50 Years since the Time of Choosing

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

I do not like using the word "liberal" to describe mainstream American leftists.

Irrelevant, since Nixon was far from a leftist. He condemned all forms of leftism often.

Hitler also expressed token opposition to leftism. But this does not change the fact that he considered himself a socialist and proceeded to de facto nationalise huge swathes of the German economy.

Back to Nixon, his economic record is crystal clear. I'd argue that his economic policies were almost as statist as Johnson's. He got rid of the gold standard, supported the creation of the regulatory state, strongly pushed Congress, and worked with Ted Kennedy, to try to create a national health service, enacted economy-wide price controls and has the worst record on domestic spending out of any President since Eisenhower. Non-defense, non-interest spending increased by a whopping 73% during his tenure - on average, an expansion of 9.9% per year. Even Obama admitted that Nixon was further left than him.

[Republic of Coldwater]

Irrelevant, since Nixon was far from a leftist. He condemned all forms of leftism often.

Hitler also expressed token opposition to leftism. But this does not change the fact that he considered himself a socialist and proceeded to de facto nationalise huge swathes of the German economy.

Back to Nixon, his economic record is crystal clear. I'd argue that his economic policies were almost as statist as Johnson's. He got rid of the gold standard, supported the creation of the regulatory state, strongly pushed Congress, and worked with Ted Kennedy, to try to create a national health service, enacted economy-wide price controls and has the worst record on domestic spending out of any President since Eisenhower. Non-defense, non-interest spending increased by a whopping 73% during his tenure - on average, an expansion of 9.9% per year. Even Obama admitted that Nixon was further left than him.

Furthermore, Nixon did state in one of his public addresses that he was a Keynesian and that he wanted the government to instill heavy handed controls over the economy.

[Imperial City-States]

Conservatism is bullshit.

American conservatives are a joke these days.
Their social policies are awful and their economics are almost as bad.

"Deport all the immigrants!"
You mean those people that hold up our economy for less than minimum wage?
Yeah, good idea.

Funny because namely it's about illegal immigrants not ones who have legally become citizens. If you want your fancy European style welfare state you're not going to want to be forced to pay for illegal immigrants who don't pay taxes.

"Less regulation on businesses!"
Ooh, another good one.
Let's give businesses more freedom to abuse workers and create products that kill us.
How about we let them discriminate based on race, sexuality, etc. too?
I'm sure the Libertarians would like that one.


Less Regulation on business is more focused (from what i've noticed ) on reducing Government intervention when it comes down to what a business can and can't produce. What's 'dangerous' (for the most part ) is a matter of opinion on how something's used.


Not to mention the fact that American conservatives are overwhelmingly religious. Specifically Christian.
We don't need a religious group controlling our country.
That doesn't represent Americans as a whole. That's not America.


99% of the "Conservatives " that i know aren't religious at all and the 1% that are even slightly 'religious' are Pagan.




Conservatives are losing support rapidly because the new generation is more liberal.
Soon we won't have a conservative party. It'll be between liberals and socialists.
Which will hopefully fix the social bullshit America deals with.


I'd personally argue that the newer generation isn't more 'liberal' in the traditional sense but rather more libertarian. The Social bullshit in America will be present as long as we're a country of mixed ethnic backgrounds.



Free healthcare and education would help this country quite a lot.


We could open a whole barrel load of shit on this , Are you fine with paying 50% income tax to support these ? I'm not , why is it my responsibility to pay for my neighbor ?

[Lenciland]

Irrelevant, since Nixon was far from a leftist. He condemned all forms of leftism often.

Hitler also expressed token opposition to leftism. But this does not change the fact that he considered himself a socialist and proceeded to de facto nationalise huge swathes of the German economy.

Back to Nixon, his economic record is crystal clear. I'd argue that his economic policies were almost as statist as Johnson's. He got rid of the gold standard, supported the creation of the regulatory state, strongly pushed Congress, and worked with Ted Kennedy, to try to create a national health service, enacted economy-wide price controls and has the worst record on domestic spending out of any President since Eisenhower. Non-defense, non-interest spending increased by a whopping 73% during his tenure - on average, an expansion of 9.9% per year. Even Obama admitted that Nixon was further left than him.

His economic policies were also very successful. I just love how you added non-defense into his spending increases as if that were that money spent on defense it would have been alright. I'd much prefer taking a quarter off of our defense budget and spending it on social policies instead.

[New Chalcedon]

The Age of Conservatism has ultimately had by hugely negative impact on America. From financial deregulation which served as a catalyst for the recession, to the national debt nearly quadrupling under Reagan, the age of conservatism has been responsible for a massive growth in inequality, union busting, and a working class that dug themselves so deep into debt just to keep up with the growing economy. The economy grew, but wages stagnated.

And, both Reagan and Goldwater were horrible, and have a rotten, bitter legacy.

That last part isn't fair. Sorry, but it just isn't. Barry Goldwater was a principled Libertarian who refused to dog-whistle on issues and stuck to his views (for good or ill) even when they'd fallen out of favour in the increasingly-corrupt GOP. Do I agree with just about anything he said or wanted? Well, not really. But I could see myself admiring someone as consistent and coherent as he was, particularly in a position of leadership of one of the two major parties.

I'll always admire the fact that, as a Republican politician in 1993, he openly stated, "You don't need to be 'straight' to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight."

[Washington Resistance Army]

Relevant. I'm not a fan of Reagan though, or any conservatives really.

[New Chalcedon]

Irrelevant, since Nixon was far from a leftist. He condemned all forms of leftism often.

Hitler also expressed token opposition to leftism.

As well as making the leftist German political parties the ones he cracked down on first, and hardest. That's not "token".

But this does not change the fact that he considered himself a socialist

Citation needed.

and proceeded to de facto nationalise huge swathes of the German economy.

Did he? I was under the impression that the Nazi M.O. was corrupt backscratching between the State and favoured corporations, not wholesale nationalization - he engaged in some (but so did every Western government during the 1930s), but he also - for instance - privatized the German banking system. On a philosophical level, Hitler was opposed to both capitalism and communism.

Back to Nixon, his economic record is crystal clear. I'd argue that his economic policies were almost as statist as Johnson's. He got rid of the gold standard,

Inevitable since before he came to office, due largely to structural pressures on the US budget and balance-of-payments. Also, what's so great about the gold standard anyway? Given that there is an inverse correlation between "time on the gold standard" and "speed of recovery from the Great Depression" among the major economies of the day, I'm rather unimpressed at all the goldbuggery.



Seriously - in the Great Depression, these five economies went off the Gold Standard in the following order: Great Britain (September 1931), Japan (December 1931), Germany (December 1931), the USA (April 1933) and France (1936). Note that France, the last to leave the Gold Standard by a full three years, was also by far the slowest to recover.

supported the creation of the regulatory state,

You mean the EPA? The EPA that Barry Goldwater supported, as he made clear in The Conscience of a Majority?

strongly pushed Congress, and worked with Ted Kennedy, to try to create a national health service,

Which got nowhere because Congress and Nixon couldn't agree on where to go or how to get there.

enacted economy-wide price controls

It's almost like there was a supply shock during his Presidency....something about oil embargoes quadrupling the price of oil within a year?

and has the worst record on domestic spending out of any President since Eisenhower. Non-defense, non-interest spending increased by a whopping 73% during his tenure - on average, an expansion of 9.9% per year.

Spending is spending is spending - you don't get to quarantine from analysis those parts of it that you like anymore than I do. If you're taking inflation into account, the real value of Nixon's spending increases were "only" 3% p.a., after inflation. If you're going to stick to "a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, whenever it is", then it was 13.5%.

Either way, you're wrong - because Nixon wasn't the biggest spender since Eisenhower. Without adjusting for inflation, Carter (who largely inherited Nixon/Ford's budgets) comes in at 16.4% - with adjusting for inflation, Johnson (6.3%), George W. Bush (5.9%), Kennedy (4.7%) and Carter (4.2%) all come ahead of Nixon (3.0%).

Incidentally, whichever way you chop the numbers, Obama is the most frugal President since Eisenhower, at 1.4% annual increases in Federal spending in raw dollars, or -0.1% in inflation-adjusted. So (and I realize this is a tangent) why all the cries from the Right at Obama? He's done a better job at starving the Federal Government ("the Beast") than any Republican President in the last sixty years!

Even Obama admitted that Nixon was further left than him.

I do seem to remember hearing something about this...got a source?

[Dyakovo]

It has been 50 years since Ronald Reagan's "The Time of Choosing" speech in favor of Barry Goldwater's Presidency. This speech was a pivotal point in American Political History in which it kick-started American Conservatism and Reagan's Political Career.

50 Years since the speech, we have seen an Age of Conservatism in the 1980s, and the legacy of Free Markets overarching until the early 2000s, Keynesianism has died down (until 2008) and a form of NeoLiberalism has take over.

For better or for worse, this memorable point in history that should be remembered as a new age of Conservatism in America

So NSG, how do you feel about this speech, Reagan, Goldwater and American Conservatism as a whole?

They all are/were extraordinarily awful.

[Chestaan]

Irrelevant, since Nixon was far from a leftist. He condemned all forms of leftism often.

Hitler also expressed token opposition to leftism. But this does not change the fact that he considered himself a socialist and proceeded to de facto nationalise huge swathes of the German economy.

Back to Nixon, his economic record is crystal clear. I'd argue that his economic policies were almost as statist as Johnson's. He got rid of the gold standard, supported the creation of the regulatory state, strongly pushed Congress, and worked with Ted Kennedy, to try to create a national health service, enacted economy-wide price controls and has the worst record on domestic spending out of any President since Eisenhower. Non-defense, non-interest spending increased by a whopping 73% during his tenure - on average, an expansion of 9.9% per year. Even Obama admitted that Nixon was further left than him.

Since when has active repression counted as token opposition? He also provided slave labour to large private companies such as IG Farben, which is hardly what you could call a socialist policy.

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

Hitler also expressed token opposition to leftism. But this does not change the fact that he considered himself a socialist and proceeded to de facto nationalise huge swathes of the German economy.

Back to Nixon, his economic record is crystal clear. I'd argue that his economic policies were almost as statist as Johnson's. He got rid of the gold standard, supported the creation of the regulatory state, strongly pushed Congress, and worked with Ted Kennedy, to try to create a national health service, enacted economy-wide price controls and has the worst record on domestic spending out of any President since Eisenhower. Non-defense, non-interest spending increased by a whopping 73% during his tenure - on average, an expansion of 9.9% per year. Even Obama admitted that Nixon was further left than him.

His economic policies were also very successful. I just love how you added non-defense into his spending increases as if that were that money spent on defense it would have been alright.

Successful if runaway inflation, instability and food shortages are good for the economy. I did not imply that, but in the context of the Cold War it's more accurate to look at domestic spending in judging a president's economic policy.

I'd much prefer taking a quarter off of our defense budget and spending it on social policies instead.

I'd prefer cutting everything. I'd say half of the defense budget could be trimmed over a five-year period, and needless to say there's too much waste in domestic programs to ignore them. Whatever can't be privatised can be shifted into a negative income tax system.

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

Citation needed.

"We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions."
--Adolf Hitler (Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p. 306)

Did he? I was under the impression that the Nazi M.O. was corrupt backscratching between the State and favoured corporations, not wholesale nationalization - he engaged in some (but so did every Western government during the 1930s), but he also - for instance - privatized the German banking system. On a philosophical level, Hitler was opposed to both capitalism and communism.

His economic policies are very difficult to categorise. His advisers were roughly divided between a pro-business wing that included the Reichsbank President and the Minster for the Economy that wished to see free trade, lower government spending and less intervention in the economy, and a wing of autarkal socialists such as Heinrich Himmler who wanted a Soviet-style command economy. He took more advice from the latter wing in crafting his 'Four-Year Plan', nationalising "key industries", enacting price controls and whatnot. The private sector remained, but its activity was heavily restricted to serving the state. It could be seen as corporatism, or as de facto nationalisation. As Reagan said, "Fascism is nominal private property, but total government control and regulation."

Inevitable since before he came to office, due largely to structural pressures on the US budget and balance-of-payments. Also, what's so great about the gold standard anyway? Given that there is an inverse correlation between "time on the gold standard" and "speed of recovery from the Great Depression" among the major economies of the day, I'm rather unimpressed at all the goldbuggery.

(Image)

Seriously - in the Great Depression, these five economies went off the Gold Standard in the following order: Great Britain (September 1931), Japan (December 1931), Germany (December 1931), the USA (April 1933) and France (1936). Note that France, the last to leave the Gold Standard by a full three years, was also by far the slowest to recover.

I'm pushed for time right now, so I'll reply to this later.

You mean the EPA? The EPA that Barry Goldwater supported, as he made clear in The Conscience of a Majority?

And the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, OSHA, etc. Goldwater was largely consistent on the issue of regulation, but I've known one or two libertarians who support environmental regulation.

Which got nowhere because Congress and Nixon couldn't agree on where to go or how to get there.

But he still believed in doing it, though, as he believed in totally banning firearms. I believe a limited employer mandate passed Congress with Nixon's signature.

It's almost like there was a supply shock during his Presidency....something about oil embargoes quadrupling the price of oil within a year?

Of course. But price controls are always the wrong answer. Basic economics says that if a price is too high, not enough goods will be sold, and if the price is too low, there'll be shortages. The latter occurred during the 1970s.

Spending is spending is spending - you don't get to quarantine from analysis those parts of it that you like anymore than I do. If you're taking inflation into account, the real value of Nixon's spending increases were "only" 3% p.a., after inflation. If you're going to stick to "a dollar is a dollar is a dollar, whenever it is", then it was 13.5%.

Either way, you're wrong - because Nixon wasn't the biggest spender since Eisenhower. Without adjusting for inflation, Carter (who largely inherited Nixon/Ford's budgets) comes in at 16.4% - with adjusting for inflation, Johnson (6.3%), George W. Bush (5.9%), Kennedy (4.7%) and Carter (4.2%) all come ahead of Nixon (3.0%).

These are the sources I used, both of which rely on official data. [1] [2]

On overall spending, he wasn't the worst, largely because of the decreases in military spending as a result of the winding down of the Vietnam War. But a Republican President, nominally a so-called limited government conservative, should not have such a terrible record on social spending. Of course, we can't entirely fault him for the huge expansion of the welfare state during his tenure. Congress holds the purse strings, after all, and it was controlled by the Democrats for nearly thirty years between 1955 and 1981. But we know from his statements in public and private that he supported Johnson's welfare state and did not try to fight it. In fact, he eagerly expanded it. So much for limited gubmint.

Incidentally, whichever way you chop the numbers, Obama is the most frugal President since Eisenhower, at 1.4% annual increases in Federal spending in raw dollars, or -0.1% in inflation-adjusted. So (and I realize this is a tangent) why all the cries from the Right at Obama? He's done a better job at starving the Federal Government ("the Beast") than any Republican President in the last sixty years!

I realise this, but there is still a lot of criticism I have for him on the spending front, such as growing the deficit massively and then taking credit for reducing it, wasting trillions of dollars on Obamacare, corporate bailouts and stimulus packages (although I'll give him credit for the limited tax relief). I know that he has tried to cut spending, but just like the Conservatives in Britain, he's just not pushing hard enough, and it's taking too long. And also, I've mentioned before that President Obama has had relatively little to do with cutting the deficit. The major reductions have happened when Republicans controlled the House.

I do seem to remember hearing something about this...got a source?

Here.

[Kelinfort]

I realise this, but there is still a lot of criticism I have for him on the spending front, such as growing the deficit massively and then taking credit for reducing it, wasting trillions of dollars on Obamacare, corporate bailouts and stimulus packages (although I'll give him credit for the limited tax relief). I know that he has tried to cut spending, but just like the Conservatives in Britain, he's just not pushing hard enough, and it's taking too long. And also, I've mentioned before that President Obama has had relatively little to do with cutting the deficit. The major reductions have happened when Republicans controlled the House.

Oh, come on, you know that data is cherry picked. This doesn't account for the sequester, for one, and for the first three years tax returns were depressed due to a major recession.

Of course deficits increase when the economy hits rock bottom; tax returns diminish and as a result, so does revenue.

[New England and The Maritimes]

Reagan raised Social Security Taxes but cut income and corporate taxes (which actually increased revenue). I do not agree with Reagan's spending policy as he spent more instead of keeping spending flat to create a balanced budget and thus not making us go into this mess.

He had a pretty good record on domestic spending.

Looks to me all three ballooned under him and directly after. As a result of, woah, who would have thought, poverty exploding!

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

He had a pretty good record on domestic spending.

(Image)

Looks to me all three ballooned under him and directly after. As a result of, woah, who would have thought, poverty exploding!

Nothing bothers me more than people not doing their research.



As you can see, entitlement spending began significantly growing in that time period during the first Bush Presidency. Total domestic spending grew by 7% during the Reagan Administration, from $925 billion to $997 billion. As a percentage of GDP, it shrunk from 28% to just 17%.

[Lerodan Chinamerica]

I realise this, but there is still a lot of criticism I have for him on the spending front, such as growing the deficit massively and then taking credit for reducing it, wasting trillions of dollars on Obamacare, corporate bailouts and stimulus packages (although I'll give him credit for the limited tax relief). I know that he has tried to cut spending, but just like the Conservatives in Britain, he's just not pushing hard enough, and it's taking too long. And also, I've mentioned before that President Obama has had relatively little to do with cutting the deficit. The major reductions have happened when Republicans controlled the House.

Oh, come on, you know that data is cherry picked. This doesn't account for the sequester, for one, and for the first three years tax returns were depressed due to a major recession.

I believe it does. Take a look at the stats for yourself. It's a useful and highly informative website.

Of course deficits increase when the economy hits rock bottom; tax returns diminish and as a result, so does revenue.

Okay, let's take a look at spending then.

2009 $3.52 TRILLION
-$100 billion
2010 $3.42 TRILLION
+$70 billion
2011 $3.49 TRILLION
-$120 billion
2012 $3.37 TRILLION
-$130 billion
2013 $3.24 TRILLION
+$150 billion
2014 $3.39 TRILLION

So clearly, aside from this year's budget, which in all fairness was a result of a bipartisan agreement, the split Congress has a much better record on spending reduction than the Democratic Congress.