To: jimpit who wrote (18182 ) 7/14/2001 8:55:48 PM From: Dayuhan Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 82486 I'm not interested in your response, since I don't really have the time to argue the points. I'm not surprised. If I had points like yours I wouldn't want to argue them either. Will some programs that are not working, as they were envisioned, be phased out (rare in politics, anywhere, much less Washington)? No. First of all, many of them are not discretionary, meaning that the President has no control over the appropriations. The single largest element in the discretionary budget is defense, and that will go up. There will be lots of talk of cuts, but there will be few - if any - significant ones. Each of those programs has a constituency, and Republican politicians are no less politicians than Democratic ones. revenues to the government coffers INCREASED after Reagan's tax cut. Where did the gargantuan deficits that characterized that administration come from? the economy will GROW itself out of deficit..."...trickle-down economics..." theories as "pie-in-the-sky" ideas! Well, don't look now... but, guess what's been happening these last 10, or so, years? Are you trying to say that the growth of the last 10 years was caused by the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations? Absurd. Equally absurd, of course, to say that they were caused by Clinton's policies. If you want a cause, look to demographics (the maturing of the baby boom generation into peak years of productivity) and the development to productive form of a broad range of technologies. Politicians, left, right, or center, had nothing to do with it. Try visiting some alternate sources of news... like the Washington Times, NewsMax, FoxNews, Drudge, WorldNetDaily, etc. and you may get a more balanced view of what is REALLY happening. I do not watch news on TV. I do not watch TV. I get most of my news from non-US sources, which I generally find more reliable; the sole exception is a daily look at the IHT site, which I find to be the best single quick summary of what's going on in the world. If you treat NewsMax as anything more than comedy in slightly bad taste, you need to look carefully at your definition of the word "unbiased". These, after all, are the people who referred to a container port being constructed in the Bahamas as "a Chinese naval base", because it is being built by a HK-based company. I have never seen a worse source of news, even on the left, and they get pretty weird sometimes. I actually think that many of the new ideas presented for a restructuring of the military are very good ones, but they present the military - and the administration - with some difficult choices. The dinosaurs in the military, the ones who still won't surrender their dream of duking it out with the Russians, Patton-style, in a giant armored battle in Europe, will only accept the new ideas if the old-style forces are retained. There will simply not be enough money to develop a new and usable force of the kind being envisioned and still maintain the old "legacy" forces, which have little or no function in the real world, but are the subject of great sentimental and emotional attachments. It will be interesting to see what they do.