More Tall Tales From the Bush Administration

[Taxman]

I apologize for any insult, I tend to get heated when I feel like I'm being attacked. Regardless I stand by my statements considering the legitimacy of the "ridiculous" statements. I still don't think that anyone who would debate a topic like this would hate America. I doubt he is plotting the downfall of the US or talks about how much our country sucks compared to the poverty and terrorist ridden middle eastern countries. Just because I exercise my right to criticize the current administration doesn't mean I hate the entire US governmental system. The same applies to anyone else. I would go so far as to say that it's anti-american to not voice objections you have concerning the elected government.

[MMMMMM]

"Just because I exercise my right to criticize the current administration doesn't mean I hate the entire US governmental system. The same applies to anyone else."

Yes, but when that's all one seems to do, it rather suggests something else. For instance Alger seems to always and only criticize the U.S. and Israel.

[adios]

"I can only hope that the perspective of history will reveal to those people, the big picture that they were missing during these last few years."

My post wasn't about what you want to cut in government spending it was about Kerry being disingenous.

"First off that sentence doesn't entirely make sense, but a clear objective of your post was to point out flaws in the democratic candidates, without balancing this with any similar comments on Bush. "

Huh? Kerry states that he can cut the budget deficit in half and I point out where what he, Kerry, proposes will increase the deficit by $265 billion to show how Kerry's being disingenous. Why are comments about Bush relevent to Kerry's being disingenous?

"If you're going to quote that extensively then you should include other relevant information."

Not sure what your point is here. Are you stating that the NTU study is erroneous? If so that should be easy to demonstrate.

"Questioning every thing I say without explicitly defining it is a weak way to argue."

I'm not questioning everything you say. To be quite honest I don't follow your reasoning very often. It's hard to disagree with someone's point of view when you're not really sure what is.

"I will try to be more specific, but you know what I meant by the model of either side (ie the economic policies). "

A model and a policy are two different things. You're asking way to much of me anyway to be able to discern your meaning when you play so fast and loose with terminology.

"You are the one obfuscating now, discrediting the vague parts of my arguments without making any actual arguments of your own."

I didn't discredit any of your arguements. I can't discredit something I don't know or understand.

"Similarly the answer I refer to is obviously meant as the "answer" to solving the economic problems of today."

It wasn't obvious to me at all what you were reffering to. What are the economic problems as you perceive them? Let's start there. Do you think it's at all possible that you and I might have different perceptions as to what the economic problems are?

"The importance of the difference between corporate and individual taxes is that corporations might be more able and more willing to utilize extra capital in a more constructive manner than individual billionaires. "

You're reffering to the amount of taxes paid I assume on a percentage basis and what I stated what constitutes taxable income. What are you specifically proposing here? Increases in the long term capital gains rate? More marginal tax brackets? Not a discredit to your post, just don't understand what you want.

"In your post you said, "wrong it's possible to modify all tax laws." Ok I'll give you this one (sorta), I was vague, but do you really think I'm dumb enough to think all laws can't be changed?"

You're someone I know nothing about and someone's posts aren't very clear to me as to what points you're addressing. It's not an excercise in putting you down, it's an excercise in trying to understand your points. Too bad you take it personally.

"I meant that a selective review of the type of taxes raised or lowered can be a useful and legitimate way of doing things as opposed to a unilateral decision of raising/lowering all taxes (or maybe this is done, but in a way to benefit only certain people. Yes, this is opinion, not fact)."

In my opinion that's in part what's behind all tax legislation.

"I'm not trying to refute the NTU model, I'm only doing what you are trying to do to me with your response, and that is cast a question over the ultimate truth provided by it."

I don't understand this statement. There's no NTU model (models have a very specific meaning to me) involved. Perhaps you mean the models used in the NTU study. I'm not trying to do anything to you. You responded to my post originally. If you have some data, studies, even models that shows Kerry will actually reduce the budget deficit with his proposals on spending I'd be highly interested in reading them.

""BTW the difficulty in defining taxable income for each and all categories of income earners is the reason the tax code is so complicated." I couldn't agree more. I know I just mentioned selective review under our current system, but ultimately I think the tax code is in dire need of extensive simplification."

Ok how do you propose doing that given the difficulties that you and I agree are inherent in defining income? This isn't a challenge or a put down. It's an inquirey as to what you ideas are.

"Also there's no need to make obtuse comments to my observations."

Like what?

"Everyone is indeed entitled to their opinion and I was just stating mine."

Ok

"And yes, I do say so: criticism is an integral part of politics (unless you prefer the soviet Russia model)."

Ok and I don't

"History will tell (more about) how things really are now because that's how history works."

Ok, hard to argue with that one [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img].

"I'm not so vain as to claim I know what that will mean. I do know that there are far more people that want tax cuts because they want more money, than care about the environmental health and future of our planet."

Your assumption to me is that higher taxes necessarily means better environmental health and a better future for the planet. Am I right about your assumption?

"And then there's the people who complain to high heaven about the probles with public education, but refuse to pay the taxes needed to bring about any improvements."

Again your assumption seems to be that higher taxes will necessarily lead to a higher quality public educational system. Am I right about your assumption?

"Maybe if they just redirected the military budget, we could solve most of these problems, but that seems unlikely in the current political climate."

I've touched on the military budget in some posts about the budget about 6 or 7 months ago. IMO all aspects of the military budget are open to debate. Perhaps it would be time to do some sort of in depth post on that. If you look at defense expenditures in the Clinton administration you'll see that in normalized terms (normalized for GDP), defense expenditures had not been that low since post WWII. I might add I acknowledge that there's some justification for this given the end of Cold War (commonly called the peace dividend). For obvious reason defense spending has increased significantly in normalized terms under the Bush administration. However, in normalized terms it's not even close to a other periods (like WWII for instance). Don't get me wrong, the DoD still knows how to waste major money on pet projects etc. but what is need is scrutiny of the various programs on a strategic basis IMO. Here's something that I believe history has shown us, that Defense spending is controllable.

I've posted about this so many times I'm sure many are sick of it. If you want to reign in budget deficits, the problems with non-linear growth in Medicare/Medicaid spending (currently much higher than GDP growth) have to be rectified as well as what I call the structural flaw in Social Security. I've post about this before, the Clinton administration had a better record than anyone I can remember in controlling Medicare/Medicaid spending. Basically during the Clinton administration the growth in Medicaire/Medicaid outlays grew at a rate around GDP (I think slightly less). The "structural" problem with Social Security is this. The system is based on people who will be receiving benifits in the future paying for those who are eligible today. The "trust fund" is a total sham or accounting gimmick to put it more politely. Social Security is a regressive tax. The demographics of the baby boomers is such that unless something changes, the amount paid out will be much higher than what is paid in the retirement years of the baby boomers. Social Security is running at surplus now but it won't be in the not too distant future.

[adios]

Ah c'mon I'll bet you weren't and aren't crazy about the Viet Nam war either.

[Chris Alger]

[ QUOTE ]
"Let me ask you, what if the president accurately estimated that Saddam would kill 20,000 of his own people if he did not invade. Would you then be in favor of the invasion?"

[/ QUOTE ]
If there was good evidence of imminent slaughter that could be prevented only by military action, then sure I would. But there were no such estimates or consideration of alternatives because humanitarian concerns had no chance of inviting intervention by the U.S., just as they had no chance of inviting it in Nigeria, Rwanda, Indonesia and other locales where masses were slaughtered, sometimes with U.S. arms and assistance. Although Kosovo is often cited to prove the opposite, the Clinton Administration also made it clear that U.S. policy was driven in part to strengthen NATO, meaning U.S. military control in Europe, it's original purpose having been exhausted.

In fact, the most likely scenario for a bloodbath in Iraq would have been in reaction to an uprising against Saddam's rule. This actually happened after the Gulf War and the U.S. record is clear: we preferred the bloodbath and keeping Saddam in power to the chance of a successful rebellion outside our control. In that case, we stood by and did nothing. Our troops watched as Saddam's henchmen marauded against civilians, slaughtering thousands. We actually gave Saddam's helicopters clearance to fly against "rebel" positions while refusing rebel access to arms captured from Saddam's forces.

This fact is well-known to informed observers, and was even the subject of a feature movie ("Three Kings"). Yet many Americans -- such as you, apparently -- have been so indoctrinated by propaganda that they are emotionally dependent on a conception of the U.S. as a force of moral goodness throughout the world, incapable of carrying out or facilitating bloodbaths when its interests, narrowly defined, so dictate. If a foreign dictator is replaced by a U.S. dictator then, by definition, that country has been "liberated," and things have turned from dark to light, something that only defenders of darkness could oppose.

According to a 1992 report by Human Rights Watch, "U.S. occupation forces who were stationed only a few miles from al-Nasiriyya, Samawa and Basra did nothing to help the rebels who rose up in these cities. Soldiers watched helplessly as Iraqi troops devastated the cities, and wounded civilians fled on foot to U.S. bases nearby telling of the atrocities that were taking place. Thomas Isom, a U.S. Army lieutenant, described what he saw from his post at the edge of Samawa: <ul type="square"> They fired at the hospital twice. We were watching them shell the train station and other small houses. This was simply designed to kill civilians or terrorize them, which it did. It did not have a military purpose, just artillery impacts on large concentrations of civilians.[/list]An officer at the same post said of Iraq's Soviet-made H-18 helicopters that were firing rockets at Samawa residents: "We could have used our own helicopters to take them out. We could hear them come over our heads."

As the revolt gathered momentum, the U.S. emphasized that it had no intention of taking or even allowing military action to thwart Saddam. According to then Secretary of State James Baker: "we do not want to see any changes in the territorial integrity of Iraq and we do not want to see other countries actively making efforts to encourage changes." The New York Times reported that the Bush administration and its supporters held the "strikingly unanimous view [that] whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression." As supportive commentator Thomas Friedman observed at the time, the U.S. doesn't want popular rule in Iraq but rather a military coup to remove Saddam so that "Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein," a return to the days when Saddam's "iron fist...held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia," and, of course, the U.S.

As Friedman implied, encouragement of Saddam was long-standing U.S. policy, dating back to days when the U.S. gave him lists of potential "subversives" so he could liquidate them, satellite intelligence so that he kill Iranians with poison gas, and WMD technology so that he could better position himself as a regional power in the service of U.S. interests, just as we have done for Pakistan and Israel. It was therefore no surprise at all when, according to HRW, "the [first] Bush Administration contributed to the making of a tragedy that left thousands of civilians massacred by Saddam's troops and nearly two million forced to flee their homes."

Now, of course, it's a different matter. Saddam's refusal to follow orders compelled his permanent isolation. 9/11 provided the pretext for the U.S. itself to wield the iron fist. A bitter dispute has arisen over nationwide elections, U.S. occupation forces siding, as usual, against democracy. This pretty good evidence of U.S. antipathy for Iraqi democracy is not being reported for what it is, of course, but rather the honest U.S. concern about a sacred timetable for "giving Iraq back to Iraqis," or some similar nonsense.

If a new Iraqi government with the U.S. seal of approval does the same, there isn't the slightest reason to suspect, much less assume, that the U.S. will do the right thing and oppose a bloodbath or other repression even if U.S. strategic and economic interests suffer. We'll likely pass the ammo while the self-satisfied U.S. "patriots" keep quiet unless someone has the bad taste to marshall evidence that impugns the presumed, unassailable nobility of U.S. motives ("America-bashing"). Just as we do for the dictator of Uzbekistan at this very moment without a peep of protest from the likes of you.

[Chris Alger]

What's wrong with that statement is the obvious omission: Iraq's support for "terrorists" has exclusively limited to the Israel-Palestine conflict, not those that "want to kill millions of Americans," and Iraq is ideologically at loggerheads with the sort of Islamicist fanatics that, as you say, want to kill "millions of Americans." In 30 years of power Saddam has never provided any support to such terrorists, despite having every means and ability to do so. Accordingly, Iraq's "support for terror" is no different from the position of virtually every other Arab country, including the ones we directly support, including Iraq when the U.S. was supporting Saddam, and cannot be considered by any sane person to be a threat to U.S. national security or a motivating factor in the war to overthrow Saddam.

Pakistan is ideologically committed to Islam, was the only country to recognize the Taliban, whom it helped bring to power, is governed by a repressive military dictatorship, has a record of aggression and mass killing of civilians, has nuclear WMD and a record of supporting terrorism that, if you ask anyone in the Indian government, continues to this day. If these facts applied to Iraq, you'd claim that only an idiot couldn't see them as the determinative facts that motivated the war. Yet the U.S. provides ample military, economic and diplomatic support for Pakistan, evidently comfortable with all of these facts, and proving that something other than the reasons Bush used to sell the war to the public were the real ones. Of course, this is usually the case when the leader of a country is trying to sell something as fundamentally unpopular as a war of aggression, but we can't conceive of it happening here.

[Chris Alger]

This is what Utah said just before the sentence I quoted, an example of what you call "making sense."

[ QUOTE ]
"Therefore, to call Bush a murderer is very misleading since the people who he supposedly murdered are happy that he undertook the action that caused their death."

[/ QUOTE ]

Is it because when they get murdered by Bush they get all those virgins?

[MMMMMM]

To me it seems that Utah is trying to refer to Iraqis in general, not to those actually killed. Granted he didn't specify such (and his words could even mislead a few as to his meaning), but isn't it obvious from the context that this is what he is trying to say? He is talking about the viewpoint of the average Iraqi, not the viewpoint of the few who got killed...as this fits with his argument and the general theme.

In other words he is saying that calling Bush a murderer is misleading, because the average Iraqi was rather glad Bush did what had to be done in order to depose Saddam. He is also saying that the average Iraqi was not overly concerned about losing a relatively small number of Iraqis in order to be freed from Saddam's grip. Utah may have worded it fairly poorly in the cited instance but I think you will see what he meant if you think about it in the context of the thread.

[MMMMMM]

"
If there was good evidence of imminent slaughter that could be prevented only by military action, then sure I would. But there were no such estimates or consideration of alternatives because humanitarian concerns had no chance of inviting intervention by the U.S., just as they had no chance of inviting it in Nigeria, Rwanda, Indonesia and other locales where masses were slaughtered, sometimes with U.S. arms and assistance."

Chris: Here I think you are conflating two issues. Given the history of Saadam's Baathist thugs, I think it could be very fairly presumed that deposing Saddam would save Iraqi lives in the long run. That this was not the primary consideration of the U.S. regarding possible intervention is besides the point, although it is certainly another point worthy of exploration.

[Utah]