Comment Blocked from InfoWars thread:
Ron Paul: Congress has lost control to outside
interests
and was meant to be a reply to
|
Matt Reply: 100 bucks says every one of you
assholes was supporting Ron Paul during the race. Now that you’ve moved on -
he’s NWO. What a bunch of crap. He’s not God like some made out and he’s not
evil like others are making out now. The truth is usually in the middle
somewhere buried under mounds of bullshit. Even if Ron Paul were a lizard man
mason who shits out all the Federal Reserve notes - he still got a hell of a
lot of people motivated who didn’t give a damn before. Stop being children. |
Comment:
This is the first comment so far in the whole
thread worthy of graduating to the 9th grade.
Not a single comment here (I have yet to read
below, I confess) mentions economics or policy.
Let's give credit to Paul for saying these problems
go all the way back (I guess Gary gets some credit for that too).
But the panel on the clip is failing to hit
the issue.
1. The will of the people is supposedly
the wellspring of legislation, but the process is entirely subverted.
Bills are written to avoid being read, reading is avoided to prevent taking the
blame. Special interests set the agenda and pay the actors in the elected
chairs to dress up the event.
2. If the people —the whole people — stood up and said no to the subversion of the process
of lawmaking, it would be possible to make the necessary changes. One
comment on the panel comes close: "no bill should be more than a
page". That's an exaggeration, but a right principle.
Where I work, there are areas where clutter
accumulates to the point of totally blocking rooms where essential equipment is
stored. The newest, least invested, and laziest just toss whatever is
being moved out of immediate use. Soon, even the most invested and best
employees say "what's the use?" and make minimal effort to stow
things in an intelligent way. Eventually, somebody goes in and
straightens up the storage area, and it keeps for a while. This
legislative clutter is of a similar nature.
3. It must be admitted that not all
eras are equally screwed up. Example:
Describing the
claim that "the Bush administration squandered this giant surplus left by
the Clinton administration" as a "Democrat [sic] mantra talking
point," nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh falsely asserted
that "there never was a surplus" under President Clinton. In fact,
from 1998 to 2001, the federal government ran total annual budget surpluses of
between $69.2 billion and $236.2 billion, according to figures
from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO). [N.B. — the original CBO page referenced by Media Matters has been
curiously deleted, so I compiled the linked one from still existing CBO pages,
and took it thru 2008 — PP]
The figures are solid. Clinton's
surplus was a total of $430B for 1998-2000. Calling 2001 a shared year
(and excluding it), Bush's deficits for 2002 thru 2008 totals $2.131T.
Can someone refute for me these paragraphs
from an article at
CommonDreams by Robert Freeman?
The first signs of impending trouble are the exploding budget deficits
themselves. They began, of course, under the parlous economic stewardship of
Ronald Reagan. Reagan cut the marginal tax rate on the wealthiest of Americans
from 70% to 38%. He promised it would spur an orgy of investment and rocket the
economy to new levels of production and prosperity. Instead, his “supply side
economics” did the exact opposite. It produced the deepest recession since the
Great Depression.
Output fell 2.2% in 1982 while budget deficits soared. When Reagan took
office in 1981, the national debt stood at $995 billion. Twelve years later, by
the end of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, it had exploded to $4 trillion.
Reagan was a “B” grade movie actor and a doddering, probably clinically senile
president, but he was a sheer genius at rewarding his friends by saddling other
people with debts.
Bill Clinton reversed Reagan’s course, raising taxes on the wealthy, and
lowering them for the working and middle classes. This produced the longest
sustained economic expansion in American history. Importantly, it also produced
budgetary surpluses allowing the government to begin paying down the crippling
debt begun under Reagan. In 2000, Clinton’s last year, the surplus amounted to
$236 billion. The forecast ten year surplus stood at $5.6 trillion. It was the
last black ink America would see for decades, perhaps forever.
George W. Bush immediately reversed Clinton’s policy in order to revive
Reagan’s, once again showering an embarrassment of riches on the already most
embarrassingly rich, his “base” as he calls them. He ladled out some $630
billion in tax cuts to the top 1% of income earners. In true Republican
fashion, they returned the favor by investing over $200 million to ensure
Bush’s re-election. Do the math. A $630 billion return on a $200 million
investment: $3,160 for $1. I’ll give you $3,160. All I ask is that you give me
$1 back so I can keep the goodness flowing. Do we have a deal? Republicans know
return on investment.