FOXNews.com - A Few Questions for the Presidential Candidates

My man The Agitator, whose fantasy football league I am playing in this yr, offers up some questions that shows we have two flip-floppers. It would be outstanding if the first debate including any of these questions, but it would just show what a fraud all these people are, so doubt we will see that.

For the Bush man...

— You also said in 2000 that you trust Americans to spend their own money more than you trust the government. But during your first term, with your party in control of both houses of Congress, you’ve spent more taxpayer dollars (adjusted for inflation) than Bill Clinton (search), Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon — more than every administration since Lyndon Johnson (search). That’s true no matter how we measure “spending.”

Even when we adjust for defense and homeland security spending, you’re still the biggest spender in four decades. You’ve increased funding to such non-conservative causes as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Departments of Health and Human Services and Education, the Peace Corps, and of course the prescription drug benefit (which your administration pushed through Congress based on misleading information about its cost).

Given your professed views on government spending, how do you justify growing government faster than any president in 40 years?

— You ran in 2000 as a “free trade president.” Since you took office, you’ve imposed tariffs on steel, shrimp, furniture, lumber, sugar, lingerie, wire, computer chips, catfish, cotton, textiles, clothing, and flowers, to name just a few. You also signed a $190 billion bill to reinstate the federal farm subsidies program, which was scheduled to be phased out. Are these the policies of a “free trade president?”

For Kerrymister...

— You’ve demagogued the outsourcing issue throughout the primaries and so far in the general election. You’ve said corporate executives who export manufacturing jobs overseas are “Benedict Arnold CEOs.” But you and your wife still own 4 percent of the H.J. Heinz Corporation, which operates 57 factories overseas, but just 22 here in the United States. The Hill newspaper reports that your campaign has accepted $370,000 from the CEOs of companies that heavily outsource jobs to other countries.

Given your vigorous opposition to outsourcing, are you prepared to ask Heinz to close all of those overseas factories, or to sell off your stake in Heinz if it doesn't? Will you give back campaign contributions from corporate executives whose companies outsource?

— You recently said of the Patriot Act: “We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night. So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time. I’ve been a District Attorney and I know that what law enforcement needs are real tools not restrictions on American’s basic rights.”

Eloquently put. So why did you vote for it?

Ouch.....

Democracy of Dolts by Bill Bonner

Mr. Bonner sums things up pretty succinctly with these words....

When times are really good, government is an inevitable but amusing flim-flam. In small, annoying ways, government bosses around its citizens, pretending to do so for their own good – that is, as a ‘public service.’ When times are bad, government murders people – either its own citizens or those of some other government – again, for the good of those who are left living.

"Government," said George Washington, "is not reason. It is not eloquence. It is force."

If you do Vote...Vote for Gridlock


That's why, in the context of November's election, a victory for Kerry, who will finally officially become the Democrats' standard-bearer in Boston this Thursday - even though he's a big-government man all the way - could paradoxically be the most likely hope for curbing excessive government growth in the next four years. Why? The party stereotypes don't always hold up, and a Democratic president and a Congress led by Republicans creates a kind of institutional impasse that actually slows the momentum of government.

It seems counterintuitive, though, to expect limited government from a Democratic president. Ever since the Goldwater vs. LBJ contest of 1964, the two major parties have staked out rough philosophical positions along these lines: the Republicans are, at least rhetorically, for a lean and limited government; the Democrats are unreconstructed advocates of state power, state spending and state solutions to every problem.

But the facts - the performance of the parties when they have the power - have never borne that out. We got such regulatory state measures as the Clean Air Act and wage and price controls under Nixon, and the Americans with Disabilities Act under the first George Bush. And it was under Democrat Bill Clinton that we got meaningful welfare reform that has knocked nearly 3 million families off the federal dole so far, even as child poverty rates shrink.

But the most vivid example that Republicans can't be relied on as consistent defenders of smaller government is our current Republican president. Bush has increased domestic discretionary spending 25 percent in less than four years, compared to an increase under Clinton over his entire two terms of only 10 percent.

Conventions

Reason mag has the best coverage by far of the DNC convention. Click the link to ch-ch-check it out.

Deaniacs

Howard Dean at the convention....yeah he is really anti-war?????

What does Dean tell the Deaniacs? Much of what you'd expect -- that intense exposure to their anti-war enthusiasm and lefty agenda:

"I ran for the president because I wanted to balance the budget and expand health care for all Americans," he said. He was a "centrist" who had supported the previous four military interventions: Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, and the Gulf War. But then came the Iraq War, which he opposed, mobilizing a passionate anti-war base he hadn't been overly exposed to before. "I noticed folks to the left of me … were saying stuff that turned out to be true."

BOTH PARTIES GET BLAME FOR THE ECONOMIC MESS - NY Post

John Crudele is one of the good guy newspaper reports, who digs for the dirt in business and in politics. This interview with Pete Peterson, former chair of the NY Fed Reserve and now chair of the financial powerhouse Blackstone Group. Peterson actually believes that the current system could fix the problem that our government has created, unfortunately I am more pessimistic on that front, but optimistic that once the system breaks things will improve.

Crudel: In your book, you blame the Republicans, as well as the Democrats. You're a Republican. Can your party be brought back to fiscal responsibility?

Peterson: I always thought my party was about fiscal conservatism. We have morphed into a kind of any-tax-cut-anytime mentality. And some big spenders have joined us in the Republican Party.

Now we have the worst of both worlds fiscally ? the biggest tax cuts and the big spending increases. What's ironic about this is that the most conservative sectors of the Republican Party agree. The Cato Institute refers to this as a "spending explosion."

Dick Armey says we can't pin this one on the Democrats. We're in charge of both the Houses and the White House.

Chuck Hagel, a conservative, says this [Republican] party has lost its moorings.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have never met an entitlement they didn't like. Even though many of them will privately admit that Medicare as now constituted is unsustainable, their principal complaint about the Medicare drug bill is that it doesn't go nearly far enough.

The question is: What can we do about it?

There are two approaches, one far more constructive than the other. First, have a massive truth-telling effort, where the American people really understand what we are inflicting on the future and their kids. Then, bold action by a president who is willing to show leadership.

Both the current and the previous presidents set up Social Security commissions and then proceeded to flush them.

TCS: Tech Central Station - Highway Robbery - Or Why Republicans are Clowns Too

In honor of the Democratic National Convention, I've been meaning to write about why both the Republicans and Democrates are clowns (or suck if you prefer that term). A couple years ago I realized that I could no longer support the DemoPublicans (save for a Ron Paul type candidate here and there that actually wants to decrease the Federal government) and began voting as often as the Vote Or Die celebs (never). At one point I was a naive college student who bought the teaching of the government schools and believed that we had great leaders like Lincoln and the rest of the croonie. Thankfully I at some point realized that the war mongering power grubbers like not very honest Abe, Tricky Dick and Bill I Didn't Inhale (and the rest of the lot) were all of the same breed. Now I'm also not a Michael Moore type of character who hates America, the government perhaps, but not the people. What makes this country and the world in general so amazing is the plethora of just wonderful and talented folks that are out there accomplishing things in spite of their governments. Anway in honor of the election I will be posting nothing but all the rediculous ideas that the two parties of the people are proposing. The laws of economics and commonsense (letting people make their own decisions) will be ignored because that is what people that make laws for this country do. Once again we find ourselves facing an election that offers us the choice of shooting overselves in the left arm or the right arm.

Here is our first example.....



Lately, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Majority Leader Tom DeLay have been touting the substantial job growth they claim will occur if Congress would just spend an extra $280 billion or more in federal taxpayer money on proposed transportation projects. In a February press release, Frist states the 2004 transportation bill would "create 47,500 new jobs" for each $1 billion spent. In a March press release, DeLay was even more ambitious: Citing the same figure, he couched the issue in terms of the federal government's attempt at "kicking the economy into high-gear… This is a jobs bill, pure and simple." In fact, that's been the mantra of Hill supporters of the highway bill on both sides of the aisle for months.

The problem with all of this is that it is wrong. Government spending won't actually create any "new" private-sector jobs. To understand why, take a look at Bastiat's famous essay, "What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen." There he explained what has become known as the "broken window fallacy." The story goes like this: When a shopkeeper's window is broken, a window repairman receives a job and compensation for his handiwork. To someone simply looking at this transaction in isolation it seems that the broken window, while the result of an accident, is actually a benefit to the economy - the window repair industry did receive business, didn't it? That, as Bastiat wrote, is what is "seen."

What is "not seen," however, is what the shopkeeper might have spent that money on if the window were never broken. Perhaps he would have bought any number of other goods or services, or hired another employee to work in his shop, but now he cannot. The breaking of a window does not increase net employment in the economy as a whole, even though it increases the employment of the window repairman.

Bastiat extends this logic to taxation and government spending. To spend money on anything, the government has to first tax that money out of the economy or borrow it from the capital markets. While supporters of a government project will argue that it creates employment for some, they fail to mention that the taxes or debt -- a form of future taxes -- will inhibit employment of others. As Bastiat wrote, "public spending is always a substitute for private spending," which "adds nothing to the lot of the working class taken as a whole." When politicians say that highway spending will create new jobs, taxpayers need to remember that the fuel taxes used to finance that spending have already taken a chunk of productive capital out of the economy.
 

He then ends the article with this gem...

To put it another way, if these types of government-financed transportation projects were indeed sources of real job growth, West Virginia would be an economic dynamo and pork-master Senator Robert Byrd would have won the Nobel Prize in economics by now. The truth is that increased government spending on highways usually only guarantees new jobs for bureaucrats. That's not the type of jobs program that the U.S. economy needs.

Mises Economics Blog: Austrian Economics and Libertarian Political Theory

Great post from the Mises Blog...

Isn't Capitalism Great?

Sheldon Richman

This month in 1979 Sony introduced the first Walkman (initially called the Soundabout), a small portable cassette-tape player designed to be used with headphones. It was priced at $199.95. In today’s dollars that’s $540. Today, of course, you will spend considerably less for a product that is considerably better. A Sony CD Walkman at Best Buy costs $50. Lesser-known brands can be had for about 20 bucks. MP3 players are more, but that will be temporary. Par for the course even in a badly hampered capitalist economy.