#93 Sphere:
” We live in the greatest, richest country on earth, yet people who have lost their jobs, and therefore their health insurance and income, are left to die from diseases and conditions that could be treated.”
Do you have some factual examples of this?
Because if anything, extending free medical care to people via the Emergency Rooms, has increased the burden on those of us with health insurance, and also caused many a hospital to close its doors. I could offer California’s sad example of bankruptcy.
“But look around. Is this country really doing well?”
We’re taking a bite out of the fecal biscuit, this is so. In large part this is paying for the excessess of the past 16 years, (since the last recession in 1992).
Capitalism is cyclical by its very nature, it oscillates between booms and busts.
This isn’t something that one can blame a President, from any party, for.
What we CAN blame Presidents for is how they react to the Capitalist cycle. A Depression is a Recession that has been mis-handled.
In 1970, Richard Nixon instituted wage and price controls and deficit spent to continue LBJ’s Wars on Poverty and in Viet Nam, when the Oil Embargo in 1973 hit, the Stagflation Era began.
In 1961 and 1981, Presidents Kennedy and Reagan slashed taxes in the teeth of the recessions that were occurring, and the economy recovered and started growing within two or three years.
In 1992, Bush 41 told us that the going would be rocky, but that the economy would rebound in 18 months or so, and this is EXACTLY what happenned. Clinton, to his credit, embarked on a remarkably prudent fiscal policy of paying down the national debt, and the 1990′s was the result.
In 2001, the dot.com bubble’s bursting, coupled with the 9/11 attacks caused W to slash interest rates and cut taxes. This was done to effect a “soft landing” so that the country would not have had to suffer a recession in addition to the other problems abroad we were facing.
W’s policy, while we can debate the merits of it, effectively caused us to skip a “scheduled recession”, and so the market never really corrected itself.
And now here comes the fellow who claims to have been born in Hawaii, whose response is Johnsonian, not Rooseveltian, (as he would like to claim).
There are very few items in his Stimulus Bill that could be called Capital Improvements,(that just happen to provide a lot of high skilled jobs), but there’s a lot of “Lifestyle subsidies” and “Government Bonuses” for Democratic poilitical constituencies, (or their representatives).
“The left doesn’t only want bigger government. We do believe in the free market. The system creates profits brilliantly. We get that.”
Maybe you “get” it, but your apparent envy is overcoming your reason in understanding it.
Government does not create wealth. Government is a parasite upon the wealth of it’s People.
At it’s best, Government can create the conditions in which wealth can be created, but FAR more often than not, the Government destroys wealth and impedes the market.
You assert without proof that people lose their jobs and are left to die from preventable diseases, as though this is a desirable by-product of a conservative, Business friendly Government.
Let me ask that you answer a few simple questions.
If that were so, who would then be alive to pay taxes? Who would buy Business’ products and services? Who would have the money?
“The unfettered capitalism that led to this country’s economic rise also gave us slavery, and child labor, and brutal working conditions in factories and slaughterhouses and in the mines.”
I would note that those conditions improved, Capitalism DOES evolve.
Henry Ford did not pay his workers the unheard of sum of 5 dollars a day because someone from the Government ordered him to.
He did it so that he could sell Model T’s.
This is 2009, chum, not 1909.
