Thank you, Wick Allison

"pragmatism"?????

This shows the difficulty of identifying "real" conservatism. I understand conservatism as holding the true objective existence of eternal verities: First, the conservative believes that there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. (http://www.kirkcenter.org/kirk/ten-principles.html )

But "pragmatism" is a denial of permanent moral truths, and a claim that "right" is determined by what--in some sense of the word--works.

Now I am well aware that things are more complicated than this, but that is precisely the point: stringing together a few descriptors and claiming this is conservatism is nonsense. At least check out the above link, and "Conservatives and Neoconservatives," By Adam Wolfson in The Public Interest, Issue #154 (Winter 2004), (available online).

I agree that her message is tired, but the idea is valid. The issue, brought up by countless others, is that we cannot curb spending. We need to a) live within our means and b) put limit to non-stop government expansionism.

In Christ,
-jp

Both parties have discovered the concept of publicly-funded vote-buying (aka "bread & circuses"), each according to their own ideological proclivities. For the Democrats, it's welfare programs of various sorts. For the Republicans, it's tax cuts & deficit spending. In theory, the tax cuts should be coupled with spending cuts, leading to smaller government; but actually doing this requires tackling bread & circuses head-on, and cutting Social Security & Medicare, and nobody in the GOP high command wants to challenge AARP. Then there's corporate welfare, which generates too much protection money (oops, "campaign contributions") to ever be severely cut.

When I see several year-on-year 10% decreases in real federal spending, I'll start to believe Republicans' commitment to "smaller government" is more than mere rhetoric. Until then, tax cuts are simply "bread & circuses" in "conservative" guise.

"The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the Dems will tax us to blow our money, and the Republicans will just put the shopping spree on a credit card."

I love it! Thanks for making me laugh this evening.

I appreciate Wick and you both. But I mean no partisan rattling here, but truly, Bill Clinton, love him or not, those were very fiscally responsible years with sound financial management putting the deficit to bed, etc. While President Bush gave the wealthiest tax breaks and fought to keep them at a time of war? McCain said it himself; that NEVER had at a time of war there been tax cut/breaks.

But the sad thing is, so much of this took place in the 1980s, but everyone is quick to forget, or if young enough, ignore it or never learn it. The hangover about so-called “tax and spend” Dems dates back to LBJ. But in the last 28 years, as an earlier poster Steve correctly mentions, the Democratic president was the only one that had a good economic policy w/o overspending and meanwhile cutting the inherited (from the GOP) deficit. So where is all this 'the Dems will kill us' talk coming from? The Carter years? That's 30 years ago.

Meanwhile, as enormous as our debt is now to China alone, how can we expect to NOT be taxed. I have said for 5 plus years, “why has this President asked NOTHING of Americans at a time of war?” When I ran a commentary about it on NPR, the howls were audible to Delaware. After the last 8 years, it will be absurdly insulting for anyone to praise GOP financial 'policy'. Yet I am already receiving emails from rabid Republicans stating that everything was rosy until the Democrats took over congress over a year ago, and all this nightmare cave-in is what followed. Incredible.

As the great P.J. O'Rourke once said, "Vote Republican and be robbed blind. Vote Democrat and be too poor to be worth robbing."

IOW, both parties reek.

if either party spent less, would they be reelected?

Probably not. Bread & circuses: the electorate, having learned how to vote itself largesse from the public trough, will punish anyone who tries to cut them off cold turkey.

What I don't understand-why does the emphasis on tax and spend not involve cutting spending in the GOP universe? Bush and the Republicans have done nothing to curb spending. In fact, they went along with a huge expansion of entitlements with the drug program,which on Day 1 was totally underfunded. They have never sought to cut government agencies, like an Education Department that operates no schools, a worthless Department of Commerce(as if the Fed and Treasury don't already do it's functions), or a Department of Energy that in my lifetime has yet to produce any discernible energy policy.

All of this goes back to the 1995 government shutdown crisis. Newt Gingrich led the Republicans in pushing for radical spending cuts in order to balance the budget. Bill Clinton resolutely opposed the GOP budget as extremist and allowed the Federal government to shut down rather than sign it into law. With a helpful assist from the dominant media in the waning of the pre-internet era, Clinton won the war for public opinion decisively in that confrontation. Lesson learned by Republican politicians: Don't fight this battle.

Shortly thereafter, the tech-driven boom in business productivity, with no help from Washington, started pushing so much tax revenue into the Federal coffers that the budget balanced itself anyway. This allowed Clinton -- the king of chutzpah! -- to claim credit as a budget balancer, and also reassured Republican congress critters that could safely engage in traditional pork barrell spending to secure reelection without sacrificing overall fiscal probity.

Then the tech bubble burst in 2001, 9/11 hit in 2001, and we got a President whose fiscal policy channelled that of Lyndon Johnson. The rest, unfortunately, is history.

A partial repost, WRT the current distribution of US tax burdens:

See this study:

www.taxfoundation.org/files/wp1.pdf

Taking the data from Tables 3 (# of households per quintile) and 4 (Household Market Income per quintile), along with Figure 1, we arrive at per-quintile rates (lowest to highest) of 12.3, 15.6, 17.4, 18.6, & 21.1 for federal, and 19.3, 12.4, 10.9, 10.3, & 9.0 for state & local.

If we take government transfers into account (as we probably should, if we're interested in figuring out how much someone pays, on net, to the government), the picture changes considerably. See Figure 3 of the aforementioned study, which gives per-quintile rates of 5.0, 12.9, 17.4, 20.2, & 24.3 for federal, and 7.9, 10.3, 10.9, 11.2, & 10.3 for state & local.

Loudon is a Fool
If taxes must be raised, the pain should fall squarely on the lower and middle class....That's a bite, but it's probably not enough to make them hate the government. Double that and the middle class may become believers in a fiscally sound government.

The new United States Republican party slogan, folks: Of the People, By the People, Against the People.

You know, in the end, all this is self-correcting. If you keep raising the taxes of the majority of the people, guess what? They'll stop voting for you. That's why the Republican party stopped raising taxes on the middle class a long time ago, and switched to deficit spending. And blaming that on the Democrats.

I think there are issues of justice that are often ignored in soak the rich tax schemes.

I'm not entirely sure I've pointed this out before, but something like half of all government spending is to help protect assets, which are, obviously, mainly owned by the rich.

Who needs property rights protecting asserts from theft more? Who needs a military protecting the sea? (Pirates are now almost extinct thanks to our spending.) Who needs laws saying who owns what land?

But it's not just that. Who needs a cheap rail and roads to ship goods so people can buy them? Who needs an air traffic system? Who needs a court system that can work out contract law?

Yeah, everyone can use those things, but who actually does use the ATC system? Commercial airlines. And the roads...yeah, we all pay gas taxes, but shipping puts a much larger toll on the roads than transport.

Seriously, there's this sort of blindness that fails to notice all the 'traditional' things, things conservatives think are 'good and proper', that a government does to maintain the rule of law and society almost invariably benefit the people who, without such a government, would be the people who had all their stuff instantly stolen.

This is because the rich and powerful invented government, and for the first 5000 years of operation it solely was there to protect them from the poor. As it had the added side effect of protecting the poor from the poor, the poor went along with it. And then we invented democracy, and it all went to crap, because it turns out that the poor figured out they could vote too.

People on the right whine and moan when the government does things that actually would benefit all, like provide health care to everyone, but ignore the fact that 'asset protection' and 'rule of law', the major things they think a government should do, mainly protect the people with assets. (Duh.) It's only fair that people with assets should pay for that.

Anatole France said it best: The law in its infinite majesty forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.

It also allows the poor, as well as the rich, to safely operate commercial airline service, to walk down the street wearing a $150,000 worth of jewelry, and to have the police investigate robberies of any banks they own.

We're all nice and equal under the law.

I don't think anything of the sort, I'm just somewhat annoyed at the conservative idea that 'socialism is bad' without the recognition that the 'traditional aspects of government', the ones that libertarians and conservatives say is the only 'legitimate' function of the government, almost entirely are set up to protect people with assets from people without assets.

I mean, there are laws that specifically set dollar amounts! Stealing more is more of a crime than stealing less, even though stealing 15 dollars from someone living min wage paycheck to min wage paycheck is a lot more harmful than stealing 50 dollars from a middle class person. But the first is a misdemeanor and the second a felony in most areas.

And even laws that are theoretically helpful to everyone, like laws against murder, end up still being disparately solved based on the economic status of the victim. Mostly because police departments in rich areas tend to be well funded, and ones in very poor areas tend to be dysfunctional.

I'm not saying the rich deserve to be robbed, but there's some fundamental lack of realization that the entire concept of 'ownership', enforced by rule of law, is for them. It is for people who own things.

And then conservatives go on and assert we should all be taxed 'equally' to make sure law enforcement has money to keep the rich from being robbed. And things that the rich don't need, but could use anyway, like government-paid health care, people shouldn't have to pay for.

It's like we're living in a commune where we all pay equally for parking, but only half of us have a car. And, meanwhile, suggestions we chip in for a washer-dryer go unheeded...the upper class have servants who wash their clothes, the middle class uses the incredibly expensive laundromat if they can afford it, and the poor shower while wearing them. But that's because a washer-dryer is 'socialism' whereas paying for parking is 'traditional'.

Check out Wick's new essay:

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me....