The failure which was Reagan...in chart form!!

[UnderseaLcpl]

I like that analysis. It's a pretty good example of how you can make statistics say anything you want. I haven't been a fan of the Reagan administration since I divorced myself from the Republican party some years ago, but even I know that some of the conclusions demonstrated there are false. The problem stems from putting unrelated data together or assuming that two things are related when there may be other factors involved.

For instance, I find it hard to believe that the decrease in US personal savings of 6.2% can be attributed solely to a 5.5% increase of concentration of wealth at the top betwen 1982 and 1992 when US median income rose by only .94% while inflation devalued money at an average rate of 5% per year in the same time period. Seems to me like maybe the fact that rich people can edure inflation more handily than average households, but again we are missing too much data. We'd need to know a lot of other things, including how much the GDP varied (it was positive) and what percentage of that was due to government spending and a million other things before we could find the real correalations, and even people who spend their lives doing that still disagree.

I try to put my faith in simpler equations, without politics, where less can go wrong, such as in the corelation between inflation, government spending, and economic growth. That decision is what made me leave the Reps. They're just as bad as the Dems when it comes to that kind of stuff, and worse during recent wars.

Economics and blame games aside, this was my favorite part of the submission, though the "needed changes" part gives me the willies. You'll tell me what I need? I think not.

But entrenched interests use their wealth and power to keep us from making needed changes

Sure they do, but who gave them that power? I didn't give it to them when I chose not to buy Shell gasoline because the Exxon across the street was cheaper. Exxon didn't entrench itself or abuse its wealth all on its own. Big companies have the power to entrench themselves because the state gave it to them through its own misguided intentions. I'll spare everyone the details of how that works, since I never shutup about the subject.

Speaking of subjects, as in same, what entity is more entrenched, powerful, and wealthy than the state? People have been complaining about government doing everything wrong on both sides of the aisle since time immemorial, and yet we are farther from changing it now than we have ever been. Too bad we can't make a quantified overlay graph about that. We might quit alternating blame between the horse's mouth and the horse's butt.

[krashkart]

Originally Posted by UnderseaLcpl

Speaking of subjects, as in same, what entity is more entrenched, powerful, and wealthy than the state? People have been complaining about government doing everything wrong on both sides of the aisle since time immemorial, and yet we are farther from changing it now than we have ever been. Too bad we can't make a quantified overlay graph about that. We might quit alternating blame between the horse's mouth and the horse's butt.

Touche.

Jesus! Now they're blaming Reagan?!

What happened? Did you realize that you were playing the, "It's Bush's fault" card too much?

[Skybird]

The author argues by setting up a correlation, so to speak, between "who held the presidency" and several trends in fiscal, economic, social developements. But a causal link can only be established if one also examines what political body (president/government, congre´ss) made what decisions at that time.

He must not be wrong (in fact I think by direction he isn pointing at he is not), but his argument is vulnerable if he leaves it to just looking at who was president and ignores what happened in congress - what party dominated it, and what they did agree to and what did they reject.

As I see it, congress and president were (and are) sometimes partners in crime, sometimes went on on different ways which both were hurtful to the nation and thus hacked away at it from two independent positions at the same time, in a case of coincidence.

A general, underlying typical cultural climate (in case of America for example excessive spending, no private saving of households, taking low price oil for granted, not to mention weapons possession), are long-term factors that are robustly anchored in a people's mentality and hardly are to be affected by just one or two presidential terms or congress periodes. such things do not change from one day to the next, but need decades if not generations to change. As long as they have not changed, new laws and legislation enforcing changes of such "paradigms" of ways of living will be challenged by many people, mostly over "guts' feeling" and irratitional motives and a basic human resistence to changes of known living conditions one has become familiar with, but sometimes over correctly pointing out flaws in the new laws' design and their implication. Man is a creature of habit.

Change is hard to be brought to people. Obama currently learns that lesson. Let people feel pain from deciding wrong. when it becomes more than they can bear, they change all by themselves, and quickly.

It's just that then so very often it already is too late.

We are too many damn people on this planet.