Hats Off to The Democrats

Jesus God almighty where do you people come from --- just what we need around here, another Clinton Kool Aid drinker -- and one who has seemingly watched the silly political ads he ran prior to the 1996 elections a few too many times.....

Next I'm sure this one will be telling us about budget surpluses.......

But shhhh, don't tell him that nothing Bill Clinton did (other than raise taxes) was particularly liberal and in fact when it came to the economy he governed far more like a moderate Republican than a liberal Democrat.......

 

Clinton's policies, at least when it comes to economics, were NOT liberal.

He raised taxes ... slightly.

But Clinton's keystone economic policies were generally conservative ...
*-Expanding free trade (signing NAFTA).
*-Welfare reform.
*-Reining in domestic spending (balanced budgets).
*-Arguing for, and getting, the line-item veto. Unfortunately for him, Bush and everyone who has come after,

While the left likes to pound on Bush for being an uber-conservative, other than cutting taxes, he and his Congresses (both GOP and Dem) have been very liberal when it comes to domestic spending.

We have had, for the last 25 years, a general run of prosperity. Not coincidentally, that 25-year run has pretty much been run on Reaganomics -- a smaller, flatter tax structure with a greater dependence on the individual to create wealth rather than government redistribution of it. It has proven that a rising tide does lift all boats. The middle class has been shrinking, but it's because more people are moving up, not down. Clinton, the only Dem president we've had in that time, didn't rock the boat. He pretty much continued and carried on the Reaganomics philosophy, with (like Bush I) a slight tax increase for the upper classes.

We've had three major economic epochs in the last century. The progressive era/laissez-faire period of 1901-1933 (which saw runaway growth and runaway depression ... and Hoover's policies made it worse by meddling too much), the expanding federal government of 1933-1981 (which brought wartime prosperity and, when there was no war, deep recessions and an economy that cracked by the 1970s ... even Nixon & Ike were economic liberals), and a conservative tide of 1981-2009 (which brought the longest periods of peacetime prosperity in American history ... the only two recessions we've had in that time were *very* minor ones until this one).

Unfortunately, we're about to go through another epochal change. And I fear the results will not be pretty. Punishing achievement -- as Obama has basically said he will do -- and redistributing income will do nothing more than stop the flow of income. Assuming economics is a zero-sum game eventually ends up in a zero-sum -- money stops flowing through the economy at all.

This particular recession has much more to do with outside factors -- OPEC, oil speculation, the rise of China & India driving up the prices of raw materials therefore leading to inflation -- than any policies of Bush's. That, and a bad monetary policy put forth by the Fed, which has led to the falling dollar, has not helped.

That said, if you'd have told someone in 1978 that we'd have a 5.5% unemployment rate, single-digit inflation, the Dow at 12K and most homes worth $150K plus in a depressed market in 30 years, they'd be dancing on the rooftops. Nobody could've envisioned that kind of economy in the 1970s. Much less anyone considering it horrible.

 

Liberal spending on the war machine but not Pell Grants or social programs.

 

I'm a Democrat, and Boom sure as hell isn't, but I agree with him 100 percent. The 2006 Democratic party campaign was a lie. They had no intention of doing anything but moving into bigger offices and better parking spaces.
As long as a party is run by gutless pukes, it will never accomplish anything. If Obama wins, watch Congressional Democrats thwart him at every turn for fear of offending "swing" voters. Then they'll wonder why everyone hates them.

 

Michael thank you for your intellectual honesty.

I guess with Obama's yea vote on wire tap act Charles Pierce remains the cynic.

 

Dear Boom: Before mutual admiration gets out of hand, let me say I will still vote for Obama despite his very pusillanimous FISA cave on the grounds that I expect that with him as President, the worst case is that things will continue to go to hell, but at a much slower pace than in the past eight years. Best case, the slide is temporarily halted. Under McCain, the toboggan ride to perdition will accelerate, and he's proud of it. We can't afford the new Cold War he appears to favor, let alone a war with Iran.
Nor am I the sort of starry-eyed child who is surprised when his side's politicians don't come through for him. No one holding my positions would ever get elected, and that's all for the best.
BUT, the 110th Congress fits most statutory definitions of consumer fraud, and anyone who points that out is merely speaking the simple truth.

 

It depends on who that someone is. Try talking to the vast majority of the American people who are working 2 or 3 jobs for $8 an hour, and have seen their wages barely keep up with the cost of inflation for the last 30 years while CEO pay has skyrocketed from nearly 40 times the amount of the average worker to over 300.

The only people who have prospered in the last 30 years are the top 1-2 percent of wage earners. Everyone else has been treading water, or sinking.

 

I can't wait until Obama uses wiretapping, circumvents the Constitution, opens secret prisons and adopts the "do and and ask for permission later philosophy" because I'm sure the GOP won't mind. Dems can use the same signing statements to ignore Congressionally-passed laws as W did.

 

Sorry Baron....but BULLSHIT!! The "vast majority of people working 2-3 jobs for $8/hr."? Please.

I see a society that waits for 2 days to buy the new $250 IPhone, $400 XBoxes selling out weeks before X-mas, vacations, a waiting list for Prius's, etc.

The industry that's been hit hardest lately, newspapers. It's the industry I see with the most consistent layoffs....IMO that's skewed the coverage of the economy (that's understandable).

 

If we are letting what is happening in the newspaper industry skew our coverage of the economy, then we are truly terrible at our craft.
I call B.S. on that.

 

I'll be ripping him the same way I rip Bush for the same shenanigans.

 

And being the partisan that you are, you'll claim it was all much different than the way Bush did it.