liberal psychedelic drug pushers

[midcan5]

The real Reagan - just a part of his awful legacy.

Common dreams posts pieces from all over, they speak for themselves.


His death has unleashed a torrent of commentary on the significance of this revolution, and so it is important to set the record straight. His economic policies were mostly a failure. Partly this was because he had promised something arithmetically impossible: to increase military spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget. He kept the first two promises, delivering the largest peacetime military build-up in American history, and cutting taxes massively, mostly for upper-income households.

But budget deficits soared to record heights. The national debt doubled, as a percentage of the economy, before Mr. Reagan's successors were able to bring it under control. This "military Keynesianism" did pull the economy out of the 1982 recession, but the 1980s still chalked up the slowest growth of any decade in the post-World War II era. And income was redistributed to the wealthy as never before: during the 1980s, most of the country's income gains went to the top 1 or 2 percent of households.

www.commondreams.org/views04/0607-09.htm


The Reagan administration didn't succeed at imposing all of his agenda. But even Reagan's failures had paradigm-shifting impacts. Among policies he sought but failed to impose were: eliminating the Consumer Product Safety Commission, consummating an unprecedented giveaway of coal mining rights on federal land, and stripping benefits from thousands of recipients of Social Security disability (a move ultimately counteracted by the courts).

It's important to remember Reagan all right, but let's remember him for what he did, not for his ability to deliver a scripted line. Ronald Wilson Reagan played up and exacerbated economic and racial divisions, and he left the country, and the world, meaner and more dangerous.

www.commondreams.org/views04/0611-04.htm


Reagan, determined to check arch-foe Iran, opened a back door to Iraq through which flowed US intelligence and hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees even as Washington professed neutrality in Baghdad's war with Tehran.

It was complemented by French weaponry and German dual-use technology that experts say wound up in Iraq's chemical and biological warfare programs.

Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan's special Middle East envoy, is credited with establishing the back channel to Saddam on a secret trip to Baghdad in December 1983.

www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0609-01.htm


"In my view, the Reagan administration's support and collaboration with it is equally immoral, evil, and totally un-Christian. . . . You are either for or against apartheid and not by rhetoric. You are either in favor of evil or you are in favor of good. You are either on the side of the oppressed or on the side of the oppressor. You can't be neutral."

www.commondreams.org/views04/0609-03.htm

Reagan's domestic policy, though, was not a success. Average incomes stagnated, and tax cuts overwhelmingly favored the well-to-do. The Reagan administration did not have either the nerve or the votes in Congress to cut spending enough to compensate for the tax cuts. The result was ballooning deficits.

www.commondreams.org/views04/0608-04.htm

[MO]

Oh, crap. Keep that "common dreams" junk to yourself. Who ever wrote that drivel is out of touch with reality, and history. Tax recipts went up after the Reagan tax cuts. Too bad the liberals in congress kept spending as fast as all the new revenues was coming in.

[TNRighty]

Medican,

It is an outright lie to state that wealth was redistributed to the rich during the 1980's. Since the dawn of the age of progressive taxation, never in the history of our country has wealth been "redistributed" to the rich. Every argument you make based on that premise is total garbage because such a thing has never happened.

You are basically saying that Reagan's tax policies took money out of the payrolls of poor people and was turned over to the rich. WRONG. You are living in la-la land. Even under Reagan's tax cuts wealth was still redistributed to the poor, only at a lesser rate.

This is what liberals do. They tell us that a tax cut is the equivalent of stealing from the poor. That is an outright lie. If I get a tax cut, I'm being allowed to keep more of the money that I EARNED! That's not "stealing", and that's not "redistribution". Only a liberal could argue that allowing someone to keep more of their own money is "stealing".

Now, if you want to talk about redistributing wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, look no further than last week's Supreme Court decision that set the precedent for the government handover of private property to rich developers. Four of the five justices who voted for this were LIBERALS! When government FORCES someone to sell their home for less than fair market value for no other reason than to increase tax revenues, THAT IS STEALING!

Moreover, if you think the government has made you poor, or if you think Reagan made you poor, you will never achieve any financial security. The best way to smash social mobility is to raise taxes. NOBODY ever got wealthy off a welfare check. You become wealthy when you realize that you and you alone are the only person capable of improving your financial circumstances. You can never be wealthy if you spend your life hating other wealthy people. They haven't made you poor. You have, and this class envy mindset you have will get you NOWHERE!

[TNRighty]

More on this Supreme Court Decision.

No tax policy in the history of our country has EVER taken hard earned money from the poor or middle class and given it to rich people, end of discussion.

And that brings me to my point. Where is the outrage from the left over this Supreme Court Decision that DOES take money from the middle class and give it to the rich? This decision delivers ten times the blow to the poor and middle class than any tax cut ever has. For the vast majority of Americans, the greatest investment they will ever make is their home, and this decison undermines the private market and deals a serious blow to those of us with modest incomes who hope to one day make money off of our property.

Pretend for a minute that you are a developer. Lets say you find a ten-acre tract of land on which you wish to build a strip mall or an apartment complex. Perhaps its a vacant piece of farmland in a suburban area that has undergone considerable growth recently, or perhaps its an urban area just outside downtown on which there sits 20 small homes. You, the developer, approach these property owners and make an offer. They decline. Perhaps they don't want to sell, or perhaps your offer wasn't good enough. Bring in the Supreme Court and now all you have to do is go to the local government and say, "Hey, I've found this piece of land on which I want to build an apartment complex and some retail shops. It would generate 50 times the tax revenue you are currently collecting from the present property owners, but I can't afford to pay what the property owners are demanding."

The local government can then cite the Supreme Court decision as judicial precedent and condemn the private property, force the owners to sell it for less than market value, and turn it over to the developer. Fifteen years these people bought their homes or their tract of land with the speculation that one day it would become commercially attractive and they could turn a big profit. Not any more. Your home and property no longer have a private market value. This decision renders it worth no more than what the government will force you to sell it for. This is outrageous.

Back to my question, why hasn't the left risen up against this decision?

I'll tell you. The left doesn't like the idea of private property, even if its owned by poor people. I'll say that again, EVEN IF ITS OWNED BY POOR PEOPLE. Liberals believe that all land should be public land and should be used for the "public good", which can be interpreted as "that which will create the most wealth for government", even if it means paying a poor family 60 cents on the dollar of the private value of their property.

This is a LIBERAL philosophy. One of the reasons Janice Rogers Brown was so criticized by liberals is that they thought she was too adamant about private property rights. You cannot pretend to look out for the public good without first protecting the private rights of the people who live in that community.

Anyways, I think I'm developing carpel tunnel syndrome from all this typing, but you will hear more from me on this topic.

Seacrest....out.

[midcan5]

TNT, I'm waiting for a good argument not 'that this is liberal thinking' as you often say. The wealth of a society belongs to all members of society and opportunity should be for all. Crooks and cons exist on all levels of society as the jails show too clearly.

I agree with you on the supreme court and private property, my own take is it should have been thrown back to the states and only in the most pressing and critical situation should private rights be stepped on - you are forgetting I am the liberal.

As far as making it, I have but I will not get into bragging. Hard work and luck do pay off but that is not always true, that is where we differ. As far as this BS claim on earning, read the piece below. Wealth is created through wealth and connections for the most part. First paragraph says it all.

"Exactly the same claim can be made about the differences in incomes within any given society. In large part, these differences must be attributed to differences in capital ownership, of which the largest part is social capital: knowledge, and participation in kinship and other privileged social relations. In addressing the question of justice, therefore, we are assessing the justice of inheritance of such resources along bloodlines. This is a question of value, not of fact. I personally do not see any moral basis for an inalienable right to inherit resources, or to retain all the resources that one has acquired by means of economic or other activities."

"The usual argument for such a right is based on the assumption of perfectly competitive markets where factors of production are paid their marginal values and where there are no externalities. But this assumption does not hold to any reasonable degree of approximation in real societies. Access to the social capital–a major source of differences in income, between and within societies–is in large part the product of externalities: membership in a particular society, and interaction with other members of that society under practices that commonly give preferred access to particular members.

"http://bostonreview.net/BR25.5/simon.html

[Ian]

my own take is it should have been thrown back to the states and only in the most pressing and critical situation should private rights be stepped on

Spoken as a true Jeffersonian.

As far as making it, I have but I will not get into bragging. Hard work and luck do pay off but that is not always true, that is where we differ. As far as this BS claim on earning, read the piece below. Wealth is created through wealth and connections for the most part. First paragraph says it all.

All should have the opportunity to be wealthy, but no one has the right. As of now everyone has the opportunity to achieve success through Affirmative Action (except white men of course).

This belief that poverty shouldn't exist under any circumstance is purely circular logic. If there is no danger of becoming impoverished and people are able to live decent lives on the government dime the drive for success and betterment (as exhibited in all rags to riches stories) is entirely lost, thus instating a permanent lower class.

Now saying that, I believe the State does have a certain responsibility to provide the means to make a living instead of selling the country down the river for the benefit of Big Business i.e. the outsourcing of steel jobs to India and the allowance of a Wal-Mart monopoly. But simply dragging along the lower class for the sake of a non-impoverished-society does no one any good and in reality exacerbates the problem you’re trying to solve.