Regarding Iraq, you wrote:
"Condi Rice articulates the position better than anyone, in effect, that you go to war based on the facts you DO have, not those you DON'T have."
Yes, that sounds just like Condi Rice....out with a soundbite that can rear-window justify just about any bungled decision that required good sense, a grasp of the odds and an understanding of the risks, none of which did she demonstrate in her long history of involvement in the Iraq war.
In addition, your laundry list of reasons for our on-the-ground intervention in Iraq mirrors the laundry list first given to justify our going in. The later list that included the "Iraqis god given right to democracy", giving Iraqi women constitutionally protected freedoms (as if writing them on paper meant a damn thing) and creating a beacon of democracy in the Middle East were offered only after it had become clear that the reasons you articulated did not justify the sacrifices we had made there. Clearly you did not get that message.
But those issues have been argued and reargued on these threads many times. To their credit, some of the most ardent supporters of the war have taken a long, hard look and changed their views. That's a good thing. If we'd kept the lessons of Vietnam in mind there'd have been no Iraq and we'd have been out of Afghanistan years ago. This nation building intervention in nations that do not share our common law, religious or cultural history is simply stupid and I hope that we can remember it the next time and not march our young soldiers off in yet another silly war.
With regard to the utility of lowering taxes to stimulate the economy, it's not a one size fits all proposition. There have been economic times where lowering taxes did provide necessary capital that was invested in new plants and businesses and thereby jump started those economies. It's insane, however, to think that in times like these where there is a boatload of money sitting on the sidelines, where production is at much less than 100% of capacity and where demand for goods and services is anemic, that putting more money into the hands of the so called "job creators" is going to induce them to build new businesses beside the plants sitting idle, or working at half capacity, to produce more goods and services to add to those that aren't selling. There isn't a businessman in the world who thinks that you can jump start a stagnant economy by producing more of the things that are sitting unsold on shelves.
If the wealthy beneficiaries of such tax breaks don't take that money offshore, the more likely outcome will be that they'll loan their new tax cut dollars back to a government that left itself further in the hole but cutting their taxes to provide the new dollars to them.
That tax cut money would be far better spent paying down the debt or, better yet, rebuilding infrastructure and thus sending the money into the hands of those who will spend it and therefore create more demand and more jobs. After all, how many jobs did Romney create with the large tax breaks he got from the Bush tax cuts and the reduction of his capital gains taxes to a maximum of 15%?
And that's why trying to historically revise the history of tax cutting by claiming that every boom from JFK to George Bush followed some kind of tax cut is, even if it were true, far too simplistic. This is a very complicated subject that is critical to our getting the economy back on sound footing, employment up, a greater percentage of the income and wealth of this country back into the hands of the middle class and our debt under control, and we can't rely on bumper sticker slogans that have far too long been employed as a justification to put more wealth in the pockets of the wealthiest among us.
The sad truth is that most of the time if someone convinces you that helping the wealthy pay less taxes is good for you, you ought to think long and hard about what that means to your relative share of the obligation to pay off the nation's yearly and accumulated debt. Here's a hint...the less paid by those at the top the more paid by those in the middle. Ed |
