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Post by cruncher on Mar 1, 2009 14:39:53 GMT -5
so heavily invested in the "small government" propaganda while actually being at least as willing as anyone else to expand government and government spending as long as it is on things that benefit their constituents. It's almost like people don't realize that the military is part of the federal gov't. How much have we expanded that over the past 8 years? |
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Post by BearClause on Mar 2, 2009 13:15:44 GMT -5
The Republicans are stuck with the fact that they are so heavily invested in the "small government" propaganda while actually being at least as willing as anyone else to expand government and government spending as long as it is on things that benefit their constituents. Also, most Red States are net recipiants of Federal money, while many Blue States are net providers of that money. So pretty much everybody they can put up with any experience at all is going to be in the same boat of having happily sucked up as many Federal dollars as they could. The "blue states" tend to be on the coasts, with fairly large numbers of higher-income residents. This leads to higher tax revenues. However - the cost of building a road isn't that much different, so the federal pot gets distributed disproportionately. |
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Post by hammer on Mar 2, 2009 14:37:27 GMT -5
I see nothing in Jindal's background to indicate that he is fiscally conservative or could get the US government's budget problems righted. If you want to make the argument that he is better than Obama or Bush, that's fine. But I think it is a little like asking how you would like to be killed, by firing squad, or the electric chair.
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Post by goGopherBill on Mar 2, 2009 14:54:25 GMT -5
The things Democrats wont talk about..
ECONOMY and ethics.
Jindal was elected for promising to clean up ethics in politics in a state ..LIKE CHICAGO.. where politics is corrupted .
Do you hear Democrats saying they wish to clean up ethics?
Yes ..but only after BUSH..not ANY DEMOCRATS...They only Dream BURRIS would disappear before the next election cycle...
Jindal's state actually added jobs last month... How's that economy going for democrats?
Palin went after BAD Republicans...
Obama just hires them.BAD DEMOCRATS.
Tax cheats,,cronies and same old boys club with a different colored flag.
History will show which and who cleaned up the most.
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Post by hammer on Mar 6, 2009 18:33:26 GMT -5
Here is what Jindal should have said -- by Charles Krauthammer:
Forget the pork. Forget the waste. Forget the 8,570 earmarks in a bill supported by a president who poses as the scourge of earmarks. Forget the "$2 trillion dollars in savings" that "we have already identified," $1.6 trillion of which President Obama's budget director later admits is the "savings" of not continuing the surge in Iraq until 2019 -- 11 years after George Bush ended it, and eight years after even Bush would have had us out of Iraq completely.
Forget all of this. This is run-of-the-mill budget trickery. True, Obama's tricks come festooned with strings of zeros tacked onto the end. But that's a matter of scale, not principle.
All presidents do that. But few undertake the kind of brazen deception at the heart of Obama's radically transformative economic plan, a rhetorical sleight of hand so smoothly offered that few noticed.
The logic of Obama's address to Congress went like this:
"Our economy did not fall into decline overnight," he averred. Indeed, it all began before the housing crisis. What did we do wrong? We are paying for past sins in three principal areas: energy, health care, and education -- importing too much oil and not finding new sources of energy (as in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Outer Continental Shelf?), not reforming health care, and tolerating too many bad schools.
The "day of reckoning" has now arrived. And because "it is only by understanding how we arrived at this moment that we'll be able to lift ourselves out of this predicament," Obama has come to redeem us with his far-seeing program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as the goal.
Amazing. As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.
At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushed by Washington (and greed) into improvident loans, corrupted bond-ratings agencies, insufficient regulation of new and exotic debt instruments, the easy money policy of Alan Greenspan's Fed, irresponsible bankers pushing (and then unloading in packaged loan instruments) highly dubious mortgages, greedy house-flippers, deceitful homebuyers.
The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy. Nor the lack of college graduates. Indeed, one could perversely make the case that, if anything, the proliferation of overeducated, Gucci-wearing, smart-ass MBAs inventing ever more sophisticated and opaque mathematical models and debt instruments helped get us into this credit catastrophe in the first place.
And yet with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and his budget that the essence of his presidency will be the transformation of health care, education and energy. Four months after winning the election, six weeks after his swearing in, Obama has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the banking crisis.
What's going on? "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," said Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
Things. Now we know what they are. The markets' recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions -- the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic -- for enacting his "Big Bang" agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.
Clever politics, but intellectually dishonest to the core. Health, education and energy -- worthy and weighty as they may be -- are not the cause of our financial collapse. And they are not the cure. The fraudulent claim that they are both cause and cure is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.
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