Our Liberal Friends April 27, 2008
Posted by reaganquotes in Uncategorized.trackback
Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.
A Time for Choosing, Address on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater,
Rendezvous with Destiny, October 27, 1964
Shop for great Reagan-themed gifts…
t-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, baby items
Things that Conservatives know that just aren’t so:
“Jimmy Carter cut the military budget.”
Actually, he increased the military budget beyond the rate of inflation. This followed several years of post-Vietnam budget cuts in the Nixon and Ford administrations. Reagan just accelerated what Carter already started.
“Jimmy Carter gave us double-digit inflation and interest rates.”
Actually, these syndromes began during the Nixon and Ford administrations that preceded Carter. Nixon tried wage-and-price controls. Ford tried “WIN” buttons. Carter did the only thing that worked by nominating Paul Volcker to chair the Federal Reserve. Volcker choked the money supply so severely that the economy fell into a near-depression, but by God, it killed inflation and let the economy reboot under Reagan. Carter’s act of political suicide made Reagan a hero
“Reagan proved lowering taxes raises revenues”:
The fact is that Reagan signed one of the largest tax increases in history and even then by the time Reagan left office, a combination of lower tax revenues and sharply higher spending for defense had created the biggest budget deficit in history.
And Clinton passed a massive tax increase in 93 (without a single Repub vote) that led a few years later to an actual surplus in the federal budget together with the strongest economic growth in our lifetimes.
“We have the highest standard of living in the world…”
No, we are 6th (2002-2003 – most likely have dropped some since then.
1. Norway
2. Sweden
3. Canada
4. Belgium
5. Australia
6. United States
7. Iceland
8. Netherlands
9. Japan
10. Finland
Notice anything??? 4 out of the top 5 are crazy socialists! And they have they socialized medicine!
Oh, and as for quality of care, we are number 37.
” The Democrat sare anti-business . . . ”
The truth is that, by any objective measure (rapid economic growth, low inflation, job growth, poverty and inequality rates) the Democrats are far more competent managers of the national economy than are Republicans. A nice summary of the evidence is here.
Even the business-oriented measures favor Democrats:
Average After-Tax Return on Tangible Capital: Jan 1952 – June 2004
Dems: 4.3%
Reps: 3.2%
Annual Stock Market Return 1900-2000
Dems 12.3%
Reps 8.0%
“Tax cuts create jobs.”
Tax cuts don’t create jobs, people do. If you relentlessly cut taxes, starve the schools and limit the opportunities kids have… no, my poor confused conservative pals, that is not good for the economy.
Reagan famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
If nothing else, Katrina surely proved forever that this is false. In the aftermath of the breach of the levees, the people of New orleans would have loved nothing more than to have heard those words. They aren’t what’s scary. What’s scary is letting people who believe that run our government.
Much of the nation wouldn’t have electricity, safe drinking water or the possibility of a college education if it weren’t for the big scary government programs of the 1930s through the 1960s. The G.I. Bill was the greatest investment in America’s future ever made, and brought about not only the greatest era in American History, but created untold wealth and generated long-term prosperity. It was a government-run SOCIALIST program.
(Hey, I’m just doing the old Cut & Paste Troll thing. Repugniscum trolls do it on Lib/Prog sites all the time. Turn-around, as they say, is fair play.)
Published on Friday, June 11, 2004 by the Seattle Times
Reagan’s Destructive Revolution
by Walter Williams
Amid the mountains of praise and the occasional criticism of Ronald Reagan, what may be his most lasting legacy remains hidden. He led a political revolution that radically altered the American system of government and its key institutions.
The revolution began in 1981 under the banner of Reaganism — Ronald Reagan’s anti-government, market-fundamentalist philosophy that now dominates American political thought.
Yet, it is best labeled the “Stealth Revolution” because pundits and the public, after nearly a quarter century, still appear to be unaware of its existence, much less the damage already done. The deleterious changes have stayed under the radar.
Be that as it may, a revolution is in full swing. President Reagan’s two terms put it on course; Reaganism sustained it for the next 12 years; George W. Bush, Reagan’s disciple, re-energized it with a vengeance.
Following the tenets of Reaganism, Bush has led the most undemocratic American government in the post-World War II era. It well may be the least democratic government since 1789.
The result is that the national institutions created by the Constitution to support representative democracy have been disfigured. America has become an entrenched plutocracy where the wealthiest individuals and major corporations unduly influence government decisions to reap benefits at the expense of ordinary citizens.
A modern-day Rip Van Winkle — falling asleep just before Reagan’s inauguration and awakening today — would be amazed to find that the political revolution has eaten away much of the foundation of the American republic during his hibernation. The Stealth Revolution has succeeded to an extent unimaginable a quarter century ago.
In “The Great Unraveling,” Princeton University economist and New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman, drawing on Henry Kissinger’s 1957 book, “A World Restored,” pointed out that what the latter labeled a “revolutionary power” intends to crush the existing structure of governance that it views as illegitimate.
Krugman argued: “One should regard America’s right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system.”
At the same time, it needs underscoring that the full implications of the political change can be perceived only when cast in a broader historical context going back to the start of the Reagan administration. The first shots were fired in 1981, not 2001; the Reagan revolution began over two decades ago.
Reagan’s unshakable conviction that the federal government was the nation’s biggest domestic problem, and his efforts to constrain it, severely reduced that government’s capacity to serve the American people and undermined representative democracy.
His commitment to an unfettered free market, deep reductions in the top income-tax rates, and massive deregulation for businesses greatly increased the political power of the wealthiest citizens and corporate America. A straight road to plutocracy lay open.
With Reaganism dominating public thinking during the 20 years before the Bush presidency, the Republicans had in place a solid base to launch the blitzkrieg that firmly entrenched the plutocratic regime. What have they done?
To start with, there is iron political control from the top ensuring far greater White House domination over the federal agencies than at any time in the past. Secrecy and deception permeate the Bush presidency, keeping needed decision-making information from the public and Congress and distorting what is disseminated.
The Republican majority exercises the same autocratic control in the House of Representatives by severely restricting debate and excluding Democrats from conference committees.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, has transformed the conference committees, which in the past were restricted to reconciling disagreements between House and Senate bills, into a key means of inserting major changes, not appearing in either bill, during the conference.
Sheer power has been substituted for the deliberations leading to reasoned compromises that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, believed to be central to a flourishing democracy.
Congress no longer placed its constituents’ interests over those of special interests — in this case, the wealthiest, most powerful citizens and corporations. America has ceased to be the world’s greatest representative democracy.
Ronald Reagan is dead, but Reaganism, and the Stealth Revolution it engendered, lives on with all its destructive force. And I fear it may be Reagan’s most lasting legacy unless the nation wakes up and sees what the Reagan revolution has wrought. Cassandras are not always wrong.
Walter Williams, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs, is the author of the recently published “Reaganism and the Death of Representative Democracy.”
BTW, according to Homer, Cassandra was RIGHT, but was cursed so that no one believed her.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Reagan’s legacy
From an article by Mark Ames in The Exile:
“When Ronald Reagan took power in 1981, Americans lived completely different lives. Health care insurance was a given for nearly all working Americans. Downsizing – the concept of mass layoffs in order to boost a CEO’s bonus – hadn’t entered the vocabulary. Neither had outsourcing. Working parents came home from work before sundown and ate dinners with their families. Unions were strong, and the industrialists felt a social responsibility to ensuring their workers’ well-being. This was all reflected in the income differential: in 1979, the average CEO earned 30 times his average employees’ wage. For some reason no one wants to remember this part of the past – because it’s too depressing, and speaks too obviously to the real decline in America.
Reagan came to office and told the plutocrats to take everything that they wanted. I mean everything. Today, CEOs make 571 times their average employees’ wage. Today’s male white collar workers in America only earn, in real dollars, six cents per hour more today than they earned in 1973. Health care is increasingly hard to come by, no job is ever safe, Americans work far longer hours and suffer from stress-related illnesses once unheard of. As an Economic Policy Institute report noted, ‘What income growth there was over the 1979-1989 period was driven primarily by more work at lower wages.’ What happened to Russia in the 90s was really started by Reagan’s attack on Americans in the 80s. When Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers in 1981, he told America he was literally willing to kill us all if we didn’t give in to his plan to transfer the wealth out of the pockets of the middle- and lower-middle classes and into the plutocrats’ offshore accounts. It was so shocking that it worked. The air controller’s union broke – and so did a whole way of life. Thanks to Ronald Reagan, we are all miserable wage slaves . . . or exiles.”
This wasn’t an accident. It was – dare I say it – a conspiracy. Reagan was put in power with the express purpose of destroying the middle class and ending any hope that the sons and daughters of the poor might rise to the middle class through education and hard work. The destruction of the middle class is his real and lasting legacy. Reagan’s murder of the middle class and its institutions, a process which has led directly to Bush’s neoconservatives, has just now been noticed by progressive commentators (favorite, from Canadian painter Robert Bateman – here: http://www.batemanideas.com/GlobeMail.html), some of whom have suggestions for how to resuscitate it. In reflecting on the nearly disastrous Canadian election, I noted how easy it is for conservatives to destroy the results of the hard work and sacrifices (up to and including their lives) of generations of progressives (if you look at the list, you can see that all good is done by progressives, and conservatives spend all their time trying to destroy the good). The effort of decades or even centuries can be destroyed, probably permanently, by the work of a tiny group of conservatives in power for only a few years. The key point of the conspiracy, and the permanent legacy of Reagan, was drastically to reduce the cost of labor. The middle class was an obstacle to this, as by definition the middle class consisted of workers who had enough economic security to have some control over the sale of their labor, and the ability to educate their offspring to rise above their own economic status. The point of post-Reagan conservatism is to create such fear and uncertainty in people that they can have no ability to prevent the ongoing erosion of their earning ability. The main goal of today’s conservatives is cheap labor, and it is accurate to describe them as ‘cheap-labor conservatives’. Not forgetting all the other awful things that Reagan did, what he should always be remembered for is his start of the process, a process which continues with a vengeance by Bush, of destroying middle class America in order to create a permanent underclass whose sole purpose is the enrichment of the plutocrats. Unfortunately, it will be decades, if not longer, before this terrible wrong is righted. The destructive capability of today’s cheap-labor conservatives is so great that even voting for them once, in order to chastise another political group, is madness.
Rod, your attempt to use facts to support your beliefs is admirable (I wish more liberals would make the effort), but it falls apart on the second line of your first comment.
Your statement that Conservatives believe “Jimmy Carter cut the military budget” is false. Further, it’s a typical liberal tactic to attribute a false belief to Conservatives so you can attack them. In fact, a Google search of that phrase reveals only one website in which a Conservative makes that statement.
The more accurate statement of belief (which also happens to be true) is that Conservatives generally believe Carter had a terrible record on defense spending compared to other presidents. This is true and supported by the facts. According to budget figures (http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/pdf/hist.pdf#page=140), defense spending during the Carter years was lower as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) than at any other time between 1962 and the end of the Reagan years.
That you begin with a misleading statement diminishes the credibility of your liberal comments. Sorry, you’re wrong.
wow, you are the most ignorant person i have ever met
what a bunch of crap, where did you get your facts.
I suppose your going to tell me that FDR got us out of the depression, dumb ass
thanks rod. i guess next you’ll tell us how history says all this spending is going to get us out of the recession.
…And I thought it was just a catchy phrase Ronny used : “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
You just proved him right…
Facts are such pesky things… Sources, and don’t bother giving us “facts” from the DNC; fuzzy logic doesn’t work that way.
Well, whatever Reagan did or did not do, we know the US economy after during and after the 80’s was the best it had been in a long time. We also know that the Soviets were ended, and that had been a goal for decades. We also know that he inspired the majority of us to hold to our American ideals, even if the rest of them, the Left, never understood them.
You on the Left will never get it until you can step outside the university classroom for a while, and start listening to the rest of us, instead of just to each other. Rod, this means you too, if you’re still around.
How can a person so educated, be so stupid? Rod is simply clueless!
Rod, you are a truly an ignorant tool