Under Democrats, you simply see more of the money you spend on taxes come back to you in services.  You’re seeing value in student financial aid, housing programs, infrastructure maintenance, food and drug safety enforcement (which we’ve been light on recently, if you haven’t noticed), safety net spending, environmental programs, scientific research, aid programs of various sorts that either come straight to you or people in neighboring communities, raising the quality of life in your area.

See, this is the thing.  Libertarians and Republicans don’t see themselves as the “you” of that sentence.  They see the correct subject of that sentence as something like “lazy welfare leeches” or “shiftless trash”.  They find it very easy to see themselves in the top 1%, able to pay for anything and everything they might need all on their own, with no help from no gubmit.  Even though, of course, this is because they are either ignorant or incredibly unimaginative as to what a social service is.  Social services = welfare = poor people = lazy people = not them.  And the ones who can’t avoid the fact that they have in one way or another benefitted from social services will rationalize that since they are taxpayers, they “deserve” these services.  Even though that flies in the face of their supposed belief that taxation is theft, and lower taxes are always better than more services for tax payers.

With libertarians and abortions, the run the gamit from fringe pro life to abortion on demand. In my experience if you ask thirty different libertarians about abortion rights you get thirty different answers.

If someone puts you in jail, your spirit is free, but who takes your money destroys your soul.

The propertarian wing of libertarianism is a sad thing to watch. Even sadder when you watch them arguing that anything done by a corporation, no matter how heinous, is OK because people have a choice on whether to do business with that corporation, and if they haven’t informed themselves about its trade secrets before doing business, that’s just too bad.

“Under Democrats, you simply see more of the money you spend on taxes come back to you in services. “
Surely you jest?
The only people that see more money when a democrat is in the white house are democrats and people that don’t pay taxes to begin with.
And who are you to be deciding how much money anyone can keep out of WHAT THEY EARN WITH HARD WORK?
This isn’t a socialist country…but there are socialist countries available for you to move to. America is one of a kind and people like you want to kill that….

It’s really cute when right wingers talk about “socialism” when it’s clear they don’t even know what it means.

The only people that see more money when a democrat is in the white house are democrats and people that don’t pay taxes to begin with.

Am I right or am I right?

“the commenters at Reason seem both to be a lot more welcoming to having their phones tapped by the government and the police throwing women in jail for fucking”

Where on earth did you get this from those comments?  I read them all and didn’t see anything close to that, but then I never took the Linguistics Charm “Sagacious Reading of Intent.”

In high school I knew a right winger. His family were medium-scale farmers and he would always rail against “welfare parasites” and people who “sucked off the government tit”.

He of course conveniently forgot the billions in farm subsidies farmers like his Dad get every year (the tobacco buyout to start with), and was none to happy when I pointed it out.

And who are you to be deciding how much money anyone can keep out of WHAT THEY EARN WITH HARD WORK?

EXCELLENT IDEA.  No more taxes on earned income, only on unearned income. Taxable gains, interest, dividends, cashing in stock options, lottery winnings—it’s all fair game. What I make selling lemonade—no tax except for FICA.

Shoot—Capital gains will be taxed to avoid penalizing one’s hard work.

For some reason it’s always seemed to me that libertarians are more likely to have had some sort of government-funded health insurance* growing up than non-libertarians. This could be entirely false.

*Usually because Mom or Dad worked for the federal government, was in the Armed Services, worked in state or local government, taught at a public university, that sort of thing.

Maureen, even if that’s not true, I’d definitely say that it’s hard to find a person anywhere who hasn’t benefitted in some way from government funded social services.  I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those bootstrap-glorifying assholes who didn’t attend a public university or at least fund their education through state-subsidized financial aid.

The only people that see more money when a democrat is in the white house are Democrats and people that don’t pay taxes to begin with.

So you assert that Democrats will always tax more than Republicans.. A Democrat like Obama versus a Republican like McCain, right? And you’re calculating this, not with supply-side economics*, but with the straight up assumption that Democrats will tax you more than Republicans, right? Just checking. OK

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/06/09/ST2008060900950.html

To summarize for those uninterested in clicking, once you drop below ~150,000 a year, Obama starts giving you more money than McCain would, and actual tax increases only begin above ~600,000 a year. So that’s simply false. Simply false. In fact, more than 60% of Americans are getting a better deal under Obama

Now, as I see it, christmasghost, you have a couple options at this point. One is to gracefully concede this, as a localized point, and come back with a supply-side argument, which I would be happy to discuss. You could assert that it’s liberal propaganda, at which point we no longer have anything meaningful to talk about. Or you could reevaluate some of your thinking about Republican and Democratic economics, which everyone here would love to talk about in a civil fashion. It doesn’t really matter to me which you pick, but I’m interested in seeing.

*Not that I’m not willing to debate supply-side economics, but that would be a rather longer issue.

Jebus.  This isn’t a game.  Our national debt is already nearly $10 trillion.  With the bailout of Freddie and Fannie, it’ll reach at least $11 trillion, maybe more.  The federal government brings in about $2 trillion annually.  Our debt is five times our income.  When you’re talking about individuals, that’s a huge problem.  No individual person should carry debt more than three to four times their income.  At the moment, investors buy our T bills expecting them to be backed up by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.  Once our debt gets so burdensome that we can’t pay it off, we are fucked.

We only have two options here.  We either raise taxes or slash spending.  It’s obvious what libertarians and the Republicans want.  They want it all gone, everything down to entitlements like Social Security.  The question is:  are Americans going to let the bastards get away with it?

Anyway, I’m pissed off today.  I’m not about to concede the election to McCain, but it still chaps my ass that a creepy, war-mongering albino who knows jack-shit about the economy is neck and neck with a handsome, charismatic man who is not only our best chance of being saved from the Republican clusterfuck, but also has a vision for this country far nobler than selling it to the highest bidder.

No offense to real albinos.  Sorry.

The only people that see more money when a democrat is in the white house are democrats and people that don’t pay taxes to begin with.

Sadly, No!

DOES the stock market do better when a Republican is president or when a Democrat is?

The answer is: It’s not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats.

This perhaps surprising finding is examined by two finance professors at the University of California at Los Angeles, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov, in an article titled “Political Cycles and the Stock Market,” published in the October issue of The Journal of Finance.

Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference.

This nine-percentage-point excess can be broken down further into an average 5.3 percent higher real return for the stock market and a 3.7 percent lower return for Treasury bills under Democratic administrations.

This finding raises three other questions. First, is this just some data anomaly resulting from selective choice of sample or quirks of the analysis?

Second, if the effect is real, why don’t investors take advantage of the predictable higher returns and buy stocks before elections that Democrats are likely to win, in that way pushing stock prices up and lowering returns? The third, and perhaps the most provocative, question: What is the economic rationale for the difference in returns?

Most Democratic administrations clearly had higher-than-average excess returns, with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s second term (1937-41) being the only significant exception. Republicans have been associated with significantly lower-than-average returns, with the only exception being Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first term (1953-57).

and

The stark contrast between the whiz-bang Clinton years and the dreary Bush years is familiar because it is so recent. But while it is extreme, it is not atypical. Data for the whole period from 1948 to 2007, during which Republicans occupied the White House for 34 years and Democrats for 26, show average annual growth of real gross national product of 1.64 percent per capita under Republican presidents versus 2.78 percent under Democrats.

You expect me to believe two ivory-tower dwelling west coasters, Dark Avenger?  BIAS!

/snark

Thanks for the cross to my jab, Dark Avenger and Guardian of 10 Gold Chow Mein. :D

Great post, and lots of excellent comments.  Would any of you be willing to step into the ring in my place the next time my dad and I get to arguing about these issues?

“It’s really cute when right wingers talk about “socialism” when it’s clear they don’t even know what it means.”

Ok Ben D, educate us! What does it mean?

I fall way below Obama’s claimed tax raise limit (combined income around 175k.  I am also investing like mad in the market for my retirement over and above my 403b.  I do NOT want to see capital gains taxes rise.  I also do not believe that the tax changes Obama claims is what we will get, especially with the Dems controlling both houses, so I will stick with McCain on taxes.

tomonthebay: Obama’s a Democrat, not some strange hybrid. The tax plan is more or less what Clinton put in. In other words, every democratic income tax plan in 3 decades has been exactly this (at least—I don’t know the details of Carter, so I capped it to be sure). So 4 questions:

Why do you believe the Congress will do something different?
What do you imagine this alternate plan to be?
Furthermore, McCain has promised to rack up deficit upon deficit, mostly giving money to those far richer than you. Do you believe he will do it, and if not, why not?
Does that seem sensible to you?

As for capital gains taxes: Obama will raise them 5 to 10%, that’s true. BUT that makes it one of the Flat Taxes that (I assume) you’re excited about generally. Snarkiness aside, there are specific exemptions in his plan for small businesses and venture capitalists if you’re worried about the economic implications.

To really address your concern: yes. Your savings will be taxed more under Obama than McCain. However, Obama will raise the payroll tax cap to stabilize social security, expand and reform health care including Medicaid, and generally ensure, far more than McCain, that when the time comes around to crack open that nest egg, you’re not in as much need.

creepy, war-mongering albino

Keshmeshi, I understand that you followed this up with “No offense to actual albinos”, but given that McCain *isn’t* an albino, I can’t understand why you even said this. “Albino” is sitting in the sentence in a place where either a slur or an accurately descriptive noun or both would be (for instance, “creepy, war-mongering senator” would be an accurately descriptive noun, “creepy, war-mongering Sith Lord” would be a slur, and “creepy, war-mongering geezer” would be both a slur and accurately descriptive.)

If “albino” is in no way accurately descriptive in this sentence, then it’s a slur. And I’m not grasping what about albinos is worth using them as a slur. I mean, would you have said “creepy, war-mongering man with white hair and a pale face?” Probably not.

This sounds as bizarre to me as if you had said “creepy, war-mongering Canadian.” He’s not a Canadian and Canadian’s not a slur, so why say it?

My husband and my son are both albinos. They’re legally blind, can’t look people straight in the eye because their eyes wobble, and they have to wear sunscreen out the wazoo. Aside from that there’s no difference between them and anyone else. Describing a person who is not an albino as an albino in a way that implies that there’s something fundamentally wrong with being an albino is, fundamentally, offensive, in a way that you can’t fix by following up with “No offense!” I’m sure that you didn’t *mean* to give offense, and being bigoted against albinos probably won’t get you more than an occasional tsk tsk on a blog since they are only 1 in 5000 people and thus you won’t run into one very often, but I would ask you not to use the word as a slur in the future.

No problem, erl, and you can call me DA.

It seems strange to me that people don’t realize you get what you pay for in terms of social services. Or maybe they do realize and they just don’t give a shit if people drop like flies from preventable illnesses and hunger.

But I’m guessing she makes less than $250,000 a year, and so unless she’s an heiress who will inherit an estate valued at $3.5 million or more, then she’s simply wrong that Obama is worse for her pocketbook on taxes than McCain.

Ah, but she hopes to be making that much pretty soon. As John Caruso just put it:

...there are too many people who fully expect they’re going to be in the winner’s circle some day, and so they want to protect the ones who are already there—and the system that put them there.  Few things have been more instrumental in cementing elite power and control in the US than this shared national fantasy of wild success just out of reach.

On socialism: Ok Ben D, educate us! What does it mean?

In general practice, state or government control of the means of production and distribution. State owned utilities, railroads etc. Possibly worker-owned businesses or collectives could count as well.

Higher tax rates do not count.

It’s not that difficult.

Amanda: But I’m guessing she makes less than $250,000 a year, and so unless she’s an heiress who will inherit an estate valued at $3.5 million or more, she’s simply wrong that Obama is worse for her pocketbook on taxes than McCain
Erl: To summarize for those uninterested in clicking, once you drop below ~150,000 a year, Obama starts giving you more money than McCain would

Both of you are incorrect. If you reread the WashingtonPost chart Erl posted, you will note that anyone in the $111K - $160K range will enjoy a 2.5% tax cut under McCain, while Obama would give a 2.1% tax cut.

Now, the math is going to get rough here for a minute, but try to bear with me. See, 2.5% is larger than 2.1%. So a “2.5% tax cut” is larger than a “2.1% tax cut”, so McCain is giving you a larger tax cut than Obama.

Ben D: isn’t it cute when left wingers try to pretend like they understand arithmetic?

“From the flailing around looking for a way to defend a vote for Republicans.  Look, it’s basic.  Republicans are tapping your phone and putting you through hell to get on an airplane.  If libertarians are looking for a way to vote Republican, they’re saying, “My basic civil rights are irrelevant to me.” They may not frame it that way themselves, but it’s the gist of their beliefs.  If you’re more worried that some rich person might pay more in taxes than in your own privacy, you’re not for liberty.  You’re an ass-sucking moron.”

I think I agree with you for the most part.  It is odd that so many Libertarians seem to put a small margin of difference in economic freedom over a largish difference in every other freedom except guns.  I read the comments again, though, and I still didn’t see more than one or two comments that was a flat-out endorsement, mostly just half-hearted lesser-of-two-evils arguments.  Which are wrong, of course.  That they would vote for Republicans over the Democats is hands-down is exasperating.

isn’t it cute when left wingers try to pretend like they understand arithmetic?

It’s even funnier when you realize it’s the Democrats who believe in pay as you go, while Republicans long since switched to borrow and spend. The last Republican who showed he understood economics was George HW Bush, who wasn’t afraid to call his party’s position “Voodoo Economics.”

Considering how W. turned out, I feel so sorry for GHW.

Republicans aren’t really in favor of lower taxes. All that debt’s going to have to be paid off someday. Today’s GOP is really in favor of taxing our children and grandchildren, for the benefit of some war profiteers today. And that’s the most disgusting type of tax imaginable.

Seriously, I am really tired of all the shitheads talking about how they will pay less in tax under McCain. It’s the most cynical, most selfish attitude imaginable.

Describing a person who is not an albino as an albino in a way that implies that there’s something fundamentally wrong with being an albino is, fundamentally, offensive,

Actually, Albinos can be pretty badass.

See, 2.5% is larger than 2.1%. So a “2.5% tax cut” is larger than a “2.1% tax cut”, so McCain is giving you a larger tax cut than Obama.

So for someone making $160,000 gross it only takes $640 per year (equivalent to $24 per biweekly paycheck) to entice them to give up their civil liberties.  One would think libertarians would value their rights more than they value their coffee.

ZOMG!  Hold on while I catch my breath!  .4%, people!  Can’t you do math???? THAT’S A HUGE FUCKING DIFFERENCE!  My god, you could pay for…..STUFF with that huge difference!

Thank goodness you pointed out that glaring, huge, gargantuan tax savings!

Me do math.  Me know 4 bigger than 1.  Me right-winger now!

In general practice, state or government control of the means of production and distribution. State owned utilities, railroads etc.

When I was down south last week, I had the privilege of having a conversation about oil prices with one of my more conservative brothers.  He seems to think that by drilling more domestically, prices for Americans will go down.  Not understanding, of course, that global capitalism means that oil drilled in the USA will go on the world market just like oil drilled everywhere else, which means that Americans will continue competing with the Chinese and Indians for it, and prices won’t likely go down noticeably.  Unless, of course, we were to nationalize the oil industry and let the government have direct control of where our oil goes and how it should be priced. 

He was fully in favor of an arrangement like that .  Until I informed him that this is the dictionary definition of socialism.  Then we just about wrecked the car due to his exploding brain.

Unless, of course, we were to nationalize the oil industry and let the government have direct control of where our oil goes and how it should be priced.

He was fully in favor of an arrangement like that .  Until I informed him that this is the dictionary definition of socialism.  Then we just about wrecked the car due to his exploding brain.

That’s fun to do.  Reflexive right-wingers in my family get a little nuts when they find out what socialism actually is (too much listening to Rush has convinced them that “socialism” is “taking money from them and using it to pay shiftless lazy people to not work”.  College educated reflexive right-wingers even.  Sigh.)

http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/05/news/economy/mccain_claim_spending/index.htm

I found this article on CNNfn pretty interesting. The bottom line is McCain leaves you with an even bigger deficit, in spite of claiming he’ll eliminate it by the end of his first term. Talk about making unkeepable promises.

I found this article on CNNfn pretty interesting. The bottom line is McCain leaves you with an even bigger deficit, in spite of claiming he’ll eliminate it by the end of his first term. Talk about making unkeepable promises.

Yes, but he has the better tax cut by .4%!  It’s my money!  MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE!

*jumps up and down on a pile of gold coins like Daffy Duck*

History has shown neither party is anti-tax it is just a matter of what they want to use taxes for.  I thought all Libertarians knew that.  Sometimes the Republicans use fiscal irresponsibility such as adding more to the national debt just so they can say “no new taxes”.  It should be “no new taxes on my watch, I will let someone else take care of this mess when I am dead and gone”.  How much has the national debt increased under Bush?  It is funny now that the Neo-cons have taken over the Republican party all the old school Conservatives are calling themselves Libertarians.  If Katherine were a true Libertarian why isn’t she pushing for Bob Barr?

I thought all Libertarians knew that.

Libertarians never know what it would be inconvenient to know at any given time. If it gets convenient to know again, they’ll suddenly remember it. It’s a bit like doublethink.

Anti-taxism is just juvenile. Driven down a paved, maintained, road? Drunk city water or flushed a toilet instead of using an outhouse? Called 911? Then my friend, you’ve benefitted from taxes! Evil evil taxes have more than likely given you your education, ensured you safe food, and made it possible for you to travel in a car outside your town’s limits! Just to name a few things. Oh, the horror of taxation!

No large complex society can survive without it; it just won’t work. Taxation allows us to do large, complex, things that we could never do on our own or as a small group of squabbling individuals.

Don’t like how your taxes are spent, fine. Agitate away. But fer godsakes, stop whining about “taxes” like they’re the worst pain imaginable. Without them, you’d basically be an illiterate serf, if you were lucky, no education, no immunizations, and no civilization to speak of.  You can’t even have a medieval-level society—you’d be doing well to just be at subsistence level. And even tribes at that level tend to have some sort of hierarchy with tributes paid, or sharing of game and resources. Which is basically—taxes!  Redistribution of wealth (good and bad) is about as old as human society itself.

It seems strange to me that people don’t realize you get what you pay for in terms of social services. Or maybe they do realize and they just don’t give a shit if people drop like flies from preventable illnesses and hunger.

Because they think they have enough money that it will never happen to them.  Sure, other people will drop dead, but they’ll be in their reinforced concrete bunker with their guns drinking colloidal silver.  And even if they do end up in a position where they have to use social services, they rationalize that they’re the only people who are using them correctly and that everyone else using them is a scammer.

It’s very rare to get someone like Arthur Silber, who got sick and ended up having to re-evaluate his beliefs once he realized that he wasn’t the only person who needed Medicaid and public transportation to stay alive.

I’m beginning to wonder if this is deliberate strategery by current Republicans:  allow the id to go wild like a teenager with a credit card (the easy thing to do that lots of people like), then leave it to the adults (Democrats, in this case) to clean it up.  Paying down the dept would involve increasing income (perhaps mowing a few lawns) and/or cutting benefits (no new video games for a month or so).  Neither of which are fun, but sometimes both can be the fiscally responsible thing to do in paying debts. When Democrats do this, they’re called tax-and-spend liberals, socialists, etc. They then get voted out only to have the cycle repeat because the consequences of not paying down the debt are far-reaching and not easily understood by your average small-town-values high-school graduate. I understand that this is very simplistic, but isn’t it a rather simple issue not to spend more than you have?  How is it that Republicans have the Fiscally Responsible narrative in their favor given the current state of affairs? How is it that this borrow-and-spend scheme has no traction in this campaign?  Because 9/11 changed everything?

Tim:

Yes, it is deliberate. David Stockman’s book is 25 years old, and people still don’t get the idea that the whole idea behind deficit spending, starting with Reagan, was to make it impossible to support social programs without being vulnerable to “tax-and-spend” accusations.

I fall way below Obama’s claimed tax raise limit (combined income around 175k.  I am also investing like mad in the market for my retirement over and above my 403b.  I do NOT want to see capital gains taxes rise.  I also do not believe that the tax changes Obama claims is what we will get, especially with the Dems controlling both houses, so I will stick with McCain on taxes.

I don’t have any problem with significantly raising the cap on tax-deferred investment contributions so long as the contributions are in a plan that an investment manager can clearly identify as a retirement account, and so long as your taxable income falls under a certain limit the IRS can define as “really fucking wealthy”.  Investment managers use things called social codes, and can identify sometimes by account number what type of account you have (i.e. is it retirement-IRA SEP, retirement-IRA simple, retirement-401K, non-retirement, etc.) so it’s not like we have to treat all money invested in mutual funds the same, just because it’s in a plan that invests in mutual funds.  I assume insurance companies that offer fixed annuity or variable annuity products have similar (or the same) means for identifying this data.  If you have IRS 1099 forms you might be able to see it specified on there.

I think reevaluating how we treat caps on tax-deferred retirement accounts would go a long way to minimizing middle-class anxiety about having their retirement income taxed to uselessness. 

As for investing outside of a qualified retirement plan

Uh, ignore that last sentence.

Amanda: I’d happily pay $640 more a year in taxes if it meant an end to this war and a return to my taxes being returned to me in services.  Also, so I don’t have to worry if we’re going to morph into fascists and I’m going to get arrested for having the “wrong” political beliefs in a public forum.  And I make many times less money a year than $160,000, so that means it’s a much bigger hit for me

You’re changing the subject. Here’s the conversation so far:

1. You (and others): Obama will give you more money! See this chart?
2. Me: Uh…you misread the chart.
3. You (and others): You’re greedy! And mean! And selfish! And it’s not that much money anyway!

Even if statement #3 were true (and it isn’t), what does it have to do with #1 and #2?

You made a mistake. Admit it. And don’t ascribe any agenda/income level/party affiliation to me; you know nothing about me. My point is that if your arguments are good enough, you shouldn’t have to put forth faulty information to support them. Is that difficult to understand?

disingenuoustrollsayswhat

cf4:

1. You (and others): Obama will give you more money! See this chart?
2. Me: Uh…you misread the chart.

You know, if someone were paying me to write you as dishonest, self-serving an interpretation of this exchange as possible, I don’t think I could come up with one that was better than yours.

Seriously, dude. This isn’t even close enough to qualify as a straw man.

You made a mistake. Admit it. And don’t ascribe any agenda/income level/party affiliation to me; you know nothing about me. My point is that if your arguments are good enough, you shouldn’t have to put forth faulty information to support them. Is that difficult to understand?

Before you start haranguing people about how they’re wrong about everything they’ve ever said, perhaps you should make sure you don’t have a vested interest in misrepresenting their claims. And that’s true regardless of your agenda, income level or party affiliation.

The lesson here is that if you’re the one lying about what people have said, you don’t get to give self-righteous lectures about whose arguments are good enough for what.

Lol, sorry. I did misread the chart. It would instead be accurate to say that once you get below 160,000 the difference is negligible, and below that, Obama will give you more money.

More importantly, more than 60% of Americans will receive more money under Obama’s plan than McCain’s. So, if everyone were to vote straight up or down on that issue, McCain would lose. Of course, I personally feel that voting for Obama is a moral obligation even for those who do not stand to benefit, like, you know, Obama. However, you don’t seem to be considering that issue. Very well. I reiterate my earlier point: concerning the purely-self-interested voting you describe, and accepting a “majority rule” political philosophy, Obama and not McCain, deserves to run the country, though not as much had I been accurate in my misreading of the chart. Fair enough?

Erl: Lol, sorry. I did misread the chart. It would instead be accurate to say that once you get below 160,000 the difference is negligible, and below that, Obama will give you more money.

Spoken like a gentleman.

(no sexism intended, btw; I just happened to watch Monty Python’s “Fish License” skit recently)

Erl: Fair enough?

Yes. Well said.

He was fully in favor of an arrangement like that .  Until I informed him that this is the dictionary definition of socialism.  Then we just about wrecked the car due to his exploding brain.

You’re a horrible, horrible person.  I like that.

paul: David Stockman’s book is 25 years old, and people still don’t get the idea that the whole idea behind deficit spending, starting with Reagan, was to make it impossible to support social programs without being vulnerable to “tax-and-spend” accusations.

Spot on. And this is why I always argue to my friends that Reagan was far worse than GWB.

GWB is a bad president because he made decisions that didn’t work out the way he wanted.

Reagan was a bad president because he made decisions that worked out EXACTLY the way he wanted. He wanted this country to become less unified, less compassionate, less generous. And it’s been going that direction ever since 1980. I always thought that, since the 80s were the reincarnation of the 50s, the 90s would be the reincarnation of the 60s. Nope. Materialism and selfishness has only increased.

I view sins of malice as worse than since of negligence/stupidity, so I will always say Reagan is worse than GWB. IMHO, “GWB is the worst president ever” is synonymous with saying “I don’t remember Reagan.”

cf4:

What makes you think GWB and his handlers have made decisions that didn’t work out the way they wanted? Sure, they were incredibly stupid about Iraq, but the results have still involved the destruction of civil liberties, record increases in oil-company profits and inequality in general, an atmosphere of cringing fear mixed with jingoism, and the implementation of large chunks of a police state. The fact that future presidents, most likely democrats, and future generations will pay the fiscal price is just a bonus.