A poll was taken in which most respondents thought Dr. Paul would've done a significantly better job than obama or romney for the middle class... it was from CNN if I'm not mistaken. I also believe that Obama's inflationary measures hurt the middle class.
I remember some polls that were taken about Ron Paul... elections.
Obama is a lot better for the middle class than Republicans, but he's no progressive.
We're gonna disagree but Libertarians are the worst. They're the 'sorry you starved to death under our policies but you have no one to blame but yourself' party.
They'd let the wealthy and powerful run absolutely wild over everyone else in the name of a misguided 'freedom' that only benefits those few generally.
Forget the EPA, forget Medicare, forget public education, I'm not going to even bother trying to point out the issue, everyone should know it by now.
The Republicans control the House of Representatives, they can shut down the govt enough to eventually balance the budget.
My theory of government is that the federal government has two main reasons to spend.
One is for economic-improving investments, the other are epxenses to benefit people (moral issues). Of course there's overhead cost to these.
The thing with austerity - as my recent austerity post described - is that cutting cutting spending harms both of these - you can cut spending and go more into debt.
I'll say Craig234's Rule #2 is: cuts to government spending generally cut the good spending before the bad.
That rule kind of kills the plan to cut the 'bad' spending.
Not necessarily, because Reagan and Bush were Republicans and they set records for number of govt employees.
That's what I said - that in previous recessions (under Republicans mostly) we added a ton of government jobs for recovery.
We can't know what Romney would've done. He may have hired more govt employees, he may have fired some, he may have kept the same number... I'd guess the first since he wanted to increase military spending and didn't propose abolition of any departments.
He did advocate aboloshing departments, but he wanted to skyrocket the military.
It's hard to say how it'd have balanced. Going by what he said, he'd have cut, but that doesn't mean much - Reagan ranted against debt while shooting it up. Bush's campaign talk was close to the opposite of what he did - he promised to use PART of the SURPLUS for some tax cuts - in fact, he wiped out the surplus and every cent of his tax cuts for the rich was borrowed.
I said expressly.

Let's say 50% consented to being governed by the President... that probably would not make Jefferson happy since he was always looking for large majorities.
Well, Jefferson noither gave us a solution for the two-party situation nor any alternative to the guy who gets 51% being elected, so not much to do about that.
Obama really should have got a lot more of the vote, but that's another issue.
What crazy elections we have - Romney being a cartoon rich guy with policies that shift trillions of Americans' money to the top isn't a problem, but his 47% speech was.