Re: Is Anyone In This Group Enthusiastic About Any Candidate?


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 16:10:55 -0600, "John Galt"
<whoisjohngalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 08:46:53 -0600, "John Galt"


<snip>



The expensive parts of HSA have to do with passenger, port, and cargo
security. The parts you allude to are electronic, not people intensive,
and
relatively cheap. The expensive parts were going to happen anyway.

They were ??? "Homeland Security" itself wasn't
"going to happen anyway".

There still would have been a 9/11 Commission, and a set of
recommendations,
one of which is the set up of an uberagency that managed intelligence and
security. That Commission would have made the same recommendations. If
you're suggesting that an HSA would not have been set up, you're
suggesting
that Gore would have ignored one of the primary recommendations of the
Comission.


Well, things weren't terribly different in the Carter years
than the policies that had worked before, since World War II,
so it seems likely that after a period of adjustment, things
would have settled out. In contrast with that, the Reagan
policies have produced skyrocketing debt that hasn't
abated except for a temporary slowdown during the Clinton
years since they were instituted.

The issue doesn't have much to do with Carter or Reagan. The question is
what Gore would have done WRT 9/11 Commission recommendations if elected
President. Since the Democrats have made it quite clear that they would have
implemented all the recommendations, there still would have been a DHS set
up and therefore incure the costs of doing so.



I doubt it. In fact, the Democratic party has been critical of Bush for
*not* implementing the recommendations of the Commission in total, have
they
not? Are you suggesting that the Democrats, with a Democrat president,
should have picked and chosen from those recommendations as has Bush? And,
if so, does that not mean that the criticism of the Bush Admin for not
implementing all the recommendations is simply political manuvering?



I'm not really responsible for what the Democratic party does. I
have pretty significant differences with the party, though they do
seem trivial in comparison to my differences with the Republican
party. Put Kucinich into the presidency, and then we'll have a
"government of and for the people". We might ride to heaven
or to hell on it, but it will truly be a "government of and for the
people" at long last. Better than riding to hell on a "government
of the moneyed interests" as we're doing now.


<snip>


We didn't have runaway deficits before the big
Reagan tax cuts, but almost continuously ever since.

This is simply wrong. The deficit was a huge issue in 1980, and was
considered "runaway" at the time. (Yes, it got worse.)



It got fantastically worse. (Don't bother trying to
assign a number to "fantastically" in order to prove
that my adjective doesn't match the number you
chose.)

Here's the chart again:
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm



You're using the advantage of hindsight to determine the definition of
"runaway." Neither term (debt or deficit) means anything unless they're
expressed as a percentage of something, that usually being either GDP or
tax
receipts. 5K in debt is huge if you earn 20K per year, but a pittance if
you
earn 200,000K. The deficit in 1980 wasn't much different than today as a %
of GDP, and certainly today is less as expressed as a % of tax receipts in
real dollars.


Carter only ran up a fraction of the deficits that Reagan and the
Bushes ran up for the same period of time. Yeah, I guess I would
have bitched about the Carter deficits if I'd been paying attention
at that time, but there's no comparison with what came later.

No, but at the time, the deficit was one of the issues that propelled Reagan
into office. It was, at the time, considered "runaway", and in the context
of the overall economy (not gross dollars) it wasn't much different than it
was today.

JG


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