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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: michael97123 who wrote (218385)	2/14/2007 2:08:44 PM
From: Katelew	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 281500

Actually, I'm not a bhl, a bleeding heart liberal. The closest I come to that is my support of a single-payer govt. health-care program that prevents catastophic and/or chronic illnesses from causing bankruptcies and premature death among the uninsured. I generally view everything that comes out of Washington, from either party, thru the prism of it's impact on the economy. BHL's are as susceptible as right-wingers to come up with proposals that are destined to become unfunded future liabilities. With Reagan, it wasn't a matter of greed with me. I was already disenchanted with Reagan over the growing deficits and the 1987 Omnibus Tax Bill that disallowed big middle-class tax deductions, such as sales tax. Refiguring my taxes under the old tax system was just my Saturday afternoon way to test my suspicions that I'd been scammed. (I voted for Reagan twice.) I didn't get pissed until several years later with the AMT bite.:) As a true-blue capitalist, I recognize that the poor are consumers too. So perhaps you should ponder the ramifications of that simple statement? I don't think the right get this. The poor are shoppers just like the rest of us. The more money they have, the more consumer products they buy. The dollars they spend ripple all the way thru the economy and increase profits for the producer class. I will vote democrat because I don't believe Republicans are good stewards of the economy. They spend all their head-scratching time figuring out ways to get more money into the hands of the affluent and don't appreciate the potential buying power of the people at the other end....the great unwashed as you call them. It's not an issue of moral obligation to the poor, it's just NOT SMART for any administration, right or left, not to be looking for ways to get more disposable income down to the poor. Both sides of the aisle need a reality check, to some extent, but the right more than the left is busy blaming the poor. Or whining that the answer is getting higher education to them. The reality is that in a capitalist structure, we will always have a bottom quintile of wage earners, most of whom are doing NECESSARY AND IMPORTANT work that doesn't need a college education. Should we have a goal of creating college educated janitors, street cleaners, construction workers, etc? If we somehow educate everybody and end up with a nation of gastro-enterologists, who takes care of the plumbing problem in my kitchen sink? As for me, I'm grateful to the bottom quintile for doing the boring, dirty work I don't want to do or can't do for myself. It's in my OWN SELF-INTEREST to vote for the political party that at least has the goal of getting a living wage to these people And it's really, really, really not smart to try to goose the economy thru deficit spending the way Republicans do. Like I said last night, if you vote Republican you are most likely voting against your own long term economic self-interests.