Posted on 11/09/2010 6:48:59 AM PST by WebFocus
One of the most frustrating tendencies of mainstream leaders in the United States is their willingness, year after debilitating year, to embrace policies that have no hope of succeeding.
From Lyndon Johnson’s mad pursuit of victory in Vietnam to George W. Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq to today’s delusionary deficit zealots, the tragic lure of the impossible dream seems never to subside.
Ronald Reagan told us he could cut taxes, jack up defense spending and balance the budget — all at the same time. How’d he do? As his biographer Garry Wills tells us, the Gipper “nearly tripled the deficit in his eight years, and never made a realistic proposal for cutting it.”
President Obama is escalating the war in Afghanistan while promising to start bringing our troops home next summer, which is like a heavyweight boxer throwing roundhouse rights while assuring his opponent that he won’t fight quite as hard after the eighth or ninth round.
I don’t know if it’s the drinking water or the rarefied air at the highest reaches of government that makes so many of our leaders go loopy. Whatever it is, we need to put a stop to these self-defeating tendencies. The U.S. is in sad shape, and most of the policy prescriptions being tossed around by the movers and shakers are bad ones.
To get a sense of how deeply entrenched the problems are, consider what passes for good news these days. The economy added 151,000 jobs last month, which was more than most economists had expected. But even at that rate of job growth, it would take 15 to 20 years to get the employment rate back to where it was when the Great Recession began in December 2007.
There is no time to waste on plans that can’t succeed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
that's the problem. they should cut spending two dollars for every new dollar raised, and apply that dollar to paying down the debt.
RE: President Reagan submitted 7 of 8 BALANCED budgets to the DEMOCRAT controlled Congress.
YES HE DID, AND HOW’d THAT WORK OUT IN PRACTICE?
A review of the obvious:
Tax increases are off the table—because we don't have the money. The country is still at war—because other people are making war on us.
Any other view is that of someone embedded in a fantasyland campaign against reality. As you are no doubt aware, this is where Mr. Herbert, a senior citizen and affirmative-action columnist old enough to have lied in print during six administrations, is most comfortable.
The reality (I know I'm not breaking new ground here) is that without the Department of Energy, Department of Education, Environmental Protection Administration, most of the Department of Agriculture, the Dept. of Homeland Security, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities Exchange Commission, and the Department of Health and Human Services—none of which can be authorized as Federal entities under the Constitution—the American people would have the money to balance the budget, retire any deficits, chase down al-Qaeda clowns with individual drones, and become prosperous enough to allow each of us to build a mini-Taj Mahal on his own property.
My guess is its solution 4#. Congress just doesn’t have the political will to cut spending. It will follow again the path of least resistance acceptable to both sides of the political aisle in the next Congress.
Thanks for the summary.
Mr. Herbert is a promoter of the zero-sum-gain lie. Keynsian economists, like Mr. Herbert, ignore the Laffer curve. The Republican plan depends on it. Thus the opinionated title that Mr. Herbert assigned to his article. Keynsians will be soon completely discredited once a contrast is established with Obama’s failed economy and the Republican fix.
“the spending that was needed to keep the Great Recession from spiraling into another Great Depression” is another lie. All this spending did was to keep dying entities on life support at the expense of healthy ones. They will die anyway, once the life support money dries up. The effect was to (unnecessarily) extend the length of the recession, perhaps by a factor of two or three. The spending did nothing to ease the depth of the recession, but it did shore up some overspent union pensions at the expense of our children’s future.
Yup. If the Democrats ever regain the House, two things will happen: we’ll get single payer health care and the VAT to pay for it.
RE: You mean people want free stuff?
Actually most people are INCONSISTENT when it comes to their love/hate relationship with government.
They would be willing to cut government spending on things that don’t affect them personally at all. But when it comes to their pet causes or spending that affects them personally (e.g., aid for children with disabilities, unemployment insurance, social security, etc), they would VOTE for MORE government.
Person A, who might be conservative on most issues would be willing for government to get out of the way of healthcare, but not if he/she has a serious pre-existing condition which will threaten to empty his/her bank account, then you begin to find out that on this one issue, he is as liberal as any other Democrat.
Tell me where all that Stimulus money went.
We should have a red hot economy and the Democrats should have won a landslide victory last week.
What the hell happened?
If Obama told Herbert that stuffing apples up his keister would fix the economy, Herbert would now be walking in a very funny manner. Herbert is the one of the biggest examples of an Obama-worshipping drone you can find.
There is no easy, painless way out of this mess. This country will be faced with some very difficult, painful decisions. Our gutless politicians need to treat Americans as adults and tell them the truth. And the people must take the ultimate responsibility by becoming informed and engaged.
RE: My guess is its solution 4#. Congress just doesn’t have the political will to cut spending.
That WILL BE the practical outcome when all horse-trading and speeches are finished.
There is also the matter of what we mean by increasing spending....
Would an increase equivalent to inflation rate + population growth be considered a broken promise to the people who elected this new Congress?
There. Fixed it.
We can absolutely fix the deficit without tax hikes if we are willing to make major cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
Bears repeating. Again and again and again.
RE: if we are willing to make major cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.
What about Social Security?
Let’s put it this way, MEDICARE, MEDICAID and SOCIAL SECURITY are the UNTOUCHABLE portions of our spending. They also happen to be the ones that cost us the most money and are on their way to insolvency.
ANY FISCAL PROPOSAL THAT DOES NOTHING TO ADDRESS THE ABOVE RAILS are merely trimming around the edges.
Not going to happen.
No congresscritter is going to cross the senior citizen voting class.
My democrat brother in-law (who is not a fan of Obama) gives a pretty good example of where the stimulus money went.
He is a road construction engineer in NY state.
He says that NONE of the stimulus money went to new construction projects. Towns, counties and states that already had funding approved for construction plans, used the stimulus money for those projects and used the funding that had been allocated for construction to shore up underfunded teacher pensions (and similar funds).
They set up a shiny orange sign next to their work that gives credit to Obama and nobody has any clue that the work would have been completed anyway, without the “Stimulus”. A pure shell game.
Agreed. But going there means political oblivion.
Even Republicans are not that stupid.
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