response 235 of 536:

Oct 30 18:42 UTC 2003

Re233 - Heh. Well. I have to admit I havent seen the most recent 
debates. Still, I cant think of a worse person to be president except 
for certain Mnetters/Grexers but they arent running. Whew. 

I was just listening to an interview with Senator McCain and all I 
could think was that things would have been sooooo much better if he 
had won the nomination. Oh well. 

response 237 of 536:

Oct 30 19:55 UTC 2003

  re #231:  Excellent.  Now that all our economic problems are solved,
  it must be time to lower taxes again!  

response 239 of 536:

Oct 30 20:37 UTC 2003

  If there's a problem with the policy I mockingly put forth,
  that's because I was sarcastically stating the Bush
  administration's apparent reasoning on tax policy. 

  I happen to agree with you that their logic is pretty backwards
  but I'm frankly surprised to see you admit it on the record..

response 241 of 536:

Oct 31 02:36 UTC 2003

#231-- an economic "recovery" on paper doesn't mean anything to 
voters.  What has happened is that companies have shed so many jobs and 
laid so many people off, and downsized so much, that they aren't 
bleeding as much and their bottom lines are looking better.  But that 
doesn't translate into jobs.  If they add jobs, the bottom line will 
look worse again.  

So it isn't about how the economy looks "on paper", its how the economy 
looks to the average working person.  The fact that fortune 500 CEO's 
ad their accounts are breathing easier doesn't mean much to the rest of 
us.  The jobs aren't there.

And you can't call an economy healthy anyway when we are running a huge 
national defecit, a defecit that was all but paid down by the end of 
the Clinton years.  The economy was healthier before Clinton left 
office than it is now and thats a fact.  These last hard years have 
been during the BUSH administration and thats what the voters will 
remember.   Voters, the majority of whom, voted against Bush last time 
anyway.  Or did you forget that Bush LOST the popular vote in this 
country in 2000.

response 243 of 536:

Oct 31 10:50 UTC 2003

Housing sales are due to low interest rates which are due to a poor economy.

response 245 of 536:

Oct 31 14:22 UTC 2003

50%?  I find that a little hard to believe.

response 247 of 536:

Oct 31 17:39 UTC 2003

jp2, Bush lost the popular vote.  That is a fact.  Since he lost the popular
vote, that means more people voted AGAINST Bush-- meaning didn't vote for
him-- than voted for him. More,
even if its one person more, is a majority.  In this case it was actually
several million more people who voted for Gore than for Bush.  Bush won the
electoral college, he lost the popular vote.  Those are the facts JP2

response 251 of 536:

Oct 31 20:59 UTC 2003

Jp2 is *partly* right in #246.
There has never been a truely balanced budget in decades, when you take *all*
government output and input into account; and the economy started tanking as
early as *1997*. What looked like a good economy was dot.com mania and Y2K
hype, neither of which produced anything of value.

However, deficit spending cannot be good for much of anything, as it erodes
the purchasing power of money.

response 255 of 536:

Nov 2 21:16 UTC 2003

Re #231:
 
Richard, you're completely wrong about the Clinton deficits.
The deficit was still there, just masked by factors including:
 
1.)  The dot-bomb bubble, and
2.)  The hidden "off budget" deficits, like Medicare.
 
If you add the mounting unfunded liabilities in programs like
Medicare and Social Security, and also add the unfunded mandates
in programs like Medicaid and special-ed which push costs down
to the states, the deficit would have been roaring along during
the entire period 1993-2000.
 
Right now, it looks to me like Dean *might* be the only candidate
ready to restructure those programs so they don't kill us.  We
need something like a statutory limit on the fraction of the
populace which is allowed to be retired, with the retirement age
going up automatically as people live longer.  We need similar
measures in other mandates so that costs are contained, and that
includes all costs of things promised but not yet paid for.
 
(Only a Republican could go to Communist China; it will probably
take a Democrat to fix the errors of the New Deal and Great Society.)

response 257 of 536:

Nov 3 13:02 UTC 2003

Agreed with Russ that the federal budget surplus didn't really exist.
However, it's also true that the deficit, no matter how measured, declined
substantially in 1993-2000.

Richard is also incorrect in saying that Gore got "several million" more
popular votes than GWB.  The actual margin was about half a million.

America would be better off if the generally accepted retirement age were
70 instead of 65.