In my experience, the usual ways: Insurance, real estate, public works kickbacks, tourism, telecom... the list goes on. It seems that the deals they make with the private sector supposedly on the public's behalf often turn out to be favorable to themselves and the business interests involved. Usually, it's crooked, as with kickbacks, turning a blind eye to inferior materials used in public works projects, and so on. Often, this stuff is technically legal, as when a mayor practically wraps downtown in Christmas paper and hands it over to the hotel-restaurant and pro sports biz, then when he's out of office, those same interests give him a cushy job with a gigantic paycheck. Smells like a backroom deal to me.
And then there's the everyday bribery we call campaign finance.
Portraying the situation this way is mostly a Democratic propaganda strategy, but both sides have endorsed it to an extent (the Republicans doing so in a bid for those big business campaign contributions), and I think it may have backfired on the Democrats in recent decades. As I see it, this could be because "big business" spends huge, huge, HUGE dollars convincing the public that it is benign. So the epithet "big business" doesn't have quite the sting it did, say, in the 1930s, when it seemed the country might be on the verge of some sort of Socialist upheaval.
Quite right. "Champion," like any positive word in politics, might here be said with a sneer. Let's say Democrats "champion" free speech in much the same way Republicans "champion" religion and free enterprise-- they pay lip service to it but are basically motivated by something else.
Of course. I mean to show that the Republicans' claim to be against "big government" is bogus, not so much to show that Democrats are for small government-- although in practice, they've had something to prove on this score in recent years, and so have wound up being the party of fiscal conservatives. But yes, any creature of government tends to be for "big government." No elected official or bureaucrat in my vast experience ever wants to see his little fiefdom shrink. Ever! Doesn't happen!
Lately, and in the short run, the Democrats. Collecting less in taxes, however, is a limited view of what it means to be fiscally conservative or against "big government," because budgets consist at least of revenues AND expenditures, and while it is consistent with an anti-big-government stance to cut revenues, it means less than nothing if they simultaneously increase expenditures, which is what the current administration has done. The bill is going to come due some day, with interest, and it's not going to pay itself. We're going to pay it, and the longer we procrastinate, the more it will hurt. This is big, bloated government that gets bigger and more bloated over time without our doing anything, and the fuckers in the White House dare to call it a tax break.
The top marginal tax rate was 55%, under Eisenhower, during an unprecedented period of national growth and prosperity.
with a majority democratic congress though, correct?
Which approved the submitted Reagan-Bush budgets usually within .5%-- that's half a percent-- and at most within 1.5%. Historically, the White House leads on budget.
with a majority republican congress though, correct?
Again, the budgets Clinton submitted were approved to within minute percentages.
Yes, he was more of a Republican than the Republicans!
The point is, the Republicans, having convinced people they're "against big government," can coast on that reputation while bloating government to Hindenburgian proportions. A Democrat-- Clinton-- couldn't get away with that. His administration had something to prove. So the thing that isn't supposed to happen happened, and the commonly held truth proved to be the opposite of true.
It's an illustration of a political principle I haven't seen put into words. It's the same principle that required a Republican 5-star General in the White House to stand down in the Korean war, causing Truman to remark, "I would have been crucified for that truce." It's the principle that caused the first black university president in a major midwestern state, a man liberal enough to merit the term "radical" in this country, to oppose same-sex partner benefits for university staff and faculty. Why? Because he would have been crucified. The Right would have been all over him, and there probably wouldn't be another black university president for 50 years.
Right now, it's that the Republican administration has to show voters that it really is "fiscally conservative," but at the same time, it can't permit its dominion to shrink. (That's practically a law of human organizations.) It can make an (empty) anti-big-government gesture by cutting taxes, but of course it must keep submitting big budgets to Congress, because it is not really against big government. Thus bloats the deficit.
Maybe the Democrats would dearly love to bloat government to the point where they get to stick Federal cameras up everyone's ass, but the fact is, they can't.
The whole mess is a sad mockery of political diversity.
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What others say about boorite!