Dear Scumbria:
Re: "BTW: Bush's Star Wars will likely provoke other kinds of ugly terrorist actions. Why engage in such inflammatory actions for a useless, expensive, jerk-off boondoggle?"
That was what they claimed about Reagan Star Wars. It accomplished one major task that you have yet to give credit where it is due, the elimination of the USSR. That is probably worth many trillions of dollars.
Re: "Reagan wasted enormous amounts of money on stupid projects like Star Wars, the Ronnie Raygun SuperConducting Mushroom Farm, debt interest payments, etc."
Clinton wasted just as many on 100,00 for this and 100,000 for that for no real benefit. He sold out trillions of dollars of research for some few millions for Democratic election campaigns including his own. As for real waste, you only need to look at Johnson's welfare boondongles. Heck, we paid $40,000 per poor family for years and what did it get us or them? They are even more poor (and more of them) than were at that time. All of the incentives were to stay on the program and all the disincentives were to do the thing it purports to assist them to.
Hey, $40K per poor family would place them in middle class directly by giving them some useful job and paying them directly (they cleverly hid it by making 400 programs dole out a little each (more government, more bureaucracy, more control)). At least we could have gotten something useful from it by the labor given for the money.
We in Wisconsin proved that much of those welfare cases could be successfully returned to work once we reversed the incentives. Yes it cost more in the short run, but incentives are only needed to get the ball rolling. Soon, we were saving enough to reduce spending to levels not seen before the Johnson administration. All the Democrats have proved that just throwing money at a problem does not make it better, it just makes it worse. You must first pay to understand the problem, create theories on how to fix it, perform trials to see it the theories work, and most importantly determine that when the trial is a bust, stop it (terminate funding (something the government seems to be very bad at (unless it is championed by the "other" side))) and try a new set. Repeat as necessary until, the problem is solved and then spread the working program countrywide.
BTW, what is your opinion about Clinton's last days in office? He seems to have shown his true colors. Pardoned out and out thiefs and wanted fugitives. Theft and vandalism. Did things by executive order that he knew would not be approved in Congress. Even members of his own party seem to want to disown him. "Any knowledge of him or his actions would be strongly denied by the ..." may become his legacy.
BTW II: Now you are continuing to "live on folklore and ignore the facts."
Pete |
