Libertarians are a minor voice in the Republican party. Libertarian ideals are mostly used by Republicans as a justification for passing laws that benefit the rich and the corporations to the detriment of the poor and middle class.
LOL … the socialists are even more marginalized than the libertarians. Mainstream Democrats don’t even bother to pander to them.
The country would fare better under Democratic single party rule simply because the Democrats represent a wider ideological spectrum and have more internal dissension. As GreasyJack said, the country would wide up kind of like it was in the 1970’s. Further to the left than it is now, but not some sort of totalitarian distopia.
Having the Republicans entirely in control would be virgin territory. The United States has never been that far to the right.
I think either side having total control would be a terrible thing. There are extremists on both sides who I consider dangerous and I’d prefer things to run more middle of the road. I am left of center, but have voted for Republicans in the past and would like to again… eventually.
The problem with the Democrats of 2012 being in absolute control is that they want an inherently unstable financial system. I asked a question on this board if deficit spending were sustainable and even the most ardent Keynesian here said no. But the Democrats seem to think the solution to the nation’s problems is tax-and-spend and borrowing. With them in control, we are a Greece waiting to happen - probably within 20 years.
As for the Republicans, there is one document that should be the supreme law of the land and it sure as fuck ain’t The Bible. When I see how the Wacky-Ass Right has hijacked my party, it saddens me. I’ve been told by members of my own party that I’m not a real Republican because I support pro-choice and SSM. Democrats may be clueless about how the real world works, but some of the Pubs are in their own world <cough> Bachmann, Palin, Tainz <cough>.
To answer the OP, a Republican nation would be better because it would at least exist in two decades, but I don’t know if it would be worth the cost.
The Democrats are currently the ones who want to actually balance the budget. They want to raise revenues to do it. The Republicans are talking about mystic “cuts” that they will institute with no specifics and which can’t possibly make the dent they want, or even cover the taxes they want to cut.
I think where you’re confused, is that to help a recovery along you need to deficit spend. Because if there is no demand in the economy in general, you need to push it along with some govt. dollars. Once the economy is back, the spending won’t work, and would be stopped. No Keynesian wants to continue stimulating the economy once it’s recovered. That’s like bandaging a wound that’s already healed.
The Dems aren’t currently advocating anything that will drive us broke. For instance, the Affordable Care Act will save us quite a bit of money.
Republicans are the ones who think that cutting taxes will magically drive up revenue.
My point is that both the Republican and Democratic parties are far more socially liberal and economically pro-regulation/welfare than they were in the 19th Century so you can’t say that the Republicans and Democrats have switched positions on issues.
You can say, however, that before the 1970s both parties had substantial liberal and conservative wings. But then they did some major constituency-swapping – Nixon played his “Southern Strategy” in 1968 and 1972, and then the formerly Democratic white conservatives of the “Solid South” went over to the GOP in droves – the moderate/liberal “Rockefeller Republicans” were more or less driven out of the GOP, and the “movement conservatives” took it over. Now, the American partisan divide really does map more or less onto the ideological divide and vice-versa.
And conservatism, as such, has no value to America. This is not a case where both parties/ideologies are “necessary” to “balance each other’s excesses,” as I’ve so often seen stated here. That would be the case if the Pubs/conservatives were completely marginalized, and our two-party system were the Democrats and the Socialists; which would be a whole lot better than we’ve got now. A multiparty system would be better still, but that’s another discussion.
Anyway, if we have to have a one-party system, better by far the Dems than the Pubs. For the reasons given above.
The two great economic crises of the past century were caused by the policies and “clients” of the Republican party. The two idiotic wars of the last century were caused by LBJ, a Democrat, and Bush II, an idiot pawn of Republicans. Arguably LBJ got us into Vietnam much worse because he didn’t want to be accused of “losing” Vietnam by the Republicans the same way Truman was accused of “losing” China. But so what?
If there was to be only one party, I’d go with the Democrats because they are much more diverse and sane. The current Republicans are just way bizarre.
And I could argue that the Republicans want balance the budget too but with reduced spending. But the reason the budget need to be balanced is due to the increased spending namely at the instigation of the Democrats. Please don’t argue that raising spending and then paying for it with increased taxes is not a tax-and-spend policy. And I guaranty that increased taxes would increase the deficit because the Dems would spend MORE than the increased revenue. Do you also remember when Congressional Democrats promised George “Read my lips” Bush to reduce spending if he allowed increased taxes. Will the Dems reneged and INCREASED spending AND the deficit that year.
And you are blind or deluded if you think that Keynsians do not want to continue stimulating the economy after the recovery. Maybe Reagan could justify increased spending to battle stagflation and maybe you can justify the current increase on battling the recession but what stimulus was needed all of the other years we ran a deficit? Did we have a recession in 1952-1956? How about 1961-1968? And this country must have been really screwed because according to your logic, we were in a recovery from 1970 to 1997and again from 2002 until now.
Heh, fair enough. I do see how the Democratic USA is pretty much like the average modern European country, and how the Republican USA is an outlier that’s not really anywhere else in the world, neither now nor in the past…which is kind of scary to be honest…
If you had to have either Theodore Roosevelt’s domestic policies or FDR’s domestic policies for perpetuity, assuming they would respond to tomorrow’s challenges by extrapolating what they did during their presidencies, except for wars, which would you choose?
Which president pushed for the Medicare drug coverage without paying a nickel for it? Which president cut taxes and started two wars? You cannot make the argument that Democrats are the party of high deficits with any degree of sincerity.
That doesn’t exactly bolster your argument. From 2003 to 2007, Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress, and passed things like Medicare Part D without paying for it. I hardly think you can blame the deficits in those years on dishonest Keynesians. And from 2008 until now, yeah, we really have been in a recovery.
They actually do. It’s just that the deficit was already so bad beforehand that even though it increased revenues, increased spending in the military, and to a lesser extent other domestic spending canceled out the increased revenues or even exceeded them to lead to a net increase in the deficit.
The Bush tax cuts worked in that they did what they were promised to do. No, they didn’t balance the budget or significantly reduce the deficit. But one thing that they DID do was increase revenues, again, for the reason I described above.
Would you rather have higher revenues with a higher tax rate percentage wise, or a lower tax rate percentage wise? (I’m not saying the Laffer curve relation holds everywhere, but that it did over the range at which tax cuts were implemented.) It’s somewhat analogous to a business that’s selling a product or service at a given price. If it cuts prices, it may or may not increase revenues. Whether it does so depends on the price elasticity of demand of that product or service, the time that the consumer has to react and possibly respond to the price cut, and most pertinently, what the initial price was before it was cut, which is analogous to the tax rate.
If the price was really high prior to the price cut, that’s vaguely similar to the tax rate being really high before the tax cut. Then, cutting prices might increase revenues by increasing quantity of purchases by a higher percentage than the decrease percentage-wise of the price per unit. Similarly, cutting tax rates might increase revenues by increasing the total taxable receipts of individuals and businesses by a higher percentage than the decrease percentage-wise of the tax rate per unit of taxable receipts; the increase in taxable receipts (businesses, individuals, etc.) is a consequence of economic growth “stimulated” by the tax cut (in that regard, it is similar to a stimulus package, which is a more direct way of achieving a stimulative effect, a tax cut being an indirect one).
But if the price is already very low, say 99 cents per product, cutting it further isn’t going to help - you’ve already cut it so low that nobody else is going to buy it more because it’s even cheaper. Likewise, if the tax rate is already 25% versus something like 40-50%, cutting it by another 10% isn’t going to have as big of an effect, because the reduction in the economic growth rate due to the higher tax versus the reduced tax rate proposed isn’t as significant, or may even be nonexistent or negative.
To say that tax cuts cannot raise revenues is to deny the possibility, in theory, of a dollar/unit decrease leading to a total dollars increase because the quantity of units increased more than the dollar/unit decreased. It’s only voodoo economics when the tax rate is, prior to the proposed tax cut, already low enough so that it won’t help to cut taxes anymore, just like it’s voodoo economics to suggest more spending when you’re already spending a huge amount already…
Point of order: Raw revenue in dollars increased during the post-tax-cut Bush years, but they dropped as a percentage of GDP. The economy’s growth rate, meanwhile, stayed pretty steady following the recovery from the tech bubble.
So no, revenues increased in SPITE of Bush’s tax cuts, since they didn’t really affect economic growth and decreased our revenue as a percentage of GDP.
A cursory analysis of the historical data that I saw in an Econ class ten years ago suggested that the Laffer Curve DOES exist, but the maxima point is somewhere around 65-70% top marginal rate–so we’ve been in the “voodoo economics” zone with regard to that with every cut made after Reagan’s first.
Increasing government spending during a recession is only one half of Keynesian fiscal policy. Cutting spending during the recovery/expansionary phase that then is supposed to occur to repay what was spent during the recessionary phase is the other half. Democrats do the first half, but don’t do the second. So it’s not really Keynes’ program at all what the Democrats tend to do, but a “voodoo Keynesianism” so to speak. :dubious:
I would like you to back that up with a cite, please. Please show your work with regard to the following: What was the trend before the tax cuts, how long did it take for revenue to overtake the pre-cut trend, and what debt and interest obligations were incurred while revenue was lower?
I’m kind of busy, so I’ll just post this link; it’s from the New York Times, and the article was published in July 2006, some three years after the Bush tax cuts were fully in place. (you can be sure it’s not GOP propaganda) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/washington/09econ.html?pagewanted=all
This is a brief excerpt, hopefully in lines with fair use policy.
If you want to call a tripling of corporate tax receipts and executive pay/stock market profits tax receipt increase “a tax cut for the rich,” we can agree to disagree.
I don’t think Keynesianism proposes cutting spending during a recovery, but rather after the recovery can be said to be complete and the economy healthy again.
You say that Democrats fail to do that. When was the last time they had the opportunity to enact their agenda during a healthy economy?
That’s very true. I think one can say that in this way many of the geographical divides in America went away-rural, conservative Midwestern and Southern voters for example probably have a lot in common but until the Southern Strategy were in different parties because of the Civil War animosities.
Without getting into a long discussion, would the Democrats in this scenario incorporate at least moderate Republicans (like say Jon Huntsman or Susan Collins) and would the Socialists incorporate people like Bernie Sanders?
Well, the Democrats had the House of Representatives until 1994 (and since the New Deal), and the House controls the budget, and I’m not familiar with Democrats cutting spending cyclically according to Keynesian theory in that time, but I’m not sure whether that’s true. The economy was healthy during much of this time, especially after 1950 and before 1970. It could be just the Republicans saying that they always increase spending when they actually didn’t, I admit.
It was during that time that PAYGO legislation was passed, which required any new spending to be accompanied by either increased revenue or savings in other areas. Basically, if you want it, you have to find a way to pay for it. It was allowed to expire at the end of 2002 under the Republicans.
