What Bush Got Right
For the next president, simply reversing this administration's policies is not the answer.
sketchtrack said:It is kind of funny to think Bush did well protecting us from Terrorism because the biggest terrorist attack on the U.S. in history was during his term. It has been shown that if they had their stuff together it could have easily been prevented.
Gokul43201 said:This is a tiring. You can disagree with the US Supreme Court, but that's just your opinion.
For more on what GOOD GWB has done, I agree with much of what's in this article by Zakaria:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151731/page/1
WheelsRCool said:Much of the planning for 9/11 took place during the 1990s. I would like to have seen people's reaction if Bush had announced, right upon entering office, "We believe the United States is wide open for a large-scale terrorist attack, so I'm enlarging our intelligence services a good deal, enacting a surveillance program, and the Patriot Act, etc..." many think that is too much even after 9/11. Imagine the thinking if he'd done such a thing prior to it, when something like 9/11 was considered unfathomable (if he would have even had the time, remember he entered office January 2001) and 9/11 ended up never managing to occur.
WheelsRCool said:Much of the planning for 9/11 took place during the 1990s. I would like to have seen people's reaction if Bush had announced, right upon entering office, "We believe the United States is wide open for a large-scale terrorist attack, so I'm enlarging our intelligence services a good deal, enacting a surveillance program, and the Patriot Act, etc..." many think that is too much even after 9/11. Imagine the thinking if he'd done such a thing prior to it, when something like 9/11 was considered unfathomable (if he would have even had the time, remember he entered office January 2001) and 9/11 ended up never managing to occur.
Thanks for the link Gokul! That was a really informative and useful article.Gokul43201 said:http://www.newsweek.com/id/151731/page/1
WheelsRCool said:I wouldn't say they "knew" per se of 9/11, more that there were a lot of indicators at the time, but not enough people paying attention.
WarPhalange said:Bush was shown the indicators and either didn't think it was a big deal, ignored it, or didn't even read it in the first place.
That is false, crackpottery.sketchtrack said:They knew that an attack using our own planes against us was going to be attempted and yet did nothing about it.
Anyone serious about preventing mass murder. And more than just paper planning occurred prior to the Bush administration; the first hijackers entered the US in January 2000 and started flight training in 2000.Who cares if the planning happened before he was in office.
The original point was that the intelligence community was fractured and uncooperative amongst itself making the intelligence process ineffective especially in areas where international intelligence and domestic law enforcement intersect. I make no comment (here) about the actual effect of the P.A., just the original point.What is the point of having a patriot act if you already have the intelligence to stop terrorism but don't use it?
Like I've pointed out repeatedly before, cutting tax rates does not make tax revenues go up, it makes tax revenues go down. What does go up is the realization of capitals gains taxes, but that's only in the short term and is completely meaningless in the long term.WheelsRCool said:The deficit shrank in 2007 from what it appears, but perhaps because of the housing bubble? (it will probably enlarge now). However, I agree on the spending habits. The Republicans could likely have kept the deficit a lot smaller if they hadn't gone on such a wild spending spree. A temporarily increased deficit, to cut taxes, I think is okay, if government is truly reigning in spending at the same time, but when they openly go and spend so much money, that is wrong.
A true Republican, even if they cut taxes and tax revenues start going up highly, still should have the discipline to reign in spending as much as possible.
My point was a statement of fact (just as yours was), not an argument of reason. But to answer your question, here's a reason: "protecting" America can make the globe more prone to terrorism, if that protection involves unjustified invasions of other countries that live on the same globe.How does protecting America make the rest of the globe more prone to terrorist attacks?
I guess it's okay to have the United Nations so long as it only infringes on other countries' sovereignties.It also did not demand the same from countries such as China and India, which are huge releasers of carbon. Kyoto called for some severe carbon constraints on American industry and would have also made America answerable to the United Nations, infringing on our national sovereignty.
I honestly can't fathom the level of ignorance required for this whole pre-9/11 mindset business. Anyone that talks of a pre-9/11 mindset is essentially admitting to being nothing more than a Neanderthal with a really good tailor and hairdresser. Did these morons in the WH really think we were protected by oceans?! Really, you ought to be able to impeach them for just saying something like that.Well the thing is, that was before 9/11 occurred. Things changed.
That has to be a joke! Really, what Nixon did to the reputation of the WH was probably lame compared to the destruction caused by Bush.And I think he did bring back some integrity to the White House.
So what? Bush also spent more on stem cell research than any previous president. And people have been talking about preventing disease since the Ancients.I wouldn't say so necessarily. It would mean he has tried more than other Presidents to aid in developing new forms energy. Politicians have been talking about dependence on foreign oil and so forth all the way back to Jimmy Carter.
It is a difficult issue, no doubt.I really don't know where to stand on the issue of illegals. On the one hand, they are illegal, and I don't think they should get things like education, healthcare, etc...off the back of the taxpayer who struggles to afford these things; on the other hand, I think they do lower prices for things like food and so forth by providing cheaper labor (however certain companies have been found to be abusing them as well, which isn't good).
Also, it's not like we can just round up these millions of illegals and ship them out of the country.
So I have mixed feelings about the issue.
Get your facts right. The average Indian emits less than a tenth of the CO2 that the average American emits. And a decade ago, that ratio was close to a thirtieth. India's per capita emission rate is currently even below the global average.WheelsRCool said:It also did not apply to China and India, two enormous CO2 emitters.
The overturn said nothing about the legality of the wiretaps. It only ruled that the ACLU specifically did not have the legal standing to sue.The ACLU, in order to challenge the whole thing, had to go and get a judge named Anna Diggs Taylor, a Carter appointee and very Leftist judge, to rule against it, and her ruling was then overturned by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Absolutely not true. If it were, Congress wouldn't have had to pass a new law (S.1927) to make the wiretapping program legal. Bush's argument all along has been that his Executive powers during wartime supercede any requirements to follow the FISA law.WheelsRCool said:It isn't "warrantless wiretapping" from my understanding. It is a foreign surveillance program that intercepts international signals. It isn't as if the government is illegally wiretapping its own citizens. The President went through all the proper means to enact such a program, it was challenged by the ACLU, and held up by the court system.
You are wrong, and the Supreme Court said so June 29, 2006.I would say waterboarding is legal when applied to terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay; I do not believe that terrorists are subject to the rules of the Geneva Convention.
The question is not about whether it should matter or not. The question is about whether it is legal or not. You brought up the legality issue, not I.*What should it matter when dealing with terrorists?
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court called BS on this one too, on three different occasions, I think (most recently in Boumedine v. Bush, a couple months ago).These are captured terrorists, not ordinary U.S. citizens. They are not subject to the same rights as American citizens.
Clarke said:'Extraordinary renditions', were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgment of the host government…. The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, 'That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ***.'
That needs to be qualified, even for only wage taxes, perhaps you already have elsewhere. Obviously neither the 0% or 99% rate extremes are optimal for revenue.Gokul43201 said:Like I've pointed out repeatedly before, cutting tax rates does not make tax revenues go up, it makes tax revenues go down.
No, as that short term revenue is now in the treasury, the time value of money means it is not meaningless even in the long term. That is, revenue taken today is worth more than cap gains revenue that might fade in the future.Gokul43201 said:What does go up is the realization of capitals gains taxes, but that's only in the short term and is completely meaningless in the long term.
Perhaps. Or, given 9/11 one might have thought the economy, already ailing from the dot com bubble collapse, might have continued declining into a full fledged depression.Gokul43201 said:Furthermore, for all the insane tax cutting from the Bush terms, you'd think we would have the highest growth rate and job creation rate ever. ...
Of course I mean in the context of the prevailing tax rate. Yes, if we were taxing near 90%, a cut in tax rates would give rise to an increase in revenues. But we are not on that side of the Laffer curve. There have been reports by the CBO, the President's CEA and I think the OMB, who all concur with this. I provided links in the hate Obama thread.mheslep said:That needs to be qualified, even for only wage taxes, perhaps you already have elsewhere. Obviously neither the 0% or 99% rate extremes are optimal for revenue.
And why might it fade in the future, instead of grow?No, as that short term revenue is now in the treasury, the time value of money means it is not meaningless even in the long term. That is, revenue taken today is worth more than cap gains revenue that might fade in the future.
That would really have debunked the idea that our economy is fundamentally strong, if a single event like 9/11 can send it into depression. Besides, what kind of depression could it possibly be that a couple wars wouldn't fix?Perhaps. Or, given 9/11 one might have thought the economy, already ailing from the dot com bubble collapse, might have continued declining into a full fledged depression.
I was accepting as true for the moment that the revenue from cap gains tax cuts would vanish in the long term, for whatever reason.Gokul43201 said:And why might it fade in the future, instead of grow?
9/11 was a single, extraordinary event, far different from, say, the 70's OPEC oil embargo. No nationwide stoppage occurred ala week long airlines shutdown because of the oil embargo. Their was the possibility at the time that people would just hunker down and start hiding money under the mattress. Move away from cities (my wife talked it up), etc. I recall hearing a lot conversations along those lines and amazingly I think its mostly forgotten now. A couple more attacks might have reached that tipping point, who knows.That would really have debunked the idea that our economy is fundamentally strong, if a single event like 9/11 can send it into depression. Besides, what kind of depression could it possibly be that a couple wars wouldn't fix?
You think it's amazing that it's forgotten now rather than it being amazing how people tend to overreact (we had a recession in the 70s, not a depression)?mheslep said:9/11 was a single, extraordinary event, far different from, say, the 70's OPEC oil embargo. No nationwide stoppage occurred ala week long airlines shutdown because of the oil embargo. Their was the possibility at the time that people would just hunker down and start hiding money under the mattress. Move away from cities (my wife talked it up), etc. I recall hearing a lot conversations along those lines and amazingly I think its mostly forgotten now.
Aren't most of the folks doing the work "over there"...us?The wars, though costly in many ways, are not much of a stimulus seen historically, Iraq spending as a percentage of GDP is a fraction of WWII and even Vietnam. Iraq spending is still dwarfed on a yearly basis by entitlement spending (SS, medicare, medicaid, etc). In any modern US war the money is mostly going 'over there' and not to some massive retooling of the domestic economy to build B27's and P51s.
Both points are untrue, and have been debunked repeatedly. Lowering taxes actually lowered revenues and the loss of revenues from tax cuts overshadowed the increase in spending on domestic programs.wasteofo2 said:Lowered taxes to a point that it actually raised Federal tax receipts. This benefit was offset by out-of-control spending, leading to debt which is just a tax on the future.
(see Figure 3)Several major pieces of legislation—the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA), and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA)—all lowered individual income tax liabilities between 1994 and 2004.
The new Congressional Budget Office budget projections released today show that the nation faces a fourth consecutive year of substantial budget deficits. Some seek to portray “runaway domestic spending” or growth in the costs of entitlement programs as the primary cause of the shift in recent years from sizeable surpluses to large deficits. Such a characterization is incorrect. In 2005, the cost of tax cuts enacted over the past four years will be over three times the cost of all domestic program increases enacted over this period.
Yes, smart people like the President's Council of Economic Advisers.WO2 said:In defense of the idea that lowering taxe rates can't raise tax receipts, it's surprising that such smart people would deny this.
Eakin was Chief Economic Adviser for GWB and Director of the Congressional Budget Office.McCains main finance advisor had this to say:Douglas Holtz-Eakin concluded the session responding to a question on whether the Bush tax cuts of 2001 pay for themselves. “They don’t pay for themselves,” said Holt-Eakin. “No tax cut pays for itself.”
Virtually every economics Ph.D. who has worked in a prominent role in the Bush Administration acknowledges that the tax cuts enacted during the past six years have not paid for themselves--and were never intended to. Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers from 2003 to 2005, even devotes a section of his best-selling economics textbook to debunking the claim that tax cuts increase revenues.
This is called the Laffer curve. The US, with its relatively low tax rates, has been shown to live on the left half of the Laffer curve, not the right half. In this regime, raising tax rates raises revenues.WO2 said:If the government taxes people at 0%, the government makes no money. If the government taxes people at 100%, they make no money, because who is going to go to work and hand over 100% of their paycheck? So then, there's some level between 0 and 100% that's optimal for maximizing tax recepits. It probably isn't 1%, and it probably isn't 99%, but it's hard to know exactly where it is in that mid range.
Laffer said:The Laffer Curve should not be the reason you raise or lower taxes
The US corporate tax rate of 35% is not low relative to other nations, and that is just federal collection. Ireland is 12%, even the UK is lower at 30%.Gokul43201 said:.. The US, with its relatively low tax rates, ...
mheslep said:The US corporate tax rate of 35% is not low relative to other nations, and that is just federal collection. Ireland is 12%, even the UK is lower at 30%.
True. To my knowledge, there are only a handful of countries (Canada and Japan, among them, I think) that have higher corp. tax rates.mheslep said:The US corporate tax rate of 35% is not low relative to other nations, and that is just federal collection. Ireland is 12%, even the UK is lower at 30%.
Have you noticed that due to targeted tax credits, most US companies pay NO taxes? It's been in the news a bit lately, though if you only watch FOX you might have missed it.mheslep said:The US corporate tax rate of 35% is not low relative to other nations, and that is just federal collection. Ireland is 12%, even the UK is lower at 30%.
I heard something on the radio last week (on NPR, presumably), but never followed up.turbo-1 said:Have you noticed that due to targeted tax credits, most US companies pay NO taxes? It's been in the news a bit lately, though if you only watch FOX you might have missed it.
Thing is, with the complex array or credits, subsidies, and other government aid, it's hard to "calculate" an effective corporate tax rate. I would think, however, such a number should be easily extractable from IRS data (probably even from that same GAO study).(AP) Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.
...
The GAO study did not investigate why corporations weren't paying federal income taxes or corporate taxes and it did not identify any corporations by name. It said companies may escape paying such taxes due to operating losses or because of tax credits.
...
More than 38,000 foreign corporations had no tax liability in 2005 and 1.2 million U.S. companies paid no income tax, the GAO said. Combined, the companies had $2.5 trillion in sales. About 25 percent of the U.S. corporations not paying corporate taxes were considered large corporations, meaning they had at least $250 million in assets or $50 million in receipts.
WheelsRCool said:Not in the United States. There have been plenty of attempts though.
WheelsRCool said:No one can know for sure, but I think it would have come out by now if he was.
russ_watters said:I thinik by "us" he meant people in the United States. And it is a fact that there has been much less in the past 7 years than in the previous 7 years. In particular, zero attacks by al qaeda.
Here's a list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents
Another list, only to 2003:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/pubs/fs/5902.htm
List of thwarted attacks:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,335500,00.html
So really there are only two possibilities here: either we've been spectacularly lucky or the ant-terror policy (ie, the DHS) has been very succesful.
Please cite one.Mental Gridlock said:I know what he means by "us" as in people in the United States, he claimed there were no terrorist attacks against people in the US since 9/11 and that is completely false because there have been plenty.
yesYour lists are showing international terrorism all over the world. As far as terrorist attacks within the US borders, were there really less of them in the last seven years than the seven years that preceded?
No such 'terr. proof utopia' claim has been made here, that is a strawman. The question is one of relative improvement.What I'm getting at is the claim that was made about Bush somehow turning the US into some terrorism proof utopia since 9/11, which there is no real indication that this happened.
'93 World Trade center attack under Clinton?So then in the seven years BEFORE 9/11, there were a total of zero AQ attacks on US soil as well. So then either you were really lucky, or Clinton's anti terrorism strategy worked. Which is it?
mheslep said:Please cite one.