WHERE'S THE MIDDLE

[wadestock]

Clinton/Gore represented the middle.

Common sense working for Americans.....

The reduction of the federal government by 15% between 1993 to 1997.
Certain improvements which were dubbed welfare reform.
Family Act and help for working Americans.
Paying down the debt.

etc...etc...you fill in the blanks....it was a good era.
Clinton was so dammed good at it...the other side of the aisle had their heads spinning.

But it spelled doom for the repukes.
Raising the upper rate to 40% meant the potential that the top was being ripped off....a move that could not be tolerated.

Balancing the budget?
Real economic progress turning towards the working middle class Americans?

TILT

They had to get Clinton....one way or another....
Let's try a perjury trap.

And let's give Limbaugh a mouthpiece to climb into the unsuspecting neurons of Americans....make them believe that liberals are the root of all evil.

Bye bye miss...

MIDDLE....

American pie.

Common sense...
And the "American Way"...
Down the tubes...to the benefit of the scummist elitest exploitative upper crazed self-destructive me me me wanna be's.

The country will be gone until the middle returns.

CLARK 2008

[AX10]

1. KICK

:kick:

CLARK 2008

[HawkerHurricane]

2. It always amazed me...

that Bill Clinton, a mushy moderate if there ever was one, was painted as a far left neo-Leninist Socialistic Red Menace by the Reich Wing...

Which let them put the Far Right/Neo-Con/Psuedo-Platonist/Trotsyites of BushCo as the moderate candidate against both Gore and Kerry.

Tell me, how do we get out of the Rabbit hole? Where is the looking glass?

[applegrove]

3. Actually there are tough choices to make. Why Clinton tried for health

care and made welfare reformed. We in the West will not be as rich as we were in the 20th century. You could close your borders to trade and it still would be a long hard slog we face (actually it would be much worse). In the 20th century the USA & Canada didn't have to compete with any country poor, any soviet block country or any european country recovering from the wars.

Now we have to compete with everyone. So it will be a time of hard choices. Universal health care makes sense because it actually is more cost effective and better for productivity (health of workers). So we have to tighten up everything.

I did not say ERASE ALL PROGRAMS - we just have to make sure they really pay off.

That is just the way it is. Unless you want to go back to colonialism.

[wadestock]

5. Preventative care...especially for our kids

is a no brainer.
Yes...the bottom line is we need responsible government to bring along QUALITY driven industries that deliver QUALITY products that all feed into a more efficient corporate America.

It's not so much that we're losing because of competition worldwide...it's more because of corporate America going sour, selling out, not investing in it's workforce and not fully embellishing what Dr. Deming said about quality. We have become a model for INEFFICIENT capitalism....and when it gets this bad....and so economically irresponsible....it stifles itself.

The fix is not that cataclysmic. First raise the upper rate back to 40%, the rich won't suffer as we already know....get back to a balanced budget....business will keep humming along as we've proven before in Clinton/Gore, and start investing money in renewable energies.

Last nite on Air America a brilliant caller proposed that as a replacement for the proposals to just drill anywhere for oil we take just 1% of the defense budget and invest that in renewable energy solutions.

[applegrove]

8. We have to trade. And all the mid sized industries will be gone and those

jobs replaced with small business with much lower profits for people. Hard to be paying payroll taxes when everyone will be working for themselves so the idea that we do not have to share risk across all classes is more important than ever. That is why shared risk programs like health care are needed and yes the rich much pay a proportionally greater portion of taxes. And that means that if people face lower salaries and fight inflation for the stock market - the profits of the stock market do their part in paying for great schools & medicine. Or they will metastisize into the machines some of them already are and become the uber elite and try and control information - the result - dark ages.

Yes corporations need to be rehumanized - at least the ones who put this lot in power. I don't think forcing Ford or Microsoft to choose between the religious right and gays & liberals makes any sense whatsoever.

I hope corporations are waking up - cause it isn't a worthwhile world to live in when Katrinas happen and nobody does anything.

[wadestock]

9. WHOA

Check that.

The rich don't pay ANY proportionate higher amount of taxes....except now up to 35% on the millions they make.

Otherwise...they pay the same as you and I on all the little amounts that you and I make.

To ask the rich to pay up to 40% (as in Clinton/Gore) on their highest earnings could never stifle their riches or big business.

JFK lowered the rate from 90% to 70% and the American capitalistic machine hummed along.

Reagan lowered the rate from 70% to 50% in his first term...and the capitalistic machine hummed along.

But in the second term, the lowering to 30% began an almost irreversible problem in terms of rising debt.

Clinton/Gore tweaked it back to 40% and balanced the budget.

Limbaugh will tell you that the "rich" pay the bulk of taxes...and that's true...it's around 60%....but that's because they have most of the money!!!!!!!!!!!!

[applegrove]

11. Well it depends what you call rich. Don't give me that they pay the

most in taxes. The total utility of the money is close to zero - whereas for a family of 5 on 35 thousand a year - each dollar saved or replaced by program is really big. When you get to the working poor - each dollar is worth millions.

[wadestock]

13. Limbaugh and the living lie machine constantly point out

as part of their supposed anti - "class warfare" argument that the rich pay the most proportionately in taxes.

Don't have the figures right in front of me...but something like the upper 5% pays 50% of the taxes in our country.

But that should be a direct indication to anyone with half a brain that they are profiting most from our capitalistic system.

What you would want to see is actually the MIDDLE benefitting the most on average and paying 50% of the total tax.

Research this and also appreciate why they champion ultimately a flat tax....the ultimate death knell for free enterprise and capitalism.

A flat tax is Bushco on steroids....driving us at warp speed to a squat pyramid system...aka....

USA AMWAY.

[applegrove]

14. I would look further in to anything Limbaugh says. Chances are

he got the figure from a partisan think tank. They are probably including 1/2 the middle class in that number. Don't know.

[seabeyond]

4. rw brother said i hated bush like he hated clinton. i dont hate bush

i oppose everything about bush, his policy, war, what he has done to this country, merging church into state. after telling brother this and that bush is incompetent and has failed all his life, why..... does he hate clinton. the blow job. not going to cut it, bush answered a reporter, what do you and father talk about when you dont talk politics, .... pussy bush says. and he had a mistress up until 1999 a stripper. father had a mistress that traveled europe with him as wife sat in the wh.

so what is it you hate about clinton. i dont want to be clintons friend either, but policy.

there was nothing. nothing. he couldnt come up with any reason he hated clinton, and i could come up with a whole lot of valid reasons bush was bad for this country and had nothing to do with his personal life, though i could go there too.

[wadestock]

6. Let me try and comment this way....

I hear what you're saying.
Part of the inherent frustration lies in how our brains have been rewired to accept the new dysfunctional American business ethic.

We have always had certain illogical kinda off the cuff beliefs about business...for instance, loyalties to GM, Ford, or whatever based on a very small data base of personal goings on. If our minds were much more open and examining of what it takes to make a quality product, and to really appreciate those people and companies that DO create quality products...then we'd be living in a world with much more quality products.

That's how America rose to industrial prominence. We had the ability to recognize a good product, bring it along, and improve it. When you get away from this basic truth and then believe that "good business" is a result of certain individual personalities achieve certain nebulous success oriented milestones then you have entered the twilight zone of a way of business life that has no bearings, no real objectives, and no firm footing on which to progress forward. Market conditions, market exploitation, and maneuvering become your only business.

The point of this is that you can take reasonable people, mix in an understanding of what it might take to make a good product, and then succeed. It's not brain surgery. It simply takes a belief in the product. Clinton/Gore was capable of that...and it has nothing to do with any personal indescretions. They for one had their sights on balancing the budget, paying down the debt, reducing government....and they did it. They succeeded.

Bushco and this entire bad business movement has evolved out of a dysfunctional interpretation of Reaganism....and it represents the worst interpretations possible of capitalism. Yes they are bad people fundamentally. Bad people are generally attracted to bad, exploitative, cheap business strategies. But even more important than that....is the point that as a group....they produce a "bad product".

You see a microcosm of this most likely right where you work. It isn't the product or the ideas that are championed, but whether you walk the walk, talk the talk...how you kiss ass...and whether or not you "believe" in success. It is this kind of empty cronyism that Bushco stands for...and why there is in fact no product of value that emerges when you go down that road.

And so....
The "middle ground"....is really where we all benefit....where the products of quality actually do feed back into the middle. That's the value of effective capitalism....and well running machine that sustains itself....and really brings everyone up....not just the upper 1%.

[HereSince1628]

7. In these parts we call that the hole of the donut.

By the way, the seeds of our sorrows are generally gleaned from the harvest of our joy.

The 90's were not uniformly good and in many ways set the scene for current problems in social programs, education, job-flight etc.

True, many good things happened, but the 1990's as a gilded age was mostly gilded for the affluent.

[wadestock]

10. You've got to be fairly young....

to see it that way.
I'm in my 50s and I saw the 80s as the era of social AND capitalistic unraveling.

The 90s achieved a remarkable REVERSAL of the essential Reagan era theory that "we can grow our way out of debt".

[Just Me]

12. A government and culture that represents the people rather than profits.

The middle is progressing the best of ALL our people. We are worth the investment because the pay-off is enormous.