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The Emperor Fabulous
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Apolyton's Resident Actor-in-Training
Aug 1999
time: 00:36
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 21-05-2004 12:00
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#1
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When will moderate Republicans revolt against the Administration?
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Remove this text
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As I speak, there is great worry among moderate Republicans regarding the immense Bush tax cuts along with the increasing public unrest and instability with the Iraq occupation.
Look at the news today:
quote:
WASHINGTON - Republicans retreated Thursday and decided to postpone a Senate vote on their $2.4 trillion budget until at least next month, averting a certain defeat by party moderates demanding curbs on future tax cuts.
The decision was an election-year embarrassment for both the Republicans who control Congress and President Bush. It came just hours after Bush met privately with GOP lawmakers at the Capitol and urged them to push the 2005 budget through the Senate.
The House approved the budget, a compromise between the two Republican-run chambers, on Wednesday by a 216-213 vote. |
The Republicans barely mustered enough support in the House and saw sure defeat in the Senate. Asked what might make them (the moderates) change their minds, famed moderate Sen. John McCain joked, "Some of us could get killed in tragic accidents."
This budget gave great increases to Administration darlings defense and anti-terror while ALSO giving a portion of Bush's tax cut, creating a historical 387 BILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT. For the supposed "CEO of the White House," he sure knows how to run "company" profits into the ground.
Couple this with recent accusations by Republican leaders of McCain not really being a Republican shows that there is a line being drawn in the sand within the Party, which could only lead to a greater line between fervent Bush supporters and those moderate conservatives who are unsure about the current state of US affairs both home and abroad. It seems the only thing that they can agree on is that gay marraige is bad and Saddam was even badder.
Unfortunately, the Democrats aren't using this decrease in support for the President to their advantage. They have squandered numerous opportunities to gather centrists and swing votes against the Administration. Any change in party politics would surely have to come with a challange that has more of a theme than "lets put Bush back in Texas." Democrats as a whole aren't ready for that, as evidenced by Kerry's overwhelming primary victory and the sudden collapse of the Dean campaign.
What, then, will it take for the GOP moderates to say enough is enough?
Last edited by The Emperor Fabulous on 21-05-2004 at 12:06
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Oerdin
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of Internet Music.
Sep 2001
time: 21:36
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I would cut alot of the military's golden gooses which aren't needed. For instance are two new Air Superiority fighters really needed when one could do the job? Do we really need the same number of officers as in the cold war when the military size has been reduced so much? Ending farm subsidies is another excellent cut as is most of the rest of the corporate welfare.
I find the government practice of "spend it or lose it" to be especially wasteful. It results in every agency spending all of its extra cash by December 31st whither they need to or not. A better practice would be to give managers and workers a bonus if they improve efficency by cutting spending while maintaining or improving opporations. This will help to farret out wast and decrease government spending. Merging the various competing health care programs into one large program would eliminate alot of middle management also cutting out a few of the 7 or 8 military command layers would help as well. I'm sure they could function with 4-6 levels instead.
Making it easier to hire and fire federal workers will help to decrease bloat in the work force. Making the government (military especially) buy off the shelf civilian items where ever possible would save a ton. An example is the automatic transmitions on humvees; the military specified a transmition without a "park" position in order to save money but automakers only make transmitions with a park. That means a new transmition had to be specially designed and when all of the costs were added up the worse transmition actually cost more money then the better transmitions already availible on the market.
I would ideally like to see an across the board cut in all programs in order to balance the budget. Sure, lots of good programs would be cut but it is insane to spend so much more then you make.
Last edited by Oerdin on 21-05-2004 at 19:47
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Jon Miller
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
What would you cut in government spending? The biggest item in the budget is the military. I'm all for cutting that. |
have you ever looked at the federal budget?
no it is not
JM
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chegitz guevara
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Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:36
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quote:
Originally posted by Oerdin
Greenspan has done an excellent job. He is quit possibly the best federal reserve chairman ever. |
The man who stayed too long
Don't believe the headline writers -- higher interest rates won't beat inflation. But Alan Greenspan's successor might.
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By James K. Galbraith
May 20, 2004 | Alan Greenspan plays the role of economist, on TV especially, better than any public official who ever lived. But that doesn't mean he is one.
Here is a man who spent the first half of his central-banking career fighting an inflation that did not exist. In so doing, the chairman of the Federal Reserve triggered the stock market crash of 1987, the recession of 1990-1991 and a "preemptive strike" on the dead beast in 1994. He had one period of glory, the late 1990s, when by doing nothing for four years he managed to bring on full employment without inflation. This was against the almost-unanimous received wisdom of the "real" economists, it should be said, and for this Greenspan should always be honored.
But then he blew it. He knew that the Internet bubble was getting out of hand. He held the power to do something about it without raising interest rates, but he declined to act. Let me quote myself here, speaking at the White House Conference on the New Economy in early April 2000:
"For its part, and instead of setting off to fight an inflation that is a pure product of academic imaginations, the Federal Reserve Board could control margin lending. Raising margin requirements is the direct approach to a stock bubble, more targeted than raising interest rates and more effective than jawboning the lenders. If a crash comes, sooner or later, a failure to have acted on margins will weigh on the record, and not for the first time."
Instead, just before and even after the Internet crash, Greenspan raised interest rates -- unsettling the markets and hitting hard at presidential candidate Al Gore. It was the wrong policy, attacking an inflation for which by then not a shred of evidence remained. And then, as the markets tumbled, Greenspan did nothing for six months. Only in December -- just as George W. Bush was anointed -- did he begin to cut rates. And while that surely helped soften the slump, allowing consumers to continue to borrow and spend through the Bush years, it came too late to save the "new economy" from a fiasco costing millions of jobs.
Greenspan has done two other key favors for Team Bush. In 2001, he famously spoke against his own convictions, expressed privately to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, that without triggers making them conditional on the vanishing surplus, the Bush tax cuts were "irresponsible." (Now he denies having said this, but there is no reason to believe him.) And in recent weeks he has tried to slit the throat of the Social Security program, calling for benefit cuts while supporting making Bush's tax cuts permanent. John Edwards correctly called this an "outrage" at the time, and John Kerry said, "We're simply not going to do it." But Greenspan is a stalking-horse for the next term of President Bush.
Chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System is truly a wonderful job. Not only is it at the center of power, money, prestige and mystery, but the occupant can do no wrong. He is always praised for the good times, never blamed for the disasters. Nowhere else in American public life is there a position so similar to that of the pope. Or, perhaps, to the president of Mexico, back in the old days: a high priest while in office -- and a complete nonentity as soon as the sash is removed.
Greenspan knows this, of course. For what other reason would he, at 78, choose to linger on in his marble palace? He has survived, after all, the Internet bubble and crash, and four years of stagnation since then. We are in that brief, happy moment that follows the onset of war and that often precedes elections: The country's growth rate is fairly high, and even employment has been rising these past two months. Now, for the first time since Greenspan was last reappointed in 2000, retirement would not imply admission of defeat.
Not only this, but the future isn't rosy. High oil and gas prices are percolating through our structure of costs, generating low-grade but perceptible systemic inflation. The dollar continues to fall against the euro. Meanwhile, China is quite sensibly converting some of its dollars into a strategic petroleum reserve. This and other stockpiling will work to keep oil prices up (always allowing for that promised gift from the Saudis of a few months' price cut just before the election) while further driving the dollar down.
Greenspan is already telling us, as clearly as he ever does, that the Fed will shortly repeat the mistakes of the last oil price shock, back in the 1970s. Faced with inflation -- even just a small amount -- it will raise interest rates. This is called "fighting inflation." The headline writers will say so endlessly, until you almost think it is true. But the effect is just the reverse. As higher rates drain funds from many companies, they will respond by raising their prices even more. Only much later, when the effect of high interest rates is to clobber demand, growth, employment and commodity prices, will inflation finally decrease.
Stock prices rose in 2003 in part because the dollar was falling. Hence U.S. transnational corporations could convert their euro earnings into more dollars, making their earnings look terrific. (No doubt, the administration's cutting the tax rate on dividends also helped.) A rise in rates and the dollar will unravel this effect. And higher rates may also hit the banking sector, depreciating banks' assets (including mortgage-backed securities) while increasing their costs. Will banks respond, as they did in 1994, by increasing their lending? It's doubtful: Pent-up demand for new loans does not appear to be there, as it was 10 years ago.
The outlook, therefore, isn't for another noninflationary boom. It's for stagflation -- the combination of low performance and rising prices some of us dimly remember from the Vietnam War. Thanks to Iraq and his own longevity, Greenspan is now likely to go out on a sour note: the man who stayed too long.
Greenspan will probably retire in 2006, according the arcane rules governing his tenure. But there is one good thing about this reappointment now. It means that President Kerry will be able to place his own man or woman in the job relatively early in his term. But then Kerry will still face the dilemmas Greenspan bequeathed: How to restore the tax system Greenspan helped unravel. How to protect Social Security from the unrelenting Cassandras of whom Greenspan is the ringleader. And how to maneuver between the devil of stagflation and the deep sea of a sinking dollar.
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November 2004. 
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