Since significantly less than half the population pays no tax (indeed, almost no one pays NO tax, since we tax goods and services :rolleyes:), then we aren’t anywhere near this scenario.
Since no where near half the population receives government benefits, unless you include all possible governmental benefits, in which case EVERYONE receives them, we are not anywhere near to this scenario.
As for governmental services, EVERYONE in the US relies upon governmental services. However, no where near 80% of people receive direct funding to pay for such services, and please note that it’s the Republicans that want to put money in your pocket to send your child to the school of your “choice,” not the Democrats.
Says who? Is there some kind of Sam Stone Rule that a political party loses its identity whenever it modifies its platform? By that reasoning, Republicans ceased to be Republicans when they stopped opposing racial integration. (And before that, by the same logic, Democrats ceased to be Democrats when they stopped opposing racial integration.)
You don’t need to sit around with your fingers crossed for a massive social and economic breakdown in the US under the Obama administration in order to retain hope for the survival of the Republican Party. There will always be enough ideological disagreements and clashing of interests to keep at least two political parties going in the US, even if their positions on certain issues end up converging (e.g., racial integration and Medicare in the past, equal rights for gays and universal health insurance in the future).
The Republicans opposed Social Security in the 1930s. It turned out to be a successful government program and the GOP learned to live with it and support it. Bush’s attempt to privatize it failed to gain support in his own party. If Obama’s new social programs work, the Republicans will evolve to support them in order to stay alive as they did with SSI. I don’t think the party ceased to be Republican, the modern GOP still looks as much like the GOP of 1920 as any political party can after ninety years.
Thatcher altered the NHS but it still left it in existence and the Conservative party has accepted the existence of the welfare state since 1951.
But see, that’s the issue right there. Republicans (at least the party leaders and mouthpieces) believe the ONLY way the Republicans can recover is to destroy the Democrats. It’s worked in the past with Clinton, why not now? And anyway, it saves them from having to actually come up with ideas.
Sam that was a fairly silly amount of hyperbole in your two-part post and if the GOP does not change and the Dems just do a better job then Bush over the next 8 years, it could mean the beginning of the end. The Republicans have somehow narrowed their focus more and more. This is not a matter of the Dems ruling forever, this is a matter of the Republicans heading down a path, they can still in theory pull back from but show no signs of doing so.
The Tax statement applies more to the very rich than any but the poorest. That was a Republican effort and not Dem.
It’s not correct to call SS a “successful” program until the people born right after it was implemented (baby boomers) have gone through their entire life cycles.
The government’s own trustees project that Social Security & Medicare will be insolvent without major reform. This is the definition of “successful”?
When the demographics play out (the USA’s aging population), that’s when we can honestly assess if the entitlements are sustainable.
In this light one might also say that a Democrat couldn’t get elected until the Republican deregulation and tax cutting policies drove the economy into the crapper.
What do you think will happen if the country is neither heaven with a better view or in chaos? That’s the most likely scenario.
BTW, I don’t think anyone is claiming the stimulus package will magically restore prosperity. It will just hold things together and stabilize them until a natural recovery takes place.
I think that generally, the party out of power is going to be universally against anything the party in power does. Members of the party in power may or may not be blindly supportive.
So, I’m not saying that all Democrats are supportive of Obama, it’s that in a Republican-controlled government, all Democrats will stand against Republican initiatives solely because they come from the ‘enemy’.
May I suggest an alternative explanation? That when a single party attains dominance, they bring out thier box of long-cherished notions, the stuff they could never in a million years pass through any sort of bi-partisan environment. The extreme stuff, and not in a good way. The kind of stuff that the moderates of said party probably don’t really support, but don’t have the grit to oppose. The kind of stuff that nobody in the opposing party can support, simply because it flies in the face of everything they stand for.
It might not be a simple blind rejection, it might actually spring from long-held principles.
Yes, Social Security is the definition of success. The system has been able to make payouts since 1937 and has kept millions of elderly Americans out of poverty, just as it was intended to do. I agree the program is going to require major reform in the coming years, but that doesn’t mean its collapse is at all inevitable.
Yes; even if it collapsed tomorrow ( which it won’t ), it has done what is was made to do for decades. And as I recall those claims of doom are from “estimates” created by the Republicans that assume no or little economic growth for decades.
I feel the same. Once upon a time I was registered Republican, and I’ve always considered myself to be pretty moderate (whatever that means anymore). I left. I don’t have any compelling reason to go back.
Basically, they pissed me off. Why “reward” them now?
Well, well, well… I KNEW Specter had made a dumb mistake and had made himself utterly impotent. I just didn’t know HOW irrelevat he’d become or how quickly:
Nice move, Arlen! You haven’t been a Democrat for 10 days, and already you’ve been royally dissed.
