, that Dwight Eisenhower was perhaps a communist—was still famous and controversial, conservative Ronald Reagan was running for office. A group of Birchers, surveying the field, said that of all those running his stands seemed most congenial, so they would support him. This set off Drudgelike sirens among journalists: Aha! Reagan unmasked as a radical! Why else would radicals support him? So they rushed to demand that he respond to this embarrassment.
Well, he said pleasantly, they said they support me, I didn’t say I support them.
He said it mildly, as if the reporters had misunderstood the story. This left them scratching their heads, and the story went away, as stories do. But his feint worked because it was grounded in truth. Reagan was neither extreme nor a Bircher, but there were areas in which he agreed with the Birchers, such as the threat of communism. He also had to function as a practical politician: He wasn’t going to tell them to take their votes elsewhere. So he made it clear they were for him, while suggesting they’d bowed to his views, not he to theirs.
This might be a good template for how Republicans approach the Tea Party as 2010 approaches. No, the Tea Party is not the John Birch Society. To note one difference, it does not coalesce around the idea of conspiracy so much as antipathy—to the increasing size, role and demands of government. As this is in line with general Republican thinking and philosophy, Republican candidates should happily accept its support while sticking to their own views and stands, whatever they are. Reagan didn’t say he was so grateful for Bircher support that on reflection Dwight Eisenhower really was a communist. He just nodded and kept walking.
For those candidates who are themselves Tea Party, and who identify more with a rebellion than an organization, some advice: Get conservative, quick. Which is another way of saying: Get serious. Conservatives are not fringe and haven’t been accused of being fringe since they got themselves a president, in 1980. He cared about reality, about the facts of the world, and bothered to know them. He bothered to think about them. He respected process, or rather respected the reality of it and learned to master it.
He also tried to put his arms around those who disagreed with him; he loved his foes into submission by showing regard for them. “Come walk with me,” he said, in 1984. And they did. And they got a new name, Reagan Democrats. Some of them wear it proudly, still. Here’s something that sounds corny but is true: Only love makes great political movements. Movements based on resentment, anger and public rage always fade, they rise and fall, they never stay. If you came to play, get serious.
Members of the Tea Party are not going to vote Democratic, and the Democrats have figured this out. Someone noted on cable the other day that only months ago many Democrats still hoped they might benefit to some degree from the Tea Party’s populist spirit, and attempted a certain tentative sympathy. True, but they did it like anthropologists discovering a new tribe in Borneo: “Come. No hurt. Be friend.” Now, seeing the Tea Party is not gettable or co-optable, the Democrats are attempting to demonize them, and use them to demonize the GOP.
Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual “Jaws”-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are “one and the same.” Not only that, they’re cooking up a plan to “get rid of” or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy and education and the EPA.
Your average viewer will see this not as information but as theater, like Demon Sheep, and of course propaganda, though some will perk up at abolishing the agencies. But the ad signals a central Democratic argument for the fall, which The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder summed up as “We may be incompetent, but they’re crazy.”
It’s a sign of Democratic panic that a week ago they were saying what was wrong with the GOP was they have no plan, while now what’s wrong is that they do have one.
The problem for the Democrats, however, is not a new Contract With America, or the Tea Party. Their problem is Chris Christie.
National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”
That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. He is famously blunt and doesn’t speak in those talking points that make you wonder, “Should I kill myself now with rude stabs to the chest, or should I just jump screaming from the window?”
On “Morning Joe” this week he said, “There were a lot of hard cuts and difficult things to do in there, but fact of the matter is we’re trying to treat people like adults. They know that we’re in awful shape, and they know that no one else is around anymore to pay for the problems that won’t hurt them.”
What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.”
On public schools: Teachers complain when they’re getting “4% and 5% salary increases a year in a 0% inflation world. They get free health benefits from the day they’re hired for their entire family until the day they die. They believe they are entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who’ve lost their homes, had their hours cut back. And all we ask them to do is freeze their salary for one year and pay 1.5% of their salary for their health benefits. . . . As much as I love teachers, everyone’s got to be a part of the sacrifice.”
Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. Governors have budgets for which they’re held accountable, so he had to move. But Mr. Christie’s way is also closer than most national Republicans have come—or Democrats will come—to satisfying the public desire that someone step forward, define the problem, apply common sense, devise a way through, do what’s needed.
He’s going to break through in a big way. The answer to our political problems lies in clarity, competence and courage, not a visit to crazy town. And he knows how to put out his hand. “As much as I love teachers.” That’s good.
Chris Christie, not the Tea Party, is the model for the Republicans.
The Wall Street Journal: July 30, 2010 - Peggy Noonan.
Back when the rather radical and ill-thought-through movement known as the John Birch Society—they thought, among other things, that Dwight Eisenhower was perhaps a communist—was still famous and controversial, conservative Ronald Reagan was running for office. A group of Birchers, surveying the field, said that of all those running his stands seemed most congenial, so they would support him. This set off Drudgelike sirens among journalists: Aha! Reagan unmasked as a radical! Why else would radicals support him? So they rushed to demand that he respond to this embarrassment.
Well, he said pleasantly, they said they support me, I didn’t say I support them.
He said it mildly, as if the reporters had misunderstood the story. This left them scratching their heads, and the story went away, as stories do. But his feint worked because it was grounded in truth. Reagan was neither extreme nor a Bircher, but there were areas in which he agreed with the Birchers, such as the threat of communism. He also had to function as a practical politician: He wasn’t going to tell them to take their votes elsewhere. So he made it clear they were for him, while suggesting they’d bowed to his views, not he to theirs.
This might be a good template for how Republicans approach the Tea Party as 2010 approaches. No, the Tea Party is not the John Birch Society. To note one difference, it does not coalesce around the idea of conspiracy so much as antipathy—to the increasing size, role and demands of government. As this is in line with general Republican thinking and philosophy, Republican candidates should happily accept its support while sticking to their own views and stands, whatever they are. Reagan didn’t say he was so grateful for Bircher support that on reflection Dwight Eisenhower really was a communist. He just nodded and kept walking.
For those candidates who are themselves Tea Party, and who identify more with a rebellion than an organization, some advice: Get conservative, quick. Which is another way of saying: Get serious. Conservatives are not fringe and haven’t been accused of being fringe since they got themselves a president, in 1980. He cared about reality, about the facts of the world, and bothered to know them. He bothered to think about them. He respected process, or rather respected the reality of it and learned to master it.
He also tried to put his arms around those who disagreed with him; he loved his foes into submission by showing regard for them. “Come walk with me,” he said, in 1984. And they did. And they got a new name, Reagan Democrats. Some of them wear it proudly, still. Here’s something that sounds corny but is true: Only love makes great political movements. Movements based on resentment, anger and public rage always fade, they rise and fall, they never stay. If you came to play, get serious.
Members of the Tea Party are not going to vote Democratic, and the Democrats have figured this out. Someone noted on cable the other day that only months ago many Democrats still hoped they might benefit to some degree from the Tea Party’s populist spirit, and attempted a certain tentative sympathy. True, but they did it like anthropologists discovering a new tribe in Borneo: “Come. No hurt. Be friend.” Now, seeing the Tea Party is not gettable or co-optable, the Democrats are attempting to demonize them, and use them to demonize the GOP.
Thus the new DNC scare ad, which features the usual “Jaws”-like monster music, and then the charge that the Tea Party and the GOP are “one and the same.” Not only that, they’re cooking up a plan to “get rid of” or privatize Social Security and Medicare, repeal the 17th Amendment, and abolish the departments of energy and education and the EPA.
Your average viewer will see this not as information but as theater, like Demon Sheep, and of course propaganda, though some will perk up at abolishing the agencies. But the ad signals a central Democratic argument for the fall, which The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder summed up as “We may be incompetent, but they’re crazy.”
It’s a sign of Democratic panic that a week ago they were saying what was wrong with the GOP was they have no plan, while now what’s wrong is that they do have one.
The problem for the Democrats, however, is not a new Contract With America, or the Tea Party. Their problem is Chris Christie.
National Republicans don’t want to talk about specific cuts in spending for the obvious reason: The Obama administration is killing itself, and when your foe is self-destructing, you must not interrupt. Let the media go forward each day reporting the bad polls. Turn it into “Franco: still dead.” Don’t let the media turn it into a two-part story: “Obama is Struggling and The Republicans Will Cut Your Benefits.”
That is classic, smart political thinking, but wrong. The public thinks we’re sinking as a nation. They want to know someone has a plan to help. The most promising leader in that respect is Mr. Christie, the New Jersey governor, who just closed an $11 billion budget gap without raising taxes. He is famously blunt and doesn’t speak in those talking points that make you wonder, “Should I kill myself now with rude stabs to the chest, or should I just jump screaming from the window?”
On “Morning Joe” this week he said, “There were a lot of hard cuts and difficult things to do in there, but fact of the matter is we’re trying to treat people like adults. They know that we’re in awful shape, and they know that no one else is around anymore to pay for the problems that won’t hurt them.”
What about the argument that in a recession we need stimulus spending? “It’s dead wrong. More spending with what? The federal government continuing to print more and more money and leaving that debt for our kids? It will only grind the economy down further.”
On public schools: Teachers complain when they’re getting “4% and 5% salary increases a year in a 0% inflation world. They get free health benefits from the day they’re hired for their entire family until the day they die. They believe they are entitled to this shelter from the recession when the people who are paying for that shelter are the people who have been laid off, who’ve lost their homes, had their hours cut back. And all we ask them to do is freeze their salary for one year and pay 1.5% of their salary for their health benefits. . . . As much as I love teachers, everyone’s got to be a part of the sacrifice.”
Mr. Christie was direct, unadorned: You can’t tax your way out of a spending problem, you’ve got to stop spending. Governors have budgets for which they’re held accountable, so he had to move. But Mr. Christie’s way is also closer than most national Republicans have come—or Democrats will come—to satisfying the public desire that someone step forward, define the problem, apply common sense, devise a way through, do what’s needed.
He’s going to break through in a big way. The answer to our political problems lies in clarity, competence and courage, not a visit to crazy town. And he knows how to put out his hand. “As much as I love teachers.” That’s good.
jeninflorida
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- Feb 17, 2003
- Posts
- 22,463
Is there anyone on morning Joe not hocking a book?
more power to them...and I'm jealous....also I want free coffee
more power to them...and I'm jealous....also I want free coffee
RightField
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- Posts
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August 3, 2010
Democrats Bite Democrats: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
Rumors of Congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration's actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two long-time Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama "cynical" and "racially divisive," that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes.
A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.
Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled "Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis." The report's dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from the current runaway government deficits.
The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of the Gross Domestic Product three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010-- and rising in future years.
Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP, even when the country was fighting the Civil War, the First World War or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II, as the nation began paying off its wartime when the war was over.
By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in "unfamiliar territory," according to the CBO, reaching "unsustainable levels." They spell out the economic consequences-- and it is not a pretty picture.
Although Barack Obama and members of his administration constantly talk about the so-called "stimulus" spending as creating a demand for goods that is in turn "creating jobs," every dime they spend comes from somewhere else, which means that there is less money to create jobs somewhere else.
There is no reason to believe that all this runaway spending is creating jobs-- on net balance. The fact that the unemployment rate remains stuck at nearly 10 percent belies the idea that great numbers of jobs are being created-- again, on net balance.
White House press Secretary Robert Gibbs' recent rant against Rush Limbaugh for criticizing the bailout of General Motors went on and on about how this bailout had saved "a million jobs." But where does Gibbs think the bailout money came from? The Tooth Fairy?
When you take money from the taxpayers and spend it to rescue the jobs of one set of workers-- your union political supporters, in this case-- what does that do to the demand for the jobs of other workers, whose products taxpayers would have bought with the money you took away from them? There is no net economic gain to the country from this, though there may well be political gains for the administration from having rescued their UAW supporters.
The same principle applies to money that came from selling government bonds, thus adding to the national debt. People who bought those government bonds had other things they could have invested in, if those government bonds had not been issued.
As the Congressional Budget Office puts it, if the national debt continues to grow out of control, a "growing portion of people's savings would go to purchase government debt rather than toward investments in productive capital goods such as factories and computers; that 'crowding out' of investment would lead to lower output and incomes than would otherwise occur."
Just paying the interest on a growing national debt can require higher tax rates, which "would discourage work and saving and further reduce output," according to the CBO.
It would probably do no good to send Robert Gibbs-- or Barack Obama, for that matter-- a copy of the government's own Congressional Budget Office report. Spending vast sums of money in politically strategic places helps the Obama administration politically, and that is obviously their bottom line.
Democrats Bite Democrats: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
Rumors of Congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration's actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two long-time Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama "cynical" and "racially divisive," that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes.
A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.
Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled "Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis." The report's dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from the current runaway government deficits.
The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of the Gross Domestic Product three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010-- and rising in future years.
Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP, even when the country was fighting the Civil War, the First World War or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II, as the nation began paying off its wartime when the war was over.
By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in "unfamiliar territory," according to the CBO, reaching "unsustainable levels." They spell out the economic consequences-- and it is not a pretty picture.
Although Barack Obama and members of his administration constantly talk about the so-called "stimulus" spending as creating a demand for goods that is in turn "creating jobs," every dime they spend comes from somewhere else, which means that there is less money to create jobs somewhere else.
There is no reason to believe that all this runaway spending is creating jobs-- on net balance. The fact that the unemployment rate remains stuck at nearly 10 percent belies the idea that great numbers of jobs are being created-- again, on net balance.
White House press Secretary Robert Gibbs' recent rant against Rush Limbaugh for criticizing the bailout of General Motors went on and on about how this bailout had saved "a million jobs." But where does Gibbs think the bailout money came from? The Tooth Fairy?
When you take money from the taxpayers and spend it to rescue the jobs of one set of workers-- your union political supporters, in this case-- what does that do to the demand for the jobs of other workers, whose products taxpayers would have bought with the money you took away from them? There is no net economic gain to the country from this, though there may well be political gains for the administration from having rescued their UAW supporters.
The same principle applies to money that came from selling government bonds, thus adding to the national debt. People who bought those government bonds had other things they could have invested in, if those government bonds had not been issued.
As the Congressional Budget Office puts it, if the national debt continues to grow out of control, a "growing portion of people's savings would go to purchase government debt rather than toward investments in productive capital goods such as factories and computers; that 'crowding out' of investment would lead to lower output and incomes than would otherwise occur."
Just paying the interest on a growing national debt can require higher tax rates, which "would discourage work and saving and further reduce output," according to the CBO.
It would probably do no good to send Robert Gibbs-- or Barack Obama, for that matter-- a copy of the government's own Congressional Budget Office report. Spending vast sums of money in politically strategic places helps the Obama administration politically, and that is obviously their bottom line.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
Doubling Down On Failed Obamanomics?
By Larry Elder
The position of chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is open. How President Barack Obama fills it can tell us whether he's finally gone wobbly on Obamanomics -- maybe in time to arrest some of the damage.
Would President Obama, to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, ponder whether to nominate liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg or conservative Antonin Scalia? Would his finalists come down to Sonia Sotomayor or Samuel Alito? Elena Kagan or John Roberts?
Such a range of choices would mean that the left-wing Obama does not know whether he wants a "constitutionalist" or a proponent of the "living, breathing document" school of jurisprudence -- whether he wants a "strict constructionist" or whether he wants a jurist who decides cases based, as he put it, on "empathy."
We know where he stands. And it is not on the side of Clarence Thomas.
Now, for the chair of the CEA, would Obama's list of possibilities include both the Obama-sympathetic left-wing economist Paul Krugman and supply-side economist Lawrence Kudlow?
Don't laugh. A Washington Post columnist actually suggested that Obama consider these two polar opposites. Honestly, Kudlow? To paraphrase press secretary Robert Gibbs, somebody needs drug testing.
Kudlow, a former member of the Reagan administration and current CNBC host and syndicated columnist, advocates lower taxes, free trade, smaller government and less regulation. Krugman, a Princeton professor and New York Times columnist, wants more "stimulus" spending and called the first package "too small and too cautious." They're as different as George Patton and John Lennon.
Obama wouldn't hire Kudlow to caddie his golf clubs, let alone to lead his team of economic advisers.
Obama is a community organizer, a person who, by definition, wants government to do more, not less. Obama rails against the "greed" of capitalism and believes that "at a certain point, you've made enough money." He urges higher taxes on the rich to "spread the wealth." He admits that higher capital gains taxes actually produce less revenue but supports a hike so that the rich pay a higher percentage -- a matter of "fairness." He doesn't understand that government subsidization of the housing market -- through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration and the Community Reinvestment Act -- sparked the unsustainable run-up in home prices. He ignores the consensus among economists and says, "The American dream ... means that we raise the minimum wage not just every 10 years, but all the time."
This is not a man who plans to get in touch with his inner Milton Friedman.
"I was wrong," Obama would say by selecting Kudlow. "Unemployment is near 10 percent. It remains high despite the passage of several stimulus packages predicted to jump-start the economy, several extensions of unemployment benefits, takeovers of two domestic automakers, and bailouts of banks and other financial institutions. We are now going in a new direction."
The outgoing CEA chair, Christina Romer, pushed for the $787 billion stimulus and predicted that its passage would prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent. When unemployment busted past that level, Romer reportedly lost power and influence.
Was she ever comfortable? When Obama chose her, some thought it a sign that Obama wanted to govern as an economic moderate. A San Francisco newspaper called Romer "decidedly centrist." OK, that's San Francisco. But she and her economist husband wrote a paper in which they sounded like Ronald Reagan: "Tax increases are highly contractionary. ... Tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects." But Obama believes President George W. Bush wrongly gave tax cuts to the rich, who "didn't need them and didn't even ask for them."
"Every economist who's looked at it," said President Obama, "says that the Recovery Act has done its job." This is true -- except for all the economists who think it failed.
Stanford economist Michael Boskin says, "The permanent government expansion and higher tax rate agenda is a classic example of what not to do during bad economic times." Heritage Foundation economist J.D. Foster says, "The problem with the idea of pump-priming the economy through deficit spending is that the government must first pump money out of the economy by borrowing it. Government spending increases public demand; government borrowing reduces private demand. Governments don't create purchasing power. They destroy it through inflation or transfer it through borrowing and spending."
What about Krugman? The Post columnist writes, apparently with a straight face: "Krugman is best known for his New York Times columns arguing that the $787 billion, debt-busting stimulus bill was not enough. ... Maybe it's time for Krugman to put his money where his mouth is. You think government needs to spend more to get us out of this funk? Okay, Paul. Here's the key to the car."
No, we've been driving that car for nearly two years. Voters elected a dangerous left-winger who trusts government to run health care, car companies, banks and the student loan program.
The driver-in-chief not only sees no need for a course correction, he wants to step on the gas.
Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc.
By Larry Elder
The position of chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is open. How President Barack Obama fills it can tell us whether he's finally gone wobbly on Obamanomics -- maybe in time to arrest some of the damage.
Would President Obama, to fill a Supreme Court vacancy, ponder whether to nominate liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg or conservative Antonin Scalia? Would his finalists come down to Sonia Sotomayor or Samuel Alito? Elena Kagan or John Roberts?
Such a range of choices would mean that the left-wing Obama does not know whether he wants a "constitutionalist" or a proponent of the "living, breathing document" school of jurisprudence -- whether he wants a "strict constructionist" or whether he wants a jurist who decides cases based, as he put it, on "empathy."
We know where he stands. And it is not on the side of Clarence Thomas.
Now, for the chair of the CEA, would Obama's list of possibilities include both the Obama-sympathetic left-wing economist Paul Krugman and supply-side economist Lawrence Kudlow?
Don't laugh. A Washington Post columnist actually suggested that Obama consider these two polar opposites. Honestly, Kudlow? To paraphrase press secretary Robert Gibbs, somebody needs drug testing.
Kudlow, a former member of the Reagan administration and current CNBC host and syndicated columnist, advocates lower taxes, free trade, smaller government and less regulation. Krugman, a Princeton professor and New York Times columnist, wants more "stimulus" spending and called the first package "too small and too cautious." They're as different as George Patton and John Lennon.
Obama wouldn't hire Kudlow to caddie his golf clubs, let alone to lead his team of economic advisers.
Obama is a community organizer, a person who, by definition, wants government to do more, not less. Obama rails against the "greed" of capitalism and believes that "at a certain point, you've made enough money." He urges higher taxes on the rich to "spread the wealth." He admits that higher capital gains taxes actually produce less revenue but supports a hike so that the rich pay a higher percentage -- a matter of "fairness." He doesn't understand that government subsidization of the housing market -- through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration and the Community Reinvestment Act -- sparked the unsustainable run-up in home prices. He ignores the consensus among economists and says, "The American dream ... means that we raise the minimum wage not just every 10 years, but all the time."
This is not a man who plans to get in touch with his inner Milton Friedman.
"I was wrong," Obama would say by selecting Kudlow. "Unemployment is near 10 percent. It remains high despite the passage of several stimulus packages predicted to jump-start the economy, several extensions of unemployment benefits, takeovers of two domestic automakers, and bailouts of banks and other financial institutions. We are now going in a new direction."
The outgoing CEA chair, Christina Romer, pushed for the $787 billion stimulus and predicted that its passage would prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent. When unemployment busted past that level, Romer reportedly lost power and influence.
Was she ever comfortable? When Obama chose her, some thought it a sign that Obama wanted to govern as an economic moderate. A San Francisco newspaper called Romer "decidedly centrist." OK, that's San Francisco. But she and her economist husband wrote a paper in which they sounded like Ronald Reagan: "Tax increases are highly contractionary. ... Tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects." But Obama believes President George W. Bush wrongly gave tax cuts to the rich, who "didn't need them and didn't even ask for them."
"Every economist who's looked at it," said President Obama, "says that the Recovery Act has done its job." This is true -- except for all the economists who think it failed.
Stanford economist Michael Boskin says, "The permanent government expansion and higher tax rate agenda is a classic example of what not to do during bad economic times." Heritage Foundation economist J.D. Foster says, "The problem with the idea of pump-priming the economy through deficit spending is that the government must first pump money out of the economy by borrowing it. Government spending increases public demand; government borrowing reduces private demand. Governments don't create purchasing power. They destroy it through inflation or transfer it through borrowing and spending."
What about Krugman? The Post columnist writes, apparently with a straight face: "Krugman is best known for his New York Times columns arguing that the $787 billion, debt-busting stimulus bill was not enough. ... Maybe it's time for Krugman to put his money where his mouth is. You think government needs to spend more to get us out of this funk? Okay, Paul. Here's the key to the car."
No, we've been driving that car for nearly two years. Voters elected a dangerous left-winger who trusts government to run health care, car companies, banks and the student loan program.
The driver-in-chief not only sees no need for a course correction, he wants to step on the gas.
Copyright 2010, Creators Syndicate Inc.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
The Democrats and the 2010 Budget Fiasco
This dereliction of duty is unprecedented.
BY Gary Andres
September 30, 2010 6:45 AM
The 2010 federal fiscal year ended unceremoniously this week – a political and substantive fiasco for the Democrats. It included a cascade of miscalculations that could haunt the party in the November elections. But that pales in comparison to the serious harm they’ve inflicted on the American economy.
Never before has a party so bungled fiscal policy in the United States, leaving citizens, businesses, and investors with head-spinning uncertainty.
Failure to pass a budget earlier this year began the debacle, but the cavalcade of missteps continued this week with the passage of a so-called Continuing Resolution (CR) to avoid an October 1 government shutdown.
Let’s start with the annual budget plan – or lack thereof. Facing one of the worst long-term debt and deficit crises in the past half century, Democrats in Congress decided to kick the can and skip developing a blueprint this year.
This is truly unconscionable. How can the Democrats – with large majorities in the House and the Senate – look voters in the eye and say, we have no plan – no long term schematic to ensure America won’t become another Greece. The only thing more unbelievable is that they apparently got away with it because no one seems to notice.
This dereliction of duty is unprecedented. Never in the history of the modern process – dating back more than a quarter of a century – have both the House and the Senate failed to pass a budget resolution.
This dereliction of duty is unprecedented.
BY Gary Andres
September 30, 2010 6:45 AM
The 2010 federal fiscal year ended unceremoniously this week – a political and substantive fiasco for the Democrats. It included a cascade of miscalculations that could haunt the party in the November elections. But that pales in comparison to the serious harm they’ve inflicted on the American economy.
Never before has a party so bungled fiscal policy in the United States, leaving citizens, businesses, and investors with head-spinning uncertainty.
Failure to pass a budget earlier this year began the debacle, but the cavalcade of missteps continued this week with the passage of a so-called Continuing Resolution (CR) to avoid an October 1 government shutdown.
Let’s start with the annual budget plan – or lack thereof. Facing one of the worst long-term debt and deficit crises in the past half century, Democrats in Congress decided to kick the can and skip developing a blueprint this year.
This is truly unconscionable. How can the Democrats – with large majorities in the House and the Senate – look voters in the eye and say, we have no plan – no long term schematic to ensure America won’t become another Greece. The only thing more unbelievable is that they apparently got away with it because no one seems to notice.
This dereliction of duty is unprecedented. Never in the history of the modern process – dating back more than a quarter of a century – have both the House and the Senate failed to pass a budget resolution.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
The race that says it all
By: Jim VandeHei
October 12, 2010 04:44 AM EDT
OSHKOSH, Wis. — Until last fall, Ron Johnson was just an intensely private guy with a good business and a nice house on Lake Winnebago. He kept a stack of Wall Street Journals next to his bed, folded just right so he wouldn't forget to read columnist Dan Henninger on this or Paul Gigot on that. A trim, silver-haired businessman, he was rich but unknown, even in this, his hometown, despite big donations to Lourdes High School and his thriving plastics company here.
Running for office never crossed his mind.
Barack Obama changed all that.
Until last fall, Wisconsin seemed destined to again send a Democrat to the Senate, just like it had for 18 years, since Sen. Russ Feingold leveraged a clever, no-skeletons-in-my-closet campaign to oust Republican Robert Kasten. Feingold, plenty liberal but with a cantankerous streak that fit the times, seemed a sure bet to go back to Washington.
Obama might be about to change that, too.
The story of the 2010 election — the tea party drama, the anti-Obama tension, the prominence of right-wing media figures and a wounded Democratic incumbent — all can be distilled in one state, Wisconsin, and through one candidate, Johnson.
Much like his contemporaries — Sharron Angle in Nevada or Rand Paul in Kentucky or Joe Miller in Alaska — Johnson talks the talk of the tea party and also talks of going to Washington as less a lawmaker, more a messenger. He argues with conviction that Obama represents nothing less than a threat to turn America into a "socialist, European-style" state, and audiences nod along, the judgment sounding neither rabid nor harsh — even in Wisconsin, a state that fell hard for Obama.
Politics has changed here, just like it did elsewhere — and it wasn’t the change Obama was promising. People were anxious, as they saw friends lose jobs, or their houses foreclosed on, or read of companies like Fond du Lac's Mercury Marine Inc., maker of the popular boat motors, threatening to bolt the state.
Tea party rallies started heating up, feeding off the anger about talk in Washington of government-run health care and a cap-and-trade vote in the House. Independents — the same ones who bought into Obama's original promise of change — started to turn on Democrats. Some of the independents began to flirt with the tea partiers, then as now a loose affiliation of activists with varying degrees of clout.
Johnson got sucked in by all of this. The Tea Party of Oshkosh was pulling together a rally for a fall event, featuring Joe the Plumber, the working man who emerged as a folk hero to small-government conservatives in 2008. They needed a businessman to talk about what they saw as the scary, Big Brother approach to Obamacare — and Johnson was happy to oblige. His daughter Carrie was born with a heart defect and saved by two doctors — a story anyone following this campaign has heard many times in ads and speeches ever since. So he let loose with an attack on the demonization of doctors and, more broadly, the mortal threat to American exceptionalism.
The new law “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson said in an interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”
In hindsight, Johnson, in that speech, was capturing a major mood change in American politics that swept up not only business owners but also anti-government conservatives and skeptical independents. These groups, by late summer of 2009, had turned against the president and his party — and never returned.
It is now clear all the talk of stimulus spending, a health care takeover and new energy taxes were to blame — coming together to form a powerful electoral force that swept candidates like Johnson, Angle and others into Senate races against once-sturdy incumbents now threatened with defeat.
By: Jim VandeHei
October 12, 2010 04:44 AM EDT
OSHKOSH, Wis. — Until last fall, Ron Johnson was just an intensely private guy with a good business and a nice house on Lake Winnebago. He kept a stack of Wall Street Journals next to his bed, folded just right so he wouldn't forget to read columnist Dan Henninger on this or Paul Gigot on that. A trim, silver-haired businessman, he was rich but unknown, even in this, his hometown, despite big donations to Lourdes High School and his thriving plastics company here.
Running for office never crossed his mind.
Barack Obama changed all that.
Until last fall, Wisconsin seemed destined to again send a Democrat to the Senate, just like it had for 18 years, since Sen. Russ Feingold leveraged a clever, no-skeletons-in-my-closet campaign to oust Republican Robert Kasten. Feingold, plenty liberal but with a cantankerous streak that fit the times, seemed a sure bet to go back to Washington.
Obama might be about to change that, too.
The story of the 2010 election — the tea party drama, the anti-Obama tension, the prominence of right-wing media figures and a wounded Democratic incumbent — all can be distilled in one state, Wisconsin, and through one candidate, Johnson.
Much like his contemporaries — Sharron Angle in Nevada or Rand Paul in Kentucky or Joe Miller in Alaska — Johnson talks the talk of the tea party and also talks of going to Washington as less a lawmaker, more a messenger. He argues with conviction that Obama represents nothing less than a threat to turn America into a "socialist, European-style" state, and audiences nod along, the judgment sounding neither rabid nor harsh — even in Wisconsin, a state that fell hard for Obama.
Politics has changed here, just like it did elsewhere — and it wasn’t the change Obama was promising. People were anxious, as they saw friends lose jobs, or their houses foreclosed on, or read of companies like Fond du Lac's Mercury Marine Inc., maker of the popular boat motors, threatening to bolt the state.
Tea party rallies started heating up, feeding off the anger about talk in Washington of government-run health care and a cap-and-trade vote in the House. Independents — the same ones who bought into Obama's original promise of change — started to turn on Democrats. Some of the independents began to flirt with the tea partiers, then as now a loose affiliation of activists with varying degrees of clout.
Johnson got sucked in by all of this. The Tea Party of Oshkosh was pulling together a rally for a fall event, featuring Joe the Plumber, the working man who emerged as a folk hero to small-government conservatives in 2008. They needed a businessman to talk about what they saw as the scary, Big Brother approach to Obamacare — and Johnson was happy to oblige. His daughter Carrie was born with a heart defect and saved by two doctors — a story anyone following this campaign has heard many times in ads and speeches ever since. So he let loose with an attack on the demonization of doctors and, more broadly, the mortal threat to American exceptionalism.
The new law “will destroy our health care system,” Johnson said in an interview. “I am totally convinced of that.”
In hindsight, Johnson, in that speech, was capturing a major mood change in American politics that swept up not only business owners but also anti-government conservatives and skeptical independents. These groups, by late summer of 2009, had turned against the president and his party — and never returned.
It is now clear all the talk of stimulus spending, a health care takeover and new energy taxes were to blame — coming together to form a powerful electoral force that swept candidates like Johnson, Angle and others into Senate races against once-sturdy incumbents now threatened with defeat.
RightField
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Reagan Dems take notice
By Jennifer C. Braceras | Tuesday, October 12, 2010 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed
We’ve heard of Tea Party voters, Wal-Mart moms, soccer moms and NASCAR dads. But in the beginning, there were Reagan Democrats.
The Reagan Dems of the 1980s were ethnic Catholics - mostly Irish, Italian or Polish. They were blue-collar union members or first-generation white-collar workers. Anti-communist hawks in a party of doves, the Reagan Dems were values voters who felt alienated by the increasingly leftward drift of the Democrats.
Although conservative in nature, Republicans they were not. They were uncomfortable with the GOP’s two predominant wings: the Wall Street bankers and the Southern born-agains. And so, the Democratic Party - the party of FDR and JFK - remained their default position.
Peter M. Sheehan was a classic example. Born in 1937, Pete grew up Irish, Catholic and working class. He spent two years in the seminary, joined the Marines and married the former Peggy Quinn. The Sheehans had three daughters and worked hard to support them - Pete as a salesman for a chemical company; Peggy as a teacher’s aide.
Active in the Lions Club and his parish church, Pete could be found on weekends drinking beer on his breezeway and talking politics.
Pete was, of course, a Democrat. But after double-digit inflation and four years of Jimmy Carter, he crossed party lines to vote for Ronald Reagan. Pete never gave up his “D” membership, serving as a delegate to the Democratic State Convention on several occasions. But from 1980 until his death in 2009, Pete remained a “swing-voter.”
In 2008, war-weary and stunned by the pre-election financial collapse, many working- and middle-class ethnic Catholics (many of whom were not even born when Reagan took office) voted for Barack Obama. In the aftermath of that election, some pundits declared the Reagan Dems politically irrelevant.
But reports of their death were greatly exaggerated.
Fourteen months later, voters in communities like Chicopee, Fitchburg, Lowell and Quincy (towns that voted overwhelmingly for Obama) helped elect Republican Sen. Scott Brown. They had turned on Obama for focusing on health care before jobs, for apologizing for America to the world and for constantly blaming George Bush for his own failings. And Brown, touting jobs and tax relief, was able to connect with Reagan Dems in a way that his foe (herself Irish Catholic, but highly critical of the church) could not.
The take-away for Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker?
It’s the American Dream, stupid.
Reagan Democrats, still a vital bloc, want a candidate who will protect their jobs, homes and retirement savings. Like Pete Sheehan before them, today’s Reagan Dems believe that America should reward those who work hard and play by the rules. As the children or grandchildren of immigrants, they embrace the American melting pot but worry about the crippling economic effect of illegal immigration.
Baker may not drive a pickup truck or wear a barn coat like Brown, but with his message of job-creation, reducing illegal immigration and government reform, he is well-positioned to garner the Reagan-Dem vote.
Unfortunately for Baker, however, the single-digit candidacy of independent (yet self-proclaimed Reagan Democrat) Tim Cahill could peel off a fragment of this constituency, just enough to tip the election to liberal Gov. Deval Patrick.
But when faced with the prospect of downward mobility and another four years of Patrick, Reagan Dems tempted to vote for Cahill just may choose Baker as the man best able to defend their American Dream.
By Jennifer C. Braceras | Tuesday, October 12, 2010 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Op-Ed
We’ve heard of Tea Party voters, Wal-Mart moms, soccer moms and NASCAR dads. But in the beginning, there were Reagan Democrats.
The Reagan Dems of the 1980s were ethnic Catholics - mostly Irish, Italian or Polish. They were blue-collar union members or first-generation white-collar workers. Anti-communist hawks in a party of doves, the Reagan Dems were values voters who felt alienated by the increasingly leftward drift of the Democrats.
Although conservative in nature, Republicans they were not. They were uncomfortable with the GOP’s two predominant wings: the Wall Street bankers and the Southern born-agains. And so, the Democratic Party - the party of FDR and JFK - remained their default position.
Peter M. Sheehan was a classic example. Born in 1937, Pete grew up Irish, Catholic and working class. He spent two years in the seminary, joined the Marines and married the former Peggy Quinn. The Sheehans had three daughters and worked hard to support them - Pete as a salesman for a chemical company; Peggy as a teacher’s aide.
Active in the Lions Club and his parish church, Pete could be found on weekends drinking beer on his breezeway and talking politics.
Pete was, of course, a Democrat. But after double-digit inflation and four years of Jimmy Carter, he crossed party lines to vote for Ronald Reagan. Pete never gave up his “D” membership, serving as a delegate to the Democratic State Convention on several occasions. But from 1980 until his death in 2009, Pete remained a “swing-voter.”
In 2008, war-weary and stunned by the pre-election financial collapse, many working- and middle-class ethnic Catholics (many of whom were not even born when Reagan took office) voted for Barack Obama. In the aftermath of that election, some pundits declared the Reagan Dems politically irrelevant.
But reports of their death were greatly exaggerated.
Fourteen months later, voters in communities like Chicopee, Fitchburg, Lowell and Quincy (towns that voted overwhelmingly for Obama) helped elect Republican Sen. Scott Brown. They had turned on Obama for focusing on health care before jobs, for apologizing for America to the world and for constantly blaming George Bush for his own failings. And Brown, touting jobs and tax relief, was able to connect with Reagan Dems in a way that his foe (herself Irish Catholic, but highly critical of the church) could not.
The take-away for Republican gubernatorial candidate Charlie Baker?
It’s the American Dream, stupid.
Reagan Democrats, still a vital bloc, want a candidate who will protect their jobs, homes and retirement savings. Like Pete Sheehan before them, today’s Reagan Dems believe that America should reward those who work hard and play by the rules. As the children or grandchildren of immigrants, they embrace the American melting pot but worry about the crippling economic effect of illegal immigration.
Baker may not drive a pickup truck or wear a barn coat like Brown, but with his message of job-creation, reducing illegal immigration and government reform, he is well-positioned to garner the Reagan-Dem vote.
Unfortunately for Baker, however, the single-digit candidacy of independent (yet self-proclaimed Reagan Democrat) Tim Cahill could peel off a fragment of this constituency, just enough to tip the election to liberal Gov. Deval Patrick.
But when faced with the prospect of downward mobility and another four years of Patrick, Reagan Dems tempted to vote for Cahill just may choose Baker as the man best able to defend their American Dream.
Last edited:
RightField
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The Texas Model
By Rich Lowry
Texas already looms large in its own imagination. Its elevated self-image didn't need this: More than half of the net new jobs in the U.S. during the past 12 months were created in the Lone Star State.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we'd have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe "stimulus" wouldn't be such a dirty word.
What does Austin know that Washington doesn't? At its simplest: Don't overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, "Open for Business."
At bottom, the struggle between national Republicans and Democrats is over whether the country will adopt a version of the Texas model, or of the Michigan, New York, or California model. Will government allow the private sector to thrive, or stifle growth with its hyperactivity and favoritism for anti-business interests? If migration were a referendum, the Texas model would be winning in a rout - more than 1,300 people a day moved there between their 2007 and 2008 tax filings, according to Internal Revenue Service data.
It's not as though Texas has been exempt from the Great Recession. Its unemployment rate is 8.3 percent - high, though beneath the national rate of 9.6 percent. It faces a recession-driven shortfall of roughly $15 billion for its next two-year budget, a significant challenge to its low-tax ways. But it has weathered the storm better than the nation, and better than its mammoth competitor on the West Coast.
A new Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes that Texas experienced a decline of 2.3 percent from its peak employment, while the nation declined 5.7 percent and California 8.7 percent. During the past 12 months, California nearly canceled out Texas's job creation all by itself, losing 112,000 net jobs. Itsunemployment rate is above 12 percent.
Texas is a model of governmental restraint. In 2008, state and local expenditures were 25.5 percent of GDP in California, 22.8 in the U.S., and 17.3 in Texas. Back in 1987, levels of spending were roughly similar in these places. The recessions of 1991 and 2001 spiked spending everywhere, but each time Texas fought to bring it down to pre-recession levels. "Because of this policy decision," the Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes, "Texas' 2008 spending burden remained slightly below its 1987 levels - a major accomplishment."
Less spending means lower taxes. Texas doesn't have an income tax - in contrast to California's highly progressive income tax - and it is among the 10 lowest-tax states in the country. Its regulatory burden is low across the board, and it's a right-to-work state that enacted significant tort reform in the middle of the last decade.
It is true that Texas enjoys bountiful oil and natural-gas reserves, but its attitude toward those resources is what's most important - "if you got 'em, use 'em." If only the Obama administration's Department of the Interior agreed. The state long ago defied the stereotype of an economy entirely dependent on bumptious oilmen. In Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, it has four diverse, thriving metropolitan areas featuring robust high-tech and manufacturing sectors.
In Texas in recent decades, the watchwords have been prudence and stability in the course of nurturing a pro-business environment, while California has undergone a self-immolation that Pres. Barack Obama wants to replay nationally. Joel Kotkin writes of California in City Journal, "During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city - as something to be sacked and plundered."
With predictable results. For policymakers wanting to restart the American jobs machine, forget the Alamo. Keep in mind the Texas model.
By Rich Lowry
Texas already looms large in its own imagination. Its elevated self-image didn't need this: More than half of the net new jobs in the U.S. during the past 12 months were created in the Lone Star State.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we'd have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe "stimulus" wouldn't be such a dirty word.
What does Austin know that Washington doesn't? At its simplest: Don't overtax and -spend, keep regulations to a minimum, avoid letting unions and trial lawyers run riot, and display an enormous neon sign saying, "Open for Business."
At bottom, the struggle between national Republicans and Democrats is over whether the country will adopt a version of the Texas model, or of the Michigan, New York, or California model. Will government allow the private sector to thrive, or stifle growth with its hyperactivity and favoritism for anti-business interests? If migration were a referendum, the Texas model would be winning in a rout - more than 1,300 people a day moved there between their 2007 and 2008 tax filings, according to Internal Revenue Service data.
It's not as though Texas has been exempt from the Great Recession. Its unemployment rate is 8.3 percent - high, though beneath the national rate of 9.6 percent. It faces a recession-driven shortfall of roughly $15 billion for its next two-year budget, a significant challenge to its low-tax ways. But it has weathered the storm better than the nation, and better than its mammoth competitor on the West Coast.
A new Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes that Texas experienced a decline of 2.3 percent from its peak employment, while the nation declined 5.7 percent and California 8.7 percent. During the past 12 months, California nearly canceled out Texas's job creation all by itself, losing 112,000 net jobs. Itsunemployment rate is above 12 percent.
Texas is a model of governmental restraint. In 2008, state and local expenditures were 25.5 percent of GDP in California, 22.8 in the U.S., and 17.3 in Texas. Back in 1987, levels of spending were roughly similar in these places. The recessions of 1991 and 2001 spiked spending everywhere, but each time Texas fought to bring it down to pre-recession levels. "Because of this policy decision," the Texas Public Policy Foundation report notes, "Texas' 2008 spending burden remained slightly below its 1987 levels - a major accomplishment."
Less spending means lower taxes. Texas doesn't have an income tax - in contrast to California's highly progressive income tax - and it is among the 10 lowest-tax states in the country. Its regulatory burden is low across the board, and it's a right-to-work state that enacted significant tort reform in the middle of the last decade.
It is true that Texas enjoys bountiful oil and natural-gas reserves, but its attitude toward those resources is what's most important - "if you got 'em, use 'em." If only the Obama administration's Department of the Interior agreed. The state long ago defied the stereotype of an economy entirely dependent on bumptious oilmen. In Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio, and Austin, it has four diverse, thriving metropolitan areas featuring robust high-tech and manufacturing sectors.
In Texas in recent decades, the watchwords have been prudence and stability in the course of nurturing a pro-business environment, while California has undergone a self-immolation that Pres. Barack Obama wants to replay nationally. Joel Kotkin writes of California in City Journal, "During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city - as something to be sacked and plundered."
With predictable results. For policymakers wanting to restart the American jobs machine, forget the Alamo. Keep in mind the Texas model.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
I'd call him Uncle Lib instead of Uncle Feds, but I digress. This is a great little story, I hope you enjoy it.
Saga of Uncle Feds explains voter anger
John Kass
When the Democrats were poised to win the national elections two short years ago, the media took notice of all the hope wafting across America.
There was even hope in Berlin, and Americans were told to be encouraged about the huge crowds of Germans gathering to approve all that hope coming to the U.S.
Hope and change, yes we can!
Hoffen und aenderen, ja wir koennen!
But now, with the economy still in the tank and unemployment hovering around 10 percent, and with Republicans poised to make big gains in the November midterm elections, the media is consumed with a different theme.
We're no longer talking hope. These days, the election is framed as one of anger and rage against the federal government.
And since we've been taught that anger is irrational, doesn't it follow that anger aimed at the government is also irrational? Who wants to be mocked as irrational?
Surely, those with a brain can see the Orwellian logic in all of this — or is that Axelrodian logic?
"When people are angry, they want to focus on their anger," said Democrat and Vice President Joe Biden a few days ago, proving my point. "If this is a referendum on anger, we lose. If this is a referendum on choice, we're going to win."
A few days ago, a reporter for one of the national TV networks stopped by the Tribune to ask me the big anger question: Where does it all come from?
So I told him one of my favorite stories. Some of you know it as the saga of Uncle Feds.
Uncle Feds is the big fat fellow who crashes on your couch. He's been there for years and years. He demands roasts and chops, devouring whatever he can find in your refrigerator. And when you're out working long hours, Uncle Feds sits on the couch ordering pay-per-view movies.
He was plenty big before all that hope and change. But in the last two years, Uncle Feds has become so incredibly large that his bulk defies description.
And while he eats, you begin to realize that you don't have enough cash to fix that hole in your shoe, let alone think about college tuition for the kids.
So one night at dinner, Uncle Feds brings up the subject of your family's financial problems. In a rational, calm and hopeful voice, he tells you that yes, the economy is lousy, but that you must stop worrying.
"Don't be angry," says Uncle Feds with a mouthful of rare beef. "Don't focus on your anger. Don't worry about a darned thing. I've just solved all your cash shortage problems."
Your wife gives you one of those startled looks.
"Uncle Feds!" she says, "Just what have you done?"
"Well, I've just taken out a second mortgage on your house," says Uncle Feds. "Your cash-flow worries are over."
If your life were a TV sitcom, the producer would cue the laugh track. A trombone would play that "wah-wah-wah" music, and you'd hit your forehead with your palm, saying "Oh, Uncle Feds!"
But real life is not a sitcom. There is no laugh track, except for the one in your head when you're in the voting booth.
Unfortunately, the TV people thought my Uncle Feds story too complicated for their report on anger, and that kind of made me angry.
So to soothe myself, I reached for a calming government report from the Social Security Administration released last week. Officials studied where some $13 billion in federal stimulus payments went.
The officials were pleased that most of the money went to the right folks. But 71,688 federal stimulus checks were sent to dead people. And 17,348 jail or prison inmates also received checks, perhaps to help stimulate the prison economies.
As for the $22.3 million of your cash that went to prisoners and dead people? Oh, well.
It's only tens of millions. That was a big number once, remember? Then billions were considered big. Then hundreds of billions. But hundreds of billions are so … 2008.
We're into the trillions now. And if you're angry that our White House and Congress are spending money we don't have, well, then, you might just be acting irrationally.
It makes you wonder what would have happened back in Boston in 1773, when those original Tea Partiers gathered to toss bales of tea into the harbor.
Let's imagine that they listened to the Tory gazettes informing them that their anger was irrational and misplaced and that only barbarians and spoiled children vent their spleens with such theatrics as tea dumping:
"Stout yeomen, our good King George has a plan! He's not mad. He needs your money to pay for much-needed programs, like government leechings for everyone!
"Access to quality leeches is a right of all Englishmen! And the king cannot afford a tax cut! Are you so blinded by your rage that you can't understand? The king cannot afford a tax cut!"
What if the original Tea Partiers wiped off that Indian war paint and went home? There would have been no tea polluting Boston Harbor. And we wouldn't have a Congress.
But we'd have a House of Lords, wouldn't we?
Sure, it's tough picturing U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-Ethically Challenged, snoozing on that beach chair in a powdered wig, but try.
Don't be angry. Uncle Feds doesn't like it. It's so much nicer to be calm and rational
Saga of Uncle Feds explains voter anger
John Kass
When the Democrats were poised to win the national elections two short years ago, the media took notice of all the hope wafting across America.
There was even hope in Berlin, and Americans were told to be encouraged about the huge crowds of Germans gathering to approve all that hope coming to the U.S.
Hope and change, yes we can!
Hoffen und aenderen, ja wir koennen!
But now, with the economy still in the tank and unemployment hovering around 10 percent, and with Republicans poised to make big gains in the November midterm elections, the media is consumed with a different theme.
We're no longer talking hope. These days, the election is framed as one of anger and rage against the federal government.
And since we've been taught that anger is irrational, doesn't it follow that anger aimed at the government is also irrational? Who wants to be mocked as irrational?
Surely, those with a brain can see the Orwellian logic in all of this — or is that Axelrodian logic?
"When people are angry, they want to focus on their anger," said Democrat and Vice President Joe Biden a few days ago, proving my point. "If this is a referendum on anger, we lose. If this is a referendum on choice, we're going to win."
A few days ago, a reporter for one of the national TV networks stopped by the Tribune to ask me the big anger question: Where does it all come from?
So I told him one of my favorite stories. Some of you know it as the saga of Uncle Feds.
Uncle Feds is the big fat fellow who crashes on your couch. He's been there for years and years. He demands roasts and chops, devouring whatever he can find in your refrigerator. And when you're out working long hours, Uncle Feds sits on the couch ordering pay-per-view movies.
He was plenty big before all that hope and change. But in the last two years, Uncle Feds has become so incredibly large that his bulk defies description.
And while he eats, you begin to realize that you don't have enough cash to fix that hole in your shoe, let alone think about college tuition for the kids.
So one night at dinner, Uncle Feds brings up the subject of your family's financial problems. In a rational, calm and hopeful voice, he tells you that yes, the economy is lousy, but that you must stop worrying.
"Don't be angry," says Uncle Feds with a mouthful of rare beef. "Don't focus on your anger. Don't worry about a darned thing. I've just solved all your cash shortage problems."
Your wife gives you one of those startled looks.
"Uncle Feds!" she says, "Just what have you done?"
"Well, I've just taken out a second mortgage on your house," says Uncle Feds. "Your cash-flow worries are over."
If your life were a TV sitcom, the producer would cue the laugh track. A trombone would play that "wah-wah-wah" music, and you'd hit your forehead with your palm, saying "Oh, Uncle Feds!"
But real life is not a sitcom. There is no laugh track, except for the one in your head when you're in the voting booth.
Unfortunately, the TV people thought my Uncle Feds story too complicated for their report on anger, and that kind of made me angry.
So to soothe myself, I reached for a calming government report from the Social Security Administration released last week. Officials studied where some $13 billion in federal stimulus payments went.
The officials were pleased that most of the money went to the right folks. But 71,688 federal stimulus checks were sent to dead people. And 17,348 jail or prison inmates also received checks, perhaps to help stimulate the prison economies.
As for the $22.3 million of your cash that went to prisoners and dead people? Oh, well.
It's only tens of millions. That was a big number once, remember? Then billions were considered big. Then hundreds of billions. But hundreds of billions are so … 2008.
We're into the trillions now. And if you're angry that our White House and Congress are spending money we don't have, well, then, you might just be acting irrationally.
It makes you wonder what would have happened back in Boston in 1773, when those original Tea Partiers gathered to toss bales of tea into the harbor.
Let's imagine that they listened to the Tory gazettes informing them that their anger was irrational and misplaced and that only barbarians and spoiled children vent their spleens with such theatrics as tea dumping:
"Stout yeomen, our good King George has a plan! He's not mad. He needs your money to pay for much-needed programs, like government leechings for everyone!
"Access to quality leeches is a right of all Englishmen! And the king cannot afford a tax cut! Are you so blinded by your rage that you can't understand? The king cannot afford a tax cut!"
What if the original Tea Partiers wiped off that Indian war paint and went home? There would have been no tea polluting Boston Harbor. And we wouldn't have a Congress.
But we'd have a House of Lords, wouldn't we?
Sure, it's tough picturing U.S. Rep. Charlie Rangel, D-Ethically Challenged, snoozing on that beach chair in a powdered wig, but try.
Don't be angry. Uncle Feds doesn't like it. It's so much nicer to be calm and rational
Last edited:
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
Democrats hurting business, economy
October 15, 2010
BY STEVE HUNTLEY
Gesturing toward the magnificent steel, glass and concrete towers of Chicago's Loop during a conversation with the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board, Mayor Daley noted that "almost 95 percent" of the skyscrapers were private-sector constructions. Then he declared this self-evident truth: "I don't think Democrats realize how important business is to our economy and to our cities."
While Democrats have long struggled under the mantle of being anti-business, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have acted as if they're not particularly bothered by it. They pushed tax and fee increases, imposed new regulations through thousand-plus page bills and bureaucratic fiat and bashed Wall Street, bankers, insurers and other businesses that dared question their agenda.
Democrats talk a good game about small business, but actions speak louder than words. Obama and the Democrats are pushing a tax increase that would hit 50 percent of small enterprise income and their massive health-care law saddles business with a flood of tax-filing paperwork for expenditures as low as $601.
Such government meddling in the economy and the threat of more have injected so much uncertainty into economic planning that businesses small and large are hesitant to invest until they get a clearer picture of the tax and regulatory environment. Democratic policies haven't reduced unemployment. Their stimulus did more to protect government jobs than lay the foundation for robust private-sector job creation.
It's no wonder that an alarmed business community is pushing back this election cycle, funneling campaign contributions to candidates and independent groups rallying around a pro-growth and jobs-creation agenda.
The White House response has been again to demonize its opponents. Obama accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of using foreign money to fund campaign activities -- a criminal act. The basis for this accusation? An unsubstantiated allegation on a left-wing blog. Recall how Democrats lambasted Republicans for taking their lead from Rush Limbaugh? Well, here's the president of the United States passing along an outrageous, unfounded bit of Internet character assassination.
An independent watchdog group, FactCheck.org, said there was "no evidence" backing this charge, as did several major media outlets not known for Republican leanings, such as the New York Times.
When challenged about the weakness of the accusation on the CBS program "Face the Nation," presidential adviser David Axelrod said, "Well, do you have any evidence it's not true?" In other words, the chamber is guilty of a crime until proved innocent. Thank you for your lesson on American civics, Mr. Axelrod. As the FactCheck organization notes, others such as the extreme left-wing group MoveOn.org have followed Axelrod's unscrupulous tactic.
The fact is that liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican groups take money under rules that don't require them to reveal donors. Some, like the chamber and the big unions, do collect contributions from foreign sources but don't use them for U.S. electioneering.
The Democrats are raising this red herring in a desperate attempt to distract the voters from their failed economic policies, the 9.6 percent unemployment rate, slowing GDP growth and the vastly unpopular ObamaCare.
Obama, with a background in community organizing, the university classroom and politics, staffed his administration mostly with like-minded folks with little business background. It's too bad -- for the economy as well as his current political predicament -- that Obama, during his time in Chicago, didn't learn from Daley a fuller appreciation of the vital role of business in a vibrant economy.
October 15, 2010
BY STEVE HUNTLEY
Gesturing toward the magnificent steel, glass and concrete towers of Chicago's Loop during a conversation with the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board, Mayor Daley noted that "almost 95 percent" of the skyscrapers were private-sector constructions. Then he declared this self-evident truth: "I don't think Democrats realize how important business is to our economy and to our cities."
While Democrats have long struggled under the mantle of being anti-business, President Obama and the Democratic Congress have acted as if they're not particularly bothered by it. They pushed tax and fee increases, imposed new regulations through thousand-plus page bills and bureaucratic fiat and bashed Wall Street, bankers, insurers and other businesses that dared question their agenda.
Democrats talk a good game about small business, but actions speak louder than words. Obama and the Democrats are pushing a tax increase that would hit 50 percent of small enterprise income and their massive health-care law saddles business with a flood of tax-filing paperwork for expenditures as low as $601.
Such government meddling in the economy and the threat of more have injected so much uncertainty into economic planning that businesses small and large are hesitant to invest until they get a clearer picture of the tax and regulatory environment. Democratic policies haven't reduced unemployment. Their stimulus did more to protect government jobs than lay the foundation for robust private-sector job creation.
It's no wonder that an alarmed business community is pushing back this election cycle, funneling campaign contributions to candidates and independent groups rallying around a pro-growth and jobs-creation agenda.
The White House response has been again to demonize its opponents. Obama accused the U.S. Chamber of Commerce of using foreign money to fund campaign activities -- a criminal act. The basis for this accusation? An unsubstantiated allegation on a left-wing blog. Recall how Democrats lambasted Republicans for taking their lead from Rush Limbaugh? Well, here's the president of the United States passing along an outrageous, unfounded bit of Internet character assassination.
An independent watchdog group, FactCheck.org, said there was "no evidence" backing this charge, as did several major media outlets not known for Republican leanings, such as the New York Times.
When challenged about the weakness of the accusation on the CBS program "Face the Nation," presidential adviser David Axelrod said, "Well, do you have any evidence it's not true?" In other words, the chamber is guilty of a crime until proved innocent. Thank you for your lesson on American civics, Mr. Axelrod. As the FactCheck organization notes, others such as the extreme left-wing group MoveOn.org have followed Axelrod's unscrupulous tactic.
The fact is that liberal and conservative, Democratic and Republican groups take money under rules that don't require them to reveal donors. Some, like the chamber and the big unions, do collect contributions from foreign sources but don't use them for U.S. electioneering.
The Democrats are raising this red herring in a desperate attempt to distract the voters from their failed economic policies, the 9.6 percent unemployment rate, slowing GDP growth and the vastly unpopular ObamaCare.
Obama, with a background in community organizing, the university classroom and politics, staffed his administration mostly with like-minded folks with little business background. It's too bad -- for the economy as well as his current political predicament -- that Obama, during his time in Chicago, didn't learn from Daley a fuller appreciation of the vital role of business in a vibrant economy.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/07/07/copyright-explained-i-may-copy-it-right/
"Copyright in the Web: An Overview
1. Copyright applies to the Web.
2. Your work is protected under copyright as soon as it’s created and protected for your lifetime, plus 70 years.
3. Copyright expires. When copyright expires, the work becomes public domain.
4. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, only the result tangible expression of the idea can. (updated)
5. You may use logos and trademarks in your works.
6. You may use copyrighted material under the “fair use” doctrine.
7. You may quote only limited portions of work. You may publish excerpts, not whole articles.
8. You have to ask author’s permission to translate his/her article.
9. The removal of the copyrighted material doesn’t remove the copyright infringement.
10. If something looks copyrighted, you should assume it is. (updated)
11. Advertising protected material without an agreement is illegal.
12. You may not always delete or modify your visitors’ comments.
13. User generated content is the property of the users.
14. Copyright is violated by using information, not by charging for it.
15. Getting explicit permission can save you a lot of trouble."
"Copyright in the Web: An Overview
1. Copyright applies to the Web.
2. Your work is protected under copyright as soon as it’s created and protected for your lifetime, plus 70 years.
3. Copyright expires. When copyright expires, the work becomes public domain.
4. Ideas can’t be copyrighted, only the result tangible expression of the idea can. (updated)
5. You may use logos and trademarks in your works.
6. You may use copyrighted material under the “fair use” doctrine.
7. You may quote only limited portions of work. You may publish excerpts, not whole articles.
8. You have to ask author’s permission to translate his/her article.
9. The removal of the copyrighted material doesn’t remove the copyright infringement.
10. If something looks copyrighted, you should assume it is. (updated)
11. Advertising protected material without an agreement is illegal.
12. You may not always delete or modify your visitors’ comments.
13. User generated content is the property of the users.
14. Copyright is violated by using information, not by charging for it.
15. Getting explicit permission can save you a lot of trouble."
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
I'll give Eric Holder my address. He can come and get me whenever its convenient for him.
Actually, I'm probably on his "bad" list already. I critisized the administration a couple times.
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Frisco_Slug_Esq
On Strike!
- Joined
- May 4, 2009
- Posts
- 45,618
Firespin's on a crusade...
It beats the hell out of reason, logic and conversation.
He wants discussion points to be limited to cherry-picked stats and out of context graphs and charts.
He's about three months from his "I'm leaving Lit forever;" once they get to lashing out out at the people most like them, you know they're about to announce their "Wright-in" candidacy...
It's really funny, on one hand he keeps admonishing, "DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO CHANGE ANY MINDS ON A MINOR, UNIMPORTANT, UNREAD PORN BOARD?" to, "Dude, the authors are going to get so wadded (just like me) to know you're violating copyright law and it like, makes you look so stupid..."
In fact 49% of the people not polled who have never even read any of the c&p's posted seem to agree with me, if you turn your monitor a bit sideways and squint when you look at the groupings...
And I always credit the source: Partisan Link.
It beats the hell out of reason, logic and conversation.
He wants discussion points to be limited to cherry-picked stats and out of context graphs and charts.
He's about three months from his "I'm leaving Lit forever;" once they get to lashing out out at the people most like them, you know they're about to announce their "Wright-in" candidacy...
It's really funny, on one hand he keeps admonishing, "DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING TO CHANGE ANY MINDS ON A MINOR, UNIMPORTANT, UNREAD PORN BOARD?" to, "Dude, the authors are going to get so wadded (just like me) to know you're violating copyright law and it like, makes you look so stupid..."
In fact 49% of the people not polled who have never even read any of the c&p's posted seem to agree with me, if you turn your monitor a bit sideways and squint when you look at the groupings...
And I always credit the source: Partisan Link.
Frisco is on a creative writing kick again. (At least he's not cutting and pasting in that post.)
It's just fun to see the excuses y'all attempt to sell to justify mechanical copying of something already on the internet.
"It's not against the rules."
"It's not plagiarism."
"It's not a copyright violation."
"The author likes it."
"A lot of people like to read this stuff."
"I just want to see what people have to think about it."
"Fuck you, I'll do what I damn well please."
Posting a link is even easier than cutting and pasting, is consistent with the rules, and makes the source clear. I figure anybody who can't figure that out and insists on posting the whole article is already worried that their message is so weak nobody would even click on their link.
It's just fun to see the excuses y'all attempt to sell to justify mechanical copying of something already on the internet.
"It's not against the rules."
"It's not plagiarism."
"It's not a copyright violation."
"The author likes it."
"A lot of people like to read this stuff."
"I just want to see what people have to think about it."
"Fuck you, I'll do what I damn well please."
Posting a link is even easier than cutting and pasting, is consistent with the rules, and makes the source clear. I figure anybody who can't figure that out and insists on posting the whole article is already worried that their message is so weak nobody would even click on their link.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
From Charles Krauthammer today. See, it's short and sweet (there's more online).
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
What will happen after the election?
mercury14
Pragmatic Metaphysician
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2009
- Posts
- 22,158
No actually Firespin pointed our what idiots you guys are for your C&P spam that you think passes as making an intelligent point. Apparently people on the right (especially ReichField) can't make a point in their own words.
Looking around here this morning I see that Rightfield copy & pasted about twenty full articles onto Lit across a number of threads (violating copyright laws every time). I'm not sure I've ever seen something as weak as this around here.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,361
Many of them I wrote myself. I'm glad that you can't tell the difference. Why are you so intent on ridiculing your debate partners? Are you afraid that there's nothing convincing that you have to say so you have to resort to elementary school critisizms.
You once said you were a Doctor. You don't have the maturity of thought nor a writing style beyond a third-rate education to be able to credibly make that claim. Why don't you give a try to letting your thought and points stand on their own without the puerile verbal pugilistics.
mercury14
Pragmatic Metaphysician
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2009
- Posts
- 22,158
One who relies on spammed C&P's and violates copyrights like it's his job, shouldn't criticize others for lack of original thought. Glass houses and all...
