Apparently Hillary Clinton feels that if you don't like the reality that actually exists you should just pretend that it doesn't exist and invent your own reality.
DENVER - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, sounding a lot like a 2008 presidential candidate Monday, accused President Bush and the Republicans of making a mess of the economy and failing to ensure affordable services for the nation's middle class and poor."It's the American dream, stupid," said the former first lady in a riff on her husband's successful 1992 campaign mantra — "It's the economy, stupid." Democrat Bill Clinton served two terms in the White House.
"They're not taking care of America. They're bankrupting our country and failing to address the problems," the New York senator said, citing skyrocketing gas, college and health care costs and lamenting a GOP "failure to provide Americans with economic security."
"Once again America needs to work for everyone not just the privileged and the powerful," Clinton said, adding that Democrats can be the "change agent" this fall by winning control of the House and Senate from Republicans.
"Democrats know we must stop passing on debt to our children and start doing what's best for our country and our children," she said in a speech to moderates attending the annual meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist think tank best known for helping her husband win the White House in 1992.
Of course, suggest to Senator Clinton that we should perhaps cut back on entitlement spending in order to avoid passing debt on to our children (federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security is at about $3 billion a day and is growing at about an 8% annual clip) and she'll look at you like you're crazy. And she'll probably accuse you of hating old people/poor people too.
Here's evidence that Hillary just doesn't get it:
She unveiled the "American Dream Initiative," a package of economic proposals aimed at strengthening the middle class and helping the poor work their way out of poverty — and offered a version of her husband's campaign line.
Got that? She's going to get this nation out of debt by spending more money on the poor. Someone ought to inform the Senator that the first step to getting out of debit is to stop spending money.
Meanwhile, this economy the "Republicans have made a mess out of" is enjoying a shrinking deficit, surging tax revenues, a rock-bottom low 4.6% unemployment rate, positive job growth since September of 2005 and an overall GDP that is growing both fast and consistently month after month.
By nearly every economic measure it is clear that America is in the midst of a boom, yet Democrats like Hillary Clinton are quick to downplay it. Because admitting that anything positive has happened under a Republican administration is just a flat-out impossibility for them.
Things are going well in America right now, and I think it does a grave disservice to Americans to tell them otherwise. I understand that people like Hillary just want to get elected and that, while things are pretty good in America's economy, they aren't perfect. I just wish Hillary and her Democrat comrades would quit trying to tell Americans that we're all going to hell in a hand basket, admit that some things are going well and then focus on the areas that need improvement.
Because there is room for improvement. It's just that this "doomsday" approach to politics is a load of crap.
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Comments: 1
Far be it for me to be the one to bring this to your attention, Cpt. Clueless, but the nation was running a budget surplus when the keys were handed to little Georgie. Ever since he stole office, he's run DEFICITS of $300-$400 BILLION, and let's not forget that his little illegal adventure is Iraq isn't even on the books. That's ANOTHER $100 billion per year.
The "surging tax revenues" are coming almost entirely from the fact that multi millionaire are making more money. Average incomes for most Americans is down.
Unemployment numbers cannot be trusted, because this administration stopped tracking them properly. Besides, they've only provided a view of how many are receiving unemployment benefits, which is NOT the same as the number unemployed. That number is probably around 8%, but even that's not THE key factor. There ARE jobs around. The problem is that they don't pay nearly what the jobs that are being shipped overseas did.
GDP is growing, as one would certainly hope, given that Bush has leveraged nearly $3 TRILLION in debt to prop it up. Of course, when you consider that $3 trillion injection into the economy, you quickly see that we haven't seen any REAL growth whatsoever.
Just because you might be able to buy a new car with your Visa card doesn't mean that you're "wealthier" than you were before you bought it.
This is the ultimate failure of voodoo economics, of course. It relies solely upon injecting massive amounts of public debt into the economy, to create a false facade of growth, while what's going on underneath is nothing short of a dismantling of the middle class, as wealth is shifted on a grand scale from that sector to the upper crust.
"Heckuva job" Georgie has brought about a massive, 25% expansion of the federal government, in order to enrich and fatten the corporate entities that bought him into office (including, of course, the war and oil profiteers). This will come at great cost to the rest of America, since all of this expansion has been funded with foreign debt.
In fact, anyone who is concerned about national security, should be vehemently opposed to this administration's reckless mismanagement of our national treasury, since we are now fully beholden to the likes of China, Saudi Arabia, and Japan, who hold the lion's share of Bushco debt.
Redink Ronnie proved during the 80's that voodoo economics is an abysmal failure of epic proportions. Actually, you could even make the argument that it caused the Great Depression as well, because similar economics were in play prior to that collapse.
What exactly IS voodoo economics? It's a massive transfer of wealth, from the middle class to the uber wealthy. With a combination of upper class tax cuts, massive corporate welfare handouts, and uncontrolled saddling of debt (to finance "growth"), the middle class is reduced while the income gap between upper class and below grows exponentially.
On the other hand, the massive debt that's intentionally brought on forces draconian cuts in "discretionary spending," such as education, healthcare, roadways, libraries, and social safety nets. The result of these federal cuts is a combination of higher state, county, and local fees, and less services available.
Another detrimental effect of voodoo economics is that, with such massive debt to finance, more and more money is required to be sent to debtors, just to pay the interest. The result is that this money is now unavailable to American lenders.
In order to offset this, and also to make our debt appear more manageable, the fed will crank up the production of dollars. This has a positive effect on the debt, because it drives the value of our dollar down, but it has a negative effect of higher inflation. The most obvious example of this to all is increased costs for oil. Since oil is traded globally using US dollars as backing, when the value of the dollar falls, it takes more of them to buy barrels of oil. Cause. Effect.
In reality, although there are surface indicators that the economy is growing, the sad fact is that only a very few at the very top of the socio-economic scale are benefitting. The masses are being hit hard with higher fees, higher taxes, higher fuel costs, higher food costs, higher clothing costs, and less income to spend.
It should come as a surprise to nobody, once you realize where the growth in this economy is occuring, that the masses are restless and uneasy. If you're Paris Hilton, life has never been better. If you're Joe Sixpack, you're being robbed blind, and it's only going to get worse as the massive Bushco debt interest begins to devour more and more of our economy.
In closing, yes, you can create "growth" in an economy by shoulding it with massive debt. However, that alone does not equate with meaningful job growth. This economy requires about 150,000 new jobs PER MONTH just to break even. When was the last time you recall seeing a job report that indicated that we were ahead of that number? Clinton averaged over 200,000 per month his entire presidency, and created over 22 million new jobs. Voodoo economics can't even come close to that.