an ever larger percentage of Americans favor the security of a govt’ chec

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To follow his logic, all would be fine if only we ALL worked for the government. Word is still to come as to who would pay taxes then, in order to make those paychecks good.

“Eisenhower saw a problem, identified a solution, and then spent the piles of money to fix it. Statists see a (imaginary) pile of money, assume it’s the solution, and then go looking for a problem.”

Bravo!

of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, it was of course Keynes who said it.

He was probably right. Under “conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire” his policies would be trashed before they could take hold, and if they did tke hold, his supporters would eventually be trashed as well. Under classic totalitarianism everything is controlled by the state, so Keynesian economics can be held in place until bankruptcy.

The federal highway system also brought the downfall of passenger and freight rail. That now has us exporting $700 billion a year to pay for the oil to run it all.

US Federal Tax Revenues Under Bush

while citing the Bush tax cuts. That takes quite the Statist goggles.

Would you have preferred that Saddam’s murderous ways continued and that the 25 million Iraqis still be under his power?

And would you have turned the other cheek on Afghanistan after 9/11? Even Obama campaigned in support of the Afghan war.

Second, I believe the Senator you’re talking about is Richard Shelby, not Jeff Sessions. And while he’s wrong in general, he’s primarily upset about a rushed $40b contract for Air Force refuelling tankers going to an European company.

Third, if you’re really stupid or deluded enough to believe America is losing jobs to “single payer” countries when a Canadian Premier is currently in America for surgery. In fact, where are the numbers showing America losing jobs to single payer countries? How many Americans have left the States for jobs in Europe? Canada?

Fourth, insurance and pharmaceutical companies’ profits are generally no more than 5% – even now. Compare that to Hollywood (e.g. Avatar alone is at 500%) and one wonders why the Left doesn’t demand windfall profits tax on the movie industry.

Fifth, Obama didn’t propose and get a $787b “stimulus bill” to distribute to the UAW and expand public sector union membership rolls among others? And that has nothing to do with the deficit? Or are you actually blaming that on Bush (whose TARP program is actually returning money to the Treasury)?

Sixth, where’s Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in all this? You know, the two GSEs the Democrats went to the mat to defend, preventing multiple attempts by the Bush Admin. to audit and regulate them (including blocking legislation by McCain and Sununu), until they crashed and took the market down with them?

Seventh, two “questionable” wars? For the past 8 years, every Democrat on TV, including Obama has been yelling at the top of their lungs that they were all in on Afghanistan … just like they claimed they supported the war in Iraq and voted for it. And now, it’s suddenly “questionable”? And where did anyone say the oil money would pay “us” back?

Eight, you’re obviously a mendacious idiot. Or thoroughly ignorant. Neither are good though the latter can be helped.

Pete Sessions is a *Congressman* from *Texas*.

Jeebus, they must be demoralized. They can’t even bother to keep straight who the heck they’re supposed to be hating this Three Minutes.

learn how to delineate paragraphs. Anything to make that stuff more readable. Who knows, you might even have a cogent point somewhere in that mess.

re: “Year 2000 we have a surplus. Year 2008 we have 10 trillion debt. Two questionable wars”

I think I know what you’re getting at, but the facts are that the Bush years included the expenses of recovering from the bubble recession that HE inherited from Clinton and fighting ONE war on FOUR fronts, a war that was forced on us by al Qaida–there was nothing optional about it. Only a fool would expect that all to be accomplished without some cost, yet the highest Bush deficit was less than $200 billion until his final year. That one was higher because of the TARP bailout, which may have been necessary (we won’t really know for several to many years) and which is in the process of being repaid. Of course, Obama wants to turn that money around and spend it on his Porkulus II package, rather than use the proceeds to pay down our national debt, as the enabling legislation requires.

Over 2/3 0f the budget is off limits to any politician and the 1/3 left will be fought over to save all the earmarks,Federal programs etc. Demonize all you want, the whole system is the cause.

I suggest that the system is not the cause, but it has been systematically subverted by Progressives over 100 years of drip, drip, torrent, drip so that it’s highly resistant to the corrective measures that would fix it. If you disagree, consider this: Any rational observer can see that the Social Security System is on the verge of collapse. Yet, when Presidents of the past, including George W. Bush, attempted to make changes to fundamentally change the SSS into something more self-supporting, the howls from the Left (and even the Right, sometimes, for different reasons) were loud and incessant enough to defeat anything that will improve the SSS. All that can pass muster seems to be changes that make things worse, not better.

How can that be? Because the government has been transformed from an institution that protects our liberty to one that provides us with too many of our necessities, such as Social Security, and the press has been transformed from a watchdog against government excesses to a cheerleader for the Progressive extension of government into new areas of largess.

is the fact that you use Government to control bubbles while using Government to bolster recessions. Unfortunately, the rule of thumb is Government must inheritantly be larger. To say that the GOP that made government larger was the Hayek/Friedman economics is incorrect since it could be said that the GOP went more towards Keynes philosophy and abandoned Hayek. I think Hayek would have been offended by the correlation you just made.

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His aim was to create an equilibrium point featuring relatively high EMPLOYMENT, high investment and low interest rates. It’s chronic unemployment that makes societies unstable.

I have a very bad cold, haven’t slept all week and am getting psychotic.

Particularly that what passes as Keynesian today is a perversion of his original theories. But I would disagree with the argument that there would be little difference between the Monetarist/von Mises and Keynesian schools without deficits. As a matter of fact, what Hayek wrote in Road to Serfdom essentially laid out his argument against Keynesian policy, in that opening the door to any large scale government intervention would move the system one step closer to authoritarianism/totalitarianism. It’s hardly a coincidence that Road to Serfdom was published 8 years after Keynes’ work, and that Hayek makes several references to what was happening in the United States at the time (although much of it is focused on England/Germany). From my readings, it seems like Hayek actually leaves government a bit more latitude to act, while Friedman essentially believed that government should be limited to providing the legal framework and little more.

But after he was tapped by both the British government and FDR for advice he became seduced and modified his theory into supporting all sorts of deficit financing and specious government meddling in the economy. So I am not keen to make any excuses for him, he was a purveyor of noxious ideas.