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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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lchic - 07:39am Sep 20, 2002 EST (# 4442 of 4448)

Krugman notes (above) that the Bush crowd have no VISION wrt people's needs from their economy.

Clinton, H R picks up on this too

NY - "city's unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 8 percent"

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/20/opinion/20CLIN.html

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Thought for the day - will the 'rich' kids in office gut America ... the Enron way ... and if they do, then later .... who'll have to pay?

lchic - 07:47am Sep 20, 2002 EST (# 4443 of 4448)

http://www.economist.com/

Fiscal policy

Deficits, dividends and discretion

Sep 19th 2002 | WASHINGTON, DC From The Economist print edition

The present is better than it looks; the future may be worse

HOW well off is the American government? The answer depends on the timeframe. From a long-term perspective, the government's finances have taken a hit. When George Bush entered the White House, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expected surpluses of $5.6 trillion over the next decade. Now the forecast is for a surplus of around $1 trillion by 2012—and that is only if you assume that Mr Bush's tax cuts will expire in 2010, something they are formally supposed to do, but few politicians believe will happen. In practice, those tax cuts, coupled with a falling stockmarket and Congress's appetite for spending, have eaten up the surplus.

On a short-term view, though, the picture is different. Fiscal loosening has helped prop up the faltering economy. Indeed, with state budgets tightening, interest rates at historic lows and the recovery still looking anaemic, some on Wall Street think that a greater fiscal stimulus may be necessary.

According to the Bush team, the right sort of fiscal policy is to control spending now and cut taxes in the future. Mr Bush has happily signed plenty of expensive laws, including $86 billion in new farm subsidies over the next ten years, and only this week the White House warned that a war with Iraq might cost $200 billion. But the president makes much of Congress's profligacy. In August, he pointedly refused to sign a bill that contained $5.1 billion in “emergency spending”, which he deemed unnecessary. Just this week, he berated Senate Democrats for their lack of budget discipline.

Mr Bush believes that the best boost for America's drooping economy is to make last year's tax cut permanent. Others want an immediate round of tax cuts too. Larry Lindsey, Mr Bush's closest economic adviser, is championing a package of measures designed to help beleaguered stockmarket investors. The economic merits of these ideas are mixed. One idea—reducing the double taxation of dividends—would improve the tax code. Another—allowing people to put more money into tax-preferred retirement accounts—might boost saving, but that would mean that consumers spent less in shops now.

The main point of talking about such tax cuts is political. Even Mr Bush's supporters agree that tax cuts for investors would have virtually no chance of congressional passage before November's elections. The idea is to give Republicans something to offer investors, though some congressional Republicans worry that they would be accused of pandering to the rich.

A sinking ship?

That would certainly be the Democrats' position. They have blamed the worsening deficits on Mr Bush's tax cuts, often in dramatic terms. Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, says the president is “punching more holes in the hull as the ship goes down.”

Despite their claims to fiscal probity, only a minority of Democrats (including two presidential hopefuls, Joe Lieberman and John Edwards) have argued that the tax cut should be delayed or rolled back. And the Democrats have made no effort to scale back their spending plans, which include expensive prescription-drug benefits for older Americans.

Alan Greenspan has also weighed in. There is plenty of fiscal stimulus already in the pipeline, argues the chairman of the Federal Reserve: the real risk is that Congress may abandon fiscal discipline entirely. Avoiding this fate does not mean rolling back Mr Bush's tax cuts (which Mr Greenspan famously endorsed last year), but depends on controlling spending. Mr Greenspan wants a raft of budget rules that were introduced in 1990 and are due to expire on September 30th to be extended. These rules set explicit caps on discretionary spending (the money that lawmakers appropri

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