Social Security and Medicare are not “entitlements”. We worked and PAID INTO THE SS SYSTEM and INCOME TAXES that paid SS and Medicare benefits for the millions of the grannies and grampas of those on FR who will skewer me for saying this. - Meantime, Al Gore (you know, “lockbox” Al Gore) and his “colleagues” in Congress basically confiscated what we paid in for all taxes and diverted the funds to buy welfare votes in order to build their “constituency”. - If we can’t get term limits, we’re sunk.
Unfortunately "going Gault" will not fix this. Those in DC in both Parties think the "status quo" will, it won't. The question is how to reassert adult leadership.
I'm certain Buchanan well knows that the apt comparison to LBJ's 1964 landslide against Republican Goldwater, is Obama's 2008 landslide against Republican McCain, with similar results -- Johnson's Great Society and Obama's Nationalized Health Care.
We expected that 2012 would be another Nixon in 1968 or even (hope springs eternal), Reagan in 1980.
That these did not happen is a tribute first and foremost to Obama's media-enhanced political skills and Democrats' party discipline.
Anyone -- especially Buchanan -- who remembers those previous elections well knows that Republicans won then, at least in part, due to wide-spread Democrats' disloyalty to their party.
We expected that to happen, and it did happen again -- just not quite enough for Republican victory.
Indeed, just the opposite: while Romney received more votes than McCain in 2008, if Romney had received just as many votes as George Bush in 2004, he may have carried the election (I'm talking overall votes, not electoral state-by-state, which I don't know).
So the problem appears not only that Democrats were more loyal than expected, but also, Republican were less.
History does indeed tell us that 2014 could be a good year for Republicans, and 2016 even better.
But by then, how much of Obama's political agenda will be permanent features of America?
This is supposed to ne heartening, and it’s true we were in a deeper hole back when. New Dealers ran the country (into the ground) for 50 years prior to the Reagan “revolution.” Somehow, though, it makes me all the sadder. Just think, we claw our way out of the Old Liberal Order, win record landslides in national elections, free market economists actually win Nobel prizes of all things, the American people get to hear of such a thing as conservatism let alone take it seriously, and so forth. Where does it lead us? To thus. Here and now, and this is all we have to show for it.
What’s the point?
GOP tax policy has been corrupt for twenty years, or more.
The hypothesis of Howard Jarvis and David Stockman - that the size of government can be reduced by "starving the beast" - has been definitively falsified. The goal was never cutting taxes, per se. The target was the beast, which is now devouring us.
Taxes are the derivative of spending. High spending REQUIRES high taxes.
Most GOPers have now conceded the point, even going so far as favoring tax cuts "because that increases government revenues".
Increasing government revenues was never the point of cutting taxes. The point was both legal - taking money for unconstitutional functions is wrong - and moral - the money is ours, not the government's.
Having surrendered on both of these fundamentals, GOP tax "policy" is simply incoherent.
The Republicans, or whatever follows their liquidation, must choose. If they vote for >$3 trillion in "public" spending, then they must accept responsibility for >$3 trillion in revenues. If they vote for $2.2 trillion in revenues, then they must also vote for an immediate >$1 trillion cut in spending.
Since they will do neither, they have become irrelevant.
He really means FEDERAL INCOME TAX ~ and he also means BY THE STANDARDS OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE.
Traditionally (the time before you were born) at least half the working age adults would be unemployed ~ and neither would the children nor the elderly. That'd be about 70% of the total population outside the rope when it came to any sort of income tax.
Here's a snapshot of today's demographics: 0-14 years: 20.1% (male 32,107,900/female 30,781,823) 15-64 years: 66.8% (male 104,411,352/female 104,808,064) 65 years and over: 13.1% (male 17,745,363/female 23,377,542) (2011 est.).