[b said:
Quote[/b] (BoSox @ Nov. 03 2004,6:56)]yup, turned 18 two weeks ago, voted for Kerry yesterday. What has America done? I think the fact that half of this country re-elected George Bush is a big argument against the efficacy of democracy. How can you lose trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, go into a bad war on false pretenses, screw over education, healthcare, and the environment, and win the majority of the vote? Christ.
This really is a conversation for another place. I did not vote for Bush or Kerry, but succinctly:
Bush did not lose trillions of dollars, it was only by the most creative of accounting methods, methods that would make Enron look clean as a whistle, that gave birth to our "surplus" of a few years ago. He has spent a lot of money, that's always the case in war time. It's also the case that since Eisenhower
every successive administration and congress has swelled the budget beyond it's previous levels.
Bush did not lose millions of jobs, the president has diddly squat to say about how many people work unless he manages to get public works projects going, and those jobs are by nature not productive. They are funded by taxes which pull capital
out of the market. Less capital for investment per person equals stagnating productivity, which leads to a lower demand for labor which leads to fewer jobs, stagnating wages, etc. Recessions are born of the economic policies which
preceded them. Do you honestly think Bush took office and all of a sudden out of no where the economy went bust? You have Clinton, or more specifically Greenspan and the Federal Reserve to thank for our current economy. The business cycle, the cycle of booms and busts which flow one from the other, are the result primarily of monetary policy, expansion of bank credit and inflation of the actual money supply. Send distorted signals to the market, you get distorted results.
As for health care, the environment, education, etc., once more there are decades of policies that have led us to our current state of affairs. Kerry would have done no better, the overall problem which affects all of these areas is too much government involvement. There's a reason why almost all poor people can afford a TV, computer and a car, but few can get a decent education and some can't get health care coverage. There's nothing magical about education and health care that make them somehow immune to market forces that drive the price of everything else down, and government intervention and regulation in these areas goes back over a century.
Specific to the environment the problem is economic externalities and property rights. Companies don't have to pay for the pollution they release, mostly because judges have interpretted current laws to mean that as long as you pollute just as much as the next guy, you're not breaking the law. Were the government to simply enforce property rights and allow people to own things pollution goes through the floor, because companies have to get your permission to polute and pay for it, or if they do it without asking they have to pay for whatever harm they cause. England is a good example of this kind of system. If your house borders a river, you own that part of the river.
Regarding property rights, there's once more a reason why forrests and oil and fisheries are all out of whack, but other natural resources like copper, iron, gold seem to be fine. The goverment does not allow ownership in the afore mentioned areas, freedom of the seas and what not. If Exxon finds an oil field they have to suck it dry, or risk someone else coming in and tapping the same field, the same goes for fishing. This pushes the companies' time horizon forward economically, making them concentrate on present exploration and production rather than being able to balance present needs with long term needs and the capital value of the resources, which they could do if they owned the resource.
You see a similar problem with forrests. Privately owned forrests are gorgeous, and the companies that own them use repletion methods to keep the capital value of the forrest high. The can balance current needs, projected shortages, etc. However the majority of the forrests are worked under a government lease, the government owns them, the companies logging in them have no ownership in the actual resource. Since they could lose the lease to log at the next election cycle because the new politician wants to give it to his brother in law, the companies log like crazy with no consideration for the capital value of the actual forrest because it doesn't matter to them; they don't own it.
I mean, the biggest polluter in the US is the US government, and this has been so under Democrats and Republicans...
Overall I can't stand Bush, but fundamentally Kerry is no different. It's just a different name for the same entree.
Jeff) understood how important it is to cast your choice as should every American but choice comes with reponsibility. The responsibility to not only base your vote on knowledge but also on your values.
