Hey now don't be trashing The MAN - Ronald Wilson Reagan! LOL, seriously, Reagan knew that "Reaganomics" wasn't a great model, he did what he did because he felt it was the right thing to do and he was right. Under Carter, the "grinning jackass from Georgia" as my Dad called him, the US Military had suffered badly and this from a President that was a US Navy officer educated at Annapolis. Look at the situation Reagan found when he took office. The Cold War was still in play and our Military was underfunded. He felt we needed a strong Military given the issues of the day. So he pumped up the Military as a strong deterrent to the former Soviet Union and it prompted the Soviets with their failed economic Socialist model to attempt the impossible .. compete with a free market model. It couldn't, as Reagan knew, and it played a large part in the fall of the Soviet Union. The Marxist Socialist doctrine as an economic model has failed every time. Look no further than Cuba as proof of that. Or Venezuela.
Now look at Bill Clinton. Under his Presidency the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed. That Act's sole purpose was to prevent Wall Street from being Banks, basically. This was a direct result of the 1929 stock market crash where without such regulation Wall Street was playing both sides in effect, just like they did after Clinton unleashed them to repeat their mistakes of greed in the 1920's. What happened? Pretty much the same thing. Clinton can say he didn't actually have any role in the bad decisions Wall Street later made, like bundling all those bad mortgage loans as investments. Whatever, Bill, you let the foxes back into the hen house and guess what? They ate the chickens. Real shocker there eh?
So i disagree with Stevie that Clinton had nothing to do with the current problems, he did. As for Obama, he also had a lot to do with it, largely by filling his staff with competing lines of economic thinkers, which he claimed was part of how Abraham Lincoln put together his cabinet. It might have worked for Lincoln during the civil war but it certainly hasn't worked for Obama. His economic models are just what you'd expect, a confusing contradictory mess. And by the way Obama, Lincoln did that in order to re-unite the country
not run the economy.
Now let's look at George Bush's role is this. While i contend Clinton set the wheels in motion for a lot of the current economic mess by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, Bush did nothing to rein in Wall Street either. The bailout bullshit began under Bush. Could you argue it was too late for anything else by then? Possibly, but i don't agree with this so-called "too big to fail" stuff. The very nature of Capitalism is that good businesses
succeed and bad businesses
fail. what would have happened if the government had let AIG or Lehman Brothers fail? Certainly there would have been some harsh fallout in the short term, perhaps another Great Depression? Maybe, but we're already in the midst of the "Great Recession" aren't we? We did survive the Great Depression so who's to say we
had to bail out these failed businesses just to avoid another one? I think we would be better off letting them fail in the long run, just as the Capitalist model dictates. Why? Because it shows businesses that they don't need to pay for their bad decisions, that the government will bail them out. With OUR tax money. What's their motivation to run their companies properly now? None.
Now let's discuss this "Rich vs. Poor" thing. What would you prefer? A model that does
not allow one person to work hard and become successful so that another person is not poor, comparatively? That model is called Socialism. Forget all this Egalitarianism shit. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia on that ..
Economic Egalitarianism in economics is a state of economic affairs in which
equality of outcome has been manufactured for all the participants of a society. An early example of economic egalitarianism is
Xu Xing, a scholar of the Chinese philosophy of
Agriculturalism, who supported the
fixing of prices, in which all similar goods and services, regardless of differences in quality and demand, are set at exactly the same, unchanging price.
[7]
Do i sometimes rail against those who are far richer than me? yep. Do i sometimes get so frustrated i'd like to "take all their money and give it to the people?" Yep. Would I? Nope. Why? Because i believe in the promise of Capitalism in that you can achieve whatever you work hard for, unlike Socialism which would prevent that. I can't stand people who whine like babies and make excuses on why they aren't rich. Maybe some people are just smarter and more hard working than others. That's life people. The value of human life is equal, the value of people's work ethic and intelligence isn't.
An example is my brother. Is he as smart as me? yeah,
maybe smarter. Is he as successful as me? No, because he's a lazy bum. He never learned that hard work is one of keys of success, he figured, wrongly, that he'd get a free ride in life. He didn't. He never finished college, i did, and i did it the hard way by putting myself thru college on my own. Both of us blew a chance at an education paid for by our Dad, who also put himself thru college and law school the hard way, on his own. And guess what? He reaped the rewards from it and was a successful businessman. Imagine that! At his peak he would have been in the 98.5 percentile of income based on current income rankings. My brother flunked out of college because he thought it would be just like high school where they basically shuffle you thru and he didn't put in the
hard work it required. I flunked out the first time because i had no clear goal at 18 of what i wanted to do, and without that i struggled to do well the first time. my brother also mistook my Dad's success and confused us with the Rockefellers and thought there's be huge trust funds to live on. My Dad was successful, but not
that successful. And he never promised to leave anything to us. It was
his money anyway. Even when we do get what's left of my Dad's estate it won't make me uber wealthy anyway. It'll be a nice windfall but it won't be nearly enough to buy a mansion in Preston Hollow, either. So where do i and my brother rank today? My brother is between 15th to 18th percentile, i'm in the lower part of the top 10 percent, about the 85th percentile based on 2005 data. To him, i might as well be Bill Gates lol. And he resents it to no end. But all he has to do is look in the mirror to see the
real reason he's poor, at 51 years old. Go figure.
