DoughtyOne, I can’t speak to the medicare issue - I didn’t follow it. “Socialist in nature” is still not socialist. Maybe a better term would be welfare, charity or “give-aways”. Even then, I find it difficult to put the whole thing at the president’s feet. People often attribute too much power or blame to the president in regards to economic policy. Bush and other republicans were smacked down when they tried to initiate reform of FEDDIE and FANNY. What else was he supposed to do?
I’m not a political purist. I never expected President Bush to do be a perfect conservative.
It’s easy to criticize but we don’t know the details, the back-story, the true circumstances surrounding a leader’s decisions.
My point is that with enough “Socialist in Nature” things going on, pretty soon you’ve got a socialist state. If you sit down and think of the countless ways the federal government has it’s fingers in our lives, it’s honestly impossible to state that we are not in large part a socialist state today. Various government entities take a massive amount of money from working people today. And then large portions of that money is provided to others.
Our retirements (Social Security), Medicare, welfare... on and on it goes. About fifteen years ago I read an article that mentioned that in Kansas City, there were more people working for the various levels of government than in the private sector. You’ve got to admit that isn’t a good example of a free enterprise nation. It’s Socialism. Perhaps we could argue about terms, but I think we’d be kidding ourselves if we didn’t recognize it for what it is.
Is this all Bush’s fault. Hell no. Still, in his eight years he contributed to this problem considerably. And when all is said and done in light of the current economic situation, we’ll have to come to terms with what took place on his watch, or as a result of his watch. it isn’t going to be kind to him.
I’m not for going out of my way to trash Bush. It still bothers me to enter threads that canonize him, when the reality is, hes left this nation in a mess. And that prompts me to take a contrarian view.
If someone posted favorable comments about Democrats standing in all this, I’d slice and dice those comments also. However, the Democrats didn’t do all this in a vacuum, unfortunately.