The_Noble_Cause wrote:tj wrote:It isn't that the GOP has zero interest in governing, it is that they don't support his policy. Reverse is the same for Democrats.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Sorry. Bush's signature issues, tax cuts and going to Iraq, were all supported by Democrats. When Obama came to power, mainstream policies such as government stimulus, were distorted to appear as the end of Western civilization. Just earlier the same year, George W. Bush was mailing rebate checks to people as a form of stimulus - which is pretty much the government equivalent of dropping money from helicopters. Back in the day, Republicans proposed BIG ideas or at the very least, signed big things into law. Ike was inspired by the German autobahn and gave us the interstate. Nixon vowed to defeat cancer and later gave us the EPA. Nowadays, Obama can't 't even propose fixing potholes without being called the devil spawn of Pol Pot. Political scientists, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, summed it up nicely in their book, "It's Worse Than It Looks" -
"Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented."
I actually have paid attention for most of the past 40 years. I don't put too much stock in the political scientists you quoted, though. Most political scientists are more political than scientist, like most journalists. I know better than most. I have a degree in PoliSci, but chose not to use it and instead entered the real world of work because I understood the farcical nature of it all.
Our political process is broken, as evidenced by Bush's support from Democrats (from which they all backtrack now - I was for the war, before I was against it or something).
Iraq was a fool's mission, even if there had been WMDs. I lost some good friends there and have others whose lives are irreparably changed due to disabilities from that fiasco. Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, you name it and we have no national interest there which requires our military intervention. Bush, with help from Democrats, used the fever of 9/11 to get us into Iraq and our country was worse off for it.
Stimulus in terms of putting cash back into people's hands who gave it to the government is far better, IMO, than giving it to crony capitalists and union bosses as payback for political support. Ike warned of the military industrial complex, which was a good warning, because that is where he had served his entire life and was familiar with it. I don't think he could have ever imagined that just 15 years later we would have the EPA, etc. as big government continued to explode under LBJ, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, Bush2, and O. Kennedy gets a pass because he was killed before he could do too much damage, and actually sounded a lot like Republicans of today on fiscal matters. Ford was a caretaker, so he gets a pass as well.
We could afford the interstate system in the 1950s, we can't even afford to fix potholes in it today. That's the gist of many Republicans' issue with O, Hilary, Pelosi, Bush, Mitt, Boehner, et. al. and why they are lambasted. As more Americans see that they individually are not keeping up financially, much less getting ahead, this reality smacks them in the face. That is what is giving Trump and Bernie such momentum.
Nixon's creation of the EPA created one of the worst bureaucracies we have ever seen. Have they done some good? Yes in many ways. But more often than not, they have bent over backward to create rules and obstruction to reasonable progress. Then, they completely destroy a river in Colorado last year and who at the EPA is accountable? What are they going to do, fine themselves a few hundred million more of your tax dollars?
IMO, government can not solve very many problems well. Look at the VA or TSA these days to see how well they do.
But you, and Bernie, are right about Wall Street and big banking. The problem is that the enemy is us. We want our 401k to grow so that we can retire early and be lazy. We have earned that right, we are told. So we invest, and keep demanding that our investment grow at ridiculous compound rates so that we get what's ours.