Sajc, God himself could come down and tell you "The ecomomy is great" and you would blame the drugs your on.  GET A GRIP!!!!

The only thing you should feel when shooting insurgents is the rifle recoil.

I'm not asking you to believe Bush or the WSJ editorial pages....   but the financial pages are solid. The information about interest rates, unemployment, new job creation, manufacturing indexes, etc. have a spotless record of being dead-on, and there are thousands of accountants, auditors, and actuarial science majors out there making and checking all of these numbers.  The numbers don't lie, the economy is fantastic by all accounts, this despite the ridiculous growth in federal spending, higher interest rates and higher oil/energy costs.... and more importantly, despite the constant drumbeat of negativity from the Lib Media.

 Your change of subject to amnesty and this supposed "great depression in wages" is irrelevant.  I disagree with amnesty and am all for the fence and even stricter policies such as a $5000 fine for every illegal alien employee of a company.  Your concern for falling wages is based on illusion and lies.  It isn't happening, show me facts defending this that are more substantial than an Olby rant or Joy Behar on The View.... otherwise you have simply fallen for and are regurgitating false propaganda.

Again, the parrots squawk, " The economy sucks, the economy sucks...." ...and all the birdbrains believe them.

I don't have time to do this justice.... but here goes....  Income Tax Reform....

In general, if you are going to tax for any reason other than simple revenue generation to fund basic gov expenditures, you should tax things you oppose or wish to discourage...cigarettes, alcohol, excessive luxury items, under cost imports, etc.  Consequently, you should subsidize things you do want....kids, certain crops, oil exploration, R&D, etc.  In a rational market, you will get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize, right?  So taxing income is ludicrous and destructive, do we really want to discourage income generation and even worse use a progressive tax that gets more discouraging as you go?.  Obviously not, and yet that is what the current progressive tax system does.  We want people to make income, right? So we shouldn't discourage/tax income, that is self defeating.  We should tax expenditures and destructive luxuries.  So, I favor a simple Sales Tax approach for generation of Fed Revenue.  There is room to vary the tax but I would prefer a simple 3 or 4 tax rates at most  (Like food at the lowest rate to impact the poor the least, up to gasoline and luxuries at the highest rate) This system fairly taxes the poor at lower rates since very small fractions of their income goes to high rate luxuries and also ensures that the wealthy still pay more in taxes since their discretionary income goes to higher taxed items.  The true beauty of this approach is that it is all done at the cash register, like state sales taxes... no one really even keeps track of what they paid in state sales tax because it is done at every purchase and collected on the spot, no deductions, no accountants, no hours of agonizing over the different forms, its just done.  It also discourages excessive consumption and encourages savings since they don't get taxed...  this lowers interest rates and makes more business opportunities feasible and profitable.

 Social Security...... the government should not be in charge of retirement planning and definitely shouldn't be buying one generation's votes with the next generation's money in a Ponzi/Pyramid scheme of collossal (and soon to be disasterous) proportions.  The solution is complex but relies on the same basic market principles that I mentioned above and would involve subsidies for retirement savings accounts and higher tax penalties for those that don't save for retirement, they do not have the right to be irresponsible and impose their retirement burden on others.  Just as cigarette smokers or the morbidly obese should not be able to push their excessive healthcare costs off on to others through socialized medicine. 

noel

great post, thanks for clearing some things up for me.

one thing though, in regards to the similarities between china now and germany in the eighties.. it seems to me that the chinese do things to our currency over there that are againt our own trade rules, and we do nothing about it. and china's growing military might is a little disconcerting.  germany wasn't growing at this rate and conducting secret military tests and operations financed by the american consumer.  

the swift meat packing plants that had those controvercial illegal alien raids months back that was all over the news...well i read that the wages went down around 13% since they started hiring illegal workers....i will try to provide links to back that up though. but there are similar reports in the roofing and landscaping industries though. 

but again, i do appreciate your earlier responces, and you obviously have a universe more knowledge on this subject than i do. 

Noel,

Economy under Clinton: "good" while Democrats controlled Congress; became even "better" under Republican control

Regarding your linked comment: Yes, I did read it shortly after you posted it and I spent a good deal of time crafting a long response explaining my political philosophy, as well as addressing once again the issues raised in the topic under discussion, but, more importantly, expressing my sincere gratitude for your kind and conciliatory remarks. I then clicked on "Preview comment" and it evaporated into cyberspace leaving omly a message saying "Access to page denied". I initially thought I had been banned. But I guess it was just a glitch.

I won't burden you by rehashing the less important parts of that response, but I will reiterate my gratitude.

Jer