Reagan was the best thing that ever happened for my Family and others of wealth and ownership. For the average American, his policies single handedly dismantled the manufacturing sector of the economy by removing key protections, stagnating wages of the average worker who did NOT see any tax breaks at all, and the middle class at that point started to shrink in size. In the 90's we did see a surge under Clinton for the Middle Class, but with the current administration, the same policies under Reagan were put into high gear again, massive tax cuts and deficit spending. Neocons always bring up, "oh, it's the social programs", but that's chump change. The huge spending goes to the Pentagon and Defense spending, which is out of control, ridiculously out of control, but these are the people that back the party.

The "conservative ideology" is only there to give the impression that the Conservatives are all inline together and strong, while the actual Conservative Republican Party memebers hardly follow any ideology at all, it's laughable. Like all other party memebers, they follow the dollar first.

The bottom line is, Neoconservatism is dying off, and as these older idtiots keep dying off in higher number, hopefully at faster and faster rates, and the Country gets a little browner, the landscape is going to look and feel vastly different in the next 20 to 30 years. I think we can all see a trend here, especially if the hispanic vote holds true with the Left, as it did in this election, and in 2006. The Republicans won't win another election in mass numbers ever again unless they can grab the latino vote, or make some major changes to the party platform. I hope to god they keep Palin in the spotlight and run her in 2012, it'll be an even bigger gap then it was with McCain.

As the President with the lowest apporval rating in modern history leaves office, it'll be fresh air for not only liberals, but moderates and dare I say so called conservatives as well. He'll no longer be up there with his administration embarring the party or the base, and more importantly, The Country.

You know what, I do miss my Republican days, voting my own interest...oh how times have changed over the years. I think Bush did a very important thing in the past years, he woke up the country in a big way, getting more people into politics then ever before. That's important. Fucking up the way he did, deficating on the Country by using the executive branch however he pleased, has no doubt made people aware of what a crazy son of bitch his party and like minded conservatives stand for.

I wonder if Paulson is getting any sleep. Well, at least under Bush, the rest of that tax payer money is in safe hands with plenty of oversight...what a fucking scam this was, and with no oppostion whatsoever, only a brave few on each side of the isle. The Democrats need to start growing a spine, the people gave them a mandate to govern with the majority rule, let's see if they can make things happen, or cave in to the right.

psychoak + karma, buddy.

no one ever learns, though, it's a tough fight.

I know this is an "off-topic" forum section, but what does this have to do with Sins?

Why don't you take this to "the Political Machine," makes more sense.

Politics is the #1 killer of conversations and starter of arguments; I know, I'm in politics.

OH, and Bush and McCain are NOT CONSERVATIVES! They're practically Democrats, in Rep clothing.

edit: Instead of arguing politics, let's help me on this thread: https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/329701 thanks

Jonnan001:

I think you understand what I'm talking about, but you didn't get my point.

Whether or not insurance premiums for legal protections are financially justified is immaterial.  Each minor case you file against MDs increases the collective fear of MDs that their own number is up.  It's not the fiscal sense of it that drives the premiums up - it's the fear and annoyance, and those are hardly ever consoled by reason.

If the entire populace wasn't so quick on the legal gun, MDs wouldn't even be paying for legal protection.

Oh, come on. The vast majority of the reading that fed my *avowedly sloppy* talk was by comfy, white academics. Lincoln's use of epithets plays no part in my view of him. It is part of my larger devotion to taking down US presidential hagiography, and a natural reaction to modern Republicans claiming some kind of bloody-shirt karma when they indeed became the new home of the billious spirit that Robert Byrd embraced and then *rejected* in substantive ways (NAACP recently gave him a 100% rating on their issues report card).

No president is a saint, or a demon. They're people, with strengths and weaknesses, who occupy the top seat in an increasingly dysfunctional part of our political system. I'm just as happy to see people take sloppy pot-shots at FDR as I am to take my own at Lincoln. All 43.5 of them need to be taken down quite a few damn notches.

Not quite. The attention grabbing fictions are just one technique in a toolkit for both art forms, and the techniques are useless without their real-world underpinnings. Games also rely on software design and/or a rules system. Politics also relies on physical force (cops & armies) and economic power (throwing around resources and/or funds).

I don't know what definition of conservative you use, but increasing spending and the size of government is not in my book conservative. It's unfortunate that the Republican congress let him loose like that, and more unfortunate that congress didn't hold him in check (seems they mostly gave up some of their duties granted to them by the constitution). As far as having a Republican congress, I do wish it had been Democrat controled for Bush as well. Though in my opinion the parties differ very little, they (congress and the president) would have made each other more ineffective.

Democrat, Republican, I don't care at this point they all need to wake up and realize that dumping dollars into this system is going to hurt us in the end. They need to be more responsible and stop spending dollars like they're going out of style (which they if we continue on the current pace).

If anybody wants to check out the budget figures (unless Obama changes them, which he is likely to do), they are here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2009/budget.html

Wow - people are actually saying that about Lincoln ?

So these days we are filling our books with hatred for our historical figures?

Who needs it to cost more, just the estimates on his medicare reforms are a fucking nightmare.

I guess I'm very confused by how one can be confused by that.

Umm, if there was a way of lowering taxes on the rich without either

A: Raising taxes on the, ah 'not rich'

B: Incurring heavier debt, or

C: Cutting government spending,

Then your statement would make sense. But economics being a zero sum game, there's not.

Reagan raised Taxes on everyone else and incurred a heavier deficit. - Two-fe.

As for helping the economy and so on - That's one of those "Neat to believe, doesn't stand up to scrutiny" deals. It's been tried - it failed. We cut the taxes for the wealthy everytime a Reupublican gets elected, yet the economy does worse under Republicans, consistently.

Jonnan

quote who="Jonnan001" reply="15" id="1939551"]Umm - yeah - Reagan far outstripped the Republican congress.[/quote]

or rather the Democratic congress and Reagan. say what you will about Reagan, Clinton, Dubya, etc. The President does not really control the agenda of the federal government. If you didn't sleep through Civics I, you'd know that: the Congress passes bills, and the President then either signs them into law or vetoes them. The President can "set" the agenda by proposing bills for Congress, but that may or may not go well for him, depending on whos in the majority there.

Reagan had the dumb luck of having a tax and spend Congress, ... he was able get a compromise from them on the tax part though.

OT, another example of this would be Clinton's terms. after 1994, Republicans took control of Congress, and for the next 6 years, Clinton had to play centrist in order to get anything done. (Believe it or not, Clinton was NOT a centrist. at least at first. he's what we'd call a political opportunist.)

Reagan inherited Carter's disasterous economy. If you take a crap sandwich and after 8 years turn it into gold, don't be surprized if the average of that taken over that time is mediocre.

Sure... Volker helped eliminate stagflation.... by clamping down on the money supply and therefore bringing on a recession. In fairness, some of the recovery was the result of the Carter administration. ....that is, Carter's move to cut the capital gains rate from 40% to 25% and some deregulation, for example. IOW, whatever recovery Reagan inherited was from *conservative* policies that Carter employed, too little too late.

ahh, so how shall i go about unravelling this mess?

first off, do you understand what inflation is? by the end of Carter's term, inflation was 13.5%. unemployment was 7%. how much is your typical pay raise, every year? maybe 5%, or 10%? Imagine you weren't getting a raise this year. right now i'm sure that's a realistic feeling. now, imagine that over the same amount of time, the dollar bill that is in your pocket lost value. can you imagine how that would reak havoc on your essential expenses? every year, groceries, heating, rent, etc. would be 10% - 12% more expensive, and yet assuming you didn't get laid off your paycheck wasn't getting much bigger. how much hurt do *you* think that would do?

you see, to use your own term, that dollar in your pocket *is* "everyones credit card." this is kind of a hard concept to graps, but really, all money is ultimately debt. every dollar bill that is printed is a dollar of debt added to the national debt. this is because there is no value in the dollar bill itself. it's just ink and paper. really fancy ink and paper to be sure, but if you went to Alpha Centauri to buy something, they wouldn't except it as payment, since ink and paper is presumably worthless to them. the value ascribed to each dollar (whether it be paper or electronic) is imaginary. it's funny money. the problem is, there's only a finite amount of value in the economy, so whenever a dollar is made up of thin air, the value of that dollar has to be exacted out of the value of the rest of the dollars in the economy. hence, inflation. and you can't print money to infinity, like Zimbabwe tried to do. at one point, you couldn't buy a sandwich without a billion Zimbabwe dollars!!! and don't be suprized when this bailout package (basically $750B made up out of thin air) drives the economy absolutely batty.

anyways, i'll stop rambling. you seem to fall for relativist, and IMO fallacious, reading of poverty. if a rich guy made a $100 googleplex dollars, but everyone else made a million dollars, and assuming the costs of living were the same, would you suppose that anyone was poor? you would have to, if you took the relative view, since a millionare *would* be "impoverished" compared to the ... umm... googolplexianare? if on the other hand, we look at an objective baseline to gauge poverty, like say the poverty line (and yes I know the poverty line is itself flawed, but its useful for the sake of example), we can determine that even though there might be financial inequality, poverty may or may not be as serious an issue. if you were a millionare, why would you care if i was an octillionaire? granted, if more and more people were falling below that baseline more every year, it's easy to sympathize with all the envy leveled against the "rich." but that hasn't been the case... even after adjusting for inflation, the average poor person was better under Reagan than Carter, as they were better under Clinton than Bush Sr. and at least until recently were better under Dubya.

another vague unrelated tangent, the poor in American really ain't that poor.

My god. Economics is ******not****** a zero-sum game. Do you understand at all what you mean by that?

here's a crash course in econ 101 for you idjuts. if the government sets the tax rate at 0%, it will get no revenue. if it's set at 100%, it will still get no revenue. this is because no one would work hard just to have all the fruits of there labor taken away. the Soviet Union fell people. you should know that by now.

just because you raise taxes doesn't mean you get more revenue, nor that lowering taxes lowers revenue. this is because people, corporations, and even community organizers anticipate the costs of work or doing business, and adjust depending on those costs. we are all speculators in a sense. and, tax is a cost. if a tax makes a business prohibitively expense, that business shuts down. you don't generate tax revenue from defunct companies. likewise, an existing tax can be so prohibitive, that lowering it actually stimilates taxable economic activity to the point where the government actually generates **more** revenue. we actually did that a couple of years under Dubya.

Reagan had to work with whatever was passed to him from Congress. you guys really need to stop treating the Presidency like it's some omnpotent god.

scrutiny? is that really what you call scrutiny? here's scrutiny. in after 9/11 and the Dot Com bust, Bush lead us out of a recession. sure the economy didn't chug along like it did under Clinton (and the Republican Congress he submitted to), but it was fair to good. then in 2006, Democrats take control of Congress, and suddenly we have scy rocketing oil prices and now this monstrosity of a mortgage/financial crisis. Obama is elected... not even President yet, and the Dow goes down 400 points. the market is voting on Obama's policy proposals with its money.

Anyone remember Clinton's first two years? anyone?

...

Really, "tax cuts for the wealthy" is liberal newspeak for a progrowth, pro-economy tax policy. sure wealthy people benefit from such tax cuts, but that's besides the point. have you ever worked for a poor man? i haven't. it takes money to pay workers. the average employee costs a company $40,000. per year. now, i don't know about you, but i don't have that kind of cash to just throw around. but investors do. rich people who privately own businesses do. and they are generous enough to give you some of that money if only you will do a fair 40 hours worth of work for them every week. you generate an income for them, and in return you get a portion of that income. sure, the government can come in, and just redistribute that money. but in so doing, the government takes wealth out of the economy that would otherwise create more jobs or fund pay raises. if a tax is so prohibitive that a company doesn't make a profit, that company has to cut expenses. remember that number i mentioned earlier? labor is the most expense cost, so guess what gets cut first. you and I. on the other hand, a probusiness tax policy frees up that wealth to be "redistributed" through the economy. in other words, the economy already does effectively what the government wrecklessly tries to do and fails.

this is economic fact. it's why the Soviet Union failed. it's why the Great Depression was such a great depression. FDR meddled in the economy, and only made it worse. Betcha your textbook never told you that.

Holy shit did this thread bring out the hayseeds. People actually think Reagan improved this Country? LOL...Please, to anyone thinking anything remotely in this direction, talk to world economists, not right wing think tank economists heard on Hannity or Fox, and you will get a univeral answer. Reagan was extremely successful in shifting the tax burden away from Business and the Wealthy, and onto the backs of the average American. It was a brilliant idea for those that benefited (thanks Ron) that actually worked, but was absolutey one of the worst policies in American history, esepecially for the average American. Clinton and the Democrats made it worse by following most of the same policies, not all of them, but passing the Conservative "Free Trade" policies with NAFTA, further dismantling the manufacturing base of the economy was a huge mistake. Surprisingly, even still, under Clinton, the average American did better under his presidency then both Reagan, Bush Sr. and Jr..

Remember, look into history and ask yoursellf this question, what happened shorty after EVERY tax cut that's ever been passed in this Country? Take a wild guess. A Reccession, and at one point, a Depression. We're in the condition right now not only becuase Gov spending has risen out of control under Conservatives in office(famous Conservative Deficit spending), but enormous tax cuts that were completely wreckless to the budget, especially in at a time of War when our Biggest Social Program, the Miliatary, went to work  on two Fronts. Talk about flat out dumb.

This is all very basic and simple to understand, but for some, they've been drinking the juice for so long, this is probably so disastrous to their conscience, it's demoralizing on a very personal level (as noted by some of the posts in this thread). Believing the lie of American Exceptionalism, the beacon of light, it's all BS. Bottom line, we're imperialists, plain and simple. The people in positions of power(Business and Government are one at this point, just read a little to figure this out) could give a shit about the population, so it's up to us to police this nonsense and push for what's best as whole, making comprimises here and there since it's just not practical for everyone to get their own personal interests taken into consideration. The general consensus is almost always overlooked by politicians. Problem is, there's too many uninformed out there, or badly misguided individuals, thanks in large part to talk radio, which is now finally losing steam and not catching on with the aging Gen X and Y'ers. A good thing now that the net dominates most information, and allows for a much better chance of getting several different positions and opinions, instead of a steady homogenous stream of one line thinking over the airwaves.

LOLZ...you know nothing about the sub prime lending mess, at all. The orginal intent of sub prime lending was a great idea, help people join the "ownership" class by easing the monthly burden, but still making them pay for property. The problem was, the program was NEVER intended for the middle class, it was intended for the lower classes, but the private companies jump all over it and sold it to the middle class, in mass numbers and sold and made a ton of money on BAD PAPER. The years it failed and came to ahead were between 2004 and 2007, when red flags starting popping up all over the place. The Democrats should have done more, they did make proposals, but the problem? The Republicans controlled all three branches of Government during this period, and were in the back pockets of most banking and lending intertests, mostly on the right but also on the left to keep most quiet. There's much blame, but it's was the conservatives fault in the end, they knew it, and allowed it to crash and burn, now we're all paying the price. Wake up and read.

And Palin? LOLOLOLOLZ