All Hank, all the time.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by ironweed
Sometimes I doubt my decision to invest my retirement fund exclusively in the fine products issued by the Franklin Mint. But only for a moment. This bubble will burst, mark my words.

did you know (everyone who reads the Sunday NYT say YES) that the owner of the Franklin Mint is the guy who owns the company marketing Poms? also, Poms the health drink- what is the main use? Mixed with vodka- true.

[i was penske]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
did you know (everyone who reads the Sunday NYT say YES) that the owner of the Franklin Mint is the guy who owns the company marketing Poms? also, Poms the health drink- what is the main use? Mixed with vodka- true.

[true story] i once interviewed for an in-house job with the franklin mint. [/true story].

[Tyrone Slothrop]

This puts the importance of liberating Iraq in some kind of perspective: President Bush says the biggest thrill of his presidency was catching a 7.5-pound perch in the stocked pond at his Crawford ranch.

[spookyfish]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
This puts the importance of liberating Iraq in some kind of perspective: President Bush says the biggest thrill of his presidency was catching a 7.5-pound perch in the stocked pond at his Crawford ranch.

The administration is chock full of them sportin' types, you know.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
This puts the importance of liberating Iraq in some kind of perspective: President Bush says the biggest thrill of his presidency was catching a 7.5-pound perch in the stocked pond at his Crawford ranch.

Did he cathc it? Od did he merely liberate from a tyranically watery ecosphere?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
This puts the importance of liberating Iraq in some kind of perspective: President Bush says the biggest thrill of his presidency was catching a 7.5-pound perch in the stocked pond at his Crawford ranch.

W-A-T-E-R

that would be twice the world record is it were a normal NA perch. Maybe he was fucking with the germans?

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
Maybe he was fucking with the germans?

D-E-E-P W-A-T-E-R

The Republican answer is, "Even this stupid article acknowledges that the reporter could not immediately provide English quotes, so they had to 'translate from the German.' Fucking Babelfish. Bush actually said the proudest moment was 'knocking Saddam from his perch.' Duh."

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
W-A-T-E-R

that would be twice the world record is it were a normal NA perch. Maybe he was fucking with the germans?

Are you sure he wasn't just being stupid again? He does that sometimes, remember?

[Gattigap]

In today's WaPo, Sebastian Mallaby declares dead a Republican bromide that's lasted for a generation: that the best way to shring gov't spending is to cut taxes.

That has become a laughable proposition for anyone who's watched the numbers for the last half-dozen years, but as Mallaby notes, some GOPers continue to hide behind this mantra.

• It's a faith that Rauch [in an article in the Atlantic] traces to the presidential debates of 1980. "John tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes," Ronald Reagan declared in reply to the independent candidate, John Anderson. "Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."
  
  Ever since that debate, the "starve the beast" argument has been a favorite of Republicans. It's an expedient argument, of course, since it justifies the tax cuts that voters are assumed to love. But even the most nakedly cynical politicians need policy fig leaves. "Starve the beast" has allowed tax cutters to feel decent.
  
  Or at least half decent. Everybody knows that the Reagan tax cuts did not actually cause spending to come down in the 1980s; most people have surely noticed that the Bush I and Clinton tax hikes were followed by spending constraint in the 1990s; and the Bush II tax cuts certainly have not stopped Congress from spending like a drunken sailor recently. But then the plural of anecdote is not data, and until the starve-the-beast theory is conclusively discredited, tax cutters won't stop hiding behind it.
  
  Well, now it has been discredited. Rauch cites William Niskanen, an economist who worked in the Reagan White House and now chairs the Cato Institute. Niskanen has crunched the numbers between 1981 and 2005, testing for a relationship between tax cuts and government spending, and controlling for levels of unemployment, since these affect spending and taxes independently. Niskanen's result punctures his own party's dogma. Tax cuts are associated with increases in government spending. The best strategy for forcing cuts in government is actually to raise taxes.

(Niskanen's in-yo-face rejection to tax-cutter conservatives can be found here).

I suppose that some aherents to this faith would reply that Starving the Beast would work just fine if we just got some real fiscal conservatives in office instead of this bunch. This is true, I'm sure, just as it's true that once we get those kinks worked out in those tiny antimatter boots, pigs will indeed be able to fly. The point is, regarless of political theory, this theory doesn't work because actual politicians seem congenitally incapable of following it. Really, how many more real-world examples can we afford?

Mallaby continues:

• But the really interesting question isn't why the starve-the-beast theory is 180 degrees wrong. It's how Republicans will react to this finding.
  
  Just consider the events of last week. On Monday the government reported that Medicare's trust fund would run out of cash in 2018, 12 years earlier than was estimated when Bush came to office. It further reported that Social Security's trust fund would run out in 2040, one year earlier than last year's projection. "The systems are going broke," Bush commented, sagely. "And now is the time to do something about it."
  
  So what exactly did Bush do? He pressed Congress to extend his tax cuts, thus depriving the government of money it might otherwise have used to plug the holes in Medicare and Social Security. In a world with a viable starve-the-beast theory, this might have been okay: Tax cuts could be presented as a way to force the government to cut spending and maybe even to reform entitlements. But if that fig leaf is gone, how can the administration feel decent?
  
  Right on cue, the Senate followed up its agreement to extend tax cuts with a $109 billion spending bill, complete with money to compensate New England shell fishermen for a red-tide outbreak. In the wake of Rauch's Atlantic article, the way the president responds to this sort of egregious spending bill is going to be interesting. Will he have the guts to veto them? Or will he stand like the proverbial emperor, naked in the public square?

Sure, it would be nice to dream of Bush (finally) exercising some underutilized Executive power and vetoing a bill that Congress passes, but I'm betting that our improbable 6-year-run of spending accomodation will continue.

Gattigap

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally posted by Gattigap
In today's WaPo, Sebastian Mallaby declares dead a Republican bromide that's lasted for a generation: that the best way to shring gov't spending is to cut taxes.

That has become a laughable proposition for anyone who's watched the numbers for the last half-dozen years, but as Mallaby notes, some GOPers continue to hide behind this mantra.

• It's a faith that Rauch [in an article in the Atlantic] traces to the presidential debates of 1980. "John tells us that first we've got to reduce spending before we can reduce taxes," Ronald Reagan declared in reply to the independent candidate, John Anderson. "Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker."
  
  Ever since that debate, the "starve the beast" argument has been a favorite of Republicans. It's an expedient argument, of course, since it justifies the tax cuts that voters are assumed to love. But even the most nakedly cynical politicians need policy fig leaves. "Starve the beast" has allowed tax cutters to feel decent.
  
  Or at least half decent. Everybody knows that the Reagan tax cuts did not actually cause spending to come down in the 1980s; most people have surely noticed that the Bush I and Clinton tax hikes were followed by spending constraint in the 1990s; and the Bush II tax cuts certainly have not stopped Congress from spending like a drunken sailor recently. But then the plural of anecdote is not data, and until the starve-the-beast theory is conclusively discredited, tax cutters won't stop hiding behind it.
  
  Well, now it has been discredited. Rauch cites William Niskanen, an economist who worked in the Reagan White House and now chairs the Cato Institute. Niskanen has crunched the numbers between 1981 and 2005, testing for a relationship between tax cuts and government spending, and controlling for levels of unemployment, since these affect spending and taxes independently. Niskanen's result punctures his own party's dogma. Tax cuts are associated with increases in government spending. The best strategy for forcing cuts in government is actually to raise taxes.

(Niskanen's in-yo-face rejection to tax-cutter conservatives can be found here).

I suppose that some aherents to this faith would reply that Starving the Beast would work just fine if we just got some real fiscal conservatives in office instead of this bunch. This is true, I'm sure, just as it's true that once we get those kinks worked out in those tiny antimatter boots, pigs will indeed be able to fly. The point is, regarless of political theory, this theory doesn't work because actual politicians seem congenitally incapable of following it. Really, how many more real-world examples can we afford?

Mallaby continues:

• But the really interesting question isn't why the starve-the-beast theory is 180 degrees wrong. It's how Republicans will react to this finding.
  
  Just consider the events of last week. On Monday the government reported that Medicare's trust fund would run out of cash in 2018, 12 years earlier than was estimated when Bush came to office. It further reported that Social Security's trust fund would run out in 2040, one year earlier than last year's projection. "The systems are going broke," Bush commented, sagely. "And now is the time to do something about it."
  
  So what exactly did Bush do? He pressed Congress to extend his tax cuts, thus depriving the government of money it might otherwise have used to plug the holes in Medicare and Social Security. In a world with a viable starve-the-beast theory, this might have been okay: Tax cuts could be presented as a way to force the government to cut spending and maybe even to reform entitlements. But if that fig leaf is gone, how can the administration feel decent?
  
  Right on cue, the Senate followed up its agreement to extend tax cuts with a $109 billion spending bill, complete with money to compensate New England shell fishermen for a red-tide outbreak. In the wake of Rauch's Atlantic article, the way the president responds to this sort of egregious spending bill is going to be interesting. Will he have the guts to veto them? Or will he stand like the proverbial emperor, naked in the public square?

Sure, it would be nice to dream of Bush (finally) exercising some underutilized Executive power and vetoing a bill that Congress passes, but I'm betting that our improbable 6-year-run of spending accomodation will continue.

Gattigap

I'm not going to waste time explaining why this shiite is exactly that. This sentence pretty much sums it up:

"The point is, regarless of political theory, this theory doesn't work because actual politicians seem congenitally incapable of following it. Really, how many more real-world examples can we afford?"

Agreed.

But that doesn't ,mean "Starving the Beast" doesn't work. That means politicians are scumbags. That doesn't disprove the soundness of the "starving the beast" theory. If anything it admits the theory would work, if only we didn't have self-interested politicians left to implement it.

This article is also shiite because it provides no alternative. Whats the option to phony conservatives spending like drunken sailors? Electing a bunch of old line bleeding hearts to spend like drunken sailors?

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This article is also shiite because it provides no alternative. Whats the option to phony conservatives spending like drunken sailors? Electing a bunch of old line bleeding hearts to spend like drunken sailors?

Um, Bill Clinton? Or George H.W. Bush?

Originally posted by Not Bob
Um, Bill Clinton? Or George H.W. Bush?

You need to cite some more recent examples if you want to engage with Sebby. He lives in the moment.

[Spanky]

The @#%#^*# Vice President is coming out to help Pombo in his primary bid. What ever happened to staying above the fray in the primary? In any event, he can't stop the bad press:

We got the endorsement from the San Jose Mercury News: Eat that Dick:

Give the nod to Pombo challengers
REPUBLICAN MCCLOSKEY, DEMOCRAT MCNERNEY WOULD BE WORTHY COMPETITORS IN THE FALL


Even before he became associated with the sleaze surrounding disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, even before he was accused of taking a family vacation on the government's dime and even before a watchdog group called him one of the 13 most corrupt members of Congress, it was clear that Richard Pombo had to go.

The conservative seven-term Republican congressman from Tracy has a record of radical anti-environmentalism that has imperiled the nation's natural resources, is wrong for the country and is out of step with a state that's known for its environmental leadership.

Fortunately, Pombo's record may be catching up with him. He faces serious challenges to his re-election from both sides of the aisle in a race that has drawn national attention. His 11th Congressional District reaches from Lodi in the north to Morgan Hill in the south and Danville in the east.

Former Congressman Pete McCloskey, who represented the Peninsula for eight terms between 1967 and 1983, is challenging Pombo in the Republican primary. At 78, McCloskey appears to have the same energy and conviction of his younger days, when he became a maverick in his own party, protested against the Vietnam War and ran against Richard Nixon in 1972.

He's hoping to bring his party back to the center and fight against the ethical lapses and fiscal recklessness that have tarnished Republicans in Congress. He also vows to be a staunch defender of environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act, which he helped write. Destruction of the ESA has been Pombo's No. 1 mission.

McCloskey admits he exercised poor judgment when he spoke in 2000 to a group that disputes historical facts about the Holocaust. Because of that speech and of his longstanding and blunt criticism of U.S. policy toward Israel, he has been labeled anti-Semitic, a charge that is undeserved.

McCloskey faces an uphill battle, but he's the best choice in the Republican primary.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Not Bob
Um, Bill Clinton? Or George H.W. Bush?

Clinton? He wanted to create a National health care system. the fact that he didn't get to doesn't mean he was crazy for thespending.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
This article is also shiite because it provides no alternative. Whats the option to phony conservatives spending like drunken sailors? Electing a bunch of old line bleeding hearts to spend like drunken sailors?

Split government. Checks and balances, baby.