Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Not getting updates. Hope this restarts the thread for me.

I once heard a man describe a coworker as someone who could be replaced with a pile of dead leaves. Hope some leaves land in the WH.

Septembri,

A quote by Benjamin Disraeli, popularized by our own Mark Twain:

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and stastistics."

The liberals can manipulate numbers the same way as the conservatives can.

Can you show me the numbers that prove that the gap between the rich and poor shrank during the Reagan admin? That's more important than the GDP growing...

Cycloptichorn

The gap between the rich and the poor had to have grown during the RayGun administration and ballooned during the bush lite.

the classes are in conflict........

IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of America; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of England. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

Cycloptichorn- Can you show me proof that my post give incorrect statistics?

Instead of BS, take the points I made and rebut them.

The left wing is not bright enough to debate point by point.

Do you deny that my information concerning the GDP is incorrect?

If so, show proof or my point stands.

Do you deny that Capital Spending now constitutes 20% of the GDP?

If so, show proof or my point stands.


Do you deny that Household Wealth in the USA has now passed the 45 Trillion mark?

If so, show proof or my point stands.

I really must inform Mr. Hinteler that the word is spelled superior not superiour. Mr. Hinteler might have been thinking of the French spelling which is
superieur( close but not quite, Mr. Hinteler.

I don't quite know why Mr. Hinteler is so dead set against Judge Richard Posner. After all, he is one of the USA's foremost jurists. I do hope it isn't because he is Jewish!

Settembri --

In another thread, you mention that I didn't answer to this post, so here's my answer. Sorry about the delay.

First of all, Mr. Niskanen is a fine economist, I like the Cato Institute, and I frequently link to its policy analyses myself. But on this specific issue, Mr. Niskanen is hardly an unbiased source. As Mr Reagan's chief economic advisor, he has a strong incentive to make Mr.Reagan's (and his own) track record look good. Did these incentives affect your trust in the Policy Analysis in any way?

Second, let me point you to a table of historical budget data from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. As you see, the tax cuts of both Kennedy and Reagan look a lot smaller when you look at the total amount of taxes, rather than just the top bracket of the income tax like Mr. Niskanen does. If you look at the whole thing, it's perfectly understandable how the normal rate of long-term growth offset the revenue loss from the tax cuts. Your earlier assertion was true in the narrow sense that absolute tax revenues grew after the tax cuts, but that doesn't mean they grew because of the tax cuts.

Third, consider that Bill Clinton raised taxes early in his term. Your supply-side economics would predict that this would make GDP growth cave in. It didn't. Bill Clinton's growth record is at least as impressive as Ronald Reagan's, especially since Ronald Reagan started from a much deeper recession.

Fourth, remember on what supply siders and the Keynesians actually differ. Nobody doubts that you can temporarily boost GDP growth by cutting taxes in a recession. But the the supply siders claim they can do more than that. They claim that cutting taxes boosts long-run growth. This claim can be refuted by subtracting business cycle effects from Ronald Reagan's growth record. Macroeconomists have done it, and you can look at the result in a textbook of your choice (Samuelson/Nordhaus on the left, Mankiw on the right). It turns out that there was no speedup of long-term growth during the Reagan administration.

Thanks Thomas! Regardless of whether or what septembri answers, you've done people like me a service by summarising the arguments like that. Economics have never been my forte (to say the least), so pointers like those are very useful!

Mr. Septembri obviously is not aware that an opening bracket like "(" is to be followed up at some point by a closing bracket, ")". Perhaps Mr. Septembri is as uninformed about the economic arguments as he is about the proper use of punctuation and spelling?

(hehhehheh ... see, I can do it too ... tho I admit, Walter's parody was much better ;-))

Thomas' analyses are truly a joy.

septembri's posts, on the other hand, produce in the reader the effect of diminishing marginal returns -- the more of it you read, the less of it you enjoy.

My advice is to go right past them as quickly as you can.

Yes, thomas' post are consistently careful and consistently gracious.

Yes, thats true - and without a hint of smugness or verbicose generalities, too. A standard we won't be able to meet.

A standard I don't even strive for anymore.

I'm in the new Rush world. Destroy, then rebuild....

septembri, a person I became acquainted with for the first time today, uses the standard operating procedure of conservatives: you don't answer my question.

How tiresome. One reason is they don't accept an answer when they receive one.

Thomas, having read both Samuelson/Nordhaus and Mankiw, I draw rather a different conclusion ... something I'm sure comes as no surprise to you :wink: In short, I disagree; growth following the Reagan Tax Cuts continues to track more or less congruently with the longterm straightline overlay, a circumstance which at first glance would appear to support your contention. However, I find it salient that it does so with a sharp rise countering the accelleratingly anemic performance of the mid-to-late '70's. I believe that shows that absent Reagan's tax cuts, the straightline overlay would have a shallower slope today. It is my interpretation that Reagonomics (along with Reagan's geopolitical achievements) got the US Economy "Back On Track" and in fact set the stage for the unparalleled peacetime expansion of the mid-to-latter '90's ... an expansion the potential of which was squandered and reversed by the disingenuous economic and geopolitical policies of The Previous Administration.

Oh, and I'll join with the others in lauding your manner of discourse here ... it is a delight.

Even if I think your conclusions are wrong much of the time

I only know that my family was flat broke when Reagan took office and we prospered during the 80's moving squarely into the middle class along with a whole bunch of other 'poor' people. The gap between the very poor and the very rich did widen during the Reagan administration but I think the evidence will show that it happened before and since the Reagan administration as well--in other words this is not a phenomenon that can be pinned on any president.

George W. Bush (the elder) raised taxes halfway through his term greatly deepening for the U.S. a worldwide recession. We had started pulling out of it by 1992, but the economy was still sputtering and this cost Bush the election.

The economy continued to sputter along the first two years of Bill Clinton's term and not a whole lot happened. Then in 1994 was the legislative revolution--the GOP took both the House and Senate and immediately pushed through a plethora of reforms. The economy was really taking off then and sustained itself through the remainder of the 1990's. Would that have happened without a GOP controlled congress? I don't know. It was on Clinton's watch, however, and I will give him credit for signing off on the GOP initiatives that most of the Democrats voted against.

Bush the second inherited a pretty good economy that almost certainly would have gotten better except that eight months into it we were attacked by terrorists. 9/11 changed everything.

One thing to remember is that the Carter administration virtually dismantled the U.S. military and it took huge amounts of money to rebuild it during the Reagan administration. The deficits were huge but they didn't hurt us. The payoff was enormous.

A strong military now is also what most of us want and it is having to be rebuilt after eight years of the Clinton administration in which it was allowed to decline. (That is not an accusation. It probably would have continued to decline in the Bush administration too if it hadn't been for 9/11.)

Now at least some of us believe the War on Terror is worth fighting. And I don't believe the military build up and the temporary deficits will hurt us any more than the deficits have hurt us in the past. I would be alarmed only if we were unaware of them and did not have an eye to paring them back down.

The two preceeding posts sound like history as wished for rather than as it was.

During the RayGun administration, the cost of living rose steadily. At the beginning of the RayGun years, a family here in Massachusetts could live on an income of about $25,000 - 30,000 and could buy a house for far less than $100,000.

A family of four with such an income today would be below the poverty level and with the average price of a house in the state hovering around the half million dollar mark, home ownership would be beyond their reach.

Does not sound like progress to me.

Furthermore, instead of limiting their families to one, at most two children, people of all economic levels are breeding shamelessly. That's bad for both the environment and the economy.

But, look how how much more the rich have now. We must feel happy for them - they are just, well, ahhhh, richer!

And we have our new God and King to thank for that - Reagan and Bush. All hail, the God and King have arrived, kneel down, rejoice and be thankful! That is an order.

(Ohhhh, this is so much fun - it feels so good to be on the "right" side!)

Wonder if someone will ask Congress to make RayGun a god?