"You didn't get there on your own"

[Vast LWC]

Its called redistribution, read about it.

So we are not a civil society, it is simply survival of the fittest and the richest?

Meaningless babble. There's nothing in the term "civil society" that justifies Social Security, Medicare or welfare. A society where A isn't allowed to plunder the income and assets of B isn't a society where everyone but the rich survive. Somehow, no one starved to death before we had welfare and Social Security.

1. Social Security was, and is, a retirement program, paid for by the same people who "take" from it.

You aren't paying for anyone else's Social Security.

The very, very small segment of Social Security receivers that get their benefits early, due to disability, etc, make up a ridiculously tiny portion of the total.

If that's what your complaining about, you should stop whining...

Because what you are paying for is the money that was taken from social security to pay for other programs that you were the "beneficiary" of. Like our bloated military.



2. There were many, many people who starved in this country before Social Security and Medicare.

Pretty much every time there was a recession/depression, (which was about every twenty years, before the Roosevelt era protections were put in place) there was a large segment of the population that would starve.

Ask your grandfather. I'm sure he'll be happy to tell you about the economic conditions at the beginning of the Great Depression.

 

[Vast LWC]

It is a great warning to Democrats. By forcing more and more entitlements and paying for it through fewer and fewer citizens, they will soon destroy it all.

When the game is rigged, so that all the nation's capital becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, the number of people who are able to pay for entitlements becomes smaller and smaller.

When the rich steal from the poor, the poor don't have any money to pay for the entitlements, which is when the richest of the rich start trying to convince everyone that they're all a bunch of "moochers".

And in this day and age, their media machine allows them to reach quite an audience of sheep. Who are in turn willing to bleat whatever spurts from the mouths of their bought and paid-for talking heads..

 

[saveliberty]

Food stamps pay for the hungry VLWC. Social Security is NOT a retirement plan, it is suppose to be a supplement.

 

[saveliberty]

It is a great warning to Democrats. By forcing more and more entitlements and paying for it through fewer and fewer citizens, they will soon destroy it all.

When the game is rigged, so that all the nation's capital becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, the number of people who are able to pay for entitlements becomes smaller and smaller.

When the rich steal from the poor, the poor don't have any money to pay for the entitlements, which is when the richest of the rich start trying to convince everyone that they're all a bunch of "moochers".

The rich are not stealing, so you don't have a valid argument.

 

[Vast LWC]

The rich are not stealing, so you don't have a valid argument.

I apologize, I edited that post after you quoted it.

There are no laws against what has been happening, but it is stealing.

When the same people doing the stealing get to write the laws, no-one gets arrested.

 

[Vast LWC]

Food stamps pay for the hungry VLWC. Social Security is NOT a retirement plan, it is suppose to be a supplement.

I agree, it is supposed to be a supplement.

But that doesn't change the fact that it was paid for.

The retirement age should in fact be raised. That I will agree with.

But you aren't paying for anyone else's retirement money. At least not yet.


And Food Stamps are "Welfare", which you had included in the post I was responding to.

 

[GuyPinestra]

Meaningless babble. There's nothing in the term "civil society" that justifies Social Security, Medicare or welfare. A society where A isn't allowed to plunder the income and assets of B isn't a society where everyone but the rich survive. Somehow, no one starved to death before we had welfare and Social Security.

Sure they did. And many lost everything that worked their whole lives for because of a catastrophic illness.

You right wingers are not conservatives, you are some mutant form of life.

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower

It is a great warning to Democrats. By forcing more and more entitlements and paying for it through fewer and fewer citizens, they will soon destroy it all.

^^^^ This ^^^^

 

[Bfgrn]

The rich are not stealing, so you don't have a valid argument.

I apologize, I edited that post after you quoted it.

There are no laws against what has been happening, but it is stealing.

When the same people doing the stealing get to write the laws, no-one gets arrested.

You were right the fist time.

Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!

Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Ronald Reagan was a cunning politician, but he didn’t know much about economics. Alan Greenspan was an economist, who had no reluctance to work with a politician on a plan that would further the cause of the right-wing goals that both he and President Reagan shared.

Both Reagan and Greenspan saw big government as an evil, and they saw big business as a virtue. They both had despised the progressive policies of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, and they wanted to turn back the pages of time. They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich. Since we don’t know the nature of the private conversations that took place between Reagan and Greenspan, as well as between their aides, we cannot be sure whether the events that would follow over the next three decades were specifically planned by Reagan and Greenspan, or whether they were just the natural result of the actions the two men played such a big role in. Either way, both Reagan and Greenspan are revered by most conservatives and hated by most liberals.

If Reagan had campaigned for the presidency by promising big tax cuts for the rich and pledging to make up for the lost revenue by imposing substantial tax increases on the working class, he would probably not have been elected. But that is exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan. Consider the following sequence of events:

1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses.

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich.

5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006. (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus revenue.)

6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers. Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike. Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike. The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.

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[flacaltenn]

Social Security is a social insurance program. It fits every criteria of an insurance program.

A Ponzi scheme is a short-term criminal enterprise. Social Security is a rock-solid social insurance program that protects millions of Americans.

Social Security is insurance. Contributors don’t want to get rich quick; they want coverage when they retire and die, and in case they become disabled. Like other insurance, benefits are paid from premiums and returns on trust funds. By law, Social Security inflows and outflows are always balanced with adjustments to benefits and contributions. Social Security has never missed paying a monthly benefit in 71 years.

The only thing that could transform Social Security into a Ponzi scheme would be a scoundrel president and Congress ending the system.

Oh -- you mean like -----???

I cannot guarantee that those checks go out on August 3rd if we haven't resolved this issue. Because there may simply not be the money in the coffers to do it.”

— President Obama, July 12, 2011

Both an admission that by BFgrn's standards --- he IS a scoundrel AND that there are no funds of ANY VALUE in the Trust Fund. New debt -- which adds to the debt ceiling must be added to pay current recipients today -- because OBAMA is stealing the FICA premiums to look like Robin Hood handing out $20 bills.. A photo-op completely devoid of economic impact, but DEVASTING to a SS Program hitting crisis 10 years early..

Good move to call him a scoundrel..

I will let the father of Reaganomics explain it to you...

Wall Street Targets the Elderly
Looting Social Security
by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.

Wall Street’s approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.

As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.

Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as “putting Social Security on a sound basis.”

Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the “trust funds” are needed to pay Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem the IOUs.

We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we can’t afford, an “unfunded liability.” This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who are retired.

Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.

Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for them.

Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and “unsustainable.” They ought to know. The phony trust fund, which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank Paulson’s derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable damage on our lives and budget.

Had Social Security been privatized, I doubt that Wall Street would have been permitted to deregulate the financial system. Too much would have been at stake.

After the latest crisis brought on by Wall Street’s dishonesty and greed, trusting Wall Street to manage anyone’s old age pension requires a leap of faith that no intelligent person can make.

Wall Street has got away with its raid on the public treasury. Now, pockets full, it wants to pay for the heist by curtailing Social Security and Medicare. Having deprived the working population of homes, jobs, and health care, Wall Street is now after the elderly’s old age security.

Social Security, formerly an untouchable “third rail of politics,” is now “unsustainable,” while the real unsustainables–a pre-1929 unregulated financial system and open-ended multi-trillion dollar Global War Against Terror–are the new untouchables. This transformation signals the complete capture of American democracy by an oligarchy of special interests.

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Well THAT was extraordinarly WEAK.. As was the repair done to "save S.S" by the Carter Admin which generated little in terms of Surplus for Reagan to steal.

The Congressional Response to Social Security Surpluses, 1935-1994 | Hoover Institution


The original Social Security Act of 1935 contained an explicit policy of building a large reserve. Within four years, the reserve policy collapsed under a firestorm of criticism from both conservatives and liberals. Its collapse led to the program's first liberalization, one that occurred even before the first benefits were paid.

Congress responded in 1977 with major increases in payroll taxes and, for the first time in the program's history, some reductions in benefits. On the benefits side, the major change was to correct the indexing flaw.

The 1977 amendments solved both the near-term and the long-term financial problem but only temporarily.34 In the ensuing four years, rapid inflation produced additional expenditures and rising unemployment generated little revenue growth. By early 1981, the reserve had fallen to two months' worth of benefits and was projected to be exhausted in two years. President Ronald Reagan and Congress created a bipartisan commission chaired by Alan Greenspan to recommend a solution to the financing problem. The commission issued its recommendations in January 1983, and Congress enacted most of them in March 1983.

The theft of the Surplus was GENUINELY bipartisian and when the Surplus completely dissapeared this time in 2010 -- YOUR heroes, the leftist revolutionary team of Reid, Pelosi and Obama invented the NEW tactic of stealing from the PREMIUMS. A practice which you smartly COMPLETELY ignored in my post. A practice designed to fit their Redistributional Fairness meme without regards for the fiscal condition of the programs.

Blame it on Reagan -- yeah right... The DEMS are now bleeding the program at a time when it REQUIRES serious fiscal sanity.. And they are doing it solely to make a political statement about tax fairness. Having forgotten everything about the UNIVERSAL nature of the program and the concept of it being a self-funded insurance program..

 

[Murf76]

While I realize that the whole off-topic discussion regarding Medicare and Social Security is purely a deflection to take our minds of the fact that Barack Obama has no more idea how business works in this country than your average 2nd grader, what our resident lefties have failed to note is..... that all those programs are UNSUSTAINABLE in their current form.

So. If these entitlements and welfare programs were actually of any REAL importance to them, why the hell would they vote for a guy who has SAT ON HIS ASS for the last three and a half years without ONE competent idea about what we're gonna do about it?

There's no budget.
There's no reform of entitlements, or even any efforts at reform of entitlements.
They've given us a whole new LARGER entitlement that costs three times what they said it would.
And we're approaching 16 TRILLION in debt, which as I've pointed out repeatedly, will cost us a cool trillion in CASH annually by the end of the decade on our current path.

Face it libs, your guy is a disaster. And here we are, at the brink of another recession and at a time when consumer confidence is shot.... and what's he doing? He's out mind-fucking small business people.

 

[Mr. H.]

So, business should thank government for not taking more of what isn't theirs in the first place?

And just who is paying for this "labor and effort of others"?

Just like a republican to have such a narcissistic and self-centered point of view.
They cannot admit that it takes more than an idea to have it work.
If you think your hard-work alone and your money alone makes a business thrive then you have the narcissistic attitude and reality in now way shape or form can make you see the truth.

If I risk my own capital and bust my own ass you're goddamn right I'll have any fucking attitude I choose, narcissistic or otherwise.

The truth?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbjhKUB66E]You can't handle the truth - YouTube[/ame]

Have you owned and operated your own business? I have for 35 years. Government is in the way, it's not THE way.

 

[Listening]

Please tell me who the 'takers' are?

Anyone getting more out of the system than they put into it.....if they put anything at all into the system.

Simple enough.

So what about someone on Medicare who lives to the age of 90? What about the worker who is injured on the job and permanently disabled? What about the child whose parents get food stamps. Are they all takers too?

By definition...yes.

 

[Listening]

The rich are not stealing, so you don't have a valid argument.

I apologize, I edited that post after you quoted it.

There are no laws against what has been happening, but it is stealing.

When the same people doing the stealing get to write the laws, no-one gets arrested.

You were right the fist time.

Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!

Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Ronald Reagan was a cunning politician, but he didn’t know much about economics. Alan Greenspan was an economist, who had no reluctance to work with a politician on a plan that would further the cause of the right-wing goals that both he and President Reagan shared.

Both Reagan and Greenspan saw big government as an evil, and they saw big business as a virtue. They both had despised the progressive policies of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, and they wanted to turn back the pages of time. They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich. Since we don’t know the nature of the private conversations that took place between Reagan and Greenspan, as well as between their aides, we cannot be sure whether the events that would follow over the next three decades were specifically planned by Reagan and Greenspan, or whether they were just the natural result of the actions the two men played such a big role in. Either way, both Reagan and Greenspan are revered by most conservatives and hated by most liberals.

If Reagan had campaigned for the presidency by promising big tax cuts for the rich and pledging to make up for the lost revenue by imposing substantial tax increases on the working class, he would probably not have been elected. But that is exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan. Consider the following sequence of events:

1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses.

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich.

5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006. (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus revenue.)

6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers. Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike. Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike. The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.

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Who were the majorities in the house and senate in 1984 ? Did they help in Reagan's spending of S.S. ?

 

[buckeye45_73]

Will left wingers tell us the purpose of him saying this? Did he want us to thank everyone everytime we got credit for something? Are we supposed to pay these people? Or was it to try and reduce the effect of feeling good about acomplishing things?

 

[Listening]

The takers need to justify taking.....from the makers.

 

[buckeye45_73]

The takers need to justify taking.....from the makers.

Dang it, I agree, but I want a liberal to tell us....come on libs what was the purpose of the statement, because he meant it, he didnt backtrack at all.....so why make that statement?

 

[chesswarsnow]

Sorry bout that,


1. Obama just stepped in the *deep doodoo*.
2. This will doom him.


Regards,
SirJamesofTexas

 

[bripat9643]

1. Social Security was, and is, a retirement program, paid for by the same people who "take" from it..

Nope. they paid for someone else's retirement, not their own. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, not a retirement program

You aren't paying for anyone else's Social Security.

I most certainly am. Every dime I pay in FICA taxes immediately goes to a current retiree.

The very, very small segment of Social Security receivers that get their benefits early, due to disability, etc, make up a ridiculously tiny portion of the total.

that's just plain stupid. Both my mother and my sister are currently collecting Social Security, and neither one of them ever paid a dime into it.

How do you explain that?

There are millions of widows who collect social security that never paid into it. There are also millions collecting disability who never paid into it.

If that's what your complaining about, you should stop whining....

You should start whining that God cheated you in the brains department.

Because what you are paying for is the money that was taken from social security to pay for other programs that you were the "beneficiary" of. Like our bloated military.

You just got done claiming the money I pay goes to my retirement. Now you're admitting that it doesn't.

2. There were many, many people who starved in this country before Social Security and Medicare.

Then you should have no trouble producing the proot to support your claim.

Pretty much every time there was a recession/depression, (which was about every twenty years, before the Roosevelt era protections were put in place) there was a large segment of the population that would starve.

Horseshit.

Ask your grandfather. I'm sure he'll be happy to tell you about the economic conditions at the beginning of the Great Depression.

I spent countless hours at the dinner table listening to my parents talk about the depression. Not once did they ever mention anyone starving to death.

 

[Mr. H.]

Our company was founded in 1947, at a time of fairly simple taxation procedures. We've still got returns on file dating back to those days and inclusive to the present. As the years progressed, government began to look closely at the practice of reducing taxable income by the amount of capital that was reinvested within business ventures for the purpose of growing a company and generating additional revenue.

Let me repeat that- a business that spent its own money for the purpose of conducting normal operations as well as expending additional capital (more money) in order to expand operations was allowed to reduce gross revenues by those dollar amounts in determining taxable income. Why? When money is spent within a business that in itself creates a taxable event. You buy something physical, you pay a sales tax. Then you take that same "something" and use it in your business toward generating revenue. You buy something non-physical, such as a service, and the money you pay that particular entity is declared as taxable income by that entity.

And so over time the government saw an opportunity to generate for itself more revenue by allowing business to deduct only "portiions" of expenditures from their revenues in determining tax liability.

And thus- depreciation was born. And depletion. And tax preference items. And alternative minimum taxes.

Today we are led to believe that government "grants" reductions in the aforementioned taxes. Taxes that at one time didn't exist. In other words, government is now in a position to mete out favors by taking less of what is not theirs to begin with.

Enter Obama- the Great Crucifier. The Judge, Jury, and Executioner of industry. He is here to kick some ass, take some numbers, and hammer out economic justice in the name of "fairness". For in His eyes and the eyes of His minions and the downtrodden masses, that which belongeth to others by the sweat of brow and burden of plow shall now becometh the domain of all.

I've said it more than once, and I'll say it more than once again... fuck that little cockwipe excuse of a President. Fuck his liberal socialist agenda and fuck the lot of you who follow his lead like so many grovelling lickspittle minion ilk drek whores.

The end.

 

[Bfgrn]

While I realize that the whole off-topic discussion regarding Medicare and Social Security is purely a deflection to take our minds of the fact that Barack Obama has no more idea how business works in this country than your average 2nd grader, what our resident lefties have failed to note is..... that all those programs are UNSUSTAINABLE in their current form.

So. If these entitlements and welfare programs were actually of any REAL importance to them, why the hell would they vote for a guy who has SAT ON HIS ASS for the last three and a half years without ONE competent idea about what we're gonna do about it?

There's no budget.
There's no reform of entitlements, or even any efforts at reform of entitlements.
They've given us a whole new LARGER entitlement that costs three times what they said it would.
And we're approaching 16 TRILLION in debt, which as I've pointed out repeatedly, will cost us a cool trillion in CASH annually by the end of the decade on our current path.

Face it libs, your guy is a disaster. And here we are, at the brink of another recession and at a time when consumer confidence is shot.... and what's he doing? He's out mind-fucking small business people.

Where did our debt come from? When did massive debt become part of the American economy?

Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!

And where was all this angst and concern about debt from conservatives when Bush and Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for almost a decade??? When Bush was starting a 3 trillion dollar war of ideology in Iraq, there was not a fucking PEEP from you right wingers, just cheers and 'bring 'em on'... And where was this less government mantra? You right wingers LOVED BIG government and government intervention into people lives... the Patriot Act, trashing habeas corpus, the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act.

And what was the concern in the Bush administration about debt and deficits? NONE...Bush's solution was to eliminate the voices of concern.

Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.

The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.

But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.

"Cheney, at this moment, showed his hand. He said to O'Neill: 'You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.' … O'Neill was speechless."

"It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society," says O'Neill. "And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."