From: jjh00@diag.amdahl.com (Joel Hanes)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,alt.politics.clinton,alt.president.clinton
Subject: Re: Its starting....
Summary: We have met the enemy, and he is us.
Keywords: scapegoats TANSTAAFL  panem et circenses
Date: 12 Nov 92 00:32:32 GMT
Reply-To: jjh00@diag.amdahl.com
Distribution: na
Organization: Amdahl Corporation  Sunnyvale California

>  taco@baby.csd.harris.com (Pablo Fumero) writes:
>>
>>As for 'Slick Willy', wait untill he starts taking away more of
>>your hard earned money to pay for all his special interest promises.
>>Prediction: the debt will increase no matter who is in the White House.
>>The problem is not with the president, it is with CONGRESS.

  nau@ssesco.com (William Nau) writes:
>
>I absolutly agree.  Who the president is is 1/4 of the problem.  The other
>3/4ths is Congress.  I suggest the American people focus on cleaning that
>pile of rubbish up.

Hardly.

The entire problem is the electorate -- that's right, you.
Me.  Your aged grandma.  We the people -- we're the problem.
All of us.

We demand that Congress and the President balance the budget and
cut taxes, without requiring any sacrifice of our beloved
entitlements, (like Medicare, Medicaid, disability, veterans benefits,
the home-mortgage interest deduction, farm price supports, federal
grazing permits, below-cost logging on public lands, Social Security,
the Resolution Trust Corp covering uninsured S&L depositors, 
Social Security, pork-barrel dams and defense projects,
"research" institutes in the backwater colleges of powerful
Congressmen, oil depletion allowances, etc ad practically infinitum.)

We've all become addicted to government handouts and government
assumption of risk, and we won't stand for these to be reduced.
Yet we demand that the government take less of our money --
in effect, we demand a free lunch, and we rise up in rightous
indignation and smite down any politician (John Anderson,
Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Paul Simon) who tries to tell
us that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Reagan's genius was that he sold the nation, for eight years,
on the idea that if we just cut taxes, especially on the`
well-to-do, a wonderful lunch would appear and trickle down
to everyone.  Without sacrifice, hard choices, or investment.

   Reaganonmics == Tax reduction produces free lunch for all.

As a nation, we bought into this malarkey because it was easy
and asked nothing of us.  Now we don't want to hear different,
though the truth stares us in the face.

If you've been paying attention, you'll notice that neither Reagan
nor Bush ever submitted anything like a balanced budget to Congress;
never even tried, because they knew, just like all Congressmen know,
that the nation won't stand for a balanced budget, no matter how
loudly we demand one.  As voters, we're consummate hypocrites,
with the result that all successful politicians must learn to
lie to us, to support us in denial of our responsibilities,
or be voted out.

  If in 1993, we reduced the defense budget to ZERO, and reduced
all "discretionary" spending (the parts over which Congress and
the President can haggle without changing the entitlements laws)
to ZERO, we would still have a budget deficit -- mandated entitlements,
(largely to the middle class) and interest payments on the national
debt are together larger than federal revenues.

---
Joel Hanes

   "We have met the enemy, and he is us."  Pogo

   " ... a government committed to a policy of improving the nation
     by improving the condition of some of the individuals will
     eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between
     a national good and a chocolate sundae."
                                                  E. B. White
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,alt.politics.bush,alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.perot