You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot establish security on borrowed money.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away man's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.
--Rev. William J. H. Boetcker, 1916
And yet they religiously intone, "Yes We Can!"
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Certainly the ordinary Iraqi's aren't better off after the removal of Saddam.
You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.
We'd all be so much better off if no one had questioned Ken Lay.
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
We spend way more fighting this war of terror than we have income.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
Yeah those civil rights movements of the sixties did nothin' for us.
These are simple trite aphorisms, applicable in a few situations, but definitely not universal truths. Search further. Deeper.
-Sadam wasn't a bit man, was he? He was a quite small man with all the cards. That's all.
-Treat me to how the Ken Lay deal has helped the poor. This particular statement refers to overburdening the rich simply because they are the ones with the dough. It doesn't refer to crooks, real or imagined.
-There is a world of difference between spending for desires and spending for needs. The war, crime, serious health issues, often require spending into debt before victory can be achieved. How can you honestly compare such disparate ideas? If you ran out of ready cash to continue medical care for a catostrophic illness or injury to your wife or child, would you let them die rather than go into debt?
-I believe the civil rights movement to which you refer was a battle against class hatred. Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and their white equivalents incite racial hatred, and Dems in general incite class hatred with their constant assault on the wealthy.
The Boetcker statements are common sense admonitions that are universally applicable if they are properly understood.
GDP : $13.86 trillion
Tot. debt: $9.3 trillion
debt to equity ratio: approx 65% or .65 (.5 is usually considered very good)
To put this in perspective of the average household just imagine your yearly income was greater than the value of your house, cars, student loans, credit cards etc. . .
It is the Democrats who believe that by tearing down corporate edifices, that the downtrodden will somehow miraculously be elevated to middle-class. OH! Sorry, Michelle Obama wants us all to spurn "middleclass-ness"
Destroying the rich does nothing for the poor. How so? The destroyers merely end up replacing the evil rich, and the poor are worse off than before.
Debt in America-- to say nothing of the Government itself --is out of control. The Bible says "the borrower is servant to the lender." We are a nation of servants, and what the Democrat contenders are proposing will increase our tax burden, increase our national debt, and further beggar this nation making us servants to everyone who holds our debt in T-Bills... thank you China, and a host of other nations.
Now one might think that this is a good enough reason to toss Capitalism to the curb, but consider the alternative-- what the Democratic Party and BOTH Democratic contenders are proposing. It is certainly wrong that one class should rule over another, but it is equally wrong that one politicians should steal from one class to distribute it to another. WITHOUT commerce and, gads!, Capitalism, the U.S. is little better than a third world country.
The civil rights marches in the sixties-- with props to Marshall --had nothing to do with INCITING class hatred. It had everything to do with demanding fair treatment and an end to abuse. Sharpton, Jackson, and Wright INCITE hatred, they do not heal division. The Democratic Party INCITES class-envy. Yes, they do.
This isn't about Iraq, or Ken Lay, the war on terror, or '60's marches. It's about what the Democrat party and its current spate of contenders are promising this nation should they win the White House.
Think things are bad now? Just wait.
Yes. I expect the evil that will rise to destroy a Democratic presidency to make the ongoing BS conspiracies against the Clinton look positively tame.
Just wait! You'd rather see this country fall than lose power. Admit it. You'd really rathedr be with Jesus-aha! Sitting on a cloud, rather than putting your hand to the to advance his kingdom here, now.
You're heart is so damned black sometimes it astounds me, EL.
Hmmm.
Let's quote the Stones...
"I look inside myself and see my heart is black
I see my red door and it has been painted black
Maybe then Ill fade away and not have to face the facts
Its not easy facin up when your whole world is black"
Or how about a little Isaiah...
"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!"
How about this...
"But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!"
Have you found Sophia yet, ER? Forgive me, but I'm having trouble believing you can discern the color of my heart when the light in your own seems to be so dim.
God promised if you diligently sought Him, you'd find Him...... not Sophia. It's not too late to turn around, ER.
Oh, and you have a decidedly pedestrian view of heaven if you think we end up 'sitting on clouds'
Thanks for the input nonetheless.
Would it be pedestrian and useless of me to point out the reality that the gov't has grown most under the last three Republican administrations than at any time in our history? Is the point here just to blame the Dems regardless of reality? If so, ignore my point.
Back to skulking...
"...the legislative branch of government [is] responsible for the federal budget."
But if you ARE interested in facts and you think the Budget is more determined by Congress, then I guess you'll blame the Republican-controlled Congress for the huge debt run up by W?
If you were interested in facts, you'd know that the Dems in office in Reagan's day were running scared and bowing to his wishes (as Dems are wont to do whichever Republican is in office, sadly) and Reagan very much set his budget - which is the largest growth of gov't in US history by outrageous numbers.
If you're really interested in facts, here's a chart to show quite clearly how extremely Big Gov't the Reagan/Bush/Bush years have been.
But, of course, this is more about bashing the spineless Dems. Sorry for intruding with facts. Carry on.
"and Reagan very much set his budget - which was the largest growth of gov't in US history by outrageous numbers UP UNTIL W came along and outdid the master.
Going away again, sorry.
For all your and Ben's and Democrats talk of rescuing the economy from Bush and Republicans, you're all insanely myopic about the damage your krewe will inflict on top of the mess Republicans and Bush have created. Say what you will, the Bush tax cuts worked. Clinton had "his" Tech bubble burst, Bush has had "his" Housing bubble burst... but neither "bursts" were the result of particularly poor policy, but rather natural and predictable market corrections.
But if we want to talk facts, let's talk facts.
1) Reagan agreed to what was then the largest tax increase in history, and he did so to reduce the deficit and with the understanding that spending cuts would follow. The Democratic Congress never produced those spending cuts.
2) Clinton proposed the socialization of one-seventh of the U.S. economy, and at the end of his second term we ended up with a balanced budget despite this initial tendency because he had to work with a GOP majority in Congress for his last six years in office.
3) Though George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" has seemed to be a rejection of the principles of a small, limited government, he did propose a program that would save Social Security from its impending insolvency; the Democrats in Congress defeated that proposal, and they provided nothing as an alternative.
Far too many Republicans have strayed from the philopsophy of limited government, true, but Democrats reject that philosophy outright. And I don't see what point you are trying to make, Dan, when -- other than the notable exception of national defense, which is both a Constitutionally enumerated duty of the federal government and a fundamental function of government -- it's not clear that there's a single expansion of the government you wouldn't oppose.
The American right is very imperfectly supportive of fiscal conservatism, but the left is strongly opposed to it. We know this, and it seems to me that you know this, too: your concerns about energy, sustainable living, so-called social justice, and everything else all lead to one solution, Government, and you know precisely which party is more consistently committed to an ever-expanding leviathan state.
Democrats are much worse on this issue because their principles are flawed to begin with.
Oh, right! I forgot that fiscal irresponsibility was a Democratic/Liberal value. It's right there in our manifesto, right?
You have obviously not read Obama's website, where he talks about fiscal responsibility and living within our means. When President Obama is elected and has to deal with the housing and pisspoor environmental/energy mistakes of the last nearly 30 years and he does so efficiently and with an eye towards fiscal responsibility, you can apologize contritely.
Until such time as you see that happen, feel free to rant and assume that the Dems are out here with some secret agenda to be stupid with taxpayer dollars. If it makes you feel better.
You've switched topics, starting out by complaining about the growth of the budget, now talking about whether spending is managed responsibly.
It's easy to guess why you switched: the left is on principle supportive of an ever-expanding state, and you personally seem to see the government as the solution to practically every problem. Obama is promising hundreds of billions of new spending, so you can't plausibly argue that the government is going to shrink in size and scope if he's elected. No, it's just that his version of creeping socialism will be enacted "efficiently and with an eye towards fiscal responsibility" just because he says it will.
sigh.
Yes, and we want to see babies killed and hope we all become commies and that we start wearing olive green uniforms with caps with little red stars on them.
It's all in the minutes of our meetings, comrade.
You fellas are funny.
Do you support the free market? Your answer was not just no but "Hell, no." Instead, you support an "intelligently regulated capitalism", which means a market that is simultaneously free and unfree, a contradiction in terms.
You believe that energy prices constitute a crisis, and you also seem to think that individual freedom is insufficient to address the crisis: or did I miss where you advocated free-market solutions? If there are areas of disagreement between you and, say, the typical European socialist, I don't know what they would be, and -- more importantly -- I don't know what principles you uphold that would inform those disagreements.
Balanced budget in the 90s,
Slimmed down military in the 90s,
cuts in intel.
What did it cost us? I would start with 3000 dead New Yorkers, dozens of passengers and the pentagon.
I hope it was worth it to have a balanced budget.
I want to say, yes. But there were certainly many other forces in play that contributed to 9/11 besides Clinton's so-called balanced budget... equally damning forces/policies.
Remember Jamie Gorelick?
Truth be told, we didn't enact a lot of cuts in any area to balance the budget: we simply reduced spending increases from, for instance, three times the rate of inflation to twice the rate. Despite their supposed "eye towards fiscal responsibility", the Democrats demonized these reductions in spending increases as outright cuts (and compared the Contract With America to Naziism), but these emminently reasonable reductions allowed the economic growth of the 90's to catch up with spending and create a surplus.
Nevertheless, it's probably still the case that fifty or sixty percent (or more) of the federal budget is on programs that have literally no basis in what the Constitution specifically enumerates as federal powers. This is a frequent theme in the writings of Walter E. Williams, as he described most recently, here:
"There's a measure introduced in every Congress since 1995, by Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., called The Enumerated Powers Act that would require that all bills introduced in the U.S. Congress include a statement setting forth the specific constitutional authority under which the law is being enacted.
"The Enumerated Powers Act currently has 44 co-sponsors in the House. In the Senate, it has never had a single co-sponsor, and that's a Senate that includes our three presidential aspirants. The question one might ask is why would Sens. Obama, Clinton and McCain have a distaste for, and fail to support, a measure binding them to what the Constitution actually permits?
"There's a two-part answer to that question. First, few congressmen, including our presidential aspirants, have the integrity, decency and courage to be bound by the Constitution, but more important is that congressmen and presidents simply reflect the constitutional ignorance or contempt held by the American people.
"Most of what Congress is constitutionally authorized to spend for is listed in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution and includes: coining money, establish Post Offices, to support Armies and a few other activities. Today's federal budget is over $3 trillion dollars. I challenge anyone to find specific constitutional authority for at least $2 trillion of it. That includes Social Security, Medicare, farm and business handouts, education, prescription drugs and a host of other federal expenditures. Americans who have become accustomed to living at the expense of another American would not want Congress to obey the Constitution, especially if it left out their favorite handout."
National defense is one of the few enumerated duties of the federal government; it is also one of the few area where the left supports spending cuts.
But the difference between the left and the right isn't merely a question of whether a government's powers are strictly limited by a written constitution.
The left seems to think we can solve terrorism by treating its supposed "root cause" of poverty with untold amounts in foreign aid, and they are almost reflexive in conceding the moral high ground to our enemies by concluding that their evil acts were justifiable blowback in response to our atrocities -- that 9/11 is an instance of, well, the proverbial chickens coming home to roost.
On the other hand, the right believes that we should be willing to pay, if necessary, billions in national defense but not a dime in tribute. I believe that the left believes almost the exact opposite: not a dime in defense, but billions in tribute.
That's a pretty damning assessment of the Left.
Nicely done. As always.
I just honestly cannot fathom the despair you exhibit here, for the world, for the country, for whatever. I simply do not see it.
We are so blessed, you and I! And this nation is so blessed! I just feel like you're slapping God in the face when you carry on the way you do. And I get pissed, and I jump ugly on you.
Sorry.
But really, WTH are you so DOWN on EVERYTHING??
Brother, it's YOUR standards that aren't being met. Not God's. Unless you think your standards are God's.
We're ALL rich, we all have FREEDOM to believe, and to practice it, and to work our ass off for the kingdom here and now, AMIDST the sickness and sin and selfishness -- which is our mission.
Quit whining about the poor pitiful world and start talking about how to save it -- soul, heart, mind and life, for they're all the same! And work on it!
Grrr. Cowboy up! Get in the fight or get out.
Sorry again, sort of.
"Yes. We. Can."
And for that, I do NOT apologize -- your own "personal wealth," and mine, be damned. It's ALL God's. How dare you bitch about, ooohhh, the eeeevill redistribution of "wealth" that isn't YOURS, or MINE, in the first dang place?!?
Another easy way might be to realize that reducing taxes does not always increase revenue. I know it's a conservative truism that lower taxes always stimulate business growth. If that was always true, we could reduce corporate taxes to zero and have unlimited business growth. Instead there is a curve, called the Laffer curve. It says on one side lower taxes stimulate business, on the other higher taxes increase federal income. Some European countries are on the side where they could lower business taxes and have growth. We are not on that side. Our national adjusted business taxes are some of the lowest in the world.
Looking to original language in the constitution is like trying to look back to the nation before the Civil War. States had greater power then. But that is not today. After the Civil War the federal government accrued the more power. Today's United States is not the original envisioned by our founding fathers. So what. Time advances and the needs of the populace change. THAT is one of the principals laid down by our Declaration of Independence, "That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
Bubba said one more thing that I wanted to respond to, "Instead, you support an "intelligently regulated capitalism", which means a market that is simultaneously free and unfree, a contradiction in terms." Capitalism is a great system for creating wealth and productivity. I heartily support a capitalistic society. But capitalism needs regulation. Without rules and check governing corporations, then you have sweatshops, unsafe working conditions and corporate pollution. Capitalism as a system has no drive to address these social concerns, that is why pure free-market systems don't work.
The signs were there, we should have taken the budget surplus and increased intel and military (cutback in military spending in the 90s was dramatic).
I think it is safe to say the Clintons were more worried about being a good Democrat then protecting our citizens. Whereas Bush is breaking the bank to make sure the middle east stays in the middle east because he fears another attack far more than Clinton did.
1) It's a false dichotomy to suggest that the only places where the budget can be reduced is the military or discretionary spending: that would seem obvious since 60% + 5% does not equal anything near 100%.
Congress itself dictates what spending is discretionary, largely for political reasons: why, we can't touch SSI, it's not discretionary! Because Social Security is not considered part of discretionary spending doesn't mean that A) it's somehow constitutional or that B) its spending can't be curtailed either by privatization or by reducing benefits.
2) Military and national-security spending DOES NOT APPROACH 60 PERCENT OF THE FEDERAL BUDGET. The center of the graph you pointed out is titled the 2009 Federal Discretionary Budget. It explicitly excludes the country's largest social programs.
"Unlike Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which are paid for by separate taxes, the discretionary budget is a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities."
I'm not sure how it's uniquely revealing, but the graph makes it easy to calculate the real percentage from the inset in the lower right:
- I'll grant that M/NS spending is $800 billion.
- Total Federal budget outlays is $3.226 trillion.
Do the math: military and national-security spending is only TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of federal spending.
Not even accounting for all the other innumerable social programs, the big three -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid -- account for $1.268 trillion: almost forty percent of the budget.
Social spending is a far bigger slice of the pie.
3) Some fiscal conservatives do wrongly believe or assert that tax cuts always increase revenue, but some on the left say that tax cuts never increase revenue.
You're right that only tax cuts increase revenue only if we're on the right side of the Laffer curve, but I'm not convinced we're on the left side of the curve, particularly concerning taxes that punish investment.
We have a GDP of $13.8 trillion. Looking again at your graph, I see that federal spending is (again) $3.2 trillion and tax revenue is $2.7 trillion. That means that federal spending is 23 percent of GDP, and -- not even counting state and local taxes -- the federal tax burden is 20 percent of GDP. I'm not convinced that no tax can be cut and revenue increased.
More to the point, a federal tax revenue of 20% of GDP is enitrely too much for a constitutionally limited government when we're not in a period of total-war as in the 1940's. God Himself only asks for half that.
And I frankly don't care how much higher taxes are in Europe. High taxation is immoral, and considering Europe's stagnant economy and high unemployment rates, I'm not sure the EU has an economy we want to emulate.
(And it may be true that "Our national adjusted business taxes are some of the lowest in the world," but that's partially because we tend to tax individuals, not businesses. The important figure is the total tax burden, no group of people has ever taxed itself into prosperity, and I'm not sure how low business taxes is a bad thing if we want to attract businesses.)
4) The U.S. Constitution is not a perfect document, and I have no problem with altering our constitution. Thing is, the document provides for its own process of alteration: the amendment process, outlined in Article V.
I for one would love to see an amendment that term-limits members of Congress, an amendment that requires a super-majority to raise tax rates, and an amendment that requires a balanced budget. I think the judiciary needs to be seriously restrained, and I'm open to suggestions for amendments that would accomplish precisely that; and if a constitutional amendment proves to be necessary to protect the people's right to determine the legal definition of marriage, I would support that too.
But it's extremely dangerous to ignore the Constitution just because it's politically expedient. We are a nation of laws, not men, and a government that is not constrained by the clear meaning of a written constitution is all the more likely to become tyrannical.
5) I certainly believe the free market needs to be governed by the rule of law that, for instance, enforces contracts and prohibits fraud and coercion. About further regulations, I'm not convinced they're necessary, and I'm not sure what principle or Constitutional limit would prevent, say, the impetus for child-labor laws to lead to the disaster of price controls.
But I do wonder, Bent, if your opinion of the necessity of child-labor laws would be remotely altered by the historical record of who supported those laws. Industries didn't need to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept laws regulating the meat industry and such: they embraced those laws because it limited competition, either by making it more cost-prohibitive for domestic competitors to enter the market or by excluding foreign competitors who did not or could not meet the new standards. Both Baptists and bootleggers support "blue laws" that limit liquor sales, the former "to address [particular] social concerns", the latter because it limits competition and makes bootlegging more profitable.
Starting with the Progressive era, creeping socialism has proven to be the result of collusion between big government and big business. Because the individual business is concerned with its own profit and not economic liberty per se, individual freedom must be protected against both the industrialist and the politician.
And as for the remarks you put in this original post from 1916, and which you so snidely dismissed because they violate your personal, worldly concept of selfish politics, I declare, not "religiously," but in the very name of Jesus Christ:
"Yes. We. Can."
You're blaspheming. You are quite literally taking the Lord's name in vain. You do this so frequently, that it's clear that you're not just guilty of false teaching: you are a false teacher.
You have no authority to promote your own political agenda "in the very name of Jesus Christ."
I reject your claim to the contrary. I wonder how you could even make such a claim when you don't think that the Bible -- the primary document about what Jesus taught -- is clear about literally anything. And I think you should be ashamed of yourself.
I am not the least bit despairing of anything. I see the world and clearly recognize what God's word has to say about it. Yes, there is much to admire and thank God for, but there is just as much [all of it the product of Man or Man's manipulation of God's handiwork] to abhor.
You see me as despairing because I take what the Bible has to say about what is surely to come as being literal. That to you is 'biblolatry'-- which I naturally reject. You don't see a need to warn people that He is coming soon. Because I do, and I seek to warn people of the reality of Sin and Hell, I am therefore seen as 'black-hearted' and 'despairing of Mankind and the future of the world'.
For the record, this world will never end. But it will be cleansed, and all the things I see that are 'black and horrid' will cease to be. That's what I look forward to. That's what I'd like everyone to one day see. But not everyone will... the Bible is very clear on that. It is also very clear that my primary duty as a Christian is to warn people that their sin will see them in hell. I'm not as vocal on this blog about these things as I should be, but neither do I shy away from it.
As for the subject of this post, philosophically speaking the Left DOES say, "yes we can" to all the snidely offered truisms by W. Boetcker. And since I cannot offer an intelligent contribution to the economic debate going on here without resorting to internet research, I'll not jump in-- I didn't expect the debate to go in this direction, and I just don't have the time for it. Besides which, Bubba is doing a fine job on his own.
"1) It's a false dichotomy to suggest that the only places where the budget can be reduced is the military or discretionary spending: that would seem obvious since 60% + 5% does not equal anything near 100%. This is true. We could have across the board spending cuts in all federal departments. But just this week Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "...it is hard to conceive of any country confronting the United States directly in conventional terms -– ship to ship, fighter to fighter, tank to tank -– for some time to come." So I have to ask why are we continuing to spend a huge portion of our budget on defense project that have no foreseeable application. Also ask yourself how much of a role is the Navy playing in our engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan? Because they are budgeted for almost exactly the same amount of federal dollars as the Army and Air Force. Does that make sense?
"Congress itself dictates what spending is discretionary, largely for political reasons: why, we can't touch SSI, it's not discretionary! Because Social Security is not considered part of discretionary spending doesn't mean that A) it's somehow constitutional or that B) its spending can't be curtailed either by privatization or by reducing benefits."
In theory we could trim the budget by cutting medicare and medicaid services. We could shrink the growth of SS payments. Practically all these issues are nonstarters. And beyond the practical all these programs are vital to our country. Whether originally envisioned by the founding fathers or not, today millions of Americans depend on these programs to secure their health, and income.
"2) Military and national-security spending DOES NOT APPROACH 60 PERCENT OF THE FEDERAL BUDGET. The center of the graph you pointed out is titled the 2009 Federal Discretionary Budget. It explicitly excludes the country's largest social programs." Again practically SS, Medicare and Medicaid are off the table. The number I gave were what Congress hashes out with the White House each year. To affect changes in those social spending programs would take, not just budget committees, but new laws that would have to be approved by the House, Senate and the President. In our yearly budget military spending is 60%. A lot of that figure is salary for our armed forces, but a significant portion is inapplicable and unneeded weapons systems.
We have a GDP of $13.8 trillion. Looking again at your graph, I see that federal spending is (again) $3.2 trillion and tax revenue is $2.7 trillion. That means that federal spending is 23 percent of GDP, and -- not even counting state and local taxes -- the federal tax burden is 20 percent of GDP. I'm not convinced that no tax can be cut and revenue increased. The Congressional Budget Office did a study on Pres. Bush's tax cuts. They found that the cuts would provide a one-time return of about $10-billion. Unfortunately extending those cuts the CBO says will result in a $20-billion loss.
"4) The U.S. Constitution is not a perfect document, and I have no problem with altering our constitution. Thing is, the document provides for its own process of alteration: the amendment process, outlined in Article V." If the founding fathers meant only the amendment process for growing and adapting the government to the changing needs of the country. We would not have Congress and the presidential veto process. Standard laws are great ways for the country to try laws before embarking on the rigorous difficult process of getting an amendment approved. If SS, Medicare and Medicaid came up for approval as amendments they would pass overwhelmingly.
"About further regulations, I'm not convinced they're necessary, and I'm not sure what principle or Constitutional limit would prevent, say, the impetus for child-labor laws to lead to the disaster of price controls." The quick snarky answer is that those regulation haven't lead to price controls yet, and we've had labor laws and corporate regulation since the 1800's. And with the immense power of corporations in our lawmaking process I don't see how we could move toward price controls.
EL,
Why do you put up with this hateful idiot?
"No one can dwell so long in shadow that they cannot return to the light" --Robert Jordan