Sounds like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, classic examples of drug-induced studied-ignorance, megalomania & paranoia. Who says crack is the only drug?
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Throwing make-work "infra-structure" billions (or actually to be TRILLIONS) will not create 1/4 the number of sustainable jobs and industries that the same tax reduction will create. Nor will it place the investments as intelligently in society's interest. The political process simply does not optimize general interest, just political interest. Look at Chicago's current corruption revelations. Can you believe they are making the best decisions for either school building or curriculum formation?
Much much more money placed at political risk by the next regime will simply putrify the much deeper waters. Remember, once individuals are compromised, they can only rarely escape the system. That's Chicago's heritage. Culturally normative but wholesale disrespect for the law creates the initial opportunity and willingness to game the system, but the fear of retribution (see: dead fish) and eventual legal entanglements keeps everyone in line long after the first taste. Ask me what it took to keep our company and our clients "clean" in Russia and St. Petersburg for almost 10 years. Trust this, i was not popular with anyone... even my own.
Of course, we could always use a few new bridges, etc. But did Boston's "big dig" need all that underground billions of "infrastructure" that will NOT stand the test of time (that is, will not be maintenance-sustainable)? Of course, not, but Tipper & Teddy-boy & Lurch needed to go out with a bang and they bot one. (One woman is already dead from a falling roof panel that proved the bolts were re-installed with irresponsibly wrong engineering decisions.)
Just like FDR's massive guv'ment spending programs of the thirties, the new regime will really spend the money cementing its inner-city political systems into another frozen patrician's-heaven of permanent political power over the US House for another 50 years; they hope. Some insightful conservatives (and even a few dems) promised that along with 0'Bambi would come lots of Chicago-style political corruption, but people do not want to believe it under any circumstances. One stinking bridge to no-where (however wrong & wasteful) will look mighty cheap compared to the next two years of dem party feed-lot frenzy.
The non-conservative wing of the pubbie party has screwed us all, big time, for not keeping fiscal promises and not over-spending. W didn't want to fight with them any more than with the dems. Mind you, it doesn't really matter, almost anyway, since the old media will drum-up any excuses to allow 0'Bambi to win ("too big & too important to let fail"). This is not simply a matter of political preference. There is real science in economics. Monstrous overspending will create inflation, huge deficits, low growth, make-work careers for more guv-ment dependencies and many many more pissed citizens of both stripes.
The dems will over-reach again, of course. Doesn't matter about which subject. With any common sense, tough in-and-out fighting and enough old media upheaval, conservative control over the Senate will be returned no later than 2010.
Voters like scrappy politicians, even if they are corrupt, as long as they get preferred media treatment along with plenty of pretty wall-paper... Newt Gingrich won over the Congress from Clinton after 35 years+ in the wilderness, as a result of good political fighting. He fought the dems, he fought the media and he fought the moderates into submission. W has had this pseudo-religious picture of genuine compromise in Washington that simply never has happened, didn't and isn't going to happen. The only political "peace" available in DC is when you let the uber-left liberal/gay/murder-called-Choice current dem leadership have their sweet way and you accept their table-scraps.
As Joe Biden just demonstrated, if you want a friend in Washington DC, get a dog.
If the big three management imagine ANY AFL-CIO union will compromise, they are simply dreaming dopes, reading and believing their own
PR releases. They have not had to compromise yet, do not intend to do so unless at their own considerable career peril and will not do so until a judge tells them the terms they have to accept. It is not here yet, but it is coming. After the judge's ruling(s), expect stock market price upside breakouts on FORD or GM. But, not until.
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