🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <DM8p0J.BCF@eskimo.com>, hmcom@eskimo.com (company account) wrote:

> Sounds like you are dodging the fact that *congress was controlled
> by democrats*.  Regardless of what you say, nothing occured
> in this country which congress did not go along with.

Largely up until the 1994 Congress, the old saw about budget politics was
"The president proposes, the congress disposes", meaning that the
President's spending priorities were to be given due consideration, even
if the funding levels were scrutinized. Fact is that Regan budget
directors were called into many hearings in the early 80s and somehow
managed to defend supply-side econmoics and the Laffer Curve. Thus
reassured, most of the folks in Congress went along with the Reagan
administration's spending priorities because running against the wishes of
the Teflon President was well nigh suicidal in every hotly contested
district and state. To say that only the congress is to blame for the
Reagan era deficits and debt explosion is just as erroneous as saying that
Ronnie managed it all by his lonesome. What we had here was a classical
political failure of one branch to provide a check against the other. You
all may (and do) assign the blame according to your own partisanship, but
the truth is that they all failed the country. If Congress was out of
control, Reagan should have been reining them in, if the situation was
percieved to be the opposite, Congress should have gutted RR's proposals.
Neither obviously happened.

-- 
Eric David Jensen

"As for the favor of the gods, we expect to 
have it as well as you; for we neither do nor
require anything contrary to what mankind hath
decreed necessary to prevail..."
The Athenian commanders in answer to the Melian
city leaders, whom they soon killed all of, during the 
Pelopnnesian Wars in 416 BC.