My state has a law that prohibits any state environmental regulation being enacted that is stricter than minimum federal mandates. Hardly any states had water, air, or mining regulations prior to the cited federal acts. Take away those and a race to the bottom would ensue as states compete for power plants, manufacturing facilities, and the like

Remove all federal funding and see what quality we have left in our schools. Or how many students can afford college without federally supported grants and loans

The internet engineering task force develops and promotes internet standards, and is currently funded by the national security agency. The US government continues to have the primary role in approving changes to the root zone file that lies at the heart of the domain name system.

Perhaps some other government or entity would step in should the U.S. government drop these roles. Perhaps not.

(On Eliminate social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment compensation) Sure it is based on your determination that you know more about the constitution than the Supreme Court does. Who granted you that authority? Why don't we compare what life was like for those in need of those programs back before they existed, when, by your reasoning, everyone was taking such good care of them through charitable giving

I consider myself a progressive

appears you do support some sort of uniform safety regulation for vehicles? Is that specifically mentioned in the constitution somewhere, or you starting to accept there might be a role for federal government NOT explicitly stated there?

Where we actually might agree is that maybe if our government hadn't utilized such flawed foreign policy, particularly under but not limited to Republican administrations, maybe the motivation for 9-11 wouldn't have been there

My grandparents suffered through a Depression without the protections that keep me from having to endure the same horrors today. I believe that the mark of an advanced society is not how easy we make it for the rich to get richer, but how well we care for the least fortunate among us, and how well we protect future generations from short sighted practices of today. That takes an engaged federal government, one that lives by the principles of the constitution but treats it as a living document, not one that limits us to the circumstances of over two centuries ago.

I agree that there is much room for improvement in how our government functions. I disagree that the answer is to revert back to little more than loosely connected independent states

You fail to realize that your state has the right to regulate. If your state has never legally regulated the environment then who's fault it is? It's not mine. And it's certainly not the fault of the rest of the country.

Our federal government spending money on education does not necessarily produce results. Just look at No Child Left Behind as the ultimate example and at the state level look at California, who spends nearly 70% of their budget on education and healthcare, and they are among the bottom of all states in education, while going bankrupt.

There are plenty of ways our government can help students make it through college without throwing tax payer dollars at them.

I consider myself a progressive


In my opinion a much worse label then liberal or left winger.

appears you do support some sort of uniform safety regulation for vehicles? Is that specifically mentioned in the constitution somewhere, or you starting to accept there might be a role for federal government NOT explicitly stated there?


The states can regulate this.

If only Herbert Hoover had practiced non intervention and small government, maybe there never would have been a Depression.

Just look at the states that have the biggest budgets. They are in serious financial trouble. Money given to elected politicians is never spent as well as money you, yourself earned and want to spend.

That's something that perhaps we'll never agree on. But at least my political philosophy suggests that you and I are free to choose our own lives, while yours suggests I should be forced to participate in government programs I disagree with.

The Democrats have ran the house since 2006 and they've done absolutely nothing to stop it, despite complaining about it when it first began under Bush.

My point is that it's not a conservative action to throw ANY tax payer dollars to any foreign nation for any reason.

So then by your defintion John F. Kennedy, LBJ, Harry Truman and FDR were all conservatives then, since they all increased military spending by a huge degree launching wars.

He did cut some taxes, but his increased spending and growth of government are not conservative actions. It would have been fine for him to cut taxes if he had reduced government at the same time. This must be understood.

Obama voted to continue the Patriot act, and guantanamo is NOT closing.

No Child Left Behind" was cosponsored by TED KENNEDY, and it is NOT a conservative action to increase federal spending on education. It is a state issue. You are unfortunately confusing Republican with conservative.

That program caused prescription drug prices to skyrocket, and it involved BIGGER government, not small.

It doesn't add up to "liberal"/Yes it does.

It's not a coincidence that every state going bankrupt also has a state income tax.

This is false. The top five percent of America pays 65% of the taxes our government takes in.

Except for the part where our government CANNOT afford them.

Both SS and Medicare are going bankrupt.

You do realize we have to borrow money from China just to continue running our government, right?

I understand. You're all about America being the policemen of the world. Got ya. And you call yourself liberal?

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Unemployment Compensation does not exist because the courts created them. I said they were unconstitutional. You've provided no information that suggests otherwise.

The internet is provided to the public by the market,

If only Herbert Hoover had practiced non intervention and small government, maybe there never would have been a Depression.

Just look at the states that have the biggest budgets. They are in serious financial trouble. Money given to elected politicians is never spent as well as money you, yourself earned and want to spend.

But at least my political philosophy suggests that you and I are free to choose our own lives, while yours suggests I should be forced to participate in government programs I disagree with.

Seeing as the Depression was primarily caused by a lack of regulation and a free market run amuck (just like today!), what you are saying is completely wrong. A speculative bubble is not a byproduct of "large goverment", nor is it cured by a small one

Really? You do realize that probably the biggest reason for California's meltdown is all the spending mandated by Propositions (which THE PEOPLE voted for) mixed with regulations mandated by Propositions (which...ah never mind) that restrict taxation. A fine example that given the choice, people will have their cake and eat it too. Um, that's US again, THE PEOPLE.

In your definition it seems that "freedom" extends to everything in your domain. You seem accept responsibility just as far. That is, you should be "free" to do whatever you want or can do (within strict constitutional limits) in "your life" and on and with your property. And you would seem to accept all consequences, good or bad, within that space. Any attempt to enjoin you with society at large (like "forrcing" you to pay into a social welfare program) is an attack and diminishment of your "freedom

Please read up on Herbert Hoover and his NOT SO Laissez-Faire way of doing this.

You are helping my example by proving that people do not spend other people's money responsibly.

Since our nation was created and based upon the concept of freedom and liberty, who am I to have these thoughts?

I don't care all the ways you think we should give up liberty for safety.

It's immoral for you or anyone else to initiate force upon me. I don't do it to you or anyone else.

Get these damn liberals off my property, and to stop treading on my rights.

So when people fail, they can use their religious beliefs as an excuse?

Where did you get your "information" about Todd Palin's intelligence?

If Sarah Palin had faded from the spotlight (like the POTUS candidate that picked her has) then the majority of people in this country would care less about what she was doing. Or about her judgment.

You're the one that needs to brush up on their reading. Hoover sat on his hands during the begining of the Depression. And the Great Depression was the result of a speculative bubble bursting- due to a LACK OF OVERSIGHT. (AKA a lack of regulation)

Hoover deeply believed in the Efficiency Movement (a major component of the Progressive Era), arguing that a technical solution existed for every social and economic problem...Hoover tried to combat the Depression with volunteer efforts and government action, none of which produced economic recovery during his term

A dedicated Progressive and Reformer, Hoover saw the presidency as a vehicle for improving the conditions of all Americans by regulation and by encouraging volunteerism. Long before he entered politics he denounced laissez-faire thinking.[22] As Commerce Secretary he had taken an active pro-regulation stance. As President, he helped push tariff and farm subsidy bills through Congress

At the outset of the Depression, Hoover claims in his memoirs that he rejected Treasury Secretary Mellon's suggested "leave-it-alone" approach

Congress approved the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930. The legislation, which raised tariffs on thousands of imported items, was signed into law by President Hoover in June 1930. The intent of the Act was to encourage the purchase of American-made products by increasing the cost of imported goods, while raising revenue for the federal government and protecting farmers. However, economic depression now spread through much of the world, and other nations increased tariffs on American-made goods in retaliation, reducing international trade, and worsening the Depression

To pay for these and other government programs, Hoover agreed to one of the largest tax increases in American history. The Revenue Act of 1932 raised income tax on the highest incomes from 25% to 63%. The estate tax was doubled and corporate taxes were raised by almost 15%. Also, a "check tax" was included that placed a 2-cent tax (over 30 cents in today's dollars) on all bank checks. Economists William D. Lastrapes and George Selgin,[36] conclude that the check tax was "an important contributing factor to that period's severe monetary contraction." Hoover also encouraged Congress to investigate the New York Stock Exchange, and this pressure resulted in various reforms

WE demand that we are protected from unsafe food and products, and that the enviroment is as well. This is not an attack on "liberty"

It does't take any intelligence to understand the smaller the government the better off we are.

July 10, 2009 Fairbanks, Alaska – Governor Sarah Palin’s chief of staff, Mike Nizich, issued the following statement today on the occasion of the 19th ethics complaint being filed against the governor or a member of her staff:

“A week ago today, the governor told Alaskans that she was about to step down as governor in large part because of the campaign of harassment against this office, in which the Executive Branch Ethics Act has been repeatedly abused. Incredibly, since then two more ethics complaints have been filed against the governor, including one today.

“Typically, the first action by these complainants has been an illegal one – to announce the filing of the complaints to the news media, in clear violation of the mandatory confidentiality in the law. Unfortunately, unlike the legislative ethics act, there is no provision in the executive ethics act for a complaint to be automatically dismissed when it is publicized prematurely. Regardless of that, it is breathtakingly hypocritical for anyone to violate the ethics law in the very act of making an allegation against the governor."

“Although the governor would not have thought it possible, the latest complaint rises to a new level of absurdity in alleging that she has been paid for interviews that she has given to the news media. It is amazing to me that anyone could think that, let alone put their name behind it and once again seek to distract state officials and needlessly increase their work load. The state is losing the value of some of its expenditures when public servants are pulled away from important assignments to deal with far-fetched and mean-spirited allegations.”

Governor Palin issued the following statement:

“The only saving grace in this recent episode is that it proves beyond any doubt the significance of the problem Alaska faces in the ‘new normal’ of political discourse. I hope this will be a wake-up call – to legislators, to commentators and to citizens generally – that we need a much more civil and respectful dialogue that focuses on the best interests of the state, rather than the petty resentments of a few.”

Of the ethics complaints against the governor or her staff, 15 have been resolved without any finding of wrongdoing, and four are now pending.

I don't know about any deals, but apparently she is still fighting more ethics complaints!
Governor’s Chief of Staff Releases Statement

Of the ethics complaints against the governor or her staff, 15 have been resolved without any finding of wrongdoing, and four are now pending.

I'm so sick and tired of hearing uneducated left wingers make claims about things they know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT.

Herbert Hoover was only in office for EIGHT months when the stock market crashed

The inaction of the United States government during the 1929–33 slide into the
Great Depression is both astonishing and puzzling when viewed from any of the
perpectives held today. All points of view today hold that governments should strive to
provide a stable environment in which the private economy can operate, and should do
this by keeping some broad nominal aggregate measure of spending or liquidity on a
stable growth path.

This, however, was not the policy followed during the Great Depression.4 The
Federal Reserve did not push reserves into the banking system during the 1929–33
decline. It passively stood by while the nominal money stock fell by a third. The federal govenment did not increase its spending while allowing its tax revenues to fall. Instead, strenuous efforts were made to balance the budget and keep it balanced.
These policies were disastrous. They certainly did not stop the contraction in
economic activity. They may well have severely aggravated it, and presumably played
an important role in making the 1929–41 depression into the Great Depression.

Economic Policy Under Hoover
Throughout this decline—which carried real GNP per worker down to a level 40
percent below that which it had attained in 1929, and which saw the unemployment rise
to take in more than a quarter of the labor force—the government did not try to prop up aggregate demand. The only expansionary fiscal policy action undertaken was the
Veterans’ Bonus, passed over President Hoover’s veto.

Contemplating the wreck of his country's economy and his own political career, Herbert Hoover wrote bitterly in retrospect about those in his administration who had advised inaction during the downslide:

The 'leave-it-alone liquidationists' headed by Secretary of the Treasury Mellonfelt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: 'Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate'.He held that even panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: 'It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people'

But Hoover had been one of the most enthusiastic proponents of "liquidationism" during the Great Depression.

What then /did/cause cause the Great Depression? According to Shlaes, an overheated market, culminating in the October Crash of 1929, had something to do with it. So did bad banking policy and protectionism. "But the deepest problem was the intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace. Government management of the late 1920s and 1930s hurt the economy...

There is very little support for this idea among professional economists. Consult Essays on the Great Depression by Ben S. Bernake, for example, and you will learn that a majority of macroeconomists have concluded in recent years that prolonged adherence to the gold standard played a dominating role in determining the worldwide monetary contraction of the 1930s. "We do not yet have our hands on the grail by any means," he writes, but countries that left the gold standard early were able to reflate their monetary supplies and price levels, while countries that remained on gold were forced into further deflation. In other words, some approaching a consensus exists among economists that poorly-designed institutions and short-sighted policies were at the heart of the Great Depression. That the understanding of these mechanisms is widely believed to have improved a great deal since then accounts for the appointment of Bernanke, a leading scholar of the mechanics of the Great Depression, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

But these statements about Hoover provide a grossly distorted view of history. In contrast to George W. Bush, who, as the Yale historian Beverly Gage has said, "stood by and didn't forge a clear direction" as the housing market collapsed around him, President Hoover moved in unprecedented ways to cope with economic calamity. Two days after entering the White House in March 1929, Hoover, who for years had been warning about "the fever of speculation," exhorted Federal Reserve officials to rein in brokers and investment bankers. Following the Black Monday stock market crash that October, he summoned leaders of industry and finance to the White House, where he implored them to maintain wage rates; he urged Congress and state and local governments to accelerate public works spending; he prodded the Federal Reserve Board to expand credit; and he encouraged a newly created Federal Farm Board to bolster crop prices.

So conspicuous was the activism of a man reputed to be a do-nothing president that some historians perceive Hoover to be the progenitor of the New Deal. But that view is absurd. Even during the first two phases of the Depression, Hoover exhibited an almost pathological fear of granting federal relief to the impoverished. By the time the Depression had entered its third phase--the banking crisis of his last weeks in office--he had become a prisoner of economic orthodoxy, obsessed with balancing the budget.

Indeed, Hoover does resemble Bush in a number of regrettable ways. He was stubborn and often myopic. He rejected counsel that did not accord with his misconceptions, and he deceived himself that conditions were far better than they were. He agreed to a massive federal program only after a long period of resistance, and he appointed men to administer it who had small sympathy for government intrusion into the private sector. He favored aid to financial institutions, but not to the victims of hard times."

"Still, it's unfortunate that commentators and politicians are employing "Hoover" as an epithet for inaction. ...

[I]ntellectual coherence is not the purpose of Shlaes's project. The real point is to recreate the political mythology of the period. It does not matter that Shlaes heaps scorn on Roosevelt for doing things that liberals also scorn. Anything that tarnishes his legacy, she seems to think, tarnishes liberalism by association...."
-snip-


http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/jonathan-chait-on-new-deal-denialism.html

And, to be brief, those taxes that were raised (Revenue Act of 1932) were in response to the wholesale slashing of them that occured under Coolidge's watch (again, same Treasury Sec., Andrew Mellon)- an inarguably CONSERVATIVE policy. Which produced the predictable deficits. So, in the name of balancing the budget- again, CONSERVATIVE policy- the taxes were raised in 1932.




First of all, you clearly have no appreciation of the word "liberty". It certainly does not mean "make me do something I don't want to", which is kind of your chief, and immature, complaint. WE ALL HAVE TO PARTICIPATE IN 'PROGRAMS' WE DON'T WANT TO. ALL OF US. From fifth graders doing homework to paying parking meters....having to do things we "disagree with" is a staple of LIFE. The absence of "liberty" exists when you have absolutely no say in the process (like participation in goverment, ability to vote) and no outlet for protest. Goverment programs that majorities, however they are construed, want and the according taxes levied to pay them are not "attacks." Grow up- and face up to the fact you are FAR from the only "educated" person here (and it's the "left" that keeps out-arguing you).

Seeing as the Depression was primarily caused by a lack of regulation and a free market run amuck (just like today!)

Grow up- and face up to the fact you are FAR from the only "educated" person here (and it's the "left" that keeps out-arguing you)

Herbert Hoover, elected president in 1928, was a doctrinaire, laissez-faire, look-the-other way Republican who clung to the idea that markets were basically self-correcting. The truth is more illuminating. Far from a free-market idealist, Hoover was an ardent believer in government intervention to support incomes and employment. This is critical to understanding the origins of the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt didn't reverse course upon moving into the White House in 1933; he went further down the path that Hoover had blazed over the previous four years. That was the path to disaster

You do realize that probably the biggest reason for California's meltdown is all the spending mandated by Propositions (which THE PEOPLE voted for) mixed with regulations mandated by Propositions (which...ah never mind) that restrict taxation

You're a lunatic if you think you or anyone else has out argued me in any form.

It's only a matter of opinion, only leftists (in particular liberal professors) push revisionist history upon the people in regards to the Great Depression. But the facts of the Great Depression cannot change. FDR basically continued the same thing that Hoover had done, causing the Depression to worsen and last longer.

The view that the New Deal was too small and accomplished little, that only WWII ended the Depression, is very widely held. But it is not correct. It is based on a mis-reading of reconstructed unemployment statistics from that time, which treat the workers actually employed by the New Deal as though they were unemployed. Which they were not.

In fact, the New Deal accomplished a huge amount, both in specific construction projects and in providing employment to the American people

At such a moment, it is imperative to expose a dangerous popular myth regarding the efficacy of President Roosevelt’s actions: that it was not the programs of the New Deal, but only the placing of the nation on a wartime footing years later, that restored the health of the nation’s economy.

This belief, though widely held, cannot stand up to even the most basic economic analysis. Yet the mainstream corporate media, which abound with anti-government ideology, seek to reinforce this myth.

The basic economic facts from the 1930s—according to the Department of Commerce, the Federal Reserve, and other official sources—are fundamentally different from the unsupported claims put forward by Shlaes and prominent in popular myth. The monthly data for industrial production show a near three-year collapse under President Hoover, ending when FDR came to office in March 1933. Production rocketed by 44 percent in the first three months of the New Deal and, by December 1936, had completely recovered to surpass its 1929 peak.

Unforunately only a government must control things liberal could ever actually believe that lack of government is what caused economic problems. Our federal government really is not supposed to run the economy. But why get all Constitutional, after all...what does the Constitution matter to a modern day liberal?

Your head is in the wrong place. Almost 70% of California's budget is spent on healthcare and education. (68.1% to be exact) Yet they are 26 billion in the hole. You know what we need? More federal government spending on healthcare and education, so we can bankrupt America just like California.

Liberals want to live in a fantasy land Democracy that doesn't even closely resemble the United States.

You define Socialism as how much of the economy the government owns. When Obama went into office it was 33%, after the stimulus it went to 40%. After healthcare reform it will be 46%. Germany is 47%.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2009020603/fdr-failed-myth
(complete with charts showing how well the New Deal worked, until it was trimmed in 1937).

Oh those facts gotta hurt (and that was after searching for a minute). The links I've put up demolish your statements, but go on- you just keep on telling me how wrong they are (though you haven't shown otherwise).

Oh well, just out-argued you again....