"Joe the Plumber" speak out!

[RRDTm3]

seems like some of the Demo's just can't man up to their own mistakes.

WTF?

There is no way you can pawn this off to an administration from 8 yrs ago.........no way.


Ok so when Slick Willy left a surplus he just go lucky? Bush and his cronies just got unlucky?

Read Bob Wooodward's new book. You will hear the incompetence flow straight from the horses’ ass, I mean mouth. Bush makes himself look dumber than he has ever been before. It is not speculation, it is drivel from the source.

[McD]

seems like some of the Demo's just can't man up to their own mistakes.

WTF?

There is no way you can pawn this off to an administration from 8 yrs ago.........no way.


Ok so when Slick Willy left a surplus he just go lucky? Bush and his cronies just got unlucky?

Read Bob Wooodward's new book. You will hear the incompetence flow straight from the horses’ ass, I mean mouth. Bush makes himself look dumber than he has ever been before. It is not speculation, it is drivel from the source.

Ah my friend you have to much into my message.... well maybe.

My point was that the Fannie and Freddie inititive is part of Bill's administration. Granted it was 8 years ago but it lives today. I'm not placing the blame on any one person or political platform. Just saying that the Democrat's have had a play in this also. So my message was more to the mortgage/financial institution problems we are in.

It is kind of important to remember that it is Congress and the Senate that make it happen. That is where the blame should be placed. IMO

Woodward is not on my to read author's list, though I might read it if it was given to me..... I'm more of an O'Rielly guy (fair and balanced).

But I still think your a OK guy anyway! :)

[LEROY]

Best explanation I've seen about who pays taxes. JW



Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and
the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their
bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something
like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed
quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the
owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good
customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of
your daily beer by $20.'Drinks for the ten now cost
just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we
pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected.
They would still drink for free.
But what about the other six men - the paying
customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so
that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They
realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they
subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth
man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it
would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the
same amount and he proceeded to work out the amounts
each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing
(100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the
first four continued to dri nk for free. But once
outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their
savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the
sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got
$10!'
'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I
only saved a dollar, too.
It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!'
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should
he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get
all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison.
'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits
the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for
drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without
him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they
discovered something important. They didn't have
enough money between all of them for even half of the
bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college
professors, is how our tax system works. The people
who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a
tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for
being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the
atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is
possible.

[BadMuther]

Best explanation I've seen about who pays taxes. JW



Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and
the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their
bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something
like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do.
The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed
quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the
owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good
customers,' he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of
your daily beer by $20.'Drinks for the ten now cost
just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we
pay our taxes so the first four men were unaffected.
They would still drink for free.
But what about the other six men - the paying
customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so
that everyone would get his 'fair share?' They
realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they
subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth
man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to
drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it
would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the
same amount and he proceeded to work out the amounts
each should pay.

And so:

The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing
(100% savings).
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now pay $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the
first four continued to dri nk for free. But once
outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their
savings.

'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the
sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got
$10!'
'Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I
only saved a dollar, too.
It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!'
'That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should
he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get
all the breaks!'

'Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison.
'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits
the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.
The next night the tenth man didn't show up for
drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without
him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they
discovered something important. They didn't have
enough money between all of them for even half of the
bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college
professors, is how our tax system works. The people
who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a
tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for
being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore.
In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the
atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.

David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia

For those who understand, no explanation is needed.
For those who do not understand, no explanation is
possible.

Good stuff.

[Looon]

seems like some of the Demo's just can't man up to their own mistakes.

WTF?

There is no way you can pawn this off to an administration from 8 yrs ago.........no way.


Ok so when Slick Willy left a surplus he just go lucky? Bush and his cronies just got unlucky?

Read Bob Wooodward's new book. You will hear the incompetence flow straight from the horses’ ass, I mean mouth. Bush makes himself look dumber than he has ever been before. It is not speculation, it is drivel from the source.

I would have to say that Slick Willy AND the congress at the time had a pretty big part in this. Both Dems and Repubs.

Congress passed the bill for the subprime and Clinton signed it into law.

[Ranger Bill]

Good stuff.

True stuff. We are going to run out of beer.

[Silverback]

::::News Flash::::

Politicians are all CROOKED, you just have to choose the one that will steal the least from your family.

[McD]

::::News Flash::::

Politicians are all CROOKED, you just have to choose the one that will steal the least from your family.

Truer words were never spoken. Why so crooked you ask??? Because even if they are truely honest they bend all over the place to cut the deals they need for re-election.

[RRDTm3]

Bush's Ownership Society
Why No One's Buying.

By Paul Glastris
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




Conservatives have a knack for taking good ideas--say, patriotism or faith--to the sort of ideologized extreme that brands the ideas as theirs and leads liberals to abandon them. We're seeing that now with the issue of choice and individual empowerment. Those very concepts used to be associated with liberal causes like abortion and voting rights. But over the last couple of decades, conservative intellectuals have roped them to a larger agenda to revolutionize government.
And they're perfectly open about it. Talk to scholars at the Cato Institute or the Heritage Foundation or to movement organizers like Grover Norquist, and they'll walk you through the strategy. Big government and individual freedom, they'll explain, are opposed to each other; more of one means less of the other. The three big areas of non-defense-related government spending are retirement (mainly Social Security), health care (mainly Medicare and Medicaid), and education (mainly K-12 public schools). For political reasons, it is practically impossible to cut spending in these areas. But it is possible to dismantle the government bureaucracies that administer them in a way that enhances personal freedom and makes possible big cuts down the road: privatize the benefits.

The father of this line of thinking is Milton Friedman. In the 1950s and 1960s, the conservative economist dreamed up the notions of education vouchers and private accounts for Social Security. Republican operatives and think tankers seized on Friedman's ideas in the 1970s, expanded them into areas like health care, and fleshed out their philosophic and political logic. Vesting individuals with more choice, control, and ownership of their government benefits, they argued, would not only enhance virtues like personal responsibility, but over time, it would also result in the shift of hundreds of billions of tax dollars from the custodial care of government to the corporations that would help manage people's private accounts. Best of all, from the conservative point of view, it would transform the electorate's political identity. Instead of government-dependent supporters of the Democratic Party, voters would become self-reliant followers of the GOP.



These ideas are the intellectual fuel of the conservative movement that has swept across the country in recent decades. They were well understood in the Reagan administration, and the Gipper's speeches are suffused with them. But it has only been in the last few years, with both Congress and the White House in conservative Republican hands, that the ideas have truly debuted.

Now, the reviews are in--and they are not good.

Consider President Bush's effort to sell the public on private Social-Security accounts. Last September, when he first began talking about the idea on the campaign trail, it looked like a winner, with 58 percent support in the polls. By December, only 54 percent favored his proposal. By February, following his detailed explanation of private accounts in his State of the Union address, support fell to 46 percent. And by June, when informed that private accounts would be paired with cuts in benefits for future retirees--as the president himself admitted they would have to be to have any impact on Social Security's long-run finances--27 percent of voters gave their approval, a level of support below that for legalizing marijuana and gay marriage.

Or consider another high-profile element of what Bush calls the "ownership society": giving individuals more control over their government health-care benefits. In 2003, the president signed a landmark measure providing prescription drug coverage to Medicare recipients, with massive subsidies to lure beneficiaries into private plans. Prior to the law's passage, 90 percent of the public supported the idea of government helping seniors with drug costs. Today, a scant 31 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of the new program. It's possible that, once the benefit actually goes into effect beginning next year, seniors will flock to it gratefully. But an interim effort offering seniors a choice of drug discount cards doesn't inspire confidence. Only 6.4 million seniors wound up getting the drug discount cards, a million fewer than the government predicted. Low-income seniors who signed up for the card were given an extra $600 subsidy to help defray the cost of co-pays--a benefit the government estimated would lure 4.7 million low-income seniors into the program. Only 1.9 million lower-income seniors actually did sign up.

Finally, consider the president's efforts to give parents more choice over the schools their children attend. Under Bush's No Child Left Behind Act, millions of students in failing schools can now transfer to other schools in their district. It is the grandest experiment in public-school choice ever attempted, and polls show overwhelming support for it. In practice, however, only about 1 percent of students in failing schools annually have taken advantage of the opportunity. That could mean that districts aren't eagerly publicizing the choice provisions, or that parents aren't impressed with the array of often-dysfunctional public schools they have to choose from. That's why conservatives say the federal government should go the next step and provide students with vouchers for private schools. Yet a two-year-old federal voucher experiment in D.C. that provides low-income students a hefty $7,500 to attend private schools has garnered only modestly more interest. Only 7 percent of families with children eligible for the vouchers have applied for them.

You can begin to see a pattern here. Americans love the idea of choice--in the abstract. But when faced with the actual choices conservatives present, they aren't buying. The reason is that conservatives have constructed choices that fail to take human nature into account. People like to have choices but feel quickly overwhelmed when they lack the information or expertise to decide confidently, and they turn downright negative when the choices themselves seem to put what they already have at risk. Conservatives were bound to make these mistakes because their very aim has been to transfer more risks from government to individuals so that government's size and expenditures can be cut. That's not a bargain most Americans will accept. They like choice just fine, but they won't trade security to get it.

That's not to say individual choice and control can't be applied intelligently to government. In fact, doing so may be key to achieving important progressive aims like universal health care. But designing policies that use choice and that Americans would actually embrace won't make government weaker. Rather, it will require government to be stronger.

Dozen card monte

It's understandable that conservatives would think that giving individuals more choice and control over government services would be an easy sell. After all, consumers increasingly enjoy these things in the marketplace. Everything, from cars to computers to pastas, now comes in an astonishing array of styles, colors, and configurations. Consumers today have access to new tools that shift control to them, and the younger they are, the more comfortable they are with that control. No one under 30 these days calls a travel agent; they use Orbitz.

But as choices and individual control have expanded, economists and behavioral psychologists have begun to document some unexpected ways people actually react to these new marketplace choices. Swarthmore social theorist Barry Schwartz explored their findings in his book The Paradox of Choice. On the one hand, notes Schwartz, having control and choice clearly benefits us. People who peruse a variety of options before choosing tend to make objectively better decisions. There are important psychological benefits as well. The ability to express one's identity via the choices one makes--in everything from the clothes we wear to the charities we contribute to--greatly increases human happiness.

On the other hand, having an ever-expanding number of choices doesn't necessarily make us happier, just as bigger and bigger food portions don't make us healthier. Indeed, too many choices tend to stress us out. Even trivial choices often require expenditures of time and energy to make informed decisions. When the variables are too numerous, people often decide that the effort isn't worth it. In one study, individuals were offered tastes of six different exotic jams and given a coupon worth a dollar off any of the jams. Another group was offered a choice of 24 jams and a coupon. Those in the first group were more likely to buy jam than those in the second.

As choices have proliferated, we feel overwhelmed, as if we're losing control--the very opposite of the feeling choice is supposed to bring. These anxieties, plus the natural human tendency to procrastinate, means that most people, most of the time, respond to choices by doing nothing. They choose not to choose.

The prescription-drug discount-card program is a classic example. The program seemed designed to give seniors more stress than savings. There were dozens of cards to choose from. Each card was good at only certain pharmacies. Each covered only certain drugs. And the amount of discount for each medicine varied by card. With so many possible permutations, figuring out which card was the best deal was largely guesswork. According to surveys conducted for the government by Apt Associates Inc, seniors complained that they "found the multiplicity of choices to be overwhelming." Those who did sign up for the cards generally liked them--though many said they found better prices at Costco without using the cards. Yet more than half of card users didn't shop around. They just accepted the first card they heard about (usually from their pharmacist). And the few seniors who did comparison-shop for cards reported only slightly higher levels of satisfaction than those who didn't.

The big flaw in the drug discount-card program was the complexity and incomparability of the choices it provided seniors. Had the GOP lawmakers and administration appointees who designed the program been less enamored of market principles and corporate lobbying agendas and been willing to impose stricter guidelines on the participating companies, so that the different features of the cards could be more easily compared, more seniors might have participated. After all, the program did offer Medicare recipients something they wanted and didn't have: financial help paying for prescription drugs.

The more intractable problem with the president's ownership society is its effort to inject choice and control into benefits people already have. Here, the culprit is not complexity but risk. Behavioral economists have described what's known as an "endowment effect": People are psychologically prone to be exceptionally risk-averse with benefits they already have. With his Social-Security private-accounts proposal, the president was in essence offering voters a variety of ways to have less retirement security. The reaction should not have been a surprise. Surveys by the Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of those who opposed private Social-Security accounts said they worried about the risk--to themselves, to others, and to the system as a whole.

Conservatives may have been blindsided by the public's rejection of the president's plan because they assumed that most Americans share their fundamental assumptions about government: that more of it is bad, less of it is good. On an abstract level, many people do feel that way. The line in the president's stump speech, that the American people can be trusted to spend their own money better than the government, usually gets an applause. But when forced to consider concrete alternatives, Americans often wind up putting their trust in the collective efforts of government to protect their security rather than in themselves. Though the president succeeded in convincing the public that Social Security has long-term financial problems, he did not convince them that shifting control and choice to individuals was the solution. Rather, polls showed huge majorities favor such measures as raising the income cap on payroll taxes to inject more money into the current system--in other words, making government bigger, not smaller.

The same dichotomy, between the choice people say they want in the abstract and what they actually want in practice, exists in other realms. For instance, conservatives have looked at polls and focus groups and convinced themselves that individuals are willing to accept more responsibility for their own health care. That's why so many on the right who detested the high cost of the prescription drug law are excited by one of its provisions, that would set up Health Savings Accounts. These are tax-favored 401(k)-like devises that allow individuals to "own" their own health care and make their own health care decisions. But in the end, will the public really welcome more individual responsibility over health care? Consider this: sixty-five percent of people polled say that if they got cancer they would want to choose their treatment options. But 88 percent of people who actually have cancer say they don't want to choose their treatment, preferring instead that their doctors do so. "Having the opportunity to choose," writes Schwartz, "is no blessing if we feel we do not have the wherewithal to choose wisely."

Forcing a decision

It would be easy and natural for liberals to react to the failure of Bush's Ownership Society with a "Phew, that was close. Now, we don't have to think about choice anymore." That would be a mistake, for two reasons.

First, it's not like the right is suddenly going to stop pushing these ideas just because Bush himself failed to sell them. The voucherizing of government is part of the guiding vision of modern conservatism. Entire organizations are funded primarily to achieving it. The problem with Social-Security private accounts, Grover Norquist recently told me, is "nothing that can't be solved with 60 Republican votes in the Senate."

Second, as reform-minded progressives from author and speechwriter Andrei Cherny to British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been at pains to argue, the public's aspirations are changing. People want and receive more choice and individual control in the marketplace, and for all its frustrations, they rather like it, and will naturally expect more individual choice and control from government, too. Conservatives have tapped into a real yearning. What they've failed to do, for ideological reasons, is apply these concepts in ways that actually solve problems. Liberals are in a much better ideological position to actually deliver on the demand for more individual control and choice. The only obstacle is realizing that liberal policy goals can be advanced by smart proposals that let citizens make their own decisions.

An instructive example is public housing. Back in the early 1990s, Jack Kemp, George H.W. Bush's charismatic Housing and Urban Development secretary, was pushing the idea of selling off public housing to tenants and letting those tenants manage their own buildings. It was a classic early example of "ownership-society" thinking--Kemp called it "empowerment"--and it was, when you think about it, highly dubious. Is it really a favor to saddle the responsibility for maintaining decrepit high-rise buildings in terrible neighborhoods on the tenants who are stuck there, many of whom have trouble managing their own personal lives? Kemp wanted to fix the places up first, but the cost would have run $100,000 per unit in 1990 dollars--enough, noted OMB Director and Kemp nemesis Richard Darman, to buy each tenant a condo.

Kemp's ideas, well-meaning as they were, went nowhere. It took his successor in the Bill Clinton administration, Henry Cisneros, to figure out an "empowerment" strategy that actually worked.

Cisneros and his advisers--including Chief of Staff Bruce Katz and Assistant Secretary (and later secretary) Andrew Cuomo--figured out two important truths. First, they understood what urban experts had been saying for years: that the heart of the problem of public housing was the way it concentrated poverty in one place. Second, they grasped that to address this problem would require using certain choice-enhancing, market-based tools long favored by Republicans and disparaged by Democrats--namely, housing vouchers and tax credits for developers.

And so, with the backing of the president and GOP moderates in Congress, Cisneros and his team implemented a sweeping plan to break up that concentrated poverty. The department forced local housing authorities to tear down broken-down, crime-ridden public-housing complexes. It encouraged the building of low-rise replacement public housing or gave departing residents Section 8 housing vouchers to help find private apartments in better neighborhoods. It also provided private and non-profit developers tax credits to build or rehab apartment buildings with rules requiring that they rent to a mix of both poor and working-class tenants.

These largely unsung efforts helped drive the renewal of many urban centers that took place in the 1990s. Not enough time has passed to know how effective they were in improving the lives of HUD's poor. But surveys by the Urban Institute show that those who left public housing did wind up in somewhat better neighborhoods, and that former residents "generally perceive themselves as being better off," with better housing conditions and fewer mental-health problems.

Notice how Cisneros's reforms were structured. They utilized policies that empowered individuals (housing vouchers, tax credits). But they relied on strict government regulation to guide the process towards a goal (breaking up concentrated poverty) that public officials determined was in the best interests of tenants and the nation. And they understood that most people, most of the time, will choose not to choose, and so they forced the issue. Individuals could move to other public housing or to temporary housing until the new low-rise developments were finished, or take a Section 8 voucher, but staying in condemned public housing wasn't an option.

Libertarian paternalism

Choice, then, can be a powerful tool to advance public ends as long as one ironic truth is recognized: People like having choice but often don't like to choose.

This concept is at the center of a brewing movement within public-policy circles, one that Cass Sunstein and Richard H. Thaler of the University of Chicago have affectionately, if cheekily, dubbed "libertarian paternalism." The idea is for government to shape the choices people have so that the natural human tendency to avoid making a decision works to the individuals' and society's advantage.

For instance, many private-sector employees don't participate in company-sponsored 401(k) programs, even though participation is hugely in their financial interest (employees can invest pre-tax dollars and watch their money grow tax-free until the money is withdrawn). Lower-paid employees are the least likely to participate because they reap fewer tax benefits, seldom receive a company match, and are often living paycheck to paycheck. But the biggest reason lower-income employees don't participate is the hassle factor. The forms are a bother to fill out. They don't know much about investing. They can't decide where to put their money. They choose not choose.

Understanding this, some clever officials in the Clinton administration changed the rules governing 401(k)s to allow for "automatic enrollment." Henceforth, firms could choose to automatically put aside a percentage of all employees' wages in 401(k) accounts. Employees would have the ability to "opt out" of the program, thus retaining the right to choose, but would have to take the initiative themselves in order to exercise that right. In practice, few do. A study of companies that instituted automatic 401(k) enrollment, by economists Bridgette Madrian and Dennis Shea, found that participation rates for employees making under $20,000 annually rose from 13 percent to 80 percent.

Imagine if every company in America automatically enrolled its employees in 401(k)s, IRAs, or similar retirement accounts? That one simple step might do more to strengthen America's retirement system than any number of changes to Social Security (at no cost to the federal treasury).

Scholars think this "opt-out" concept could be applied to a wide range of policies that are vitally important, broadly supported politically, but plagued by low participation rates. Why not automatically enroll all owners of homes on floodplains into the federal-flood insurance program? Why not automatically enroll all eligible low-income working families into SCHIP, the health-insurance program for children of such famlies?

A related strategy for dealing with the natural human reluctance to choose is the one used by Cisneros: compel people to make a choice. The New America Foundation has proposed making health insurance mandatory, as auto insurance is, with federal subsidies for lower-income workers to be able to buy private policies.

That idea could be combined with another one popular in liberal circles: A universal health-care initiative that would allow individuals to buy into the health-insurance program for civil servants, the Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB). Under FEHB, workers choose from an array of private insurance plans pre-selected for quality and efficiency by the government. Also, those plans must disclose price, coverage, and other information in standard ways, so that employees can make apples to apples comparisons before choosing. It's no coincidence that federal workers report higher levels of satisfaction with their health care than most Americans working in the private sector.

Education is another area where structured choices might be beneficial. New Democrats have long supported giving parents more choice via charter schools. The jury's still out on whether charter schools produce any real educational benefits, and the schools themselves are prey to sabotage by the education bureaucracies. But studies suggest charter schools do have two advantages. First, parents who chose them for their kids do seem to like them. Second, the act of choosing tends to inspire more parental involvement and a more cohesive school culture, two attributes typical of successful schools.

One way to capture those benefits within larger school systems with large numbers of failing schools would be to make choice mandatory. Parents would have the option of putting their children into one of several schools in the district, including their neighborhood school. But not choosing would not be an option. Several districts have experimented with this idea. The most famous was District 4 in East Harlem, New York. In the 1970s, the district launched an experiment which combined mandatory choice with relaxed rules that allowed groups of administrators, teachers and parents to form small schools-within-schools focused on unique curricula--art, science, technology etc. The results were public schools with strong cultures and more parental involvement, and while not all students benefited, test scores rose substantially.

There are plenty of good reasons, then, for progressives to embrace the idea of designing more choice and individual control into government programs. But doing so means facing down some major opposition--from corporations that don't want to be regulated to liberal interest groups that often oppose choice initiatives. Liberals also have to stop accepting the right-wing proposition that choice and empowerment are somehow inherently conservative ideas.

But it's conservatives who face the bigger obstacle. They are committed to a strategy of using choice as a Trojan horse to undermine government, yet it's impossible to make choice work in the real world without strong measures from government. With choice, as with so much else, conservative have mastered the art of winning elections with abstract language voters agree with, even as they push policies voters don't much like. They can't pull that trick off forever. At some point, conservatives themselves are going to have to make a choice.

[McD]

seems like some of the Demo's just can't man up to their own mistakes.

WTF?

There is no way you can pawn this off to an administration from 8 yrs ago.........no way.


Ok so when Slick Willy left a surplus he just go lucky? Bush and his cronies just got unlucky?

Read Bob Wooodward's new book. You will hear the incompetence flow straight from the horses’ ass, I mean mouth. Bush makes himself look dumber than he has ever been before. It is not speculation, it is drivel from the source.

I love ya Bubba But Slick Willy didn't leave Bush a surplus. That is a myth. Here is some data from the Treasury Dept.

While not defending the increase of the federal debt under President Bush, it is aggravating seeing Clinton's record promoted as having generated a surplus. It never happened. There was never a surplus and the cold hard facts support that position.

Fiscal
Year Year Ending National Debt Deficit
FY1993 09/30/1993 $4.411488 trillion
FY1994 09/30/1994 $4.692749 trillion $281.26 billion
FY1995 09/29/1995 $4.973982 trillion $281.23 billion
FY1996 09/30/1996 $5.224810 trillion $250.83 billion
FY1997 09/30/1997 $5.413146 trillion $188.34 billion
FY1998 09/30/1998 $5.526193 trillion $113.05 billion
FY1999 09/30/1999 $5.656270 trillion $130.08 billion
FY2000 09/29/2000 $5.674178 trillion $17.91 billion
FY2001 09/28/2001 $5.807463 trillion $133.29 billion

As can clearly be seen, in no year did the national debt go down, nor did Clinton leave President Bush with a budget surplus that Bush subsequently turned into a deficit. Yes, the budget was almost balanced in FY2000 (ending in September 2000 with a deficit of "only" $17.9 billion), but it never reached zero--let alone a positive number. And Clinton's last budget proposal for FY2001, which ended in September 2001, generated a $133.29 billion deficit. The growing deficits started in the year of the last Clinton budget, not in the first year of the Bush administration.

Keep in mind that President Bush took office in January 2001 and his first budget took effect October 1, 2001 for the year ending September 30, 2002 (FY2002). So the $133.29 billion deficit in the year ending September 2001 was Clinton's. Granted, Bush supported a tax refund where taxpayers received checks in 2001. However, the total amount refunded to taxpayers was $38 billion. So even if we assume that $38 billion of the FY2001 deficit was due to Bush's tax refunds which were not part of Clinton's last budget, that still means that Clinton's last budget produced a deficit of 133.29 - 38 = $95.29 billion.

Clinton clearly did not achieve a surplus and he didn't leave President Bush with a surplus.

The only debt that matters is the total national debt. And the national debt went up every single year under Clinton. Had Clinton really had a surplus the national debt would have gone down. It didn't go down precisely because Clinton had a deficit every single year. The U.S. Treasury's historical record of the national debt verifies this.

A balanced budget or a budget surplus is a great thing, but it's only relevant if the budget surplus turns into a real surplus at the end of the fiscal year. In Clinton's case, it never did.

[RRDTm3]

End of the ‘Ownership Society’
By Zachary Karabell | NEWSWEEK


Remember the ownership society? President George W. Bush championed the concept when he was running for re-election in 2004, envisioning a world in which every American family owned a house and a stock portfolio, and government stayed out of the way of the American Dream.

These families were, of course, conservative, or at a minimum traditional and nuclear, consisting of a heterosexual married couple and at least two kids living in a stand-alone home with a yard, a car or two and a multimedia room with a flat-screen television. The latter was a new addition to this 21st-century simulacrum of the 1950s "Leave It to Beaver" idyll. But the dream was the same.

Such a country would be more stable, Bush argued, and more prosperous. "America is a stronger country every single time a family moves into a home of their own," he said in October 2004. To achieve his vision, Bush pushed new policies encouraging homeownership, like the "zero-down-payment initiative," which was much as it sounds—a government-sponsored program that allowed people to get mortgages without a down payment. More exotic mortgages followed, including ones with no monthly payments for the first two years. Other mortgages required no documentation other than the say-so of the borrower. Absurd though these all were, they paled in comparison to the financial innovations that grew out of the mortgages—derivatives built on other derivatives, packaged and repackaged until no one could identify what they contained and how much they were, in fact, worth.As we know by now, these instruments have brought the global financial system, improbably, to the brink of collapse. And as financial strains drive husbands and wives apart, Bush's ownership ideology may end up having the same effect on the stable nuclear families conservatives so badly wanted to foster.

The dream of a better society through homeownership didn't originate with George W. Bush. It's as American as Manifest Destiny. The Homestead Act in 1862 offered acres to anyone willing to brave the Western frontier. During Reconstruction, freed slaves were promised "40 acres and a mule." And after World War II, with Levittown and its cousins, affordable homes were a reward of victory. But until very recently, those hopes and dreams were connected to actual income and gainful employment. No longer.

The giddiness of the Bush years built on the promise of the New Economy era, a promise perfectly encapsulated by a 1999 billboard advertising a shiny new subdivision in Scroggins, Texas, filled with homes that most of their owners couldn't really afford: YES, YOU CAN HAVE IT ALL! That dream took a sharp hit with the collapse of the Internet stock bubble in 2000-2001 and then with 9/11, both of which destroyed billions of dollars of wealth. But it came roaring back in 2002, encouraged by Bush's post-9/11 exhortation that Americans could do their patriotic duty by going shopping and paying lower taxes, even as government spending exploded. Shop they did, and homes they bought.

The spree wasn't confined to the United States. Britain has its own version of the ownership society, which received a boost from Margaret Thatcher, who promoted "a property-owning democracy" that her Labour successors, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, endorsed. Blair liked to talk of building a "stakeholder economy" with a big role for the ordinary property-owning citizen. More recently, Brown has spoken of creating a "homeowning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy." Millions were happy to buy into the vision. Tenants of government-owned properties gladly took up Thatcher's offer to sell them their homes at knockdown prices. More than 70 percent of Britons now own their homes, compared with 40 percent of Germans and 50 percent of French.

[McD]

Damn them was some long reading posts Bubba!

On the first one: I understand what they are saying but I like to make my own decisions. Give me or who ever wants it the choices and let the others have the goverment handle it for them. One simply choice for them then.

On the second one: I have not and will not say that the GOP isn't neck deep in the stink of everything that is happening. But the Democrats hands are not clean in this either. There is plenty of blame to go around.

"Pilot washed his hands and sealed his fate"

Don't you love this shit! Hook-Jab-Hook-Jab!

[Ranger Bill]

Generally, for every "expert" on one side of an issue there is an equally qualified "expert" on the other side. They can be lined up all day. There is a tendancy in most of us who have opinions to agree with those "experts" who reinforce our opinions. As I have quoted Patrick Henry before, "Reasonable men can often see the same subject in differentl light." I respect those who honestly hold their beliefs and stand by them, becasue if men don't stand for something, they may fall for anything.

But over my years, it seems that more and more, a growing segment of our voting population doesn't stand for much. The "undecideds" who often identify themselves as "independents," are the ones who the polls show sway in the wind weekly with their opinions. They stand for little. Many of them will fall for anything and will take the rest of us in the direction they go. They seem to base their shifting opinion on the latest sound byte or image from a debate or commercial or who knows what. And chances are they are never going to read any "expert" opionions.

[Sleepy Doc]

Damn, Bubba you beat me to it. I was going to mention the Newsweek article. Very informative.

As far as the "Crisis" is concerned, at every level there are those guilty for keeping the ship artificially afloat.

Lenders, for seeing a quick way to make a buck.

Ditto for the investment bankers and not giving a shit about what happened.

Borrowers for thinking that they can get a free lunch.

Politicians for selling out to keep their corporate power base by deregulating.

From what I understand, though, the root cause was the Securities Modernization Act of 2000. Yes, passed in the 11th hour of the Clinton regime, but on the ass of an omnibus spending bill literally in the middle of the night. This ensured that it wouldn't be debated and forced it to be signed. Until this was passed, the shoddy mortgages weren't traded like unregulated securities. In fact, they were specifically banned from doing so since 1982. Seven of the ten signatories were Republicans. This, from what I read, was the straw that broke the camel's back because it allowed traders to make shit loads of money with a "three card monty" like finesse. (to answer your question lusus)

Everyone has a hand caught in the cookie jar, and by that I mean everyone that participated. I was always taught to live within my means and if I couldn't afford the payments, don't take a loan. Some years ago a woman who lived across the hall from my apartment at the time was moving out because she bought a house. "How?", I said, "You work as a grad student making slave wages. How much did you put down?" "Oh, nothing, " she replied, "and I get no interest for the first two years. I have a renter that covers my mortgage every month." That may have been the case at the time, but now her mortgage went through the roof and she is paying exorbitant interest. Oh, and she cant sell because the house lost a third in value because the price was inflated. Guess what happens next?

Do I think that the banking industry wanted it to happen. No, I don't. No more than me hoping people have lots of accidents because I get paid to take them to the hospital. Banks make money by lending money out, right. No, I think the more reckless ones didn't give a shit about the consequences. There is a really great explanation in the Newsweek that Bubba referenced. It tells of how Wall Street fed the monster by rewarding irresponsible trading, again, helping to keep the ship afloat. This is also why all banks didn't fail, because the more prudent ones saw things for what they were and didn't go for the short term profits.

Perhaps saying it was a failure of conservatism was inaccurate. I think it was a failure of classical conservatism, the 'laissaiz fair" economics. The so-called "invisible hand" of economics can scratch my balls, because it doesn't seem to work. BM, yes, I do see total free market economic returning us to the days of the robber barons. Some regulation is absolutely necessary, but too much is completely counter productive.

Allow me to give examples:

Good Regulation: Anti-Trust laws. To have them allows competition and prevents one corporation or entity from freezing markets. Or in the 80s when we put huge tarriffs on Japanese motorcycles to prevent them from flooding the market, thus allowing Harley to come back from the brink of bankruptcy.

Bad Regulation: In the Peoples Republic of Connecticut the regulations concerning the operation of an ambulance service have been made to be in effect a state mandated monopoly and crushed any competition. Under the pretense of protecting the public from shoddy, fly-by-night private companies, regulations that were already in place were made redundant. In effect, it allows only those with huge amounts of capital to start and run a paid service, ie- either someone with millions in capital or a large corporation like the service I work for. It was pushed for by the biggest private ambulance service in the country, to basically eliminate their competition and in reality serves no other purpose.

No, the conservatism I believe in is that of Warren Buffet and the like. Work hard and save responsibly. I'm paraphrasing from the Newsweek, but he basically says if you are smart, eventually you will be very rich. He says, the only way a smart man can loose everything is by borrowing against himself. I also believe in a hand up, not a hand out. I don't think that lowering taxes to the ultra-wealthy will create jobs and stimulate the economy. If it does, it is in a very narrow sector. What do wealthy people do when they make more money? One of two things; they buy stuff or take that money and protect it (tax shelters, off shore accounts, etc.) Do you think lowering Cindy McCain's taxes is gonna compel her to make new jobs? Perhaps, but they will be in Brazil and Belgium, not here. But don't believe me, believe Paul Krugman. He is '08 Nobel Laureate and professor of economics at the hotbed of commie socialism, Princeton University.


Charlie51, nice one with the "droogies". Welly, welly, welly, well?...

[Rangerguru]

Damn, all this debate because some guy named Joe doesn't feel that he should be forced to give his hard earned money to support a welfare program, oops, I mean tax credit.

Personally, I don't think that I should have to pay higher taxes to support a welfare program either and I will be voting accordingly.