Which doesn't make Bush worse than the others, just not better. You do make a good point that the size of the federal government has been increasing for longer than Bush was in office.
I agree, but we have to consistantly bear one thing in mind when judging any President, and it something that amazingly enough, at least to me, that most people always seem to forget, and that is that it's the Congress who holds the purse-strings. A President can say "I want to do this, that, or the other thing", but unless Congress writes and passes the legislation that will make it a reality, it doesn't matter what the President says, and in fact, it's the Congress who has a nasty history of completely ignoring not only what the President wants to get done, but what the American people sent them to Washington to do in the first place.
Going into debt to one extent or another is not the same as failing to ask the electorate to provide any funding for the war at all. <snip>
Since the Civil War, WWII is the only time that the American people have actually had to make any real sacrifices
at home. We didn't do it during the Spanist American War, we didn't do it during WWI, Korea, or Vietnam. The sacrifices that are made though is perhaps the greatest sacrifice, that of our sons and daughters, and in my mind, that far outweighs any "belt tightening" that might be suggested.
How we can't afford to fight a pathetic third rate nation like Iraq, while at the same time trying to root out the Taliban in Afganistan is beyond me. <snip>
We not only can afford to, we are doing it. The challenge is not a lack of funding, it's a lack of personnel and equipment, thanks to President Clinton and his gutting of the military to pacify peoples cries for a balanced budget. He had to make a choice, and he made the same choice that liberals always make, he sacrificed our military and national security so that he wouldn't have to inconvenience the millions of slackers we have by making them get off their lazy butts and get a job and take care of themselves!
How much do we need to spend? The only way to answer that question is to answer another question first, and that is how much is our economic prosperity worth? If you think that we should go back to a time where we only have what we can produce here at home, where we go back to a time where all of the cheap trinkets we all buy were "Made in America" by a below minimum wage American worker, then we don't need much of a military. If on the other hand, you prefer having those same cheap trinkets available to us, but made somewhere else, so that our work force can be freed up to do jobs that pay far more, then we need a very strong military to ensure that our trade interests and trade routes are secure and open to commerce.
The fact of the matter is that until 1973, our military budget has always been higher than our social spending, but today not only does social spending outstrip our military spending, social spending is 3 times MORE than our military spending! In the 2007 budget, we dedicated $553 Bn for national defense, but we dedicated over $1.8 TN for social programs! Tell me we're not living in a Socialist country when we're spending over 60% of our federal budget every year on social programs! The fact of the matter is that we're spending more per capita on social programs than the Soviet Union did at the height of the Cold War!
You can blame Congress for raiding the SS fund if you want, but the fact remains that it was raided, and has been raided ever since LBJ put it in the general fund. <snip>
It's not a matter of blaming them "if I want", it's a fact. Again, Congress holds the purse-strings, and Congress is the only ones that can write a spending Bill, and Congress is the ones that write the budget, so blaming the President is, in my mind, intellectually dishonest. The President can ask for anything he wants, but it' up to Congress to decide where the money is going to come from. You're also failing, as you did earlier, to understand the actual numbers.
Our debt hasn't "soared to unmanageable proportions" under Bush, and the facts and figures simply don't support that assertion. Go the the OMB website, download the historical tables, take the time to study them, and you'll see that along with our budget growing an average of 10% every year, our debt has also grown by an average of 10% since before the Great Depression!
Again, and I don't want to hit this too hard, but you're simply operating under a gross misunderstanding of the facts, probably because that's what the lame-stream media WANTS you to believe, because it's politically expedient for them to want you to believe it.
Oh, that makes me feel a lot better about the whole thing. OK, so we can't blame bush for everything. Does that make him a conservative?
Or only no more liberal than his predecessors?
If you honestly feel that way, you have a rather strange way of determining what "conservative" means, and extremely unrealistic expectations of what a President can and cannot do. Name your perfect "conservative" President from our history, and I'll show you someone who did exactly the same things, if not MORE, than you fault President Bush for doing.
The deficit is only 162 billion? It has been declining since '04?
Again, go look at the OMB's historical tables (and don't forget to inflation adjust). In 2004, inflation adjusted, the deficit was $450 Bn, in 2005 it was $335 Bn, in '06 it was $255 Bn, and in '07 it was $162 Bn, so yes, the deficit has been falling since '04, and that with 2 wars going on at the same time.
I think we're in agreement here.
The original discussion started about he liberal or conservative credentials of the pres. You have made some good points that he isn't the only big spending liberal on Capitol Hill. Do you still think that Bush is a conservative, though?
"Conservative" and "liberal" are measures of proportion, and compared to me, we haven't had a "conservative" President since Thomas Jefferson, compared to what we've had in the last 50 years however, yes President Bush is conservative. Perhaps not as conservative as Reagan, but a lot more conservative than Clinton, Carter, Johnson and Kennedy, and just as conservative as Ford, Nixon, or even Ike.
Charter schools and parents having a choice are all good things. Surely there must be a better way to go about that than creating a test centered curriculum and spending billions of federal dollars on what is not, in the final analysis, a federal responsibility. The result of more charter schools is, as you said, an unintended consequence.
If you've got a better suggestion, other than the complete abolishment of the DoEd (because it's already been mentioned), I'd love to hear it.
It is one of the talking points used to excuse the "conservative" president: The Democrats made me do it! It's pure, unadulterated hogwash.
I never said that "the Democrats made me do it", I said that he had to make a deal with Congress, and I'd appreciate it if you'd refraing from attributing to me things that I didn't say. Also anyone who doesn't realize that back room deals are a political reality (regardless of whether it happened in this case or not) is naive on a level approaching being dangerously ignorant.
Yes, but what about the people who paid into SS and Medicare for 40 years? Aren't they owed something?
I was very clear PLC, so in case you simply overlooked it, I said that they should get their money back, at 6% interest, less any money's they've already received. That's better than any interest rate that they'd have gotten from any bank in the last 30 years, so they would be getting back exactly what they are owed.
Such programs need to be reformed, not abolished.
I simply disagree. They not only need to be ablolished, they need to be OUTLAWED!! It is not the governments responsibility, nor is it their Right, to take money from anyone and give it to anyone else, and it's sure not within their perview according to the constitution for them to be able to promise to put the money in a lock box, but then turn around and use it, and then saddle future generations with paying for it again!
Well, Reagan was known for deficit spending. He and his supporters blamed the Democratic Congress for that, of course. Bush has no such convenient scapegoat, as the Republicans were in charge of Congress for six years of his term in office.
Ok, look, there's something you've really got to get an handle on, it's not about democrats or republicans in Congress, it's about Congress itself. Ever since it was decided that Senators were going to be elected by popular election rather than being appointed by their states legislatures, the system has been broken, because there is not "check and balance" between the needs of the states and the desires of the people. Today it's all about what the people want, and Senators and Representatives owe their political careers to pandering to those same said people, and if they want to stay in Washington, they've got to "bring home the bacon", so all they care about is "pork barrel speding" and "special interests" instead of what's best for the nation as a whole.
Probably neither of us will live to see such a thing.
Nope, becasue as I said in another thread, I'm unelectable.
But Dan Rather, in the day-in, day-out effort of the lib media to denigrate republicans, went to far even for See BS. It's actually a little sad to see Rather hanging on to this, trying to prove he shouldn't be fired even though he was broadcasting a bald-faced lie. 
