"CaveLamb" wrote in message
m...
F. George McDuffee wrote:
On Sun, 24 Jul 2011 23:15:19 -0400, lid
wrote:
YOUR tax money hard at work being spent by politicians whom could
obviously give a slim rat's ass about balancing the budget and
providing for the public health and welfare.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b5d_1311548511
Unbelievable.
Dave
===============
This shows again how far the thought processes and
perceptions of reality have diverged between the majority of
Americans and the policy makers in DC. The Democrats continue to
communicate with the spirit of FDR
while the Republicans continue to channel Ronald Reagan. The current
economic conditions and circumstances are
completely different from those existing during the
administrations of FDR and RR, e.g. the levels of national
debt, the elimination of most financial control and
regulation (such as Glass-Stegall), the rise of the
supra/trans national corporations, globalization, and the
export of most consumer manufacturing among many others.
This being the case, it is only to be expected that the old
economic elixirs, panaceas, potions and nostrums no longer
work.
George, you usually are much more verbose, but this was so
succinct - a keeper for sure!
There are some factual problems with it, however. As for "channeling Ronald
Reagan," under Reagan our foreign aid rose from $10 billion to $22 billion,
and Reagan consistently asked for more foreign aid than Congress granted
him. Foreign aid never dropped below 1.10% of the federal budget under
Reagan -- even when we were in recession and unemployment topped 10%. Now,
it's around 0.86% of our budget.
So it isn't different policies or guiding lights. It's basically the same
policy we've had for over a quarter-century. The Department of State is
hardly profligate, and our foreign aid percentage is consistently at the low
end of the developed countries.
What we're channeling now is isolationism. I'm not judging whether that's
good or bad here, but it's clearly a different posture than we've had since
WWII. If we're going to do that, we have a lot of changes to make in
international relations.
--
Ed Huntress
--
Richard Lamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~cavelamb
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~sv_temptress