I know this is a repeat, but it pretty much sums up my thoughts, in part my own, in part by the thoughts of others to demonstrate many, (not totally all) of my thoughts through theirs. I know who I want as a president and why. I would hope others would not simply "side-up", but vote based on what is available for them to find in their search for the truth, IF the care enough about looking for the truth and taking the time to look for it. Although it is tempting and I have fallen into that tempatation, IF we are to either criticize others or try to convince others to our side, disrespect for those others may not feel disrespect for does not seem a logical way to change their mind. If we try (and I know it is difficult) to not reduce ourselves to the same level (use of distortions of the names of those we oppose, but others may still respect) of those we oppose based on their level of conduct, then we can reduce, to some measure, our hypocrisy.
I can't call someone a thief while I am picking their pocket.
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Shouldn't we all be asking these basic questions in order to gain perspective, relativity and comparison to the current administration and what they have done?
The economy was what when Bush entered office? It was what when he left office?
The economy was what When Obama took office, it is what now?
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/Documents/20120229_EssentialEcon.PDF
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/US-Economy/Pages/default.aspx#crisis
'The bursting of the dot-com bubble may have played an important role in the slow growth of 2001 and 2002, but to be fair, the technology sector’s crash wasn’t the fault of Bush 43. The one-year lag gives the recession to Clinton. On the other hand, Clinton bequeathed to Bush 43 a huge fiscal gift: The debt as a percentage of GDP steadily fell from 1996 through the recession year of 2001, to 56.4 percent from 67.1 percent. That’s an improvement of 10.7 percentage points.'
"Comparisons have been made between the economy Reagan inherited and the one Obama inherited, with some claiming Reagan was dealt the worse hand. True, Reagan had to cope with high inflation and high interest rates and Obama didn’t, but other than those two indicators, the economy Obama took on was significantly worse."
"For example, Reagan inherited a national debt at the end of Carter’s last budget (1981) of only 32.5 percent of GDP. Obama inherited a national debt of 85.2 percent of GDP in 2009, including debt owed by the U.S. Treasury to the Social Security trust fund and other intergovernmental obligations. With the economy still spiraling down, debt was rapidly climbing. Obama had far less maneuvering room than Reagan did to jump-start the economy. In addition, Bush 43 left Obama with 9.3 percent unemployment, while Carter left Reagan a 7.6 percent jobless rate. Bush handed Obama an economy in steep decline, with GDP decreasing 3.5 percent. Reagan came to office with GDP growing 2.5 percent, a 6 percentage point difference in growth rates."
"Looking at Obama’s performance in the context of his inheritance, his record is respectable. Obama’s score is 79 points higher than that of Bush 43, greater than the difference in scores between second and sixth place in the presidential rankings, and comparable to the margin between Reagan and Carter."
"Under Obama, the federal budget as a share of GDP shrank by 1.1 percentage points, compared with Bush 43’s increase of 7 percentage points. Obama so far has the lowest tax revenue as a share of GDP, at 15.3 percent, and the largest reduction in real interest rates of 3.5 percentage points. He also has better stock-market growth -- 5.5 percent against 1.9 percent for Bush -- and a reduction in the unemployment rate of 1.2 percentage points versus the second largest increase under Bush of 4.5 percentage points."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...conomic-legacy-is-his-successor-s-burden.html
Written in 2003:
"Over the course of the 1980's, under the influence of this revolution, what grew most was federal debt, from 26 to 42 percent of G.D.P. During the next decade, Republican leaders became less conditional in their advocacy. Since 2001, the fiscal strategizing of the party has ascended to a new level of fiscal irresponsibility. For the first time ever, a Republican leadership in complete control of our national government is advocating a huge and virtually endless policy of debt creation."
"The numbers are simply breathtaking. When President George W. Bush entered office, the 10-year budget balance was officially projected to be a surplus of $5.6 trillion -- a vast boon to future generations that Republican leaders ''firmly promised'' would be committed to their benefit by, for example, prefinancing the future cost of Social Security. Those promises were quickly forgotten. A large tax cut and continued spending growth, combined with a recession, the shock of 9/11 and the bursting of the stock-market bubble, pulled that surplus down to a mere $1 trillion by the end of 2002. Unfazed by this turnaround, the Bush administration proposed a second tax-cut package in 2003 in the face of huge new fiscal demands, including a war in Iraq and an urgent ''homeland security'' agenda. By midyear, prudent forecasters pegged the 10-year fiscal projection at a deficit of well over $4 trillion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/magazine/08WWLN.html?pagewanted=all
Written in 2006:
"The federal government and the U.S. economy face a looming debt crisis. The budget procedures and commitment to fiscal discipline that helped bring down the federal budget deficit and boost national saving in the 1990s have been abandoned. Deficits and debt are rising once again, as they were in the 1980s, and national saving has declined sharply.
Without a serious commitment to the budget principles and procedures that worked to restore fiscal discipline in the1990s, the U.S. economy faces consequences likely to include growth stunting increases in interest rates and possibly an international financial crisis. Symbolic gestures such as a line-item veto or unrealistic budget targets will almost surely fail again as they failed in the 1980s."
http://www.jec.senate.gov/archive/Documents/Reports/debtandtaxes2006.pdf
Written just recently:
"Thirty years of Republican apostasy — a once grand party’s embrace of the welfare state, the warfare state and the Wall Street-coddling bailout state — have crippled the engines of capitalism and buried us in debt. Mr. Ryan’s sonorous campaign rhetoric about shrinking Big Government and giving tax cuts to “job creators” (read: the top 2 percent) will do nothing to reverse the nation’s economic decline and arrest its fiscal collapse. "
"Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/opinion/paul-ryans-fairy-tale-budget-plan.html
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So there are a number of thoughts, all with a similar warning and similar discussion about what have become the "New" (neo) republican policies over the last 30 years, increase defense spending, tax cuts and blame someone else for the deficits caused by them.
The same ole complaint about "tax and spend" Democrats no longer seems to carry much weight when placed next to the spend-and-spend-and-don't-tax-to-pay-for-it or Run-A-Tab (RAT) spending policies of the republican party of the last 3 decades. Taxing to pay for spending begins to look good when combined with cutting out unnecessary spending, spending on things that act as seed money for growth and economic health so that there is payback for the spending. There is dubious if any payback for defense spending beyond the huge outlays for initial contracts and even those prove that tax revenue does create jobs through government contracts. WWII defense spending was massive and involved much of the nation, people sacrificed a "free market" and access to goods and services for the war effort.
What is better known as the GI Bill expanded college level education for a huge number of Americans and that helped spur on home ownership and more people attaining the goal of what was once a much more modest "American Dream" as opposed to the American Dream on steroids or perhaps what one might call the American Nightmare of unbridled ruthless greed and worship of material wealth and the inevitable collapses caused by such that wise sages and religious tenets have warned about since the dawn of recorded human philosophy.
Will that nightmare, will those steroids be purged from our system so we can get back closer to center with a balanced and healthy gap between the top incomes and the bottom with a solid middle so people can move from the bottom to the top or will we go right back to a widening gap with a middle that has fallen into the abyss, more and more concentrated wealth and a feudal order where the bottom is deprived of ownership of any kind, pushed out by having to take lower and lower wages and benefits in order to simply keep a job?
At what point does the cost of getting to work and putting a child in day care make working an expense rather than a paycheck someone can then buy food with, much less shelter and some manner of care for their health should they fall sick???? What kind of choices does that leave them with for sending their children to something OTHER than a public school for education when they come of age to start school??
People speak of how terrible communism is and we have seen that communism has pretty much burned itself out as it is difficult to have a classless society when right away, there becomes a class that is responsible for enforcing a classless society. The other side of communism is feudalism or something more akin to monarchies, empires and all the slave labor that funnels wealth and riches to a relative few at the top.
The founders of this nation had many long discussions and debates about how best to balance out the interests of all people so that NONE has suppressive power over the others and all because they had studied and witnesses human nature and knew what humans were disposed of when it came to leaving them totally to their own devices without any sort of government to balance out injustices. They sorted out the difficult concept of the suggestion that people should be as free as possible, BUT knowing what people have done and are likely to do without guidelines, sought to provide a means for guidelines, BUT guidelines set by those that will be subjected to them. They believed the only way to do that would be to allow all interests to have an equal chance at an equal say in what the guidelines would be so that all the poor people weren't outlawing all the wealthy people and all the wealthy people weren't supressing and taking advantage of all the poor people, that minorities of people based on things they had no control over, like skin color would not be suppressed based on those things and that some sort of civil order was called for.
If one studies their conversations and debates, aristocracy, money and power are brought up innumerable times and always considered as a means of influence and suppression IF unbalanced by the interests of those who would be suppressed by them. They did not speak of a means to eliminate wealth, only of a means to balance out those who would use their wealth as a means of power and influence to suppress and control others and to do so in perpetuity.
Will the system they devised to not allow that to happen and to balance the interests of the non-wealthy with the wealthy work?????
November may be one of the biggest tests of that this nation has known since its founding, but for the era leading into the Great Depression. One has to remember, many of the founders were well educated men of means, many with very intelligent and wise spouses and the "don't tread on me" was not about a republic with a democratically elected government, but about a monarchy. Many could have simply thrown off the monarchy and adopted an oligarchy or aristocracy and completely ignore the rights and interest of the "common man" or the common wealth. They didn't and we shouldn't allow wealth to become such an influence and power that those who possess the greatest amounts of it suppress and take advantage of all those who do not possess it.
"Men with the muckrake are often indispensable to the well-being of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck." "An epidemic in indiscriminate assault upon character does not good, but very great harm." "There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful."
-Theodore Roosevelt - Washington, DC, April 14, 1906
