In other words, “fiscal responsibility” for Democrats means “gaining short-term political advantage at the expense of the taxpayer rather than addressing a serious issue”.
And you believe people who care more about damaging Bush than being about the country’s business are to be trusted with the public treasury?
:rolleyes:
Regards,
Shodan
If you go back far enough, no. And I’d be worried about one-party rule by the Dems, but I don’t see that happening. I think a healthy dose of the oppositiion party will help keep things in control better than letting either party run wild. And although the Dems might have complained about Bush’s not spending enough in certain areas, they also think he’s spent too much in certain other areas. I agree with that last part. Witness: Iraq. It’s too late to get that money back now, but why risk further wasteful adventures by the Pubbies?
BTW, I almost hate to be complaining about the monetary loss that Iraq has cost us when so many lives have been lost. I don’t want to trivialize the loss of life, but for the purposes of this debate we’re focusing on fiscal issues. Please don’t interpret that as insensitivity to the loss of life.
:dubious: Cutting taxes is not fiscal conservatism, nor is raising taxes contrary to its principles.
In the last few decades, definitely. See John Mace’s above link to an editorial (in the right-wing Wall Street Journal opinion page, no less) that shows how much more inflation-adjusted spending has increased under Bush than under Clinton (who had a better record in that regard then Bush I or Reagan, too). Compare Reagan’s and Bush II’s budget deficits to Clinton’s, or even to Carter’s. These days the Pubs simply do not have the facts on their side if they want to claim that they’re the more fiscally responsible party.
Where did I say that? What I said was that the Dems don’t seem to be engaging in the level of deliberate lying and misrepresentation about the financial effects of their policies that the current Administration is employing. Democrats are no saints by any means, but the current Administration’s level of sheer shameless fraudulence is in a class by itself. Telling your own chief actuary that you’ll fire him if he doesn’t go along with you in concealing the true projected costs of your plan from legislators, in order to deceive them into voting for it? Golly.
Sorry, dude, but Republicans have no more claim to be “the party about the country’s business” than they do to be “the party of fiscal responsibility” these days. The Republican leadership have absolutely no room to point the finger at anybody else when it comes to putting partisan politics above the public interest. This is the most power-obsessed, manipulative, cronyist, anti-bipartisan federal govenment that I can ever remember seeing.
Note, moreover, that in the case of the disastrous SS privatization plan, “damaging Bush” is “being about the country’s business”. As far as I’ve been able to make out (and Bush supporters so far don’t seem to have produced any actual evidence to the contrary), Bush’s plan was ill-thought-out, irresponsible, extremely risky, and with no reliable financial benefits overall for anybody except for those who would be managing all the new private investments. The Administration was trying to rush it through under cover of fear-mongering rhetoric about an imminent major catastrophe in SS funding which was simply not factually realistic. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.
Should those cooler heads now get to work on a more sensible plan for SS reform? Yes they should, and I commend Wexler for having stepped up to the plate on that one. However, as John Mace pointed out, how much can you realistically expect them to do while hard-core right-wingism has a lock on the government?
By Democrats I mean Democrats in general. Of course there are individual Democrats who support individual cuts in certain programs. But look at farm subsidies, which you mentioned. Tom Daschle and Tom Harkin were instrumental in passing a hugely expensive farm bill earlier this year (along with the Republicans, of course) that had broad bipartisan support. On missle defense you are probably right. I’ll give you that. So Democrats want to cut missle defense. Wow.
The evidence is any number of complaints by Democrats that the No Child Left Behind Act isn’t fully funded, their votes against the Deficit Reduction Act, their press releases blasting Bush’s budget proposals for all the “spending cuts” (in reality, usually cuts in spending increases).
Yes, Wexler offered an alternative and got bashed by his leadership for doing so. I’ll grant that individual Democrats have plans, but their leadership does not.
The DRA was one bill and the tax cuts were another bill. The Democrats could have easily voted in favor of the DRA and against the tax cut bill. Instead, they voted against both.
Until they are willing to couple their love of tax hikes with proposals to shrink federal spending, there is no reason to entertain that idea. Individual Democrats may indeed want to cut certain programs, but the Democrat Party leadership needs to outline their fiscal plans. Currently, the only plans they have is to increase taxes.
I know that, but raising taxes won’t cut the deficit. Only cutting spending will do so. Only addressing the ever-increasing rate of spending for entitlement programs will do so. Democrats stood in the way of meaningful Social Security and Medicaid reform. Ignoring these problems and instead calling for more taxes makes no fiscal sense.
We did have a thread last year on what the Dems might put in their own version of the “Contract with America.” Unfortunately, I haven’t heard of the Dems running for Congress putting forth any such thing.
In broad, general terms, to succeed the Dems need to embrace economic populism and downplay cultural liberalism, IMO.
I seem to recall a GOP Congress during six years of Clinton’s term. They get no credit?
It does if it balances the budget or brings it closer to balancing. Fiscal responsibility (and, for that matter, fiscal conservatism) means wanting a balanced budget, not a smaller budget.
Sure they do. As you and John Mace both noted above, a divided government almost always has natural “spending brakes” that a one-party government lacks, no matter which party the one-party government belongs to.
However, the GOP congressional majority that achieved budget surpluses under Clinton is largely the same GOP congressional majority that’s been spending like drunken sailors under Bush. So whatever’s driving the Republicans these days, it apparently ain’t the traditional GOP commitment to fiscal conservatism and spending restraint.
This is essentially semantics because the question here is how Democrats can appeal to disaffected Republicans like myself. Those of us in the GOP who don’t like the Bush spending spree aren’t going to be comforted by any Democrat who says “we are fiscally conservative because we want to hike taxes to cover all the increased spending done by Bush and proposed by us.” No, we want a reduction in spending. So call us what you will, if Democrats want to get our vote they need to have a plan to cut spending or at least reduce the rate of its growth.
How about this? We’ll give you Clinton as President and you give us the Class of '94 back in Congress? That seemed to work pretty well for fiscal responsibility.
The Bush plan to privatize Social Security:
Bush did not have a plan to “privatize” Social Security and it’s disingenuous to say that he did.
Nitpick: It didn’t exactly pass.
Not necessarily. Many Pubs are against W but remain loyal to the party – “fence sitters” in that sense. Pointing out that only a Dem Congress will even consider investigating possible malfeasance by the Admin might shake them loose from that loyalty, at least for this one election.
Knock yourself out with that one, **BG[/B. I still think you just can’t fathom that some people don’t hate Bush. Fact is, most people don’t.
Sorry, but this isn’t necessarily true. It’s an elementary arithmetic fact that raising taxes will cut the deficit, as long as it isn’t accompanied by spending increases that are larger than the tax increase.
You can balance a budget by raising taxes, or by cutting spending, or by some of each. I’m in favor of the “some of each” option myself, but it’s simply not rational to argue that tax increases alone can’t reduce deficits.
Once again, do you have a cite for the claim that Bush’s SS privatization plan was in fact “meaningful reform”? Once again, as far as I can make out, what Democrats (and many Republicans too, by the way; Democrats alone couldn’t have killed Bush’s plan if more Republicans had supported it) “stood in the way of” was an ill-considered and overly expensive privatization scheme that would cause more problems than it solved.
Your last remark about it a few posts ago seemed to claim that we don’t even actually know what Bush’s plan would have accomplished in terms of savings, because no specific legislation for it was ever introduced (and, I would argue, because the Administration deliberately glossed over the details of the shaky financial policies). But now here you are back again, repeating the vague accusation that “Democrats stood in the way of meaningful reform”. Once again, what’s your evidence that the plan that the Democrats opposed qualified as “meaningful reform”?
Actually, if “disaffected Republicans” like yourself are really serious about not voting for candidates who won’t reduce spending, then they won’t vote for most of the current crop of Republicans either. If enough of them just stay home on Election Day, that will solve the Dems’ problem too.
Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of Republican voters are willing to keep voting for Republicans who merely talk about reducing spending more than the Democrats do, irrespective of how much they actually spend.
How you figure, John? I’ve been using the term “privatization plan” myself in this thread, and I didn’t think anybody had a problem with it. In fact, IIRC, it was a standard description of Bush’s proposed policy in much of the news coverage, such as this hardly-left-wing USA Today 2004 headline:
and is used in many of the article titles in this even-less-left-wing Cato Institute issue page, e.g.:
I thought it was a reasonably descriptive way to refer to the proposed intention of transferring (at least some of) Social Security revenues into private individual accounts. Disagree?
Yes, it did. Sure, some folks are suing and saying it didn’t. However, people in the real world know it did and are acting accordingly. States have already passed Medicaid legislation based on its provisions, for instance.
OK, as long was we can say that universal healthcare = socialized medicine. 
Bush wanted to allow people the option of investing some small amount of their SS withholdings in private accounts. But no one would be forced to, and anyone could stay in the current system if he or she wanted to. I wish we were talking about privatizing SS, but that ain’t privatization.
BTW, I couldn’t decifer your CATO link, but it wasn’t clear those articles were about Bush’s plan. Looked to me like they were about real privatization. But if they were about Bush’s plan, they are equally wrong. If you want to call it “partial privatization”, that would accurate.
:rolleyes: I hope you will not argue it’s fiscally irresponsible to complain about that!
Raising taxes without increasing spending would cut the deficit. Raising taxes and increasing spending would cut the deficit if the added revenue were greater than the added spending. Basic arithmetic.