09.19.08
Two On The Economy
First this via Americablog, How many times?:
How many times do we have to hear:
We don’t have ENOUGH MONEY to fix Social Security.
We don’t have ENOUGH MONEY to fix Medicare.
We don’t have ENOUGH MONEY to provide health care to ALL Americans.
We don’t have ENOUGH MONEY to help out Americans losing their homes.
We don’t have ENOUGH MONEY to help all our veterans returning from war.
We don’t have ENOUGH MONEY to rescue “no child left behind”.BUT…
We DO HAVE ENOUGH MONEY to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
We DO HAVE ENOUGH MONEY to bail out Bears Stearns.
We DO HAVE ENOUGH MONEY to bail out AIG.
We DO HAVE ENOUGH MONEY to pay for an unnecessary TRILLION DOLLAR war.When the LITTLE GUY needs help, they scornfully say, “GET A JOB!”
But when one of their BIG GUY CRONIES need a bailout, what do they say? SURE, NO PROBLEM. Where’s the checkbook?“But what about the debt we’re leaving on the backs of our childen and their future?”
“Children? WHOSE Children? OUR children won’t have to pay for this. YOUR children will.”The Republicans have had their hands in our pockets for well over 8 years.
Now they are robbing us blind IN BROAD DAYLIGHT and smiling about it!!!!
The Republicans have shown their true colors and now they expect us to vote them back into office?What’s next? Should we bend over and spread ’em? Oh, I’m sorry, but we’ve ALREADY DONE THAT!!
SEVERAL TIMES!!!Vote for REAL change this November.
VOTE BLUE
More like 30 years, Are You Better Off Now Than You Were 30 Years Ago?
A week before the election in 1980, Ronald Reagan asked, during a debate, whether Americans felt they were better off than they had been four years earlier when Jimmy Carter was elected to the presidency. Reagan, who is said to have nailed down the election with that line, ushered in a new era of lower taxes for the wealthy, ballooning federal deficits, and massive deregulation.
John McCain likes to say he was a foot soldier in the so-called Reagan revolution, which was indeed a revolution, though not in the way McCain imagines. Reagan and his followers rejected the New Deal/Great Society view that government has an important role to play in helping people get through hard times, in providing a safety net for those who would otherwise be on the streets, in giving people not born to affluence a fair shot to get ahead. The Reagan ethos was a crude re-hashing of 19th century Social Darwinism, used to justify unrestricted, everyone for him or herself, free market capitalism. Reagan denounced mythical “welfare queens” who were supposedly driving Cadillacs paid for with government largesse, and promoted an “up from the bootstraps” philosophy that ignored the reality that people don’t start life on equal terms. Cutting taxes was the remedy for every problem, magically said to actually result in increased revenues (though George H.W. Bush briefly described the theory as “voodoo economics”).
For the past 30 years, Republicans have attacked every government program under the sun (apart from the military and corporate subsidies) as wasteful, or creeping socialism, or both. “Big government” became some of the dirtiest words in politics, and it it was political suicide to support any tax, whatever the purpose or scope (as Walter Mondale learned in 1984). Similarly, the ideal of unfettered free markets was elevated to the level of dogmatic certainty; no serious politician could dare to question this organizing principle of political discourse.
Enough! Let’s get rid of this philosophy.