In article , HeyBub wrote:
CJT wrote:
Joe Williamson wrote:

On Sun, 03 Sep 2006 20:11:56 -0400, Larry Bud
wrote:

snip
Government is essentially legalized banditry.

That's been true for almost six years now.

But, thanks to tax cuts, not as much banditry as in the preceeding eight.

Oh, you think tax-and-spend is worse than
tax-less-spend-more-&-make-the-taxpayers-pay-the-interest-on-the-borrowing?
Oh yes, tax cuts without spending cuts mean taxpayers paying in the
future for today's spending plus interest!

When did we last have a tax cut accompanied by putting the brakes on
spending? It appears to me that the answer is "Eisenhower
Administration"!

Reagan proposed that tax cuts would "reduce the allowance" to Congress
and motivate Congress to cut spending. Problem is, Reagan submitted to
Congress in every year he was in office a budget request with a bigger
deficit than ever occurred on Carter's watch - and ballooning deficits
were something held against Carter in 1980!

How much of a fiscal conservative is the current president? Answer:
Sometime back in his first term, he requested from Congress a $8 billion
"energy bill" and signed a $14 billion one returned to him. The current
president has on his record only a single veto after almost 6 years, and
that is on the "stem cell" issue!

Makes Clinton look good, despite his opposition to a "Penney-Kasich"
(I hope I spelled it right) piece of deficit-reduction legislation!
Despite that, Clinton was president at the start of all fiscal years with
surpluses since 1970 or even a few years before that!

On a side point - the surplus years of late 1990's-2000 occurred when a
Democrat was in the Oval Office and Republicans ruled Congress. That
meant gridlock! That slowed spending a little and slowed tax cuts a
little!
Shame that there was lack of similar similar-extent gridlock from
1983-1991 when Democrats held both houses of Congress and a Republican was
in the Oval Office, although in that era spending did grow less than was
requested in Presidential budget requests due to Congress not
appropriating as much Defense spending as the President requested.
Spending growth was less in fiscal years 1984-1992 than 1978-1982.
Carter was blamed to be a "Big Spender" enjoying same party dominating
both houses of Congress during his administration. For that matter,
Carter presided over Defense spending growth, even in comparison to
inflation, only since exceeded in fiscal years starting in the first half
of Reagan's first term!

Keep in mind that around 1980 give or take at least a few years, there
were many people in the "south"/"southeast" portion of the USA that got
counted as Democrats while being more like what most Americans would
consider Republicans to now be and have been since 1980 or so.
During Reagan's first term, one house of Congress was majority Democrat,
but most of the time the "ideological majority" there was a coalition of
Republicans and some conservative Democrats that mostly came from
South/Southeast USA. My best example is Jeremiah Denton - although I
remember him as being in the other House of Congress, while being a prime
example of a Republican-like conservative Democrat from Alabama!
And during first half of Reagan's first term, not only did the House of
Representatives have an "ideological majority" of Republicans and
Republican-like conservative Democrats, the Senate also had a majority of
Republicans plus Jeremiah Denton! And how did defecits and spending go in
the fiscal years that started in that era?

Makes me favor paleocons over neocons! Paleocons are fiscal
conservatives while neocons are less "fiscal conservative" than even
Clinton despite his opposition to "Penney-Kasich"!

- Don Klipstein )