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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (75740)	10/8/2004 11:37:45 AM
From: SBHX	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793883

Government cannot do that much to 'create jobs', but when it tries to tinker too much, it was very adept at creating stagflation and in a few rare cases depressions. Bush's economic vision is one of the "ownership society". Despite his inarticulate shortcomings, he did say this : "...if you own something, you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country." He really was talking about things such as home ownership, health savings accounts, removing cost of bureaucracy, choices in healthcare, and something the multi-million-dollar judgment enriched trial-attorney filled democratic party dislike vehemently : tort reform. If you think about it, it is not that different from Reagan's often maligned voodoo economics --- which I might add, the economic intellegentsia and academia such as Galbraith and other Keynesian establishment ridiculed in their time --- Reagan turned out to be correct, and all the academics in the post jimmy carter era were (for lack of a better word) wrong. Milton Friedman had a few things to say about this : On Freedom and Free Markets INTERVIEWER: Why are free markets and freedom inseparable? MILTON FRIEDMAN: Freedom requires individuals to be free to use their own resources in their own way, and modern society requires cooperation among a large number of people. The question is, how can you have cooperation without coercion? If you have a central direction you inevitably have coercion. The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom. INTERVIEWER: Marxists say that property is theft. Why, in your view, is private property so central to freedom? MILTON FRIEDMAN: Because the only way in which you can be free to bring your knowledge to bear in your particular way is by controlling your property. If you don't control your property, if somebody else controls it, they're going to decide what to do with it, and you have no possibility of exercising influence on it. The interesting thing is that there's a lot of knowledge in this society, but, as Friedrich Hayek emphasized so strongly, that knowledge is divided. I have some knowledge; you have some knowledge; he has some knowledge. How do we bring these scattered bits of knowledge back together? And how do we make it in the self-interest of individuals to use that knowledge efficiently? The key to that is private property, because if it belongs to me, you know, there's an obvious fact. Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property. ... MILTON FRIEDMAN: Yes, absolutely. There is no doubt in my mind that that action of Reagan, plus his emphasis on lowering tax rates, plus his emphasis on deregulating ... I mentioned that the regulations had doubled, the number of pages in the Federal Register had doubled, during the Nixon regime; they almost halved during the Reagan regime. So those actions of Reagan unleashed the basic constructive forces of the free market and from 1983 on, it's been almost entirely up. pbs.org Yup, that sounds an awful lot like the ownership society, while what Kerry Edwards was talking about on the specifics of increasing taxes was clearly leaning towards the marxist view. Just like you cannot coerce Walmart to stop buying cheap goods from China, just like you cannot force ordinary americans to pay 50% more for their shoes, it really is about free market, lower taxes, and... ownership.

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (75740)	10/8/2004 12:13:10 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 793883

Wouldn't it have been easier to tell me that you don't actually have a clue as to what, if anything, Clinton or Bush actually did to affect the economy? Rather than making me read ten inches of dishwater, looking for facts?

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (75740)	10/8/2004 12:13:49 PM
From: aladin	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793883

Mary, Great work at taking facts out of context. Clinton/Rubin managed to turn a budget deficit into the biggest budget surplus in history Of course this had nothing to do with the: o biggest stock market bubble in history o biggest decline in military spending since WW2 The bubble generated tons of previously unanticipated tax revenue and its demise, not increased military spending, accounts for the majority of the difference. As for the 5.4% having no real meaning - I guess to people who want this to be 1930 all over again it doesn't. We should go back to the good old days of 1978 maybe? John

To: Mary Cluney who wrote (75740)	10/8/2004 2:21:33 PM
From: Sully-	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793883

"Clinton/Rubin managed to turn a budget deficit into the biggest budget surplus in history" So Mary, explain to me how our national debt went up every single year of the Clinton Administration, yet they claimed a budget surplus? How can anyone claim a surplus when every single year you spent more than you took in & had to increase your borrowing to meet the deficit spending for 8 straight years? The Illusory Budget Surplus ncpa.org The Sham Budget Surplus and What Clinton Wants to Do with Your Money sccs.swarthmore.edu FEDERAL BUDGET "SURPLUS" -- SMOKE & MIRRORS bedfordonline.com Balanced Budget? Not Really progress.org President Clinton's 1999 "balanced" budget, the first in 30 years, is an accounting illusion. epf.org