Pre-existing conditions coverage

[Bfgrn]

You are a fool and a liar. You are no liberal and you are an economic retard. YOU don't understand the difference between deficits and debt. And you are totally oblivious to the fact that Reagan's military spending was textbook Keynesian..

Certainly not an economics text book written by an actual economist.

What do you call a fiscal policy that cuts taxes and increases spending to stimulate the economy? Keynesianism!

1. deficits and surpluses are what occur in any given budget year.
2. Debt is the summation of accumulated deficits.
3. Government spending can be considered Keynesian if the point of the spending is to stimulate the economy.
4. Government spending that produces value to the government may be Keynesian as a side product but is not intended as stimulation. In Reagan's case it was to rebuild the military infrastructure destroyed by earlier administrations.
5. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the high end to spur investment and make consumer goods less expensive because of more supply is Supply Side policy.
6. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the low end of the spectrum designed to put more money in the hands of consumers is Demand Side policy.

The fact is, you only know what your left wing propagandists tell you, and they lie therefore you are economics challenged; actually amazingly ignorant would be more like it. I am a liberal, I am just not a left wing extremist fool like you; thank God.

The people you call "left wing propagandists" are President John F. Kennedy and the people he chose for the New Frontier. They were the 'best and the brightest'. You putting down people who are 1,000,000,000 times smarter than you shows just how dogmatic and ignorant you really are..

Like I said, you believe in the left wing propagandists for all your "information." If you believe that JFK or any politician actually believed themselves, or if every word they speak is true, I have a bride over the Mississippi to sell you. Can you possibly be that stupid?.

Don't you think the people who authored those programs knew what their philosophy was and what it wasn't? Or that they knew the intent of those programs?

They knew exactly what their philosophy was, and they knew the intent of their programs. But you forget they are politicians who need to get stuff approved by congress. JFK knew that when giving the biggest tax cuts to the rich and to corporations was supply side economics. Do you believe that a democrat in congress would have voted for it if he had told the truth? Are you that much of a gullible left wing extremist?

Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
Seymour Essrog

Your dogmatic mind continues to fail you...

President John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Tax Cut
BY DAVID SHREVE

In the current political contest over President Bush’s proposed federal income tax cut, we see the Kennedy presidency, once again, through a glass, darkly.

Featuring excerpts from Kennedy’s December 14, 1962, New York Economic Club address, a recent political radio ad advertises JFK’s support for tax cutting and suggests implicitly that the 35th president would have supported the tax cuts proposed by the current administration. “Our present tax system,” Kennedy declares in the featured excerpt, “developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime.” Kennedy, the liberal politician and Democratic icon, has, it would appear, suddenly become a benefactor of supply-side economics and an exemplar for conservative politicians. Yet at the time of this address, Kennedy was engaged in a spirited battle against conservative politicians and much of the business community who then opposed his tax cut proposal. Against today’s conventional wisdom, which lumps all tax cuts in the supply-side policy category—where marginal rates function only as a relative work or investment disincentive—this opposition seems either wholly inexplicable or a relic of an indecipherable and eccentric political confrontation.

How was it that all but a few prominent business leaders—Tom Watson of IBM, Frederick Kappel of AT&T, and Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company, for example opposed the Kennedy tax cut proposal when it was first announced in the summer of 1962? If President Kennedy was, indeed, a nascent supply-sider, why were most conservative politicians so staunchly opposed to the Kennedy proposal? Were they motivated simply by the historic mistrust of business community for FDR’s Democratic successors? Or did the business community of that period simply respond more quickly and more fervently to a different political economy, one that had little place for the now much more familiar supply-side concerns? Kennedy, after all, wanted his tax cut to produce a fiscal deficit; perhaps this alone was too much for conservatives. Only by looking more fully at the political economy of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (under whom the tax cut proposal won passage) can we begin to unravel this paradox. The commentary and writings of Kennedy-Johnson economic advisors, the complete text of the 1962 Economic Club speech, and material from recently released presidential recordings, provides us with at least some of the necessary clues.

To Kennedy and the liberal economists who advised him, most supply-side effects were simply derivative: the primary (although not singular) goal of the tax cut was to stimulate demand and thus to achieve full employment. In their way of thinking, this demand would serve as a precursor to a virtuous cycle within which productivity and investment would also respond positively. “The tax cut is good for long run growth,” Kennedy adviser James Tobin declared in 1965, “only in the general sense that prosperity is good for investment.”1 The effect of the ’64 tax cut on the productive capacity of the nation was significant, to be sure, and very much anticipated in the Kennedy-Johnson political economy, but it was mostly incidental to rising demand and full employment.

“The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy,” Kennedy economist Arthur Okun recalled. Among business leaders in private, Kennedy seldom put it any other way: “What you want is a deficit,” he reminded a small group of business leaders at an August 9, 1962, White House meeting. “You want more money being spent than is being taken out of the economy.” Focusing naturally, then, on the propensity to consume—the tendency, that is, of individuals in various income brackets to spend additional income—the administration sought a tax cut that showered most of its direct benefits upon working class and middle class Americans. “The fundamental law upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence,” John Maynard Keynes remarked, describing this tendency, “is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.” Though it is widely ignored today—or cast aside by competing, but far less robust analyses—this consumption function was critical to the Kennedy-Johnson political economy.

It underscores, as well, the paramount goal of the Kennedy tax cut proposal: to put more money into the hands of people most inclined to spend it. This is not to say that the Kennedy administration dismissed a somewhat different kind of tax cut entirely or that it ignored the merit of other supply side policy, however subordinate it might have been. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut offered some benefits for the wealthy and for corporations mostly because it was politically impractical not to do so. Too few members of key congressional committees, reflecting southern Democratic conservatism or a decidedly pro-business orientation, would have voted for the proposal in any other form. “We can only applaud his political acumen,” Tobin remarked in 1965, “while regretting the misguided, but powerful, ideology which made his bargain necessary.” Moreover, if supply-side initiatives were never counted on for any of the heavy lifting, Kennedy and his Keynesian cohorts still found them useful in a variety of circumstances. The seven percent Investment Tax Credit, accelerated depreciation schedules (effected by Executive Order), and a special tax credit for the DuPont Corporation were among these activities.

“The Heller strategy of the 1960s,” James Tobin remarked in 1982, “was not a one-sided program of demand expansion.” Yet, these initiatives, along with other efforts in the realms of international trade and currency, wage and price control, and domestic monetary policy, were never as basic to the Kennedy political economy as demand management. “Although there is some merit in some of the ‘supply side’ proposals so popular today,” Tobin added, “the danger is that they are considered a substitute for expanding demand.” In short, Kennedy used the Economic Club speech to sell these ideas to a constituency who believed them heretical and whose friendship and forbearance Kennedy hoped to cultivate, if only well enough, in the short term, to pass favored legislation. At Yale in June 1962, he had characterized his relations with the business community as “a bog of sterile acrimony.” Only weeks before his Yale address, Kennedy told Ben Bradlee, “We want the support of business on trade, we want them on the tax bill. I’ve been breaking my ass trying to get along with these people.” A heated confrontation in April 1962 with steel companies over steel pricing, the appearance of “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise” bumper stickers, and a subsequent stock market decline blamed on Kennedy’s anti-business attitude had marked the first two years of his presidency. A New York Times poll of 30,000 members of the business community, taken in June 1962, revealed that over 88 percent believed President Kennedy to be strongly or moderately anti-business. In December 1962, at the New York Economic Club, he hoped to turn the corner. He counseled his assistants to avoid using terms that raised the ire of business opponents, asked his anti-trust division to soft-pedal their investigations, and he adopted a rhetoric of conciliation with a sharpened focus on business concerns. The times did not permit him to speak directly or “to wait until the economic intelligence gap had been closed,” chief economic adviser Walter Heller recalled.

Reflecting on the Economic Club speech the morning after, Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen remarked, “It sounded like Hoover, but it was actually Heller.” Yet, as Walter Heller would put it, “because the arguments for the tax cut were poured into old molds, its success cracked, perhaps even shattered, those molds of ideology and error.” Only the most selective reading of the Economic Club speech, therefore, would reveal genuine supply-side predilection.

Hoping to convey an appreciation for frugality and private enterprise while selling demand management and full employment, Kennedy was, nonetheless, pessimistic about his chances for a positive response. “Lip service to free enterprise, Goodyear Tire executive Roy Dinsmore had warned him in May, “is belied by the steady march to socialism.” When he finished, the positive response cheered President Kennedy. “I gave them straight Keynes and Heller,” he boasted to Walter Heller afterward, “and they loved it.”

 

[dnsmith35]

You are a fool and a liar. You are no liberal and you are an economic retard. YOU don't understand the difference between deficits and debt. And you are totally oblivious to the fact that Reagan's military spending was textbook Keynesian..

Certainly not an economics text book written by an actual economist.

1. deficits and surpluses are what occur in any given budget year.
2. Debt is the summation of accumulated deficits.
3. Government spending can be considered Keynesian if the point of the spending is to stimulate the economy.
4. Government spending that produces value to the government may be Keynesian as a side product but is not intended as stimulation. In Reagan's case it was to rebuild the military infrastructure destroyed by earlier administrations.
5. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the high end to spur investment and make consumer goods less expensive because of more supply is Supply Side policy.
6. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the low end of the spectrum designed to put more money in the hands of consumers is Demand Side policy.

The fact is, you only know what your left wing propagandists tell you, and they lie therefore you are economics challenged; actually amazingly ignorant would be more like it. I am a liberal, I am just not a left wing extremist fool like you; thank God.Like I said, you believe in the left wing propagandists for all your "information." If you believe that JFK or any politician actually believed themselves, or if every word they speak is true, I have a bride over the Mississippi to sell you. Can you possibly be that stupid?.

Don't you think the people who authored those programs knew what their philosophy was and what it wasn't? Or that they knew the intent of those programs?

They knew exactly what their philosophy was, and they knew the intent of their programs. But you forget they are politicians who need to get stuff approved by congress. JFK knew that when giving the biggest tax cuts to the rich and to corporations was supply side economics. Do you believe that a democrat in congress would have voted for it if he had told the truth? Are you that much of a gullible left wing extremist?

Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
Seymour Essrog

Your dogmatic mind continues to fail you...

President John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Tax Cut
BY DAVID SHREVE

In the current political contest over President Bush’s proposed federal income tax cut, we see the Kennedy presidency, once again, through a glass, darkly.

Featuring excerpts from Kennedy’s December 14, 1962, New York Economic Club address, a recent political radio ad advertises JFK’s support for tax cutting and suggests implicitly that the 35th president would have supported the tax cuts proposed by the current administration. “Our present tax system,” Kennedy declares in the featured excerpt, “developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime.” Kennedy, the liberal politician and Democratic icon, has, it would appear, suddenly become a benefactor of supply-side economics and an exemplar for conservative politicians. Yet at the time of this address, Kennedy was engaged in a spirited battle against conservative politicians and much of the business community who then opposed his tax cut proposal. Against today’s conventional wisdom, which lumps all tax cuts in the supply-side policy category—where marginal rates function only as a relative work or investment disincentive—this opposition seems either wholly inexplicable or a relic of an indecipherable and eccentric political confrontation.

How was it that all but a few prominent business leaders—Tom Watson of IBM, Frederick Kappel of AT&T, and Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company, for example opposed the Kennedy tax cut proposal when it was first announced in the summer of 1962? If President Kennedy was, indeed, a nascent supply-sider, why were most conservative politicians so staunchly opposed to the Kennedy proposal? Were they motivated simply by the historic mistrust of business community for FDR’s Democratic successors? Or did the business community of that period simply respond more quickly and more fervently to a different political economy, one that had little place for the now much more familiar supply-side concerns? Kennedy, after all, wanted his tax cut to produce a fiscal deficit; perhaps this alone was too much for conservatives. Only by looking more fully at the political economy of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (under whom the tax cut proposal won passage) can we begin to unravel this paradox. The commentary and writings of Kennedy-Johnson economic advisors, the complete text of the 1962 Economic Club speech, and material from recently released presidential recordings, provides us with at least some of the necessary clues.

To Kennedy and the liberal economists who advised him, most supply-side effects were simply derivative: the primary (although not singular) goal of the tax cut was to stimulate demand and thus to achieve full employment. In their way of thinking, this demand would serve as a precursor to a virtuous cycle within which productivity and investment would also respond positively. “The tax cut is good for long run growth,” Kennedy adviser James Tobin declared in 1965, “only in the general sense that prosperity is good for investment.”1 The effect of the ’64 tax cut on the productive capacity of the nation was significant, to be sure, and very much anticipated in the Kennedy-Johnson political economy, but it was mostly incidental to rising demand and full employment.

“The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy,” Kennedy economist Arthur Okun recalled. Among business leaders in private, Kennedy seldom put it any other way: “What you want is a deficit,” he reminded a small group of business leaders at an August 9, 1962, White House meeting. “You want more money being spent than is being taken out of the economy.” Focusing naturally, then, on the propensity to consume—the tendency, that is, of individuals in various income brackets to spend additional income—the administration sought a tax cut that showered most of its direct benefits upon working class and middle class Americans. “The fundamental law upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence,” John Maynard Keynes remarked, describing this tendency, “is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.” Though it is widely ignored today—or cast aside by competing, but far less robust analyses—this consumption function was critical to the Kennedy-Johnson political economy.

It underscores, as well, the paramount goal of the Kennedy tax cut proposal: to put more money into the hands of people most inclined to spend it. This is not to say that the Kennedy administration dismissed a somewhat different kind of tax cut entirely or that it ignored the merit of other supply side policy, however subordinate it might have been. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut offered some benefits for the wealthy and for corporations mostly because it was politically impractical not to do so. Too few members of key congressional committees, reflecting southern Democratic conservatism or a decidedly pro-business orientation, would have voted for the proposal in any other form. “We can only applaud his political acumen,” Tobin remarked in 1965, “while regretting the misguided, but powerful, ideology which made his bargain necessary.” Moreover, if supply-side initiatives were never counted on for any of the heavy lifting, Kennedy and his Keynesian cohorts still found them useful in a variety of circumstances. The seven percent Investment Tax Credit, accelerated depreciation schedules (effected by Executive Order), and a special tax credit for the DuPont Corporation were among these activities.

“The Heller strategy of the 1960s,” James Tobin remarked in 1982, “was not a one-sided program of demand expansion.” Yet, these initiatives, along with other efforts in the realms of international trade and currency, wage and price control, and domestic monetary policy, were never as basic to the Kennedy political economy as demand management. “Although there is some merit in some of the ‘supply side’ proposals so popular today,” Tobin added, “the danger is that they are considered a substitute for expanding demand.” In short, Kennedy used the Economic Club speech to sell these ideas to a constituency who believed them heretical and whose friendship and forbearance Kennedy hoped to cultivate, if only well enough, in the short term, to pass favored legislation. At Yale in June 1962, he had characterized his relations with the business community as “a bog of sterile acrimony.” Only weeks before his Yale address, Kennedy told Ben Bradlee, “We want the support of business on trade, we want them on the tax bill. I’ve been breaking my ass trying to get along with these people.” A heated confrontation in April 1962 with steel companies over steel pricing, the appearance of “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise” bumper stickers, and a subsequent stock market decline blamed on Kennedy’s anti-business attitude had marked the first two years of his presidency. A New York Times poll of 30,000 members of the business community, taken in June 1962, revealed that over 88 percent believed President Kennedy to be strongly or moderately anti-business. In December 1962, at the New York Economic Club, he hoped to turn the corner. He counseled his assistants to avoid using terms that raised the ire of business opponents, asked his anti-trust division to soft-pedal their investigations, and he adopted a rhetoric of conciliation with a sharpened focus on business concerns. The times did not permit him to speak directly or “to wait until the economic intelligence gap had been closed,” chief economic adviser Walter Heller recalled.

Reflecting on the Economic Club speech the morning after, Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen remarked, “It sounded like Hoover, but it was actually Heller.” Yet, as Walter Heller would put it, “because the arguments for the tax cut were poured into old molds, its success cracked, perhaps even shattered, those molds of ideology and error.” Only the most selective reading of the Economic Club speech, therefore, would reveal genuine supply-side predilection.

Hoping to convey an appreciation for frugality and private enterprise while selling demand management and full employment, Kennedy was, nonetheless, pessimistic about his chances for a positive response. “Lip service to free enterprise, Goodyear Tire executive Roy Dinsmore had warned him in May, “is belied by the steady march to socialism.” When he finished, the positive response cheered President Kennedy. “I gave them straight Keynes and Heller,” he boasted to Walter Heller afterward, “and they loved it.”

Still posting long diatribes from politicians I see. I am and have been aware of WHAT THEY SAID; doesn't mean they were telling the truth. So I guess I need to change my description of your screen names from BF (what ever he is) to BFGullible. If you believe what they said you are a fool. Even JFK lied on many occasions, but then it is expected of politicians; but as hard as they try they cannot change what honest economists have none for many years. When the largest tax cuts are made for the top earners and corporations IT IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE SUPPLY SIDE POLICY. And when Bush did it, you left wing extremists (and even us plain liberals) were quick to claim he was "favoring the rich" at the expense of the poor. Why don't you learn something about economics instead of repeat propaganda?

I feel sorry for people who believe politicians, LW or RW, since all they are really interested in is power.

 

[kaz]

C and P from the other thread:

Is the "feel-good" part the fact that we aren't required to explain to them, when very ill, that actual Capitalism would drop them like a hot rock if it were allowed to and tell them never to return? That once sick, if unregulated, no insurance company would ever cover them again and no employer would hire them given the chance? Yeah, that would make you feel-good I bet.

Once again you feel good and pat yourself on the back at the expense of someone else's wallet. Charity is an act which cannot be performed with someone else's money.

 

[dnsmith35]

Winston Churchill: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Churchill was a great man.

It is my opinion that the liberals you speak of are Classic Liberals as opposed to Neo or Modern Liberal. The true liberal is one who believes in the dignity of life for all people such that those who are in need are given assistance such that they live in dignity.Democrats are not liberals, they are authoritarian leftists, closed minded and rigidly intolerant. True liberals are political libertarians, we support freedom and individuality, particularly from the greatest transgressor, government

Some Democrats and some Republicans are liberal: The moderates of both parties. The extremes of both parties are not liberals; they are power hungry politicians who choose their extremist positions to appeal to those who swing back and forth politically. Liberalism got its start trying to give power to the people instead of to the authority of the government, which initially a monarchy or a dictatorship. Left wingers want the government to socialize without regard to the tradition of socialism becoming controlled by a dictatorial and authoritative entity moving the power away from the people and giving it to that central government. They overlook the fact that every experiment in Socialism/Communism (the most extreme left wing positions) has failed miserably.

 

[kaz]

Winston Churchill: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Churchill was a great man.

It is my opinion that the liberals you speak of are Classic Liberals as opposed to Neo or Modern Liberal. The true liberal is one who believes in the dignity of life for all people such that those who are in need are given assistance such that they live in dignity.Democrats are not liberals, they are authoritarian leftists, closed minded and rigidly intolerant. True liberals are political libertarians, we support freedom and individuality, particularly from the greatest transgressor, government

Some Democrats and some Republicans are liberal: The moderates of both parties. The extremes of both parties are not liberals; they are power hungry politicians who choose their extremist positions to appeal to those who swing back and forth politically. Liberalism got its start trying to give power to the people instead of to the authority of the government, which initially a monarchy or a dictatorship. Left wingers want the government to socialize without regard to the tradition of socialism becoming controlled by a dictatorial and authoritative entity moving the power away from the people and giving it to that central government. They overlook the fact that every experiment in Socialism/Communism (the most extreme left wing positions) has failed miserably.

What specifically in your mind is the difference between a "moderate" liberal and an "extreme" liberal. I see none.

 

[dnsmith35]

Winston Churchill: The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Churchill was a great man.

It is my opinion that the liberals you speak of are Classic Liberals as opposed to Neo or Modern Liberal. The true liberal is one who believes in the dignity of life for all people such that those who are in need are given assistance such that they live in dignity.Democrats are not liberals, they are authoritarian leftists, closed minded and rigidly intolerant. True liberals are political libertarians, we support freedom and individuality, particularly from the greatest transgressor, government

Some Democrats and some Republicans are liberal: The moderates of both parties. The extremes of both parties are not liberals; they are power hungry politicians who choose their extremist positions to appeal to those who swing back and forth politically. Liberalism got its start trying to give power to the people instead of to the authority of the government, which initially a monarchy or a dictatorship. Left wingers want the government to socialize without regard to the tradition of socialism becoming controlled by a dictatorial and authoritative entity moving the power away from the people and giving it to that central government. They overlook the fact that every experiment in Socialism/Communism (the most extreme left wing positions) has failed miserably.

What specifically in your mind is the difference between a "moderate" liberal and an "extreme" liberal. I see none.

Don't confuse my comment about moderate democrats and moderate republicans. I consider both of them as just basic liberal as opposed to left wing or right wing. Moderates of both parties tend to want to insure that the poor and disabled are cared for with dignity. We both are sufficiently liberal to want good public schools, universal medical care, equal rights/racial equality, and tend to be humanists in that all humans deserve dignity. To that end, and because it does not cut jobs in the US based on studies, allowing some jobs to go overseas, especially labor intensive jobs that now tend to be low wage jobs.

Classic liberalism came from the European early attempt to get rid of Monarchies/Dictatorships and give power to the people, to individual people.

Classical liberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology belonging to liberalism in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government. The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States. It advocates civil liberties with a limited government under the rule of law, private property rights, and belief in laissez-faire economic liberalism. Classical liberalism is built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, including ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on a psychological understanding of individual liberty, natural law, utilitarianism, and a belief in progress."

The tendency to disagree with giving the truly needy to include all of the poor and/or disabled (physical or mental) public assistance FROM TAX DOLLARS because personal charity has never been sufficient to care for those people with dignity.

The next issue is not liberalism but left wing extremism which tends to want more central government power, larger government, control from cradle to grave of all our citizens.

Then we get to right wing extremism which does not accept the tenets of the liberals (moderate democrat and republican) and wants to insure that everyone uses self reliance with virtually not help what so ever.

So basically we have three prominent political divisions, Left wing, right wing and liberal. The democrat leadership has moved so far to the left they have left the moderates out of the picture. The Republican leadership has moved so far to the right they have left moderates out of the picture. The only people who can be considered Classic Liberal are the moderates, everyone else in both extreme camps have become interested in virtually nothing else but power.

I would hope you are not like most right wing conservatives who claim if you have any liberal preferences you are left wing. Or like most left wing liberals who claim that if you have 1 conservative preference you are a right wing extremist. The latter is how BFGullible thinks.

 

[crisismangement]

You are a fool and a liar. You are no liberal and you are an economic retard. YOU don't understand the difference between deficits and debt. And you are totally oblivious to the fact that Reagan's military spending was textbook Keynesian..

Certainly not an economics text book written by an actual economist.

1. deficits and surpluses are what occur in any given budget year.
2. Debt is the summation of accumulated deficits.
3. Government spending can be considered Keynesian if the point of the spending is to stimulate the economy.
4. Government spending that produces value to the government may be Keynesian as a side product but is not intended as stimulation. In Reagan's case it was to rebuild the military infrastructure destroyed by earlier administrations.
5. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the high end to spur investment and make consumer goods less expensive because of more supply is Supply Side policy.
6. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the low end of the spectrum designed to put more money in the hands of consumers is Demand Side policy.

The fact is, you only know what your left wing propagandists tell you, and they lie therefore you are economics challenged; actually tamazingly ignorant would be more like it. I am a liberal, I am just not a left wing extremist fool like you; thank God.Like I said, you believe in the left wing propagandists for all your "information." If you believe that JFK or any politician actually believed themselves, or if every word they speak is true, I have a bride over the Mississippi to sell you. Can you possibly be that stupid?.

Don't you think the people who authored those programs knew what their philosophy was and what it wasn't? Or that they knew the intent of those programs?

They knew exactly what their philosophy was, and they knew the intent of their programs. But you forget they are politicians who need to get stuff approved by congress. JFK knew that when giving the biggest tax cuts to the rich and to corporations was supply side economics. Do you believe that a democrat in congress would have voted for it if he had told the truth? Are you that much of a gullible left wing extremist?

Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.

Yes you are most certainly guilty of that.

Your dogmatic mind continues to fail you...

There is no one with as dogmatic a mind as you.

President John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Tax Cut
BY DAVID SHREVE

In the current political contest over President Bush’s proposed federal income tax cut, we see the Kennedy presidency, once again, through a glass, darkly.

Yet he like Kennedy lowered the top brackets, but not as much as JFK. Bush's tax cuts were more across the board. JFK's were top heavy.

Featuring excerpts from Kennedy’s December 14, 1962, New York Economic Club address, a recent political radio ad advertises JFK’s support for tax cutting and suggests implicitly that the 35th president would have supported the tax cuts proposed by the current administration. “Our present tax system,” Kennedy declares in the featured excerpt, “developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime.” Kennedy, the liberal politician and Democratic icon, has, it would appear, suddenly become a benefactor of supply-side economics and an exemplar for conservative politicians. Yet at the time of this address, Kennedy was engaged in a spirited battle against conservative politicians and much of the business community who then opposed his tax cut proposal. Against today’s conventional wisdom, which lumps all tax cuts in the supply-side policy category—where marginal rates function only as a relative work or investment disincentive—this opposition seems either wholly inexplicable or a relic of an indecipherable and eccentric political confrontation.

How was it that all but a few prominent business leaders—Tom Watson of IBM, Frederick Kappel of AT&T, and Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company, for example opposed the Kennedy tax cut proposal when it was first announced in the summer of 1962? If President Kennedy was, indeed, a nascent supply-sider, why were most conservative politicians so staunchly opposed to the Kennedy proposal? Were they motivated simply by the historic mistrust of business community for FDR’s Democratic successors? Or did the business community of that period simply respond more quickly and more fervently to a different political economy, one that had little place for the now much more familiar supply-side concerns? Kennedy, after all, wanted his tax cut to produce a fiscal deficit; perhaps this alone was too much for conservatives. Only by looking more fully at the political economy of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (under whom the tax cut proposal won passage) can we begin to unravel this paradox. The commentary and writings of Kennedy-Johnson economic advisors, the complete text of the 1962 Economic Club speech, and material from recently released presidential recordings, provides us with at least some of the necessary clues.

To Kennedy and the liberal economists who advised him, most supply-side effects were simply derivative: the primary (although not singular) goal of the tax cut was to stimulate demand and thus to achieve full employment. In their way of thinking, this demand would serve as a precursor to a virtuous cycle within which productivity and investment would also respond positively. “The tax cut is good for long run growth,” Kennedy adviser James Tobin declared in 1965, “only in the general sense that prosperity is good for investment.”1 The effect of the ’64 tax cut on the productive capacity of the nation was significant, to be sure, and very much anticipated in the Kennedy-Johnson political economy, but it was mostly incidental to rising demand and full employment.

“The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy,” Kennedy economist Arthur Okun recalled. Among business leaders in private, Kennedy seldom put it any other way: “What you want is a deficit,” he reminded a small group of business leaders at an August 9, 1962, White House meeting. “You want more money being spent than is being taken out of the economy.” Focusing naturally, then, on the propensity to consume—the tendency, that is, of individuals in various income brackets to spend additional income—the administration sought a tax cut that showered most of its direct benefits upon working class and middle class Americans. “The fundamental law upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence,” John Maynard Keynes remarked, describing this tendency, “is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.” Though it is widely ignored today—or cast aside by competing, but far less robust analyses—this consumption function was critical to the Kennedy-Johnson political economy.

It underscores, as well, the paramount goal of the Kennedy tax cut proposal: to put more money into the hands of people most inclined to spend it. This is not to say that the Kennedy administration dismissed a somewhat different kind of tax cut entirely or that it ignored the merit of other supply side policy, however subordinate it might have been. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut offered some benefits for the wealthy and for corporations mostly because it was politically impractical not to do so. Too few members of key congressional committees, reflecting southern Democratic conservatism or a decidedly pro-business orientation, would have voted for the proposal in any other form. “We can only applaud his political acumen,” Tobin remarked in 1965, “while regretting the misguided, but powerful, ideology which made his bargain necessary.” Moreover, if supply-side initiatives were never counted on for any of the heavy lifting, Kennedy and his Keynesian cohorts still found them useful in a variety of circumstances. The seven percent Investment Tax Credit, accelerated depreciation schedules (effected by Executive Order), and a special tax credit for the DuPont Corporation were among these activities.

“The Heller strategy of the 1960s,” James Tobin remarked in 1982, “was not a one-sided program of demand expansion.” Yet, these initiatives, along with other efforts in the realms of international trade and currency, wage and price control, and domestic monetary policy, were never as basic to the Kennedy political economy as demand management. “Although there is some merit in some of the ‘supply side’ proposals so popular today,” Tobin added, “the danger is that they are considered a substitute for expanding demand.” In short, Kennedy used the Economic Club speech to sell these ideas to a constituency who believed them heretical and whose friendship and forbearance Kennedy hoped to cultivate, if only well enough, in the short term, to pass favored legislation. At Yale in June 1962, he had characterized his relations with the business community as “a bog of sterile acrimony.” Only weeks before his Yale address, Kennedy told Ben Bradlee, “We want the support of business on trade, we want them on the tax bill. I’ve been breaking my ass trying to get along with these people.” A heated confrontation in April 1962 with steel companies over steel pricing, the appearance of “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise” bumper stickers, and a subsequent stock market decline blamed on Kennedy’s anti-business attitude had marked the first two years of his presidency. A New York Times poll of 30,000 members of the business community, taken in June 1962, revealed that over 88 percent believed President Kennedy to be strongly or moderately anti-business. In December 1962, at the New York Economic Club, he hoped to turn the corner. He counseled his assistants to avoid using terms that raised the ire of business opponents, asked his anti-trust division to soft-pedal their investigations, and he adopted a rhetoric of conciliation with a sharpened focus on business concerns. The times did not permit him to speak directly or “to wait until the economic intelligence gap had been closed,” chief economic adviser Walter Heller recalled.

Sure is a lot of propaganda. Do you believe it? More the shame if you do!

Reflecting on the Economic Club speech the morning after, Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen remarked, “It sounded like Hoover, but it was actually Heller.” Yet, as Walter Heller would put it, “because the arguments for the tax cut were poured into old molds, its success cracked, perhaps even shattered, those molds of ideology and error.” Only the most selective reading of the Economic Club speech, therefore, would reveal genuine supply-side predilection.

Hoping to convey an appreciation for frugality and private enterprise while selling demand management and full employment, Kennedy was, nonetheless, pessimistic about his chances for a positive response. “Lip service to free enterprise, Goodyear Tire executive Roy Dinsmore had warned him in May, “is belied by the steady march to socialism.” When he finished, the positive response cheered President Kennedy. “I gave them straight Keynes and Heller,” he boasted to Walter Heller afterward, “and they loved it.”

You are a left wing asshole. You cling to all of the left wingers claims as gospel without regard to the honesty of their statement.

 

[kaz]

The only people who can be considered Classic Liberal are the moderates, everyone else in both extreme camps have become interested in virtually nothing else but power.

Actually, classic liberals are libertarians. "Moderates" are just liberals who want death by government suffocation less quickly, there is nothing individual liberty about them.

I would hope you are not like most right wing conservatives who claim if you have any liberal preferences you are left wing. Or like most left wing liberals who claim that if you have 1 conservative preference you are a right wing extremist. The latter is how BFGullible thinks.

I claim anyone who thinks government is a solution to our problems is liberal. Government is the opposite of "individual liberty."

 

[dnsmith35]

The only people who can be considered Classic Liberal are the moderates, everyone else in both extreme camps have become interested in virtually nothing else but power.

Actually, classic liberals are libertarians. "Moderates" are just liberals who want death by government suffocation less quickly, there is nothing individual liberty about them.

I would hope you are not like most right wing conservatives who claim if you have any liberal preferences you are left wing. Or like most left wing liberals who claim that if you have 1 conservative preference you are a right wing extremist. The latter is how BFGullible thinks.

I claim anyone who thinks government is a solution to our problems is liberal. Government is the opposite of "individual liberty."

I agree that government is not a solution to all our problems, but no government at all is not a solution. It must protect our rights and civil and economic liberties. Government is a solution to many problems: National Defense, Law and Order, financing education (to include private schools to the same tune as individual costs for public schools, caring for the truly needy (disabled or too ill to take care of themselves). Government is not a solution to everything. Personal responsibility is essential for able bodied people. The difference is some libertarians are RW, and some are not.

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology belonging to liberalism in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government. The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States] It advocates civil liberties with a limited government under the rule of law, private property rights, and belief in laissez-faire economic liberalism. Classical liberalism is built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, including ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on a psychological understanding of individual liberty, natural law, utilitarianism, and a belief in progress.

In the early 20th century, liberals split on several issues, and particularly in America a distinction grew up between classical liberals and social liberals. Classical liberals supported the rights of captains of industry, who they saw as the natural leaders of society and the wellsprings of progress,[citation needed] while social liberals supported the rights of labor to organize into unions, and also supported the rights of minorities.[citation needed] Classical liberals often favor what they call "limited government or small government", while social liberals believe government intervention is necessary to provide equal protection and opportunity for all citizens.

In the mid-20th century, the classical liberals often formed an alliance with social conservatives (an ideology known as liberal conservatism). Neither liberals nor conservatives entirely adopted the ideology of pure classical liberalism, the belief that government exists to protect both social and economic civil liberties.​

Classic Liberalism is not Libertarianism. Libertarianism is more like the conservative based on common definitions used today. You are no more correct in that respect than BFGullible is that left wing extremism is liberalism.

 

[Bfgrn]

Certainly not an economics text book written by an actual economist.

1. deficits and surpluses are what occur in any given budget year.
2. Debt is the summation of accumulated deficits.
3. Government spending can be considered Keynesian if the point of the spending is to stimulate the economy.
4. Government spending that produces value to the government may be Keynesian as a side product but is not intended as stimulation. In Reagan's case it was to rebuild the military infrastructure destroyed by earlier administrations.
5. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the high end to spur investment and make consumer goods less expensive because of more supply is Supply Side policy.
6. Fiscal policy which cuts the taxes on the low end of the spectrum designed to put more money in the hands of consumers is Demand Side policy.

The fact is, you only know what your left wing propagandists tell you, and they lie therefore you are economics challenged; actually amazingly ignorant would be more like it. I am a liberal, I am just not a left wing extremist fool like you; thank God.Like I said, you believe in the left wing propagandists for all your "information." If you believe that JFK or any politician actually believed themselves, or if every word they speak is true, I have a bride over the Mississippi to sell you. Can you possibly be that stupid?.

They knew exactly what their philosophy was, and they knew the intent of their programs. But you forget they are politicians who need to get stuff approved by congress. JFK knew that when giving the biggest tax cuts to the rich and to corporations was supply side economics. Do you believe that a democrat in congress would have voted for it if he had told the truth? Are you that much of a gullible left wing extremist?

Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
Seymour Essrog

Your dogmatic mind continues to fail you...

President John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Tax Cut
BY DAVID SHREVE

In the current political contest over President Bush’s proposed federal income tax cut, we see the Kennedy presidency, once again, through a glass, darkly.

Featuring excerpts from Kennedy’s December 14, 1962, New York Economic Club address, a recent political radio ad advertises JFK’s support for tax cutting and suggests implicitly that the 35th president would have supported the tax cuts proposed by the current administration. “Our present tax system,” Kennedy declares in the featured excerpt, “developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime.” Kennedy, the liberal politician and Democratic icon, has, it would appear, suddenly become a benefactor of supply-side economics and an exemplar for conservative politicians. Yet at the time of this address, Kennedy was engaged in a spirited battle against conservative politicians and much of the business community who then opposed his tax cut proposal. Against today’s conventional wisdom, which lumps all tax cuts in the supply-side policy category—where marginal rates function only as a relative work or investment disincentive—this opposition seems either wholly inexplicable or a relic of an indecipherable and eccentric political confrontation.

How was it that all but a few prominent business leaders—Tom Watson of IBM, Frederick Kappel of AT&T, and Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company, for example opposed the Kennedy tax cut proposal when it was first announced in the summer of 1962? If President Kennedy was, indeed, a nascent supply-sider, why were most conservative politicians so staunchly opposed to the Kennedy proposal? Were they motivated simply by the historic mistrust of business community for FDR’s Democratic successors? Or did the business community of that period simply respond more quickly and more fervently to a different political economy, one that had little place for the now much more familiar supply-side concerns? Kennedy, after all, wanted his tax cut to produce a fiscal deficit; perhaps this alone was too much for conservatives. Only by looking more fully at the political economy of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (under whom the tax cut proposal won passage) can we begin to unravel this paradox. The commentary and writings of Kennedy-Johnson economic advisors, the complete text of the 1962 Economic Club speech, and material from recently released presidential recordings, provides us with at least some of the necessary clues.

To Kennedy and the liberal economists who advised him, most supply-side effects were simply derivative: the primary (although not singular) goal of the tax cut was to stimulate demand and thus to achieve full employment. In their way of thinking, this demand would serve as a precursor to a virtuous cycle within which productivity and investment would also respond positively. “The tax cut is good for long run growth,” Kennedy adviser James Tobin declared in 1965, “only in the general sense that prosperity is good for investment.”1 The effect of the ’64 tax cut on the productive capacity of the nation was significant, to be sure, and very much anticipated in the Kennedy-Johnson political economy, but it was mostly incidental to rising demand and full employment.

“The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy,” Kennedy economist Arthur Okun recalled. Among business leaders in private, Kennedy seldom put it any other way: “What you want is a deficit,” he reminded a small group of business leaders at an August 9, 1962, White House meeting. “You want more money being spent than is being taken out of the economy.” Focusing naturally, then, on the propensity to consume—the tendency, that is, of individuals in various income brackets to spend additional income—the administration sought a tax cut that showered most of its direct benefits upon working class and middle class Americans. “The fundamental law upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence,” John Maynard Keynes remarked, describing this tendency, “is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.” Though it is widely ignored today—or cast aside by competing, but far less robust analyses—this consumption function was critical to the Kennedy-Johnson political economy.

It underscores, as well, the paramount goal of the Kennedy tax cut proposal: to put more money into the hands of people most inclined to spend it. This is not to say that the Kennedy administration dismissed a somewhat different kind of tax cut entirely or that it ignored the merit of other supply side policy, however subordinate it might have been. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut offered some benefits for the wealthy and for corporations mostly because it was politically impractical not to do so. Too few members of key congressional committees, reflecting southern Democratic conservatism or a decidedly pro-business orientation, would have voted for the proposal in any other form. “We can only applaud his political acumen,” Tobin remarked in 1965, “while regretting the misguided, but powerful, ideology which made his bargain necessary.” Moreover, if supply-side initiatives were never counted on for any of the heavy lifting, Kennedy and his Keynesian cohorts still found them useful in a variety of circumstances. The seven percent Investment Tax Credit, accelerated depreciation schedules (effected by Executive Order), and a special tax credit for the DuPont Corporation were among these activities.

“The Heller strategy of the 1960s,” James Tobin remarked in 1982, “was not a one-sided program of demand expansion.” Yet, these initiatives, along with other efforts in the realms of international trade and currency, wage and price control, and domestic monetary policy, were never as basic to the Kennedy political economy as demand management. “Although there is some merit in some of the ‘supply side’ proposals so popular today,” Tobin added, “the danger is that they are considered a substitute for expanding demand.” In short, Kennedy used the Economic Club speech to sell these ideas to a constituency who believed them heretical and whose friendship and forbearance Kennedy hoped to cultivate, if only well enough, in the short term, to pass favored legislation. At Yale in June 1962, he had characterized his relations with the business community as “a bog of sterile acrimony.” Only weeks before his Yale address, Kennedy told Ben Bradlee, “We want the support of business on trade, we want them on the tax bill. I’ve been breaking my ass trying to get along with these people.” A heated confrontation in April 1962 with steel companies over steel pricing, the appearance of “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise” bumper stickers, and a subsequent stock market decline blamed on Kennedy’s anti-business attitude had marked the first two years of his presidency. A New York Times poll of 30,000 members of the business community, taken in June 1962, revealed that over 88 percent believed President Kennedy to be strongly or moderately anti-business. In December 1962, at the New York Economic Club, he hoped to turn the corner. He counseled his assistants to avoid using terms that raised the ire of business opponents, asked his anti-trust division to soft-pedal their investigations, and he adopted a rhetoric of conciliation with a sharpened focus on business concerns. The times did not permit him to speak directly or “to wait until the economic intelligence gap had been closed,” chief economic adviser Walter Heller recalled.

Reflecting on the Economic Club speech the morning after, Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen remarked, “It sounded like Hoover, but it was actually Heller.” Yet, as Walter Heller would put it, “because the arguments for the tax cut were poured into old molds, its success cracked, perhaps even shattered, those molds of ideology and error.” Only the most selective reading of the Economic Club speech, therefore, would reveal genuine supply-side predilection.

Hoping to convey an appreciation for frugality and private enterprise while selling demand management and full employment, Kennedy was, nonetheless, pessimistic about his chances for a positive response. “Lip service to free enterprise, Goodyear Tire executive Roy Dinsmore had warned him in May, “is belied by the steady march to socialism.” When he finished, the positive response cheered President Kennedy. “I gave them straight Keynes and Heller,” he boasted to Walter Heller afterward, “and they loved it.”

Still posting long diatribes from politicians I see. I am and have been aware of WHAT THEY SAID; doesn't mean they were telling the truth. So I guess I need to change my description of your screen names from BF (what ever he is) to BFGullible. If you believe what they said you are a fool. Even JFK lied on many occasions, but then it is expected of politicians; but as hard as they try they cannot change what honest economists have none for many years. When the largest tax cuts are made for the top earners and corporations IT IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE SUPPLY SIDE POLICY. And when Bush did it, you left wing extremists (and even us plain liberals) were quick to claim he was "favoring the rich" at the expense of the poor. Why don't you learn something about economics instead of repeat propaganda?

I feel sorry for people who believe politicians, LW or RW, since all they are really interested in is power.

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).”
John Kenneth Galbraith

Honest economists have know for years that 'trickle down' doesn't work. We already determined that PERSONAL tax cuts for the wealthy does not create jobs. It creates DEBT and it creates wealth inequality. The empirical proof is the last 30 some years since liberals lost power in this nation, and a conservative era took over, including your dogmatic worship of supply side economics that replaced Keynesian economics in America.

It has been the biggest failure in American history.

Kennedy's tax cuts were demand side.

JFK’s cuts were deliberately crafted so that the rich wouldn’t be the sole beneficiaries. As the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation explained at the time, the bottom 85% of the population received 59% of the benefits of Kennedy’s tax cut; the top 2.4% received 17.4% of the tax cut; and the top 0.4% received just 6% of it.

In 1964 Congress passed, and Lyndon Johnson signed into law, a big income-tax cut that had originally been proposed by John F. Kennedy. The top marginal rate dropped from 91 percent to 70 percent, which represented a 23 percent cut. The bottom rate dropped from 20 percent to 14 percent, which represented a 30 percent cut. The middle rates dropped from 59 and 62 percent to 45 percent, which represented a cut of 24 percent to 27 percent.

The 1964 tax cut has been embraced by supply-siders as a supply-side cut, and JFK even sold it that way to big business in a 1962 speech that supply-siders love to quote. But in fact Kennedy, and his chief economist Walter Heller, saw the tax cut as a demand-side cut aimed at creating old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus in a sluggish economy. Indeed, what Kennedy really wanted was to stimulate the economy through government spending, but he didn’t have the votes in Congress for that. So he went with the tax cut instead. The giveaway that Kennedy's wasn’t really a supply-side tax cut was that the cuts were greater in the middle and at the bottom than at the top. If you want to stimulate consumer purchasing, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts in the middle and at the bottom. If you want to stimulate investment, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts at the top—or, if that’s politically impossible, you make the cuts the same across the board. Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981 was pretty obviously a supply-side cut because it lowered the top tax rate more than it did rates at the middle or the bottom. After it passed, White House budget chief David Stockman got in a lot of trouble for admitting what was obvious to anyone paying the slightest attention: The only cuts Reagan cared about were those at the top. "It's kind of hard to sell 'trickle down,'" Stockman blurted out to William Greider in the Atlantic, "so the supply-side formula was the only way to get a tax policy that was really 'trickle down.' Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."


"The debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."
David Stockman - Director of the Office of Management and Budget for U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

 

[kaz]

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology belonging to liberalism in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government. The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States] It advocates civil liberties with a limited government under the rule of law, private property rights, and belief in laissez-faire economic liberalism. Classical liberalism is built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, including ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on a psychological understanding of individual liberty, natural law, utilitarianism, and a belief in progress.

That's exactly what a libertarian today is. Are you confusing libertarians with anarchists? Anarchists want no government. They do use the word "libertarian" to imply there is some sort of strategy to what they think. There isn't, they have no idea how anarchy would work and are unable to answer questions about it. I typically get the response from anarchists, oh yeah, well I'm not omniscient, so I can't answer any questions! Apparently there is nothing in the middle of all knowing and knowing nothing.

Most libertarians support the military, police, roads, civil and criminal courts, management of limited resources and recognition of property rights. Those are functions which cannot be performed without general recognition, which can only be done by government. Pretty much anything else can be done by free people in free markets, and therefore are not legitimate functions of government using force to impose the will of some citizens on others just because they can.

In the mid-20th century, the classical liberals often formed an alliance with social conservatives (an ideology known as liberal conservatism). Neither liberals nor conservatives entirely adopted the ideology of pure classical liberalism

For conservatives, yes, there are a lot of Republicans who think we need to cut back on military excursions and that government isn't a good implementer of reality. But they aren't classic liberals even though they are close because they have not fully embraced that government is such a bad solution to every problem it should only be used when it is the only solution. However, they are a breeding ground for libertarians as they are most likely to have the aha moment. That, BTW, is my background.

As for social liberals, they adopted force, and then fell in love with government. And are authoritarian leftists. They are in every way the opposite of a classic liberal. There is no overlap. Except maybe that we both want to have roads. Which is why when I object to government redistribution schemes, they like to go to, well you want roads don't you! That means government can take money and freely redistribute it!

 

[Soggy in NOLA]

How much would auto insurance cost if people waited to purchase it after they totaled their car?

At this point, it isn't insurance... it's doomed to failure. So accordingly the left embraces it.

 

[kaz]

How much would auto insurance cost if people waited to purchase it after they totaled their car?

At this point, it isn't insurance... it's doomed to failure. So accordingly the left embraces it.

Yes, that is true. Auto insurers are too greedy to pay out money to people who need it, that is true. Government needs to fix that problem too.

 

[dnsmith35]

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology belonging to liberalism in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government. The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States] It advocates civil liberties with a limited government under the rule of law, private property rights, and belief in laissez-faire economic liberalism. Classical liberalism is built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, including ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on a psychological understanding of individual liberty, natural law, utilitarianism, and a belief in progress.

That's exactly what a libertarian today is. Are you confusing libertarians with anarchists? Anarchists want no government. They do use the word "libertarian" to imply there is some sort of strategy to what they think. There isn't, they have no idea how anarchy would work and are unable to answer questions about it. I typically get the response from anarchists, oh yeah, well I'm not omniscient, so I can't answer any questions! Apparently there is nothing in the middle of all knowing and knowing nothing.

Most libertarians support the military, police, roads, civil and criminal courts, management of limited resources and recognition of property rights. Those are functions which cannot be performed without general recognition, which can only be done by government. Pretty much anything else can be done by free people in free markets, and therefore are not legitimate functions of government using force to impose the will of some citizens on others just because they can.

In the mid-20th century, the classical liberals often formed an alliance with social conservatives (an ideology known as liberal conservatism). Neither liberals nor conservatives entirely adopted the ideology of pure classical liberalism

For conservatives, yes, there are a lot of Republicans who think we need to cut back on military excursions and that government isn't a good implementer of reality. But they aren't classic liberals even though they are close because they have not fully embraced that government is such a bad solution to every problem it should only be used when it is the only solution. However, they are a breeding ground for libertarians as they are most likely to have the aha moment. That, BTW, is my background.

As for social liberals, they adopted force, and then fell in love with government. And are authoritarian leftists.

You are describing left wingers, not simply liberals.

They are in every way the opposite of a classic liberal. There is no overlap. Except maybe that we both want to have roads. Which is why when I object to government redistribution schemes, they like to go to, well you want roads don't you! That means government can take money and freely redistribute it!

I object to wealth redistribution EXCEPT to the truly needy, like disabled in one way or another. In so far as giving money to poor people who do not work for it, I am against that. In my opinion a person receiving government assistance should perform work for the state. If we stuck to that rule people will be looking for private jobs. I believe the difference between you and I is how strictly we want to apply the rules of personal responsibility. I break political goals down into 3 groups. Right Wing, moderate conservatives/liberals, and Left wing. I don't believe either extreme is good for the country.

 

[dnsmith35]

Beware of the half-truth. You may have gotten hold of the wrong half.
Seymour Essrog

Your dogmatic mind continues to fail you...

President John F. Kennedy and the 1964 Tax Cut
BY DAVID SHREVE

In the current political contest over President Bush’s proposed federal income tax cut, we see the Kennedy presidency, once again, through a glass, darkly.

Featuring excerpts from Kennedy’s December 14, 1962, New York Economic Club address, a recent political radio ad advertises JFK’s support for tax cutting and suggests implicitly that the 35th president would have supported the tax cuts proposed by the current administration. “Our present tax system,” Kennedy declares in the featured excerpt, “developed as it was, in good part, during World War II to restrain growth, exerts too heavy a drag on growth in peacetime.” Kennedy, the liberal politician and Democratic icon, has, it would appear, suddenly become a benefactor of supply-side economics and an exemplar for conservative politicians. Yet at the time of this address, Kennedy was engaged in a spirited battle against conservative politicians and much of the business community who then opposed his tax cut proposal. Against today’s conventional wisdom, which lumps all tax cuts in the supply-side policy category—where marginal rates function only as a relative work or investment disincentive—this opposition seems either wholly inexplicable or a relic of an indecipherable and eccentric political confrontation.

How was it that all but a few prominent business leaders—Tom Watson of IBM, Frederick Kappel of AT&T, and Henry Ford II of the Ford Motor Company, for example opposed the Kennedy tax cut proposal when it was first announced in the summer of 1962? If President Kennedy was, indeed, a nascent supply-sider, why were most conservative politicians so staunchly opposed to the Kennedy proposal? Were they motivated simply by the historic mistrust of business community for FDR’s Democratic successors? Or did the business community of that period simply respond more quickly and more fervently to a different political economy, one that had little place for the now much more familiar supply-side concerns? Kennedy, after all, wanted his tax cut to produce a fiscal deficit; perhaps this alone was too much for conservatives. Only by looking more fully at the political economy of both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (under whom the tax cut proposal won passage) can we begin to unravel this paradox. The commentary and writings of Kennedy-Johnson economic advisors, the complete text of the 1962 Economic Club speech, and material from recently released presidential recordings, provides us with at least some of the necessary clues.

To Kennedy and the liberal economists who advised him, most supply-side effects were simply derivative: the primary (although not singular) goal of the tax cut was to stimulate demand and thus to achieve full employment. In their way of thinking, this demand would serve as a precursor to a virtuous cycle within which productivity and investment would also respond positively. “The tax cut is good for long run growth,” Kennedy adviser James Tobin declared in 1965, “only in the general sense that prosperity is good for investment.”1 The effect of the ’64 tax cut on the productive capacity of the nation was significant, to be sure, and very much anticipated in the Kennedy-Johnson political economy, but it was mostly incidental to rising demand and full employment.

“The Revenue Act of 1964 was aimed at the demand, rather than the supply, side of the economy,” Kennedy economist Arthur Okun recalled. Among business leaders in private, Kennedy seldom put it any other way: “What you want is a deficit,” he reminded a small group of business leaders at an August 9, 1962, White House meeting. “You want more money being spent than is being taken out of the economy.” Focusing naturally, then, on the propensity to consume—the tendency, that is, of individuals in various income brackets to spend additional income—the administration sought a tax cut that showered most of its direct benefits upon working class and middle class Americans. “The fundamental law upon which we are entitled to depend with great confidence,” John Maynard Keynes remarked, describing this tendency, “is that men are disposed, as a rule and on the average, to increase their consumption as their income increases, but not by as much as the increase in their income.” Though it is widely ignored today—or cast aside by competing, but far less robust analyses—this consumption function was critical to the Kennedy-Johnson political economy.

It underscores, as well, the paramount goal of the Kennedy tax cut proposal: to put more money into the hands of people most inclined to spend it. This is not to say that the Kennedy administration dismissed a somewhat different kind of tax cut entirely or that it ignored the merit of other supply side policy, however subordinate it might have been. In the end, the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut offered some benefits for the wealthy and for corporations mostly because it was politically impractical not to do so. Too few members of key congressional committees, reflecting southern Democratic conservatism or a decidedly pro-business orientation, would have voted for the proposal in any other form. “We can only applaud his political acumen,” Tobin remarked in 1965, “while regretting the misguided, but powerful, ideology which made his bargain necessary.” Moreover, if supply-side initiatives were never counted on for any of the heavy lifting, Kennedy and his Keynesian cohorts still found them useful in a variety of circumstances. The seven percent Investment Tax Credit, accelerated depreciation schedules (effected by Executive Order), and a special tax credit for the DuPont Corporation were among these activities.

“The Heller strategy of the 1960s,” James Tobin remarked in 1982, “was not a one-sided program of demand expansion.” Yet, these initiatives, along with other efforts in the realms of international trade and currency, wage and price control, and domestic monetary policy, were never as basic to the Kennedy political economy as demand management. “Although there is some merit in some of the ‘supply side’ proposals so popular today,” Tobin added, “the danger is that they are considered a substitute for expanding demand.” In short, Kennedy used the Economic Club speech to sell these ideas to a constituency who believed them heretical and whose friendship and forbearance Kennedy hoped to cultivate, if only well enough, in the short term, to pass favored legislation. At Yale in June 1962, he had characterized his relations with the business community as “a bog of sterile acrimony.” Only weeks before his Yale address, Kennedy told Ben Bradlee, “We want the support of business on trade, we want them on the tax bill. I’ve been breaking my ass trying to get along with these people.” A heated confrontation in April 1962 with steel companies over steel pricing, the appearance of “Help Kennedy Stamp Out Free Enterprise” bumper stickers, and a subsequent stock market decline blamed on Kennedy’s anti-business attitude had marked the first two years of his presidency. A New York Times poll of 30,000 members of the business community, taken in June 1962, revealed that over 88 percent believed President Kennedy to be strongly or moderately anti-business. In December 1962, at the New York Economic Club, he hoped to turn the corner. He counseled his assistants to avoid using terms that raised the ire of business opponents, asked his anti-trust division to soft-pedal their investigations, and he adopted a rhetoric of conciliation with a sharpened focus on business concerns. The times did not permit him to speak directly or “to wait until the economic intelligence gap had been closed,” chief economic adviser Walter Heller recalled.

Reflecting on the Economic Club speech the morning after, Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen remarked, “It sounded like Hoover, but it was actually Heller.” Yet, as Walter Heller would put it, “because the arguments for the tax cut were poured into old molds, its success cracked, perhaps even shattered, those molds of ideology and error.” Only the most selective reading of the Economic Club speech, therefore, would reveal genuine supply-side predilection.

Hoping to convey an appreciation for frugality and private enterprise while selling demand management and full employment, Kennedy was, nonetheless, pessimistic about his chances for a positive response. “Lip service to free enterprise, Goodyear Tire executive Roy Dinsmore had warned him in May, “is belied by the steady march to socialism.” When he finished, the positive response cheered President Kennedy. “I gave them straight Keynes and Heller,” he boasted to Walter Heller afterward, “and they loved it.”

Still posting long diatribes from politicians I see. I am and have been aware of WHAT THEY SAID; doesn't mean they were telling the truth. So I guess I need to change my description of your screen names from BF (what ever he is) to BFGullible. If you believe what they said you are a fool. Even JFK lied on many occasions, but then it is expected of politicians; but as hard as they try they cannot change what honest economists have none for many years. When the largest tax cuts are made for the top earners and corporations IT IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE SUPPLY SIDE POLICY. And when Bush did it, you left wing extremists (and even us plain liberals) were quick to claim he was "favoring the rich" at the expense of the poor. Why don't you learn something about economics instead of repeat propaganda?

I feel sorry for people who believe politicians, LW or RW, since all they are really interested in is power.

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).”
John Kenneth Galbraith

Yeah, like JFK's tax cuts which gave more to the rich and corporations. That was classic supply side/trickle down tax policy.

Honest economists have know for years that 'trickle down' doesn't work. We already determined that PERSONAL tax cuts for the wealthy does not create jobs. It creates DEBT and it creates wealth inequality. The empirical proof is the last 30 some years since liberals lost power in this nation, and a conservative era took over, including your dogmatic worship of supply side economics that replaced Keynesian economics in America.

1. I don't worship Supply Side economics. Are you so unable to understand what I hate is the propaganda which suggests JFK actually cut taxes such that it was demand side economics. Only the stupid or the dishonest accept his stated label.

It has been the biggest failure in American history.

Almost all excessive monetary policy and fiscal policies invented by politicians have failed.

Kennedy's tax cuts were demand side.

Are you just stupid? Do you always believe everything left wingers tell you? Kennedy's tax cuts were more supply side tax cuts than they were demand side. Any time you cut taxes for the rich (highest tax brackets) and corporations it is Supply side. A better way if one chooses to cut taxes is cut them more on the lower paid people.....that is what demand side it. Giving the people who spend all their money tax cuts.

JFK’s cuts were deliberately crafted so that the rich wouldn’t be the sole beneficiaries. As the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation explained at the time, the bottom 85% of the population received 59% of the benefits of Kennedy’s tax cut; the top 2.4% received 17.4% of the tax cut; and the top 0.4% received just 6% of it.

Yet he cut the top brackets a greater %.

In 1964 Congress passed, and Lyndon Johnson signed into law, a big income-tax cut that had originally been proposed by John F. Kennedy. The top marginal rate dropped from 91 percent to 70 percent, which represented a 23 percent cut. The bottom rate dropped from 20 percent to 14 percent, which represented a 30 percent cut. The middle rates dropped from 59 and 62 percent to 45 percent, which represented a cut of 24 percent to 27 percent.

I guess you never heard of the old adage, "100% of nothing is still nothing." Dropping the lower rate by 6% is puny compared to the the 26% tax cut on the top bracket is very specifically supply side and when coupled with a drop in corporate taxes it is Supply Side in spades. You listen to those left wing extremists like your self, and all you hear are lies, or stupidity, your choice.

The 1964 tax cut has been embraced by supply-siders as a supply-side cut,

Because it was a supply side cut.

and JFK even sold it that way to big business in a 1962 speech that supply-siders love to quote. But in fact Kennedy, and his chief economist Walter Heller, saw the tax cut as a demand-side cut aimed at creating old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus in a sluggish economy.

Changing the definition by a politician of something doesn't really change the meaning.

Indeed, what Kennedy really wanted was to stimulate the economy through government spending, but he didn’t have the votes in Congress for that. So he went with the tax cut instead.

And he had to lie about the tax cut being demand when it actually was supply to get it through congress.

The giveaway that Kennedy's wasn’t really a supply-side tax cut was that the cuts were greater in the middle and at the bottom than at the top.

Lets test that theory.

History and effects
President John F. Kennedy brought up the issue of tax reduction in his 1963 State of the Union address. His initial plan called for a $13.5 billion tax cut through a reduction of the top income tax rate from 91% to 65%, reduction of the bottom rate from 20% to 14%, and a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 52% to 47%. The first attempt at passing the tax cuts was rejected by Congress in 1963.[3]

Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and was succeeded by Lyndon Johnson. Johnson was able to achieve Kennedy's goal of a tax cut in exchange for promising a budget not to exceed $100 billion in 1965. The Revenue Act of 1964 emerged from Congress and was signed by Johnson on February 26, 1964.[1][4]

The stated goal of the tax cuts were to raise personal incomes, increase consumption, and increase capital investments. Evidence shows that these goals were met to some degree by the tax cut.[4] Unemployment fell from 5.2% in 1964 to 4.5% in 1965, and fell to 3.8% in 1966.[4][5] Initial estimates predicted a loss of revenue as a result of the tax cuts, however, tax revenue increased in 1964 and 1965

​

So lets recap: Top rate cut of 26%
Bottom rate cut of 6%
Corporate tax cuts of 4%

Taxable income......................................Taxable income
............2006 Bush.............................................2000 Clinton
............0 to 7,550.............10%
............7,550 to 30,650.....15%.........................0 to 26,250...............15%
...........39,650 to 74,200.....25%........................26,250 to 63,550.......28%
...........74,200 to 154,800...28%........................63,550 to 132,600......31%
..........154,800 to 336,550..33%........................132,600 to 288,350....36%
..........336,000 up..............35%........................288,350 to up............39.6%​

If you want to stimulate demand, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts at the bottom. If you want to stimulate investment, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts at the top—or, if that’s politically impossible, you make the cuts the same across the board. Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981 was pretty obviously a supply-side cut because it lowered the top tax rate more than it did rates at the middle or the bottom.

So did JFK's tax cuts, but not Bush. Look at the chart, it clearly tells us Bush cut more at the bottom than JFK.

Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."

Yes it is, and you get there by making the biggest cut in marginal rates at the top, just like JFK did.

"The debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party's embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don't matter if they result from tax cuts."
David Stockman - Director of the Office of Management and Budget for U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

Deficits matter no matter if they are from tax cuts or spending.

 

[crisismangement]

Classical liberalism is a political philosophy and ideology belonging to liberalism in which primary emphasis is placed on securing the freedom of the individual by limiting the power of the government. The philosophy emerged as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the 19th century in Europe and the United States] It advocates civil liberties with a limited government under the rule of law, private property rights, and belief in laissez-faire economic liberalism. Classical liberalism is built on ideas that had already arisen by the end of the 18th century, including ideas of Adam Smith, John Locke, Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on a psychological understanding of individual liberty, natural law, utilitarianism, and a belief in progress.

That's exactly what a libertarian today is. Are you confusing libertarians with anarchists? Anarchists want no government. They do use the word "libertarian" to imply there is some sort of strategy to what they think. There isn't, they have no idea how anarchy would work and are unable to answer questions about it. I typically get the response from anarchists, oh yeah, well I'm not omniscient, so I can't answer any questions! Apparently there is nothing in the middle of all knowing and knowing nothing.

Most libertarians support the military, police, roads, civil and criminal courts, management of limited resources and recognition of property rights. Those are functions which cannot be performed without general recognition, which can only be done by government. Pretty much anything else can be done by free people in free markets, and therefore are not legitimate functions of government using force to impose the will of some citizens on others just because they can.



For conservatives, yes, there are a lot of Republicans who think we need to cut back on military excursions and that government isn't a good implementer of reality. But they aren't classic liberals even though they are close because they have not fully embraced that government is such a bad solution to every problem it should only be used when it is the only solution. However, they are a breeding ground for libertarians as they are most likely to have the aha moment. That, BTW, is my background.

As for social liberals, they adopted force, and then fell in love with government. And are authoritarian leftists.

You are describing left wingers, not simply liberals.

They are in every way the opposite of a classic liberal. There is no overlap. Except maybe that we both want to have roads. Which is why when I object to government redistribution schemes, they like to go to, well you want roads don't you! That means government can take money and freely redistribute it!

I object to wealth redistribution EXCEPT to the truly needy, like disabled in one way or another. In so far as giving money to poor people who do not work for it, I am against that. In my opinion a person receiving government assistance should perform work for the state. If we stuck to that rule people will be looking for private jobs. I believe the difference between you and I is how strictly we want to apply the rules of personal responsibility. I break political goals down into 3 groups. Right Wing, moderate conservatives/liberals, and Left wing. I don't believe either extreme is good for the country.

I am a moderate who leans right. I agree with most of what you say. The guy you are arguing with is way out in right field, as far right wing as our resident left wing fanatic.

 

[kaz]

That's exactly what a libertarian today is. Are you confusing libertarians with anarchists? Anarchists want no government. They do use the word "libertarian" to imply there is some sort of strategy to what they think. There isn't, they have no idea how anarchy would work and are unable to answer questions about it. I typically get the response from anarchists, oh yeah, well I'm not omniscient, so I can't answer any questions! Apparently there is nothing in the middle of all knowing and knowing nothing.

Most libertarians support the military, police, roads, civil and criminal courts, management of limited resources and recognition of property rights. Those are functions which cannot be performed without general recognition, which can only be done by government. Pretty much anything else can be done by free people in free markets, and therefore are not legitimate functions of government using force to impose the will of some citizens on others just because they can.



For conservatives, yes, there are a lot of Republicans who think we need to cut back on military excursions and that government isn't a good implementer of reality. But they aren't classic liberals even though they are close because they have not fully embraced that government is such a bad solution to every problem it should only be used when it is the only solution. However, they are a breeding ground for libertarians as they are most likely to have the aha moment. That, BTW, is my background.

As for social liberals, they adopted force, and then fell in love with government. And are authoritarian leftists.

You are describing left wingers, not simply liberals.

They are in every way the opposite of a classic liberal. There is no overlap. Except maybe that we both want to have roads. Which is why when I object to government redistribution schemes, they like to go to, well you want roads don't you! That means government can take money and freely redistribute it!

I object to wealth redistribution EXCEPT to the truly needy, like disabled in one way or another. In so far as giving money to poor people who do not work for it, I am against that. In my opinion a person receiving government assistance should perform work for the state. If we stuck to that rule people will be looking for private jobs. I believe the difference between you and I is how strictly we want to apply the rules of personal responsibility. I break political goals down into 3 groups. Right Wing, moderate conservatives/liberals, and Left wing. I don't believe either extreme is good for the country.

I am a moderate who leans right. I agree with most of what you say. The guy you are arguing with is way out in right field, as far right wing as our resident left wing fanatic.

Yes, I'm a right winger who is pro-choice, thinks all drugs should be legal as well as prostitution and gambling. I'm against the death penalty. I oppose our military being in the Middle East or overseas in any country permanently or used for any purpose other than the direct defense of the United States.

Good insight there. Here's a cookie. Barney is on in a few minutes...

 

[crisismangement]

You are describing left wingers, not simply liberals. I object to wealth redistribution EXCEPT to the truly needy, like disabled in one way or another. In so far as giving money to poor people who do not work for it, I am against that. In my opinion a person receiving government assistance should perform work for the state. If we stuck to that rule people will be looking for private jobs. I believe the difference between you and I is how strictly we want to apply the rules of personal responsibility. I break political goals down into 3 groups. Right Wing, moderate conservatives/liberals, and Left wing. I don't believe either extreme is good for the country.

I am a moderate who leans right. I agree with most of what you say. The guy you are arguing with is way out in right field, as far right wing as our resident left wing fanatic.

Yes, I'm a right winger who is pro-choice, thinks all drugs should be legal as well as prostitution and gambling. I'm against the death penalty. I oppose our military being in the Middle East or overseas in any country permanently or used for any purpose other than the direct defense of the United States.

Good insight there. Here's a cookie. Barney is on in a few minutes...

A right winger who is pro-choice, drugs should be legalized, against the death penalty or military incursions. So you are right wing fanatic economically and left wing socially. So what? Sounds to me like you are a mixed up cookie, but at least you are individualized as opposed to sticking with either right wing or left wing propaganda. Personally I am for the death penalty, legalizing drugs, using our military in an attempt to protect the oppressed anywhere and since I am a man abortion is a non-issue to me.

 

[dnsmith35]

I am a moderate who leans right. I agree with most of what you say. The guy you are arguing with is way out in right field, as far right wing as our resident left wing fanatic.

Yes, I'm a right winger who is pro-choice, thinks all drugs should be legal as well as prostitution and gambling. I'm against the death penalty. I oppose our military being in the Middle East or overseas in any country permanently or used for any purpose other than the direct defense of the United States.

Good insight there. Here's a cookie. Barney is on in a few minutes...

A right winger who is pro-choice, drugs should be legalized, against the death penalty or military incursions. So you are right wing fanatic economically and left wing socially. So what? Sounds to me like you are a mixed up cookie, but at least you are individualized as opposed to sticking with either right wing or left wing propaganda. Personally I am for the death penalty, legalizing drugs, using our military in an attempt to protect the oppressed anywhere and since I am a man abortion is a non-issue to me.

Over the years the two main parties in the US have switched sides of the conservative/liberal argument. At one time it was the Democrat party which was the conservative, anti-racial equality, the same traits now plugged by the Democrat Party. I have lived through liberal democrats, liberal republicans, and again liberal democrats, but more to my regret to the point where the Democrat party is led by leftwing extremists.

In my opinion, party politics should be abolished and people should run without party backing on their own recognizance. Federal offices such as the Senate and the Presidency should go back to being chosen by the state legislators. The House members represent a small bit of turf so they should be directly elected by the people. Campaign money should only be legally from those in the individuals district. That would eliminate huge party financial support to candidates. Only a limited amount of money should be spent on campaign donations to individuals, solving the billionaire, corporate or other groups buying candidates.

 

[Bfgrn]

Still posting long diatribes from politicians I see. I am and have been aware of WHAT THEY SAID; doesn't mean they were telling the truth. So I guess I need to change my description of your screen names from BF (what ever he is) to BFGullible. If you believe what they said you are a fool. Even JFK lied on many occasions, but then it is expected of politicians; but as hard as they try they cannot change what honest economists have none for many years. When the largest tax cuts are made for the top earners and corporations IT IS AND WILL ALWAYS BE SUPPLY SIDE POLICY. And when Bush did it, you left wing extremists (and even us plain liberals) were quick to claim he was "favoring the rich" at the expense of the poor. Why don't you learn something about economics instead of repeat propaganda?

I feel sorry for people who believe politicians, LW or RW, since all they are really interested in is power.

“If you feed enough oats to the horse, some will pass through to feed the sparrows (referring to "trickle down" economics).”
John Kenneth Galbraith
Honest economists have know for years that 'trickle down' doesn't work. We already determined that PERSONAL tax cuts for the wealthy does not create jobs. It creates DEBT and it creates wealth inequality. The empirical proof is the last 30 some years since liberals lost power in this nation, and a conservative era took over, including your dogmatic worship of supply side economics that replaced Keynesian economics in America.

1. I don't worship Supply Side economics. Are you so unable to understand what I hate is the propaganda which suggests JFK actually cut taxes such that it was demand side economics. Only the stupid or the dishonest accept his stated label.

It has been the biggest failure in American history.

Kennedy's tax cuts were demand side.

JFK’s cuts were deliberately crafted so that the rich wouldn’t be the sole beneficiaries. As the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation explained at the time, the bottom 85% of the population received 59% of the benefits of Kennedy’s tax cut; the top 2.4% received 17.4% of the tax cut; and the top 0.4% received just 6% of it.

In 1964 Congress passed, and Lyndon Johnson signed into law, a big income-tax cut that had originally been proposed by John F. Kennedy. The top marginal rate dropped from 91 percent to 70 percent, which represented a 23 percent cut. The bottom rate dropped from 20 percent to 14 percent, which represented a 30 percent cut. The middle rates dropped from 59 and 62 percent to 45 percent, which represented a cut of 24 percent to 27 percent.

The 1964 tax cut has been embraced by supply-siders as a supply-side cut, and JFK even sold it that way to big business in a 1962 speech that supply-siders love to quote. But in fact Kennedy, and his chief economist Walter Heller, saw the tax cut as a demand-side cut aimed at creating old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus in a sluggish economy. Indeed, what Kennedy really wanted was to stimulate the economy through government spending, but he didn’t have the votes in Congress for that. So he went with the tax cut instead. The giveaway that Kennedy's wasn’t really a supply-side tax cut was that the cuts were greater in the middle and at the bottom than at the top.

If you want to stimulate demand, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts at the bottom. If you want to stimulate investment, you’re better off concentrating income-tax cuts at the top—or, if that’s politically impossible, you make the cuts the same across the board. Ronald Reagan’s tax cut in 1981 was pretty obviously a supply-side cut because it lowered the top tax rate more than it did rates at the middle or the bottom.Supply-side is 'trickle-down' theory."


Deficits matter no matter if they are from tax cuts or spending.

For someone who claims to have schooling in economics, you are a dunce. NOW, the Joint Committee on Internal Revenue Taxation is lying to protect Kennedy...

Here are your words for the day:
1) brackets
2) marginal

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.
President John F. Kennedy