>>I sure hope the democraps run on this Bush lied crapola in 2004......
They will, jellydick. The emperor has no clothes, and it's time to show the truth about the lies.
A good place to start would be their turning a $5 trillion projected long term surplus into a $4 trillion long term deficit.
Along with his bankrupting the country, warmongering, transfer of wealth from j6p to the elite, and a hundred other things he's doing to wreck our country for all but the elite.
I wouldn't limit it to the past tense of the word "lie" so freely if I were you, either.
Here's a few more articles grabbed from the CFZ to show the growing awareness of the scum that the Republicrims have become (neocons and hard right wingers, that is. There are decent moderate repubs, though they seem to be a vanishing breed).
The reckoning is coming. Just like the 2000 Nasdaq crash, we know it's approaching. Just a matter of when, heh heh heh.
June 8, 2003
Deficits and Dysfunction
By PETER G. PETERSON
have belonged to the Republican Party all my life. As a Republican, I have served as a cabinet member
(once), a presidential commission member (three times), an all-purpose political ombudsman (many times)
and a relentless crusader whom some would call a crank (throughout). Among the bedrock principles that the
Republican Party has stood for since its origins in the 1850's is the principle of fiscal stewardship -- the idea
that government should invest in posterity and safeguard future generations from unsustainable liabilities. It is
a priority that has always attracted me to the party. At various times in our history (especially after wars),
Republican leaders have honored this principle by advocating and legislating painful budgetary retrenchment,
including both spending cuts and tax hikes.
Over the last quarter century, however, the Grand Old Party has abandoned these original convictions.
Without ever renouncing stewardship itself -- indeed, while talking incessantly about legacies, endowments,
family values and leaving ''no child behind'' -- the G.O.P. leadership has by degrees come to embrace the very
different notion that deficit spending is a sort of fiscal wonder drug. Like taking aspirin, you should do it
regularly just to stay healthy and do lots of it whenever you're feeling out of sorts.
With the arrival of Ronald Reagan in the White House, this idea was first introduced as part of an
extraordinary ''supply-side revolution'' in fiscal policy, needed (so the thinking ran) as a one-time fix for an
economy gripped by stagflation. To those who worried about more debt, they said, Relax, it won't happen --
we'll ''grow out of it.'' 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.
So there you have it: in just two years there was a $10 trillion swing in the deficit outlook. Coming into power,
the Republican leaders faced a choice between tax cuts and providing genuine financing for the future of
Social Security. (What a landmark reform this would have been!) They chose tax cuts. After 9/11, they faced a
choice between tax cuts and getting serious about the extensive measures needed to protect this nation
against further terrorist attacks. They chose tax cuts. After war broke out in the Mideast, they faced a choice
between tax cuts and galvanizing the nation behind a policy of future-oriented burden sharing. Again and
again, they chose tax cuts.
The recent $10 trillion deficit swing is the largest in American history other than during years of total war. With
total war, of course, you have the excuse that you expect the emergency to be over soon, and thus you'll be
able to pay back the new debt during subsequent years of peace and prosperity. Yet few believe that the major
drivers of today's deficit projections, not even the war on terror, are similarly short-term. Indeed, the biggest
single driver of the projections, the growing cost of senior entitlements, are certain to become much worse
just beyond the 10-year horizon when the huge baby-boom generation starts retiring in earnest. By the time
the boomer age wave peaks, workers will have to pay the equivalent of 25 to 33 percent of their payroll in
Social Security and Medicare before they retire just to keep those programs solvent.
Two facts left unmentioned in the deficit numbers cited above will help put the cost of the boomer retirement
into focus. First, the deficit projections would be much larger if we took away the ''trust-fund surplus'' we are
supposed to be dedicating to the future of Social Security and Medicare; and second, the size of this trust
fund, even if we were really accumulating it -- which we are not -- is dwarfed by the $25 trillion in total
unfinanced liabilities still hanging over both programs.
A longer time horizon does not justify near-term deficits. If anything, the longer-term demographics are an
argument for sizable near-term surpluses. As Milton Friedman once put it, if you cut taxes without cutting
spending, you aren't really reducing the tax burden at all. In fact, you're just pushing it off yourself and onto
your kids.
You might suppose that a reasoned debate over this deficit-happy policy would at least be admissible within
the ''discussion tent'' of the Republican Party. Apparently, it is not. I've seen Republicans get blackballed for
merely observing that national investment is limited by national savings; that large deficits typically reduce
national savings; or that higher deficits eventually trigger higher interest rates. I've seen others get pilloried for
picking on the wrong constituency -- for suggesting, say, that a tax loophole for a corporation or wealthy retiree
is no better, ethically or economically, than a dubious welfare program.
For some ''supply side'' Republicans, the pursuit of lower taxes has evolved into a religion, indeed a tax-cut
theology that simply discards any objective evidence that violates the tenets of the faith.
So long as taxes are cut, even dissimulation is allowable. A new Republican fad is to propose that tax cuts be
officially ''sunsetted'' in 2 or 5 or 10 years in order to minimize the projected revenue loss -- and then to go out
and tell supporters that, of course, the sunset is not to be taken seriously and that rescinding such tax cuts is
politically unlikely. Among themselves, in other words, the loudly whispered message is that a setting sun
always rises.
What's remarkable is how so many elected Republicans go along with the charade. The same Republican
senators who overwhelmingly approved (without a single nay vote) the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to crack down on
shady corporate accounting of investments worth millions of dollars see little wrong with turning around and
making utterly fraudulent pronouncements about tax cuts that will cost billions or, indeed, even trillions of
dollars.
For some Republicans, all this tax-cutting talk is a mere tactic. I know several brilliant and partisan
Republicans who admit to me, in private, that much of what they say about taxes is of course not really true.
But, they say, it's the only way to reduce government spending: chop revenue and trust that the Democrats,
like Solomon, will agree to cut spending rather than punish our children by smothering them with debt.
This clever apologia would be more believable if Republicans -- in all matters other than cutting the aggregate
tax burden -- were to speak loudly and act decisively in favor of deficit reductions. But it's hard to find the
small-government argument persuasive when, on the spending front, the Republican leaders do nothing to
reform entitlements, allow debt-service costs to rise along with the debt and urge greater spending on defense
-- and when these three functions make up over four-fifths of all federal outlays.
The starve-government-at-the-source strategy is not only hypocritical, it is likely to fail -- with great injury to the
young -- once the other party decides to raise the ante rather than play the sucker and do the right thing.
When the Democratic presidential contender Dick Gephardt proposed in April a vast new national health
insurance plan, he justified its cost, which critics put at more than $2 trillion over 10 years, by suggesting that
we ''pay'' for it by rescinding most of the administration's tax legislation. Oddly, it never occurred to these
Republican strategists that two can play the spend-the-deficit game.
Not surprisingly, many Democrats have thrown a spotlight on the Republicans' irresponsible obsession with
tax cutting in order to improve their party's image with voters, even to the extent of billing themselves as
born-again champions of fiscal responsibility. Though I welcome any newcomers to the cause of genuine
fiscal stewardship,
I doubt that the Democratic Party as a whole is any less dysfunctional than the Republican Party. It's just
dysfunctional in a different way.
Yes, the Republican Party line often boils down to cutting taxes and damning the torpedoes. And yes, by
whipping up one-sided popular support for lower taxes, the Republicans pre-empt responsible discussion of
tax fairness and force many Democrats to echo weakly, ''Me, too.'' But it's equally true that the Democratic
Party line often boils down to boosting outlays and damning the torpedoes. Likewise, Democrats regularly
short-circuit any prudent examination of the single biggest spending issue, the future of senior entitlements, by
castigating all reformers as heartless Scrooges.
I have often and at great length criticized the free-lunch games of many Republican reform plans for Social
Security -- like personal accounts that will be ''funded'' by deficit-financed contributions. But at least they
pretend to have reform plans. Democrats have nothing. Or as Bob Kerrey puts it quite nicely, most of his
fellow Democrats propose the ''do-nothing plan,'' a blank sheet of paper that essentially says it is O.K. to cut
benefits by 26 percent across the board when the money runs out. Assuming that Democrats would feel
genuine compassion for the lower-income retirees, widows and disabled parents who would be most affected
by such a cut, I have suggested to them that maybe we ought to introduce an ''affluence test'' that reduces
benefits for fat cats like me.
To my amazement, Democrats angrily respond with irrelevant cliches like ''programs for the poor are poor
programs'' or ''Social Security is a social contract that cannot be broken.'' Apparently, it doesn't matter that the
program is already unsustainable. They cling to the mast and are ready to go down with the ship. To most
Democratic leaders, federal entitlements are their theology.
What exactly gave rise to this bipartisan flight from integrity and responsibility -- and when? My own theory, for
what it's worth, is that it got started during the ''Me Decade,'' the 1970's, when a socially fragmenting America
began to gravitate around a myriad of interest groups, each more fixated on pursuing and financing, through
massive political campaign contributions, its own agenda than on safeguarding the common good of the
nation. Political parties, rather than helping to transcend these fissures and bind the country together, instead
began to cater to them and ultimately sold themselves out.
I'm not sure what it will take to make our two-party system healthy again. I hope that in the search for a
durable majority, Republicans will sooner or later realize that it won't happen without coming to terms with
deficits and debts, and Democrats will likewise realize it won't happen for them without coming to terms with
entitlements.
Whether any of this happens sooner or later, of course, ultimately depends upon the voters. Perhaps we will
soon witness the emergence of a new and very different crop of young voters who are freshly engaged in
mainstream politics and will start holding candidates to a more rigorous and objective standard of integrity.
That would be good news indeed for the future of our parties.
In any case, I fervently hope that America does not have to drift into real trouble, either at home or abroad,
before our leaders get scared straight and stop playing chicken with one another. That's a risky course, full of
possible disasters. It's not a solution that a great nation like ours ought to be counting on.
Peter G. Peterson is chairman and co-founder of the Blackstone Group and chairman of the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York. He served as secretary of commerce under President Nixon.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to
Top
Doing What We Can't Help Doing
Fred Reed
fredoneverything.net
The Free Will Of A Newtonian Particle
March 24, 2003
Wars, like the political eruptions of teenagers, groan under the weight of moral justification: We are fighting to
protect ourselves, protect democracy, establish democracy, end atrocities, avenge former mistreatment,
dissuade dictators. We have to save something from something or for something. If we don't fight, this boogie
or that boogie will take over the world.
When you notice that all teenagers do the same things at the same time, you suspect that what is involved is
hormones. So with wars. Military adventures only seem to be about things. Really they are just military
adventures. We fight for the same reasons fish school and peacocks strut--because it's how we are.
You don't think so? Step back, look at the world on a scale of centuries, and it is obvious. History is one long
repetitive story of war. Start anywhere: The Old Testament, the Eddas, Homer. When the Greeks of classical
antiquity were not fighting Persians, they fought each other. The Romans fought everyone they could find and
often, when they needed a new emperor, each other. In the Middle Ages, knights fought as a hobby; when they
couldn't find anyone to fight seriously, they held tournaments and fought for sport.
Wars pass by in their thousands, The War of Spanish Succession, of Jenkins's Ear, of the Roses, of this and
that and practically everything. We're still doing it--everywhere, always, today, yesterday, tomorrow.
Why?
Because we are over-brained apes. Fighting is built into men (far less into women). Our instincts crave it.
Watch young males in a movie theater when Star Wars is playing. They will be on the edge of their seats,
leaning unconsciously with the maneuvering of the swirling space-fighters, adrenaline pumping, thinking "Get
him, get him, get him!"
It's how we are. Videogames, football, boxing, jousting, paintball, NASCAR, gladiatorial games, drag racing,
dueling, war, and bar fights are expressions of the same drive.
We fight as naturally, inevitably, and unthinkingly as dogs sorting out questions of territory. What is instinctive
seems so perfectly reasonable that we seldom ask whether it makes sense. Perhaps army ants believe they
are fighting for some forested virtue.
If you are male, and don't believe in instinct, find a big man with a pretty girlfriend, and put your hand on the
wrong part of her topography. Without reflection, he will arrange for you to make several mortgage payments
for your dentist. But why? You didn't harm her in the least. For that matter, how comfortable are you in a dark
forest when you hear something…moving? Even if you know it has to be a deer or a house dog?
Instinct rules us. Little girls left to themselves play house and care for dolls. Little boys form hunting packs. As
a kid of ten in a civilized suburb, I joined with my buddies to venture into farther suburbs unknown to us. We
had a distinct sense of venturing into alien and possibly hostile territory. When we encountered other kids,
there was a sizing up, a calculation of the odds, a question of whether to run, fight, or hang out. We were
unconsciously practicing for adulthood, like tussling puppies.
If people have an inbred desire to fight, so do they have an inbred moral sense. In the past a king could simply
strip the peasants of their provisions and ride off to put cities to the sword. What people thought didn't matter.
Today a modicum of support from the public is needed. In war, people do ghastly things that in time of peace
they regard as hideous. Comfortable folk unafraid will not readily approve. Thus lying is essential to war.
People must be frightened, enraged, or both.
It is easy to arrange. Half of the population is of below-average intelligence, four-fifths are not sure where the
enemy nation is, and fully ninety percent do not know what countries border on it. Further, people do not
handle abstractions well. Instead they personalize, confusing the enemy nation with its Evil Leader: Iraq is not
twenty-five million rather ordinary people; rather it is Saddam Hussein. Cuba is not an island of eleven million
agreeable people who sing and dance splendidly; it is Fidel Castro. Warring governments encourage this
confusion.
Part of the boilerplate of war are the atrocity stories used to arouse hatred in the public. Armies commit
atrocities-your army, my army, the other guy's army. Everyone agrees that everyone else does it. When no
real atrocities are convenient to hand, governments manufacture them. Some are so conventional that there
ought to be a rubber stamp: Babies are bayoneted, women's breasts are cut off, and pregnant women are
disemboweled.
Curiously, a company commander who takes sniper rounds from a village of 250, and calls in an air strike, will
say that he has never seen an atrocity. Nor were the carpet bombings of London and Hamburg atrocities;
rather these were legitimate burnings alive of children, the unlucky, and the slow. If truth is the first casualty,
reason isn't far behind.
It is useful in war that people do not respond emotionally to what they cannot actually see. A thousand abstract
dead mean nothing, whether they died in a war or an earthquake. This explains the desire of the military to
control the press. An inattentive democracy will tolerate a war provided that it is described as surgical and
intended for high moral purposes; and that the footage shows videogame bombs falling precisely on distant
targets. This also arouses pride in their gadgets.
If television showed a soldier, anybody's soldier, with his face shot away, interior of the mandibular joint
glistening cartilaginous white, the man gurgling in agony with globs of yellow god-knows-what bubbling out of
his throat, the war would suffer in the ratings.
Thus you will never, ever, ever see footage of the dead and wounded as they actually are. Not ever. This is
said to be to protect the dignity of the injured. No it's not. It's to keep small-town Idaho from vomiting and
saying, "Stop!"
Morality? Countries have none. They pretend for political effect. China objects to our brutalizing of Iraq, yet
was perfectly happy to brutalize Tibet. France objects to our behavior in the Mid-East but behaved savagely in
Algeria. Countries celebrate defensive wars to drive out invaders but, a few years later, are invading someone
else's country. It's how we are. You might as well look for morality in a used-car lot. |
