Democratic Underground - Nice Distortion

Tahkcalb,

Thanks for taking the opening part of my letter, quoting only part of it, and deliberately distorting it. It's nice to know that you're not above distorting someone's words. Anything goes, as long as it helps support your views, doesn't it. I'll post the entire letter, so readers can actually see what I wrote.

For 20+ years, I was a Republican. Back then, I didn't like the "share-the-wealth" thinking the Democrats seemed to embrace. I voted for Ronald Reagan twice.

Then I saw an interesting graph regarding the National Debt. It showed how well Bill Clinton had done, and how poorly the Republican presidents on both sides of him had done. Bush had done MUCH worse. Considering I voted AGAINST Bill Clinton, this gave me pause. I began researching economic statistics, and economic principles.

Then a light suddenly came on. My previous views of the benefits of increasing investment capital by reducing taxes on corporations came into question. When I began reviewing economic principles and statistics, I realized financial commentators were omitting something. In fact, they ignored the most important aspect of economics. They ignored consumer DEMAND. It was as if that concept didn't even exist. And yet, many commentators were also stating that consumer spending is 2/3 of all economic activity. Since consumer spending creates DEMAND, this seemed like a serious ommission. It made me question everything I was hearing.

In fact, the importance of DEMAND should have overshadowed all other commentary, such as "investment creates jobs," the "onerous regulatory burden," etc. No attention whatsoever was paid to consumer buying power. I thought that was strange, considering profits are made by SELLING goods, not producing them.

I began to realize that my previous "right-leaning" economic beliefs were wrong. VERY WRONG. Worse still, I realized they didn't even make sense. When I started doing some serious thinking, I independly re-discovered 2 Keynesian concepts. The 1st was that of AGGREGATE DEMAND. The 2nd was that of "Marginal Propensity to Consume." It wasn't until later I realized Keynes had already described these concepts. To me these were just common sense concepts. And yet, many of the financial talking heads act is if they had never heard of these principles.

This is when I crossed over to the so-called "left" side of the road. From that point on, my view on economics was changed forever. Though Democratic and Liberal economic policy is sometimes described as "share-the-wealth" policy, they are also "increase-the-wealth" policies. Increasing investment is of no benefit unless demand also increases. Increasing production without increasing consumers' ability to buy production makes no sense. It's even worse when the increase in capital (to increase production) is at the expense of consumer buying power. That's what's happening today. That's why I'm now an "ex-Conservative." Current Neocon economic policy is illogical. It defies even common sense.

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