Posted on 06/11/2006 7:45:06 AM PDT by Xing Daorong
This topic is about the spending policies of our elected politicians.
Reagan advocated smaller government and made good on that promise by busting the leech-like unions, but he spent incredibly outrageous amounts of money for military research, clandestine operations in Nicaragua, and direct military interventions in Grenada, Libya, and Lebanon.
George Bush wants smaller government, but due to events none of us could have foreseen the government's power increased with the Department of Homeland Security being formed and the U.S.A PATRIOT Act (which don't get me wrong I support) being drafted soon after the devastating 9/11 attacks. His plan to reform the dying Social Security System flopped because it was too far ahead of many people's ideals (a temporary bubble of wealth that would soon burst mattered more to big-government liberals obviously) then they could worry about at the time. He hasn't vetoed a single spending bill yet, largely because of Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, but seems overall disillusioned on where to cut programs that aren't working and spending that isn't necessary.
I don't think of Bush as a big liberal spender like people think he is, I think he is merely reacting to the catastrophes which have struck our nation since 9/11 and has tried to keep the economy going after our former president Clinton had rode the Dot Com Boom to re-election and made no economic plans after that to prevent a major downslump. Bush cut taxes and our economy is in fine shape, despite what Newsweek and the New York Times claim.
Bush seems to want to lower spending, and I think he is, but it's still at an unbelieveable level. It just seems like everything the government does today costs billions more than it used to. I don't see many politicians standing up for real conservative economics anymore, I see liberal economics infecting Congress to the point where an unlikely veto from Bush wouldn't make any difference at all.
What do you think?
The Goldwater Doctrine:
"I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.
I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom.
My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them.
It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed in their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden.
I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is 'needed' before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible.
And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' interests, I shall reply that I was informed their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."
- Former Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.), "The Conscience of a Conservative"
Best regards,
That was a refreshing speech by a very forgotten politician, it's a shame Lyndon Johnson won the election, Goldwater could have greatly reduced the government's power before LBJ went and quadrupled it. :(
The modern Presidency is basically a powerbroker position.
He literally buys votes with the coin of the realm-government spending.
Very few votes can be bought within the system for elimination of programs unless there is some equivalent offset ie-if the education bureaucracy thought more money could be made with home schooling you would see the public school budget plummet like a sack of potatos out of a shipyard cargo net.
Best regards,
What makes you think Barry Goldwater is forgotten?
Unfortunately, this is true. So what can be done?
It's a shame isn't it?
Wonder how much longer until this country goes Socialist....
That's the weird thing, you ever notice that in democracies the scale keeps tilting more and more to the left as history progresses? Reagan tipped it back right but only so far until Clinton politics took control. Right wing candidates who actually stick to their philosophy are reviled by the left as well as the 'moderates' in our nation.
All that one needs to look at for proof of this is Europe.
The conservatives I've had the pleasure to meet in my lifetime all remember famous Republicans who really defined political philosophies contrary to the leftists. People like Abraham Lincoln,, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolige, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.
Barry Goldwater could have done great things for this nation but this was the 1960's, the era where if you didn't agree with people who were Socialists borderline Communists, you were a 'close-minded McCarthyist'.
I eagerly await George W's invocation of the Goldwater Doctrine in his next Saturday radio address along with a 10 point program he plans to enact in the time remaining to his administration to celebrate same.
Best regards,
Categorizing people who dissented from Sen. Goldwater's view with pejorative accusations of sympathy for hated foreign ideologies or a loud-mouth senator pandering for the fright vote was entirely wrong in the 1960s. Doing the same today with regard to those critical of this administration's policies - - or a shouting screed by a third-rate author - - is equally inconsistent with fervent, yet enthusiastic, political discussion. The issue cuts both ways however strange as that may sound to many here.
You mention an interesting group as "conservatives". The first two, at least, were considered pretty radical in their time by the "establishment", and Nixon is now considered farther to the left than he was at the time of his presidency.
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