I have always been an independent voter. I'm not all that interested in party labels, but I get seriously interested in party lies. Both the so-called major parties have done their share of bending the truth, and even telling some whoppers. Now, the Democrats are making the telling of outright lies the norm for their political public information.
I have been noticing more and more that they are referring to "Bush's deficit", as though they are not familiar with the practice. Let me set them straight on that point. In 1932, our national debt amounted to an astounding $19.5-Billion - ah, that's with a "B". In 1933, Roosevelt's first year in office, he instituted the practice of deficit budgeting, which was another way of saying "let's spend whatever we want to spend, and if we don't have enough to cover the tab, we'll go out and borrow all we need by selling Treasury securities." The new money borrowed each budgetary year is called the budgetary deficit, or, just the deficit. At the end of the budgetary year that deficit gets added to the debt. They are not synonymous terms. The national debt rose steadily for literally decades. Roosevelt told us he was "priming the economic pump" to get us out of the Great Depression. Only after nearly 2 full terms, unemployment was still 17% in 1939; 14% in 1940; and even after getting us on a quasi-wartime economy, unemployment was still at 9.9% in 1941! We didn't emerge from the Depression until after he had gotten us into W.W.II.
There have been only 6 balanced budgets since that time, the last one being in 1969, Nixon's first year in office. (The one we heard about a couple of years ago was done with your basic "smoke and mirrors". If the budget had been balanced, the debt would not have risen, but it did. If the budget is balanced, there is no deficit, and the debt does not go up.) Politicians tell you a lot of things hoping that you will not be intelligent enough to know when they are lying. That's one of them. The national debt that shows is up to something over $6.29-TRILLION!
Roosevelt did a few other things which have become Standard Operating Procedure for the Democrats. He took us off the gold standard, for one. He also made it illegal to even own gold (excepting dentists and jewelers). The only backing our currency had, excepting some silver certificates, was the "full faith and credit of the United States government". The money which came in from the sale of Treasury securities - bonds, notes, and bills - was the money backing the value of our currency. That makes up the principal portion of what is called "the national debt". If currency is redeemable with specie, i.e. gold, silver, etc., it tends to lessen the problem of inflation. Currency cannot be printed unless there is enough specie to back it up. Without the gold standard, the Federal Reserve was energized because it was then able to expand or contract the money supply virtually by the stroke of a pen. The Fed charges member banks a rate of interest called the discount rate which they must pay for money borrowed from the Fed. By lowering the discount rate, it becomes easier for the banks to borrow money, and they are able to loan more money to the public at a lower rate of interest, which has the effect of increasing the money supply. The Fed may also raise the discount rate, which makes it tougher for banks to borrow money, and they will raise their interest rates on loans to the public, having the tendency to decrease, or contract, the money supply. There are other methods by which the Fed can control the amount of money in circulation, which are all impinged upon if the money has to be redeemable in specie.
When Johnson was president, he took all silver certificates out of circulation which made our currency a fiat currency - legal tender for the payment of debts, but not redeemable in specie. Sometime during the seventies, the government started borrowing money to pay the interest on the debt! That is an accelerator on the size of the debt. From 1974-1975, both the debt and the deficit increased by more than $40-billion, and I'm prompted to call that the "blastoff that sent our national debt sky-rocketing". It increased 46% from 1976 to 1980, to just under the first trillion.
I heard Senator Daschle say the other day that the current economic figures are the worst we have had since the Great Depression. I believe that if the Senator were to check back to 1980 - the last year of Carter's administration - he would find interest rates were at 21%, inflation at 14%, and unemployment was at 9.9%! Those were the worst economic figures since the Great Depression. Oh yes. Carter was the Democrat who promised folks in Kentucky that our coal would be our ace in the hole, because he was going to find a way to convert soft coal into gasoline, and then we wouldn't have to depend on foreign oil. Better he should have promised us a way to distill tobacco juice and use it as an additive to gasoline.
The recession that should have landed on Carter landed instead on Reagan. And Reagan did his bit as well. He signed into law a bill which allowed foreign investors to buy our Treasury securities in 1981. Only Americans were allowed to buy them before. Now, more than 60% of our national debt is owned by foreign investors! Reagan also allowed the sale of American corporations to foreign investors at what might be termed fire-sale prices.
The point is the Democrats have no right to complain about "Dubya's deficit". It was they who began the practice of deficit budgeting, and continued it for more than 60 years, expanding our national debt from a mere $19.5-billion to what it is today, something over $7.29-trillion. They have no right to proclaim these are the worst economic figures we have had since the Great Depression! The only times the debt didn't grow because there was a balanced budget, there was a Republican majority in the Congress!! You can check that out for yourselves in the Statistical Abstracts published by the government every year.
I will say that this President Bush was not spinning a yarn when he said he was going to hunt the terrorists down and destroy them. I don't like it that we had another war without a declaration of war. (There hasn't been a declaration of war since Dec. 8, 1941, and yet we have still had more than 115,000 men and women killed in combat, and another quarter-million wounded. The Constitution says that our armed forces are not to be committed to combat without a declaration of war, and only the Congress can make that declaration.) But the results were more than satisfactory. We got rid of another tyrant who was a danger to everyone in the world, not to mention his own people. Again, we're hearing the braying of Democrats and the left-wing media about "where are those weapons of mass destruction?" A simpleton could figure out that France gave Saddam the word that Bush was not kidding. He had best get rid of his WMD before the whole thing got started. (With allies like the French, who needs enemies? Give a Frenchman a sharp knife and a dark alley, and he is in his element!) Bush has also told the U.N. in no uncertain terms that we are a sovereign nation, and we don't need to have anyone tell us how to decide what is or is not in our best interests. That's the best news I've heard in this century!!
[Note: Many have been taught that Marbury v Madison, 1803 was important because that was when the Supreme Court assumed the power of judicial review. If you read further, the decision was unanimous, and Chief Justice John Marshall wrote the unanimous decision, in which he declared certain portions of the Judicial Act to be unconstitutional. (The case concerned the infamous "Midnight Letters" of appointment by John Adams, literally issued in the eleventh hour of his administration.) He wrote also that Congress could not change the Constitution by writing a mere law. The only way the Constitution can be changed is through the amendment process described in the Constitution. The War Powers Act, and any assumption that the president has the right to declare war on his own volition should be invalid. Even Roosevelt, after the "dastardly attack" of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, asked that Congress declare war on Japan. That was the last declaration of war we have on record. Germany and Italy declared war on us because of their pact with the Japanese which formed the Axis Powers.
Also, the very first sentence in the Constitution beyond the Preamble - Article I, Section 1 - gives all legislative powers to the Congress. That means that no judicial edict, executive orders, or agency/departmental regulations can be considered the law. You will find the powers of the president in Article II, and the duties of the Supreme Court in Article III, and there are no asterisks there to make exceptions. All other federal courts are created through the powers granted the Congress in Article I, Section 8, and if the Congress can create them, the Congress may also regulate them, and even do away with them. The judicial system was designed not to be all-powerful because it was the actions of the royal courts that deprived the Founding Fathers of their legal recourse to law, leaving only revolution as a means to regain the rights they had as Englishmen.
A further insight which is often overlooked. In 1937, Roosevelt asked the 75th Congress to expand the Supreme Court to 15 members, the infamous "Court Packing" situation. He had a number of his New Deal programs stricken down by the Court. He told the Congress that he would use the decisions of the Supreme Court to streamline government, and make it more progressive. Another way of saying he wanted to avoid the amendment process because it took too long to get results. He lost that round, but it didn't take long for activist judges to be appointed to the Court because of attrition. And the Court started changing our government by decree in 1947, and has been at it incrementally ever since. By the way. In the thirties being called a communist wasn't very desirable, so the communists here called themselves socialists; then "socialists" called themselves progressives; then "progressives" called themselves liberals. Go figure. In 1944, Henry Wallace was removed from the ticket with Roosevelt in favor of Harry Truman because Wallace was too closely associated with "socialists". Yeah! Right!