How to recruit anti-Bush voters

See, thats just the kind of sophisticated thinking I was looking for! “It’s possible”. Certainly settles that!

I didn’t want to clutter you poor, unsophisticated head with high falutin’ economic ideas. But since you mentioned the Laffer curve, here you go. It is from the Heritage foundation (written by Laffer himself), so what’s the saying you like-- shields up? Enjoy:

You may laff and the Laffer curve or at Laffer himself, but the Kennedy tax cuts producing more tax revenue is pretty well accepted in economic circles. Note that I am specifically referencing the Kennedy tax cuts because the tax rates at that time were exceptionally high (the highest bracket was 90%). It’s unlcear that tinkering with the tax rates like Bush did when they are relatively low has the same effect.

Thanks for the info, John Mace. It confirms my dislike of the current spending patterns of the current Republican leadership. So, again, I say to Democrats who want my vote and the votes of other Republicans dissatisfied on economic matters, where is the Democrats’ plan to cut spending? What have they done during the Bush term to stand up against this spending explosion?

I don’t like it when folks play the victim card, but in reality what could the Democrats do on that issue since the other party controls both Houses of Congress? And a divided government is probably a lot better at controling spending that a one-party government.

Well, for one thing, most of them voted against the massive corporate-welfare giveaway to Big Pharma known as the Medicare drug benefit:

The author of the article goes on to say that Dems are being somewhat disingenuous in complaining about the massive costs because the plan they preferred would have been even costlier, but I’m not sure that that’s true. For one thing, Democrats were pushing for having the government use its biggest-insurer clout to negotiate discounts with pharma companies, and also for permitting patients to import drugs from Canada, both of which would have reduced costs, and both of which the Republicans refused to implement.

Now, this is not to say that Democrats in general tend to be in favor of smaller government. But at least they are not so devoid of elementary financial sense and conscience as the Republicans now in charge of government seem to be.

Have you attempted to find out what Democratic candidates in your district(s) actually say (or in the case of incumbents, do) about government spending? I recommend checking out their positions on the Project Vote Smart site (www.www.vote-smart.org). You can type in the candidate’s name and find a lot of information about them. It’s most helpful if they’ve supplied an NPAT (National Political Awareness Test) profile, which summarizes their positions on a wide range of issues (including budget, taxes and spending) in a standard format; but there are also links to voting records for incumbents, and other information.

Pretty drastic, IMO. Do you really want continued tax cuts to an indefinite extent? Do you really think that the only acceptable solution for budget deficits is spending cuts? Do you not consider it even theoretically possible that tax revenues might in some situations be too low for the government to do a decent job of governing?

We have had staggering amounts of tax cuts under the current Administration, most of them benefiting very disproportionately the wealthiest taxpayers. I certainly agree that we need to reduce government spending, but I’m skeptical of the claims that that’s all we need to do in order to balance the budget (especially with a very expensive war going on). I don’t understand how you can categorically refuse to consider ever giving your vote to a candidate who might consider it desirable to raise taxes.

That strikes me as the strangest thing of all. You mean, you’d deliberately vote for somebody who was pursuing a recklessly unsound fiscal policy of perpetual taxcutting and ever-increasing deficit spending—as long as s/he promised not to raise taxes—over somebody whose approach to budget issues was halfway sane?

I just don’t see how you can call that attitude “fiscal conservatism”. It sounds to me more like sheer fiscal wishful-thinkingism, or outright fiscal delusionism. Isn’t “fiscal conservatism” supposed to imply a basic minimum of fiscal realism and common sense?

How would a moderate Republican losing his seat to a Democrat inspire future GOP candidates for that seat to be more conservative? Seems to me that by voting for a candidate to the left of your incumbent, you are just encouraging your party to shift leftwards. (Which I’d personally be all in favor of, mind you, but it doesn’t sound as though that’s the goal you’re aiming at.)

I wish more Republicans had managed to figure this out back in 2002 and 2004, don’t you? You would think that if controlling government spending was really so important to the average Republican, and if so many Republicans acknowledge that a divided government has a braking effect on government spending, then Republicans would, you know, stop voting for so many Republican politicians.

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. I’m afraid that not just Republican politicians but Republican voters in general, with their tame acceptance of their leaders’ fiscal recklessness and their willingness to “hold their nose” and vote them back in anyway, have forfeited their claim to be the “party of fiscal responsibility”.

I’m afraid that too many people on the right are not so much against big government spending as they are against big government spending on things they don’t support or by politicians they don’t like. It’s not the spending that bothers them, it’s what it’s being spent and (just as importantly) who is doing the spending.

On Medicare, as you pointed out, the Democrats’ plan was more expensive than the GOP plan, so no points for Dems there. That seems to be the way it is across the board. The GOP spends a lot of money on education, health care, border security, etc., and the Democrats criticize them for spending too little. That seems to say to me that if Democrats were running Congress then they would spend even more than the GOP.

We’d have to lower taxes quite a bit until I’d be happy.

Yes. Our government spends way too much money as far as I’m concerned and any deficit reduction should only deal with the spending side of the equation. We can start with entitlement programs which are out of control. At least Bush had a plan to reduce spending for Social Security and Medicaid. Democrats gave themselves a standing ovation for opposing even this modest bit of fiscal sanity.

Not any time soon.

Since the wealthiest taxpayers pay a very disproportionate amount of taxes, then I see no unfairness in that. If you pay taxes, you get a tax cut. If you pay a lot of taxes, then you get a big tax cut. That makes perfect sense to me.

It’s not quite true. As I stated, I’m voting for the Democrat for Congress just to get rid of our RINO we have in there now.

Raising taxes and increasing spending (as Democrats propose) is twice as insane as cutting taxes and increasing spending.

Well, I have the choice between two parties that both want to spend a lot of my money. One wants to cut taxes and spend a lot. The other wants to raise taxes and spend even more. I hold my nose and vote for the first. Neither choice is great, but neither choice is being fiscally responsible. Again, if Democrats offered a fiscally responsible choice, I’d take it. They aren’t doing so. Even with the tax increases they propose they will do little to tackle the deficit. This is especially true if they got their wish for all the spending increases they want.

The goal is to get rid of the moderate we have. With this district it’s likely that in two years a more conservative candidate would run and beat the Democrat. It’s pretty clear that most conservatives in this district don’t like our Congressman and would likely select a conservative candidate in the 2008 primary.

I’ll grant you that the GOP is irresponsible fiscally. That was never the point of any of my posts. My point was that the Democrats are even more fisally irresponsible. We all acknowledge that the GOP has increased spending. What Democrats fail to acknowledge is that the Democrat Party wants to increase spending even more.

Can you say ‘hypocrisy’ children? No, I didn’t think you could.

Really, the entire ‘fiscal conservative’ label is misleading in the extreme. A fiscal conservative doesn’t necessarily want all taxes lowered. A fiscal conservative wants a federal spending pattern that is responsible and reasonable. That means that if the electorate demands high services then taxes must be high enough to support that level of service.

But the ‘cut taxes’ while increasing spending thing should give any true fiscal conservative a case of electoral poison ivy. And those that attempt to wave it away betray themselves at each turn.

Where the hell is the heir to Goldwater when you need him/her?

Why, the good Rev. Fallwell is right over there, why do you ask?

Of course, there’s good ol’ “Drown it in the bathtub” Grover, but he’s kinda busy, talking to his lawyers lately…

That’s worrisome, because it takes away one of the traditional PR disincentives for balancing government fiscal policy. It used to be a common rhetorical device (and apparently still is) for Republicans to try to paint Democrats as feckless spendthrifts who wasted taxpayer money every chance they got. (Similarly, Democrates traditionally paint Republicans as heartless elitists who have no concern for the problems of the little guy as long as rich people are doing okay.)

However true or false that accusation might have been in any particular instance, as long as the Republicans had some general credibility as the “party of fiscal responsibility”, Democrats had to rein in their spending proclivities somewhat so as not to get scolded too bad. (This concern IMO was a big incentive for Clinton’s deliberately centrist, deficit-cutting fiscal policy.)

But if there’s nobody left who can credibly shake the “spendthrift” finger at anybody else, what’s going to happen? Is there any kind of guarantee that this irresponsible cycle will stop before we have a serious economic catastrophe and wind up in a Chinese fire sale? (No, that’s not some kind of derogatory ethnic expression like “Chinese fire drill”: I mean a fire sale, a seriously depressed economic condition, in which we lose out big-time to our major creditor China.) Exactly how much security is standing between us and something that one could credibly describe as a genuine economic collapse?

Do you have a cite for the claim that the Democrats’ plan was in fact projected to be more expensive than the GOP plan actually turned out to be? I know that the Republicans said their plan would cost less, but we now know that many of them were deceived about that and the rest were lying (and in some cases, explicitly prohibiting the officials who knew the realistic projections to reveal them before the vote). As far as I can tell, the costs of the Republican plan as realistically projected now dwarf what the opposition’s plan would have cost.

Do you have a cite for the claim that Bush’s SS privatization plan would actually have reduced its costs? The way it looked when I was digging around in it (and one of the chief reasons I opposed it) was that it was in fact going to result in vastly increased costs in the near term, due to the transition costs from a pay-as-you-go structure to a save-for-yourself one. So we would have reduced security and income for future generations of seniors without actually doing much good to anybody else financially speaking (except of course the private investment firms who would be getting commissions on all that new private investment).

What seems to be “the way it is across the board” these days is that the Republican leadership say that their policies will reduce spending, but they don’t actually mean it and won’t actually do it. A lot of Republican voters seem to keep believing them anyway, unfortunately.

Huh? Personally, I think that courting serious economic catastrophe with a policy of perpetually taxing less and spending more (and in the meantime racking up such huge deficits that large amounts of the remaining tax revenues have to be spent just on financing the interest on them) is way more insane than a moderate tax increase that actually reduces the deficit.

Well, we saw in the Clinton years that a Democratic administration was actually capable of substantially reducing deficits with a combination of moderate tax hikes and spending restraint. They certainly look like a better bet than the no-brakes spendthrifts we’ve currently got running the show.

Hey, howzabout Ralph “Babyface” Reed! Oh, he is? Hmmm. Tom DeLay, aways brings in the undead vote…Oh, really? No, hadn’t heard. Well, good ol’ “Duke” Cunningham, war hero, fighter pilot and…twelve years? No shit? Well, there’s always squeeky clean Bob Ney!..

As with pretty much every government program, projected costs are always dwarfed by actual costs. It was really no surprise that happened with the Bush Medicare plan. It’s also highly unlikely that if the Democrat plan would have been enacted it would have escaped this seemingly iron law of politics. So since their plan was projected to cost more than the GOP plan I have little doubt that if it were enacted it would have actually cost more than the GOP plan is costing.

Of course there is no cite because it is all theoretical. I fully realize it would have raised costs in the short-run. However, in return it would have lowered costs in the long run. That seems a pretty prudent plan to me since right now we could handle the short-term increase. As Social Security exists now, future taxpayers (probably including both you and me) will be on the hook for a hugely expensive system. Running up the price tag now to bring the future price tag down makes a lot of sense.

Find me one Republican voter who actually thinks the GOP is reducing spending and I’ll be surprised.

Where the GOP does have it over the Dems is that there is a committed group of conservatives who is trying to reduce spending in the Republican Study Committee. They try and force leadership to reduce spending or at least the growth of spending. Sometimes they succeed. There is no similar group in the Democrat caucus.

There is no proof that moderate tax increases will reduce the deficit, especially if Democrats get their way and increase spending more than Republicans are currently doing.

Fine. Bring back Bill Clinton and I would probably vote for him. However, Clinton isn’t running for Congress. Furthermore, that was a Democrat presidency with a GOP Congress. I think we’d be in for a worse fiscal disaster with a spendthrift President (Bush) and a Democrat Congress that thinks he isn’t spending enough.

Um, but the Bush Medicare plan instance was somewhat outside the usual run of ordinary project overruns. Remember, that was the case where the plan’s backers knew that the fake projections they made public were lowballing the **actual/b] projections by more than $100 billion:

You really can’t just shrug off that kind of skullduggery as governmental business-as-usual, at least I hope you’re not prepared to do so. That’s not ordinary cost overruns, that’s the Administration deliberately and drastically lying about its cost projections in order to con legislators into voting for their bill. Say what you like about the Democrats’ bill, but at least they were being reasonably candid about the projected costs.

If the Bush plan really would have saved money in the long run, even when the transition costs were factored in, you should be able to find a reliable cite explaining in an understandable and convincing way how that would have worked. When privatization was on the table I spent quite a bit of time looking around for such an explanation, but I never found one.

Well, you yourself seem to think that Bush’s privatization plan would have reduced SS spending overall, without showing any evidence for it. And you also seem to believe that the Medicare plan scam was just an ordinary case of predictable cost overruns rather than a deliberately fraudulent massive underestimate. It appears that even critical Republican voters such as yourself who claim to have no illusions about the GOP’s current level of fiscal responsibility can still let some of the propaganda claims get by them.

Kimstu, having done some research on Bush’s plan(s) – there seems to be three he was supporting – it seems that there was no legislation introduced that specified exaclty how benefits would be restructured, which is key for any Social Security savings.

This is all a bit of distraction from my main point – the GOP sucks on fiscal responsibility, but Democrats have given every indication they would do even worse if they were in charge. For example, on Social Security, the Democrats’ plan is to do nothing. That means that once the trust fund becomes insolvent, we are faced with massive tax increases or huge benefit cuts. That’s very fiscally irresponsible.

On the wider issue of government spending, as I’ve said before, Democrats complain that Bush is not spending enough. They even oppose the modest efforts of the Deficit Reducation Act which barely reduced the growth of spending. Thankfully, it passed over their opposition. If we accept that the GOP is being irresponsible, how much more irresponsible is it for the Democrats to oppose any cuts to spending and to call for increased spending? If they were so fiscally responsible, why hasn’t the Democrat caucus joined the Republican Study Committee in its efforts to cut spending? If it did, then that would be a majority of votes in the House.

The Democrat commitment to fiscal responsibility is an illusion.

Perhaps not, but I’m sure there are a lot of “fence sitters” who would like to see him brought to account.

Remember that W has been working hard (at least rhetorically) to preempt the alternative-fuels issue.

No, otherwise they’d already be off the fence.

Renob: I get the impression that you’re simply unwilling to entertain the idea that the Dems can be the party of fiscal responsibility. As someone said above, raising taxes isn’t necessarily a sign of fiscal irresponsibility. If you want to argue about funding specific programs, that’s one thing, but fiscial responsibility is first and foremost about not spending more than you take in.

Um, cite? I can find lots of Democratic candidates’ and incumbents’ position statements (e.g., on the Project Vote Smart profiles I mentioned above) which do specifically support particular spending cuts, on everything from farm subsidies to missile defense. Where do you get the extremely broad-brush claim that “Democrats oppose any cuts to spending”? Which Democrats? Which cuts?

I think lots of politicians of all stripes are too spending-happy, but I no longer believe the old shibboleth that Democrats are somehow certain to be worse than Republicans in this regard, or are less to be trusted with control over fiscal policy. The standard right-wing defense seems to have slid from “The GOP is the party of fiscal responsibility” to “The GOP sucks at fiscal responsibility, but we all know the Dems would suck worse” without being required to back it up with evidence.

Case in point: it is not true that “the Democrats’ plan is to do nothing” on Social Security. It was Democrats in 2000 who insisted in the “Hyde Park Declaration” on the necessity for Social Security reform. It’s true that Democrats in general don’t buy into the Administration’s “looming catastrophe” rhetoric designed to scare people into rushing through an ill-judged privatization plan (and AFAICT they’re quite right). It’s also true that the Democrats in general under Bush made a strategic decision to let Bush shoot himself in the foot with his ill-judged privatization plan rather than drawing attention away from his failure by focusing on competing plans for reform. But that doesn’t mean that the Dems would actually do nothing to repair the projected Social Security shortfall if they were running the government. Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler, for example, outlined an alternative reform plan in 2005.

Another case in point: you seem to believe that a vote for the 2005 “Deficit Reduction” Act correlates to a genuine intent to reduce federal budget imbalance. As this article points out, however, the net effect of the Act will actually be to increase federal deficits:

The Republican leadership is apparently hoping that if they just make misleading vague statements about the effects of their policies that resonate with Republican stereotypes about spendthrift Democrats, Republican voters will buy into it without bothering to read the fine print or find out the facts. Unfortunately, this strategy seems to be working.

Maybe, but it appears to be on the whole at least somewhat less illusory than that of today’s Republicans. At least the Dems aren’t pretending that it’s feasible to go on indefinitely with a policy of simultaneously cutting taxes, increasing spending, and lying about the results.

Do you think the Democrats have a better record historically of not spending more than the government takes in? Especially in light of the fact that almost all of their complaints about the spending Bush has done (which is reprehensible, no doubt) was that the spending increases were not large enough?

(Unless you are willing to do what Kimstu seems to be doing, which is to take the Dems’ word for it that none of their programs would cost more than they claim).

Nearly every campaign I am aware of seems to feature Democrats advocating increased taxes (on the rich, of course), and a long list of things they want to increase spending on.

Regards,
Shodan