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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Les H who wrote (387)	8/3/1998 10:44:00 PM
From: Bill	Respond to of 13994

It's amazing that anyone would actually vote for a democrat.:-)

To: Les H who wrote (387)	8/4/1998 2:52:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13994

Thank you FDR: Most Detailed Academic Analysis Ever Reveals Massive 'Hidden Tax' Imposed by The System NEW YORK, April 15 /PRNewswire/ -- As Americans today file their 1997 income taxes, a groundbreaking study conducted by leading academic experts and commissioned by Merrill Lynch reveals that the U.S. Social Security system levies a lifetime ''hidden tax'' of more than $500,000 on middle-class American workers born since the mid-1950s.... biz.yahoo.com Milton Friedman gives Reagan credit for allowing Volcker to break the back of inflation, stating that no other president would have had the resolve to take the political "hit" for wringing out stagflation and the excesses of the 1960's and 1970's. Similarly, Friedman credits Reagan's decontrol of oil (elsewhere) with diminishing OPEC pricing power and lowering prices. MR. WATTENBERG: Yeah. Well, were you a voodoo economist at that time? MR. FRIEDMAN: Absolutely. I still am. But what Reagan's role in that is not what is ordinarily thought. I think the most important role he played was being willing to standby while the measures were taken, the monetary measures were taken, which was necessary to break the inflation. I do not believe that there is any other president in my lifetime who would have stood by and supported the Federal Reserve in the policy of sharp deflation, which occurred from 1980 to 1982. MR. WATTENBERG: This is Paul Volcker as the head of the Fed, right? MR. FRIEDMAN: Paul Volcker as the head of the Fed. MR. YERGIN: And Volcker is saying, if we don't deal with inflation, that our social fabric is going to snap, that terrible things can happen, and that, as painful as it is, if you didn't bring it out of the system -- MR. FRIEDMAN: And by 1981, you were in a very sharp recession. The poll results for Reagan were going down. But Reagan did not in any way try to pressure Volcker to change his course, because Reagan understood, despite what people say, Reagan really was a smart man, is a smart man, and Reagan knew that you had to slow down the rate of monetary growth and keep it slow if you were going to get out of the inflationary spiral. And, that worked. And, thanks to his willingness to take the heat when it was very, very intense, you came out of it in 1983, and started on the very rapid rise of the next -- well, ever since. pbs.org The whole transcript is excellent reading. I would like to get that book. -"Joining us to explore that history and its consequences are Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Yergin, co-author with Joseph Stanislaw of The Commanding Heights, The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That is Remaking the Modern World; and one of the supreme generals in that battle, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman."