Agreed.

Conservatives often like to quote Reagan as saying this:

Of course, the problem with that (beyond the fact that it's monumentally stupid dogma), is that he didn't actually say that. He said this:

The crisis he was talking about was the economic crisis involving insane inflation. Whatever the merits of Reagan's position were then, it's absolutely not the same situation today.

It's in the Preamble to the Constitution. . .

. . . which was written by, politicians (people in the gov'ment -- the founding people of the gov'ment, no less), and therefor, bad by nature. That "provide for the common defense" part is a good principle because it can be used to spend trillions of dollars fighting an illegal war or clandestine wars that private industry can make money hand over fist off of.

This is the big, unethical lie in socio-economic philosophy. It presupposes that there should be an economic elite. That the economic elite (the executive class) are the true and only engines of society,
and they should be the determiners of the rest of society's value, and that whatever shakes out of their pockets, whenever a benevolent mood strikes them, should be good enough for the health of the country. And, of course, the way to determine the health of the country, is to take their temperature.

And poor or working people who believe that, believe that because [i[]they aspire to be the plantation boss some day.


Another bone to pick: Please, whoever you crazy people are, stop thinking that profit motive is a magic elixir or the best indicator for the success of an entity. It just isn't.

How much proof (historical, and topical) do you need?

The problem right now is that the legendary 1% we're always talking about are holding all of the chips in the game. Nobody else can play, and the rich people still won't budge. The whole idea in the first place was to grab as much wealth from everybody else and live in little gated fortress communities where no poor (or brown) people would be. (Unless of course they were cleaning your pool, cutting your grass or shopping for you.) I know slavery sounds like a really neato idea to rich people, but we've already been through that shit once in this country. People won't do any work just because some kind of fucked up social order says that they're supposed to. They have to receive compensation for that work, and that's where the rich people fucked up. Now, there's no money for anybody (unless it's in a Swiss bank being guarded by lots of fuckers with machine guns), and the rich people have to pony up and start spreading it around. That, of course, is not going to happen. (The only thing that rich people have really shown any aptitude for, aside from getting pilot's licenses, ignoring their children and being assholes, is holding on to their money with a white-knuckled, bony death-grip.) America's on it's way to another civil war, and it's going to be poor people against rich people, plain and simple. They may live in tiny fortresses with iron gates and ADT security systems, but their 1% had better remember what just about every war in history has taught us: Numbers always win. Fucking period. If the rich 1% still want to hold onto what's "theirs", that is simply not going to happen if the other 99% just up and decide to take it by force. (That is, of course, not going to be pretty, but so be it.) Let's lynch a few rich folk and see what happens!

penitenziagite!

I couldn't have said it better myself.

It is extremely frustrating to be a young person in these times & know that what happens in these next few years is basically going to define much of how I live in the coming decade and beyond.

That is why I work full-time, save 5% of my income in my bank (which terrifies me these days, but I'm overseas & it is crazy-difficult to switch banks abroad) and I am learning to be thrifty while not shutting off spending completely.

I'm looking to my government for leadership, and while I see more from this President than the last one, he's still only 1 man in a city full of government workers. I hope the rest of the US government pulls their heads out of their asses, but I'm a cautious optimist at best.

We can't have a efficient government because we anti-government conservatives working for the fucking government!

I was in the Air Force during the last two years of the Clinton Administration and most of the Bush Administration and you payed any attention to conservative rhetoric like the Rumsfeld Doctrine and the effects it had down the hierarchal line, it was plain as day that these fucking morons purposely crippled the government's ability to do things.

My former colleagues would wonder why stupid shit like "Force Shaping" (Google it) would come down from Air Force leadership, and I kept saying in response, "It's not necessarily them. Read the newspaper! It's the fucking ideologues running the Federal Government!"

Ever see those guys on the street playing the shell game on top of a card board box?
It's like that, along with some finger pointing.

I just love that the Republidiots keep yelling about how we need tax cuts, but when tax cuts are given to the people with the least amount of money, they complain. You asked for tax cuts, idiots. We're giving tax cuts. In fact, more people are getting tax cuts than anytime I can think of (97% is the estimate). Isn't that what you wanted, Republicans? Isn't it?

At what point are we going to step in and tell the self-stimulating asshats in wallstreet to stop screwing with the cost of our goods and the stability of our companies? I realize this is talking about Reaganomics, but I mean, we spent how long at nearly $5/gal because of speculation. At first it was hard to accept until Opec dropped production at the same time that the actual wallstreet value plunged to the now 1/3d of what it was when it hi it's peak!

I whole heartedly agree, and always bitch about :-p, the state of our infrastructure, education, and health systems. There's a LARGE chunk of people without work. Ignoring that part of the population that would rather eat glass than work, there would be plenty of jobs created if they worked on doing a 'baseline' overhaul of the system, nothing elaborate JUST the basics, then let the states find a way to work on things like where to put that speed limit sign.

This country's general education system is beyond in the crapper both physically and the, ever so popular, test score view. I still say that method of evaluation needs an overhaul in itself, but at a minimum we need to get more/good teachers back into the system. All I hear is there will be X-number of school closings cause they have too few kids and Y-number of job cuts. Consolidate the bloody schools into a whole new system if need be, but don't mess with the basic lives of people because you hired a corrupt treasurer or don't want to lose your bonus this year. As for the teachers, in college they offer you ALOT more free govt money if you say that you wanna teach! But after you finish, you get all these teachers going to a school system saying we aren't hiring? Sounds more like the budget cuts need to start at the top not the bottom.

Healthcare...Once the other things are done, there has to be something done about the rising costs of things like healthcare. I personally think that much of this is the result of the increasing number of sue-happy assclowns we have in this country. I mean, why the hell should I work when I can get paid by the doctor for the rest of my life if I tell some judge that I have perma muscle dmg from his last recomended treatment of medical-issue-Z? IDK, too many core issues to deal with before our society can be properly righted :-(


And to think, I Avoid getting into the political game > . <

This is often overlooked, and the fact that Reagan steadfastly supported the New Deal flies in the face of the idea that he thought government was the always the problem.
For all the talk about cutting marginal rates, I suspect the most important part of Reagan's original tax cut was indexing - inflation was pushing people into higher tax brackets at the same time it was cutting the actual value of their take-home pay and Reagan fixed that.

Oh, and the same people who don't think that going to war against the rich in a violent uprising is necessary at this point are either A: Just scared. (I know, violence and guns are scary things, I don't blame you.) or B: Too busy trying to be rich themselves. Shame on you, you are worse than they are. They (most of the rich) are idiots who inherited their money, they were born into it and will die with most of it. (Not if I have my way, that is.) Prosperity and success are not just necessarily capital wealth, it involves a lot of things like satisfaction, peace, happiness, being ok with the world around you and other people, etc. Bottom-liners just don't get this. If you're busy fucking people over, alienating your friends, family and whoever you can actually get to trust you for more than five minutes in order to get enough money to move into Grosse Pointe, you're missing the point entirely: You will never be rich like they are through work. None of those people have ever known what it is like to make car payments, house payments, etc. While you're busy leading up to your first heart attack, ask yourself this question: How much is enough? How much do you really fucking need to be at peace?

oh, brother.

ha ha, I love liberals, they are the smartest most educated people on the planet. Thank you for all you do.

i love trolls, they contribute so much to everything they touch.