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Presidential Election 2012

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Started 2 years ago by Walker
Latest reply from Pablo

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Twixlen
The Weston District
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rus said:
Inflation, unemployment, the energy crisis, operation eagle claw, attacked by a rabbit...

And since when do you give a rats ass about fiscal conservatism?

Inherited inflation and an economy that I admit (and Pres Carter has admitted) wasn't handled in the best way - they tried a fiscal policy by half measures, and it failed, miserably. I'm not exactly sure how we can be blamed for the middle east crisis - and Carter did actually broker peace there at one point. And it wasn't a speedy process, but he did get the Iranian captives free - even if Reagan did try to make it seem like that was all him.

Carter cut national debt; while socially liberal, he walked the walk of fiscal conservatism much more harshly than any president since. He installed solar panels on buildings on the White House Campus, turned the heat way down, and forced everyone to bring their own lunches & water to meetings. He was willing to walk a fiscally conservative line himself - instead of just spouting off long speeches about it.

I don't think that today's GOP hates poor people, really, insomuch as they simply don't care. Their policies have created millions more people who are actually poor, and at the same time, they push policies to eliminate programs meant to assist them. They speak of bootstraps and individualism and responsibility - and blame poor people for being poor in the first place. Which, btw, isn't the nature of original conservatism.

Mostly, I'm tired of people holding up Reagan as a paragon of policy - the man spent and then taxed (two things he said he wouldn't do), and had a foreign policy that essentially created the Taliban and made Osama bin Laden. Not to mention the Everyone wants to forget that when Reagan was in office debt was in the trillions - and that Reagonimics failed everyone but the uber wealthy.

ETA: I forgot the best thing Carter did - he deregulated the brewing industry. The delicious craft brews we have today, and the legal ability to home-brew our own beers? Thank Carter for that one.

Posted 12 months ago #
Twixlen
The Weston District
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Also - good op ed by EJ Dionne on conservatism in WaPo yesterday -

Conservatives used to care about community. What happened?

I have long admired the conservative tradition and for years have written about it with great respect. But the new conservatism, for all its claims of representing the values that inspired our founders, breaks with the country’s deepest traditions. The United States rose to power and wealth on the basis of a balance between the public and the private spheres, between government and the marketplace, and between our love of individualism and our quest for community.

Conservatism today places individualism on a pedestal, but it originally arose in revolt against that idea. As the conservative thinker Robert A. Nisbet noted in 1968, conservatism represented a “reaction to the individualistic Enlightenment.” It “stressed the small social groups of society” and regarded such clusters of humanity — not individuals — as society’s “irreducible unit.”

Posted 12 months ago #
rus

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Twixlen said:

I don't think that today's GOP hates poor people, really, insomuch as they simply don't care. Their policies have created millions more people who are actually poor, and at the same time, they push policies to eliminate programs meant to assist them. They speak of bootstraps and individualism and responsibility - and blame poor people for being poor in the first place. Which, btw, isn't the nature of original conservatism.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_25/b3888032_mz011.htm

As a result, the impact of the policies Reagan set out in the 1980s, which slowly worked their way through the economy, helped lay the groundwork for the Information Revolution of the 1990s. That's nothing to sneeze at, especially since technology has been the major factor driving the U.S.'s rapid productivity growth since 1996.

...

True, the percentage of families below the poverty line fell under Reagan, going from 11.2% in 1981 to 10.3% when he left office in early 1989. But under Clinton, that poverty rate dropped a full three percentage points.

You can argue that other, later policies were more effective ( or reaping the benefits of previous policy ) but "created millions more poor" isn't borne out by the numbers.

Posted 12 months ago #
pedex

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rus said:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_25/b3888032_mz011.htm

As a result, the impact of the policies Reagan set out in the 1980s, which slowly worked their way through the economy, helped lay the groundwork for the Information Revolution of the 1990s. That's nothing to sneeze at, especially since technology has been the major factor driving the U.S.'s rapid productivity growth since 1996.

...

True, the percentage of families below the poverty line fell under Reagan, going from 11.2% in 1981 to 10.3% when he left office in early 1989. But under Clinton, that poverty rate dropped a full three percentage points.

You can argue that other, later policies were more effective ( or reaping the benefits of previous policy ) but "created millions more poor" isn't borne out by the numbers.

actual Reagan did most certainly help create lots of poor

average income since the early 1970's has basically stagnated while debt and inflation climbed at a higher rate than GDP

Add into the mix that Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush all helped change how our econ stats are calculated and scored to make them appear far more benign than they are and its all coming to fruition now that the credit bubble is deflating. It's exposing 30 plus consecutive years of avoiding real solutions and playing kick the can down the road. Deregulation under Reagan and Clinton opened up fraud, offshoring jobs, and an increase in the rent seeking component of our economy. Financialization was cut loose to do whatever it wanted and all we got from it was a few decades of false prosperity built on debt, book cooking, and fraud along with the accelerated hollowing out of our industrial and export base. Obama walked into one hell of a mess. The next POTUS will face even worse.

Posted 12 months ago #
rus

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pedex said:
Deregulation under Reagan and Clinton

Didn't airline deregulation start under Carter? Keep hearing that as an example of the little good that administration did.

Posted 12 months ago #
pedex

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rus said:
Didn't airline deregulation start under Carter? Keep hearing that as an example of the little good that administration did.

yup in 1978

Nixon started working towards deregulation in 1971. Everyone from Nixon up to present has added more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation

Posted 12 months ago #
rus

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Posted 11 months ago #
DavidF
Elysium Fields
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rus said:

Pretty good one Rus!

Posted 11 months ago #
Twixlen
The Weston District
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Mitt released his birth certificate. Clearly forged. Also, where is the Long Form Certificate? Where is the original? His father was born in Mexico, which makes Mittens Mexican. If he's Mexican, he can't be a natural born citizen. These are things I've learned from Fox News.

Posted 11 months ago #
joev
Merion Village
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He's been lying about his real first name! What else is he hiding?

Also, what kind of Mexican names his kid Willard?

Posted 11 months ago #
rus

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Maybe he should have got Biden to make the speech.

AFP via Yahoo

US President Barack Obama's description of a Nazi German Holocaust site as a "Polish death camp" shocked Poland, whose leaders insist the record be set straight 67 years after World War II.

Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a "Polish death camp." The White House later said the president "misspoke" and expressed "regret".

Posted 11 months ago #
Mister Shifter
Lewis Center
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Posted 11 months ago #
rus

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Mister Shifter said:

Thought it was liberals moving to Canada after Bush got elected a second time?

Posted 11 months ago #
SusanB
Hungarian Village, Columbus' fastest growing Gayborhood!
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Real iPhone app btw I just downloaded it myself. The possibilities are endless.......

Posted 11 months ago #
kit444
Elsewhere
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Twixlen said:
Mostly, I'm tired of people holding up Reagan as a paragon of policy - the man spent and then taxed (two things he said he wouldn't do), and had a foreign policy that essentially created the Taliban and made Osama bin Laden. Not to mention the Everyone wants to forget that when Reagan was in office debt was in the trillions - and that Reagonimics failed everyone but the uber wealthy.

And he traded arms for hostages, after years of saying he would never negotiate with terrorists.

Posted 11 months ago #
gramarye
In Exile
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All of which are part of what made him an outstanding president. Taking a hard initial line is a classic negotiating strategy. Holding firm on that hard line sometimes, even against one's short-term material interests, can be important for building credibility as well. However, part of the whole point of taking hard lines and holding firm to them in lesser circumstances to build credibility is so that you have the ability to forge advantageous deals, which is also part of the job of an effective executive (public or private sector). Reagan occasionally deviated from his own principles--but at the same time, he managed to foster a much broader adoption of those principles by 1980 than existed in the country by 1988. That alone was an incredible success given the prevailing tax-and-spend political orthodoxy of the previous decades, because since then, it has been taken as a given that convincing conservatives to sign off on tax and spending hikes is a deviation from their principles--which does not make such things impossible, but makes them harder (and, generally, more limited) than they would have been had the earlier orthodoxy never been challenged.

Reagan also hastened the downfall of the Soviet Union at the expense of hastening the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. (I will not go so far as to say "enabling." The religious politics of the Middle East and South Asia were ripe for such a rise for a long time; one reason we chose religious fundamentalists as our cat's paws is because they already existed in the area in very large numbers.) I was only a child at the time, but I consider that a perfectly acceptable trade. Notwithstanding the fact that Al Qaeda managed to attack us on our soil and the USSR did not, that was not because the USSR lacked the ability to do so, but because they did not want to start WWIII. Al Qaeda has largely been bankrupted, both financially and ideologically, and most of its senior leaders have been killed, captured, or driven into hiding. Islamists have indeed found another vector to rise--the Arab Spring--but that is at most tangentially related to anything Reagan (or any of his successors, including Obama) did for or against the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

The fact that actions have consequences does not mean that action is never warranted. Sometimes it's better to take the action and choose to deal with the consequences. Reagan dealt with the USSR, and we've largely dealt with Al Qaeda by now as well. To the extent that dealing with Al Qaeda has had consequences, so far, those don't seem to be the rise of other external threats, but rather the rise of a significantly more pervasive police-surveillance state at home. Once again, that was a development that might well have arisen anyway, given the progress of the technology needed to enable it. And, once again, I'd rather eliminate Al Qaeda (at least as a significant military and ideological threat) and then deal with the consequences of that than just ignore Al Qaeda and hope that we can either ignore them into oblivion or give them a foreign aid check and convert them to our side.

Posted 11 months ago #
pedex

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kit444 said:
And he traded arms for hostages, after years of saying he would never negotiate with terrorists.

and tried to unleash a plague
S&L crisis
BCCI
Iran Contra which was never cleaned up properly
failure to reign in the military once the cold war was over
let his cabinet and cronies run the show behind his back, he was mostly hands off with very vague policy direction and no accountability

great figurehead for policy which never really existed if you dig into it

Clinton of course doubled down on many of those policies many of which are biting our azz now.

The Iran deal always cracks me up, Americans are funny. One ex dictator with terminal cancer is worth more than hostages and shoving a dictator down another nations throat is expected to be tolerated when we'd never allow it here. American exceptionalism is something special.

Posted 11 months ago #
Pablo
Crestview Addition
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pedex said:
and tried to unleash a plague
S&L crisis
BCCI
Iran Contra which was never cleaned up properly
failure to reign in the military once the cold war was over
let his cabinet and cronies run the show behind his back, he was mostly hands off with very vague policy direction and no accountability

great figurehead for policy which never really existed if you dig into it

Clinton of course doubled down on many of those policies many of which are biting our azz now.

The Iran deal always cracks me up, Americans are funny. One ex dictator with terminal cancer is worth more than hostages and shoving a dictator down another nations throat is expected to be tolerated when we'd never allow it here. American exceptionalism is something special.

Plus, I believe the Reagan administration leads the nation in felony convictions....

Posted 11 months ago #
Twixlen
The Weston District
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pedex said:
and tried to unleash a plague
S&L crisis
BCCI
Iran Contra which was never cleaned up properly
failure to reign in the military once the cold war was over
let his cabinet and cronies run the show behind his back, he was mostly hands off with very vague policy direction and no accountability

great figurehead for policy which never really existed if you dig into it

Clinton of course doubled down on many of those policies many of which are biting our azz now.

The Iran deal always cracks me up, Americans are funny. One ex dictator with terminal cancer is worth more than hostages and shoving a dictator down another nations throat is expected to be tolerated when we'd never allow it here. American exceptionalism is something special.

* Grew the federal government to it's largest state - all the while touting "small government"

* Again, grew the national debt into the trillions (in the 80's!)

* The Reagan administration went deeper into the money-for-policy pit than anyone had done before (hence the deregulation, etc) - again, the Father of Income Inequality, as it were.

I remember as a teenager, suddenly realizing that the number of homeless people that I encountered in my small town had increased. I remember going to NYC and there were homeless people *everywhere* - Reagan (and the real estate lobby) had opened some policies for landlords to get tax money for empty units. This meant it was more profitable for landlords to get the tax money available than rent to low-income people... it caused a huge spike in rental costs in bigger cities, and really spurred the number of people dumped into the street without recourse.

Yeah, that's a great president right there, boy-o.

Also. Kind of another thread, eh?

ETA - Gram - I honestly can't believe that you can't see the irony of defending Reagan deep in your libertarian soul.

Posted 11 months ago #
Twixlen
The Weston District
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Pablo said:
Plus, I believe the Reagan administration leads the nation in felony convictions....

Oh, we can't even get started on the fake "War on Drugs" that was really code for "Jail the Black Folks."

Posted 11 months ago #