1. - Sunday, February 12, 2012 - 15:29 - 0 notes

  2. “

    The idea of cutting taxes was a part of a policy that I call starving the beast. It’s you take away the government’s credit card, as Ronald Reagan said. And this will force spending down. This will shrink the size of government. And conservatives believe that there’s only so much freedom out there. And the more the government, the more power government has, there’s less freedom for the people.

    And they have a tendency to look at this in terms of spending as a share of GDP. So it can be measured very precisely. So if the federal government takes 25 percent of GDP, then essentially, we have only 75 percent freedom. We’re not 100 percent free. You know, if we could cut government spending down to 20 percent of GDP, then we would gain five percent freedom. We’ll go from being 75 percent free to being 80 percent.

    I’m serious. This is the way they think. And this drives a lot of these policies that on the surface don’t make any sense. They’re just about taking away the government’s resources to force it to shrink to — if you cut the budgets of the regulatory agencies, then they can’t regulate. This is a good thing.

    They really believe that there’s absolutely nothing good that comes out of government, unless it comes out of the Pentagon.

    ”

    — Bruce Bartlett

    (Source: billmoyers.com)

  3. - Thursday, January 26, 2012 - 22:21 - 0 notes

  4. (Source: youtube.com)

  5. - Saturday, January 7, 2012 - 19:34 - 0 notes

  6. “You know, there was no big balls in the deficit, the federal deficit until the Reagan administration. And the reason it went up $4 trillion there—and that was the biggest jump we’d had up until that time under any administration—was because he kept increasing military spending and then giving tax cuts. You can’t cut your revenues and increase spending without—so that was the first thing that… I never bought supply-side economics. And the second big balls came under Bush Jr. — another $4 trillion. Why? Because he cut the taxes to the wealthy and got us into two wars. And so there’s $8 trillion of the $15 [trillion], over half of it on those two wars. We’ve got to quit getting involved in these wars which contribute nothing to our security.”

    — George McGovern

    (Source: charlierose.com)