Defending the Truth

Clueless Edwards
By Lawrence Kudlow
January 3, 2007


So, John Edwards has thrown his hat into the presidential ring.
Unfortunately, he has a losing message.
His ultra-liberal approach will elicit only a small niche of support among the ultra lefties in the Democratic Party.
Democrats know (or at least, I think they know) that their success in the 2006 midterm election was largely a function of their best efforts to imitate Republicans. It was the conservative Blue Dog Democrats who were the tail successfully wagging the entire Democratic dog.
That said, if John Edwards somehow managed to reverse this tide and win his party's nomination, he would lead his party to a crushing defeat in 2008.
For starters, he wants to cut and run from Iraq. Such an ill-conceived policy would leave this budding nation in shambles, with terrorists following us back to the United States. It would extinguish the candle of Iraq's democracy experiment -- an experiment that could still pay enormous dividends if the United States follows through with a bold, new troop surge strategy and a refurbished plan of economic reconstruction. These are the actions that will stabilize Baghdad and their democratically elected government, not cutting and running.
On the domestic side, Mr. Edwards fares just as badly. He's recycling an old page from the liberal Democratic playbook, saying that he wants to make fighting poverty the great moral issue of our time. He says he'll accomplish this by taxing the rich in order to help the poor. Oh, really?
Tax capital in order to create new jobs? Huh? Haven't we learned that you can't create new jobs (for the poor or anyone else) without healthy businesses and plentiful new business creation? And that businesses require capital in order to expand? And haven't we learned that punishing success through higher tax rates that make it pay less to work, save and invest will only reduce investment, jobs and prosperity?
Well, Mr. Edwards forgets that entrepreneurs, not government, create long-lasting jobs and growth. Rather than government spending, it is economic freedom, through a strong incentive structure inside a market economy, that opens the door to new opportunities so that the non-rich can get rich.
What's more, Mr. Edwards has failed to consider that poverty has fallen steadily for decades.
Pro-growth, market-oriented policies launched by Ronald Reagan 25 years ago unleashed record wealth creation and economic growth that continues to this very day. In fact, economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth has shown that total compensation and consumer spending for all five income quintiles have steadily increased over the past three decades.
Furthermore, Alan Reynolds has shown that the percentage of households with income (adjusted for inflation) lower than $35,000 has actually fallen from 52.8 percent to 40.9 percent since 1967. (Wait -- it gets even better.) Households with a real income higher than $50,000 rose from 24.9 percent to a remarkable 44.1 percent. The rest of the story here:
Clueless Edwards*-*Commentary*-*The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

The Edwards/Obama Ticket would be a huge winner.
Alias: You read the Times and think Reagan was a thinker?
Also, you can't use income amounts not ajusted for inflation to compare income gains or losses over long period of times.

Ronald Reagan was the best president of the last half of the 20th century. If you will re-read alias's remarks again you will see that the economic figures he quotes WERE ADJUSTED FOR INFLATION!

Ronnie Raygun thought Star Wars was real and we should spend bazillions to protect ourselves with it. Just think where we would be if we followed that freaky plan. On the economic front, he didn't really have a clue, but had some sound people running the show for him. Thankfully.

Really!!!! Cany you say the Patriot Missile. Hmmm that is a direct result from the ideas spawned by SDI. Ronald Reagan when he proposed a system of defense that would make nuclear weapons obsolete was just take his page from history. Perhaps you should examine it closer.

First man with hands and fists, then someone realized that if you used a stick as a club you were more effective, because of the club man invented the wooden shield. The shield led to the sword, that led to armor and on it goes. Why is it a shock for us to believe that if science can create a nuclear weapon, it cannot create a means of defense against it???? That is exactly what President Reagan wanted our science community to do.

As for the economic policies, well again study some history, Reagan did. The Democratic Golden Boy JFK reduced the marginal rates and as a result saw increased tax revenues, Reagan did the exact same thing and what happened the exact increase in revenues that was expected. Perhaps the defecit would have been much smaller if the members of Congress had kept their word and cut $3 in spending for each $1 tax increase President Reagan gave them, but alas, they LIED and did not. What cowards, and today they still try to blame President Reagan for the deficit, when the truth was in their own hands, tell me how many lovely building, structures and bridges in West Virginia bear the name of Senator Byrd who packed home the pork barrel spending projects.

dmk

China has just proven that the "STAR WARS" works. They destroyed one of their own satellites.