From: erics@infoserv.com (Eric S. Smith)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.dan-quayle
Subject: Re: Actual Dan Quayle Interview
Date: Fri, 13 Nov 92 08:28:17 PDT
Organization: Reigning Cats and Dogs
Reply-To: erics@infoserv.com
X-Mailer: uAccess - Macintosh Release: 1.6v1


KEL111@psuvm.psu.edu (Kurt Ludwick) writes:

> cka52397@uxa.cso.uiuc.edu (Slartibartfast) says:

> >        Qualify this.  The current problem w/ the economy is NOT a recession.
> >It is a ****DEPRESSION***.  The main difference is not severity, of course,

> You must be kidding.  This is by no means a depression.  The debt hurts,
> of course, but it's been higher in the past (*as a percentage of GNP*).

Recession: When your friend loses his job.
Depression: When you lose your job.
Recovery: When George Bush loses his job.

> >Supply-side economics, like Communism, interestingly enough, holds faith in
> >the premise that man is good, and inherently selfless.  Voodoo economics says
> >that as the rich get richer, the poor will benefit from teh things that the
> >rich do, since the rich will give them a share of the pie.  The rich didn't in

> That's not at -all- what supply-side is about.  The 'rich' don't _give_ the
> poor (or the middle class) anything.  The lower taxes and easier creidt were
> to allow them to more easily expand the size of their busniesses, which would
> mean that they would -hire- more people.  In that way, sure, -everyone- would
> get a slice of the pie, but not because the 'rich' suddenly decided to give
> away money.  Nobody expects that, and it's not what happened.

Reagan, prompted by economic theorists like Kemp, Laffer, and Stockman
(who later admitted the theory was unworkable) promised that the recovery
could be financed *without* massive deficit spending. That's what people
expected, but by 1984, the year by which Reagan had promised to balance
the federal budget, he had given up and decided that the only way to
offset his tax cuts was massive deficits.

> The truth is,
> people in -all- income brackets, as a whole, did better in the 80s because
> of supply-side economics.

No, people did better in the '80s because massive deficit spending financed
a period of economic boom. The rich did *much, much* better, but by the
end of the '80s, the middle class was about even in average family income,
despite the fact that many more families required two incomes to survive.

> the 1990 tax increase, the second largest in
> history, which -everyone- seems to bash Bush for, was a departure from what
> had worked so well in the 1980s.

The 1990 tax increase was seen as necessary to combat the exponentially
growing national debt, caused by massive deficit spending and the savings
and loan bailout, which was a result of the loosening of federal regulations
on those institutions during the Reagan years. The debt is finally,
and correctly, being seen as a barrier to the future ability of the
government to fund any of its programs. By the way, Reagan raised taxes
too, several times; he just never gave a "reasd my lips" promise that
he wouldn't.

> Census bureau data shows this to be untrue.  I'm sure some individual
> poor people got poorer, but as a whole they did not.

People may not have gotten poorer as a whole (although the rich certainly
got wealthier as a whole), but what did happen was that their confidence
in the future of the economic system has been shaken to a degree not
seen since the depression of the '30s. Many people have lost confidence
that government can lead the country out of this mess. It's those fears
that led people to vote Bush out; he was seen as out of touch with the
concerns of average people.

-----
Eric Smith
erics@infoserv.com
CI$: 70262,3610