Is conservatism a faith based ideology?

Question

or does it actually require FACTS?

For example, most cons FAITHFULLY believe in supply side economics in which tax cuts (mostly for the rich) lead to investment that slowly trickle down to everybody else leading to faster economic growth.

They believe this REGARDLESS of the facts.

Liberals, on the other hand, believe that by shifting taxes to those who can better afford it (the rich) and investing in the American people through education, job training, scientific research, and temporary safety nets, we can increase the size of the middle class which in turn will lead to better economic growth.

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ON WHOSE SIDE ARE THE FACTS WITH?

HERE'S WHAT I DID:
I got the real GDP stats from the Bureau of Economic Analyses. I took the percent increase over 4 year intervals. I then ranked them from best to worst. Out of (((18))) 4 year intervals, the supply siders Reagan and Bush Jr ranked 8th, 12th, and 16th.

1 FDR (44') 74.69%
2 FDR (36') 34.62%
3 LBJ (68') 21.81%
4 TRUMAN (52') 21.00%
5 JFK (64') 19.86%
6 FDR (40') 19.32%
7 CLINTON (00') 17.87%
8 REAGAN (88') 15.98%
9 CARTER (80') 13.67%
10 CLINTON (96')13.53%
11 IKE(56') 13.45%
12 REAGAN (84') 12.63%
13 NIXON (72') 12.38%
14 IKE (60') 10.91%
15 FORD (76') 10.62%
16 BUSH JR (04')9.03%
17 BUSH SR (92')8.81%
18 TRUMAN (48') -9.04%

http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls

EXAMPLE CALCULATION

1996, 8,328.90 inflation adjusted billions of dollars
2000, 9,817.00 inflation adjusted billions of dollars

PERCENT CHANGE = (9817.0/8328.9 - 1.0)*100.0 = 17.87%

IF YOU PREFER OVER FULL 8 YEAR TERMS:

1) Here are the percent increase in real GDP for various presidents:

FDR 177.51% (from 32' to 45')
FDR 88.14% (from 32' to 41', without WWII)
JFK/LBJ 46.00%
CLINTON 33.81%
REAGAN 30.63%
BUSH JR 16.55% (from 00' to 06')

http://www.bea.gov/national/xls/gdplev.xls

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2) Here is the percent increase in inflation adjusted tax revenues:

FDR 447.54% (40' to 44', only data available)
CLINTON 57.91%
JFK/LBJ 37.63%
REAGAN 20.16%
BUSH JR 4.44% (assuming predictions up to 2008 hold)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/sheets/hist01z3.xls

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3) Here is the percentage point change in poverty for various presidents:

FDR N/A
JFK/LBJ -9.40
CLINTON -3.50
REAGAN +0.00
BUSH SR +1.80 (88' to 92')
BUSH JR +1.30 (00' to 05')

http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/hstpov2.html

Intruder,

"now can you go back and look up who was held the majority in congress for the economic booms?"

New Deal era, DEMOCRATS, Great Society era, DEMOCRATS. 1993 the year Clinton passed his Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (which Repubs predicted would lead to recession), DEMOCRATS.

Might as well point out that DEMOCRATS had majority during the Reagan years too. However, it is obvious that the person who has the greatest affect on foreign or domestic policy is the president.

Unless the opposing party, has 2/3rds of Congress, they cannot overide an opposing president.

Answer 1

I believe that people should keep more of what they make. It is THEIR money, not the governements.
I believe the quote is "The government that governs best, governs least."

Answer 2

Everyone has bought into the lib con war. The so called conservatives cut their own throats when they allowed the Republicans to renege on the "New Deal". They did it because they have been fed this nonsense that all liberals are immoral.
The Republicans have been very successful at convincing the average Joe, that if he votes in his own financial interest, he is voting for the downfall of the American culture.

Unless considered in the context of a particular issue, like this one, the label of liberal or conservative is meaningless. But Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter, and all of the rest of the divisive purveyors of the lib con nonsense, are very good at keeping the average Joe peeved about those immoral liberal scum.

Answer 3

You make a good case as an amatuer statistician but you forget some things;

Statistics do not live in a vacuum. You failed to point out the circumstances for each president. FDR started at a very low point. He had nowhere to go but up! The economy was overheated during WW II as it was necessary to produce all of the goods necessary for war. If you look for a standard deviation then you would probably see that FDR's terms are outside of the norm and therefore not a good example. Ditto for LBJ. For your statistics to be representative you have to smooth out the independent variables. You want to critize Bush apparently (He is not a Jr.) so use him as your base. Figure out the current tax rate, monies taken in by taxes, GDP is not a good measure of tax policy. The United States in in a war but it does not compare with WW II for outlays.

Bottom line; your "facts" look impressive, but they are not "information" yet. They mean nothing until they have been processed for a person to use.

Facts would tell you that a start up company is doing extremely well because it increased it's customer base by 50% and a Exxon is a failure by only increasing it's customer base by .7%. Of course measured in dollars it is the difference between 10s of thousands of dollars and 10s of millions of dollars.

As far as poverty figures go, you absolutely have to point out that the definition for poverty has been changed over the years. Are you aware that government aid is not counted for income when figuring poverty levels. A person can make only 12,000 dollars and then receive 45,000 dollars in benefits; they would be considered impoverished with a combined 57,000 income. Poverty figures only deal with annual income, not wealth. A retired person with 1 million dollars in the bank and a pension of 18,000 dollars is considered impoverished.

The devil is always in the details.

Answer 4

Conservatism as a political philosophy is notoriously difficult to define, encompassing numerous different movements in various countries and time periods; there may sometimes be contradictions between alternative conceptions of conservatism as the ideology of preserving the past, and the contemporary worldwide conception of conservatism as a right-wing political stance. For instance, as one commentator questions, "who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of modern conservatives such as Margaret Thatcher?"[1]
Samuel Francis defined authentic conservatism as “the survival and enhancement of a particular people and its institutionalized cultural expressions.”[2] Roger Scruton calls it “maintenance of the social ecology” and “the politics of delay, the purpose of which is to maintain in being, for as long as possible, the life and health of a social organism.”[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism

Answer 5

Yes, it requires a huge leap of faith to accept any of the Republicans' claims any more, but their supporters have more blind faith than a suicide bomber. How else can you explain that some still believe that the Republican Party favors a smaller and less intrusive federal government and less spending?

The article below, "Republicans Aren't Even Good for the Rich", provides further support for your statements.

[edit]
regerugged, by your definition, G.W. Bush is NOT a conservative, so why do you defend him? He spends more than any Democrat has. Probably the only other President ever to match his rampant spending was Reagan, who spent nearly as much in peacetime as Bush is spending in war. How can you go on believing Republicans spend less when faced with such overwhelming evidence? As for "less government", how can you say that with a straight face when we're talking about the party that wants to rewrite the Constitution to legislate morality and make protest a crime? Thank you for proving my point even better than I did.

Answer 6

From President Harry Truman, I learned the expression: "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."

The facts are: conservatives believe in less government, less government spending and free enterprise.
Liberals want government to run everything. Liberals want to run the government.
Ronald Reagan got the US out of the Jimmy Carter doldrums by engineering lower tax rates. By the time he left office, tax revenues doubled, compared to this first year in office.
George W. Bush and his administration engineered tax rate cuts. They got us out of a Bill Clinton inspired recession. The economy grew and prospered, despite the set backs of 9/11.
We now have the best economy in the world. We have more people working than ever before. The unemployment rate is at a very low level.
Those are the facts. Your stats don't mean squat.

Answer 7

Ronald Reagan way to pump the economy

What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors, yet not have anybody realize you've done it? If you're Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan.
Through the "golden years of the American middle class" - the 1940s through 1982 - the top income tax rate for the hyper-rich had been between 90 and 70 percent. Ronald Reagan wanted to cut that rate dramatically, to help out his political patrons. He did this with a massive tax cut in the summer of 1981.
The only problem was that when Reagan took his meat axe to our tax code, he produced mind-boggling budget deficits. Voodoo economics didn't work out as planned, and even after borrowing so much money that this year we'll pay over $100 billion just in interest on the money Reagan borrowed to make the economy look good in the 1980s, Reagan couldn't come up with the revenues he needed to run the government.
Coincidentally, the actuaries at the Social Security Administration were beginning to get worried about the Baby Boomer generation, who would begin retiring in big numbers in fifty years or so. They were a "rabbit going through the python" bulge that would require a few trillion more dollars than Social Security could easily collect during the same 20 year or so period of their retirement. We needed, the actuaries said, to tax more heavily those very persons who would eventually retire, so instead of using current workers' money to pay for the Boomer's Social Security payments in 2020, the Boomers themselves would have pre-paid for their own retirement.
Reagan got Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alan Greenspan together to form a commission on Social Security reform, along with a few other politicians and economists, and they recommend a near-doubling of the Social Security tax on the then-working Boomers. That tax created - for the first time in history - a giant savings account that Social Security could use to pay for the Boomers' retirement.
This was a huge change. Prior to this, Social Security had always paid for today's retirees with income from today's workers (it still is today). The Boomers were the first generation that would pay Social Security taxes both to fund current retirees and save up enough money to pay for their own retirement. And, after the Boomers were all retired and the savings account - called the "Social Security Trust Fund" - was all spent, the rabbit would have finished its journey through the python and Social Security could go back to a "pay as you go" taxing system.
Thus, within the period of a few short years, Reagan dramatically dropped the income tax on America's most wealthy by more than half, and roughly doubled the Social Security tax on people earning $30,000 or less. It was, simultaneously, the largest income tax cut in America's history (almost entirely for the very wealthy), and the most massive tax increase in the history of the nation (which entirely hit working-class people).
But Reagan still had a problem. His tax cuts for the wealthy - even when moderated by subsequent tax increases - weren't generating enough money to invest properly in America's infrastructure, schools, police and fire departments, and military. The country was facing bankruptcy.
No problem, suggested Greenspan. Just borrow the Boomer's savings account - the money in the Social Security Trust Fund - and, because you're borrowing "government money" to fund "government expenditures," you don't have to list it as part of the deficit. Much of the deficit will magically seem to disappear, and nobody will know what you did for another 50 years when the Boomers begin to retire 2015.
Reagan jumped at the opportunity. As did George H. W. Bush. As did Bill Clinton (although Al Gore argued strongly that Social Security funds should not be raided, but, instead, put in a "lock box"). And so did George W. Bush.
The result is that all that money - trillions of dollars - that has been taxed out of working Boomers (the ceiling has risen from the tax being on your first $30,000 of income to the first $90,000 today) has been borrowed and spent. What are left behind are a special form of IOUs - an unique form of Treasury debt instruments similar (but not identical) to those the government issues to borrow money from China today to fund George W. Bush's most recent tax cuts for billionaires (George Junior is still also "borrowing" from the Social Security Trust Fund).
Former Bush Junior Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounts how Dick Cheney famously said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Cheney was either ignorant or being disingenuous - it would be more accurate to say, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter if you rip off the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for them, and don't report that borrowing from the Boomers as part of the deficit."

Answer 8

How many times are you going to ask this question? Presidents don't have the power to change the economy, it's congress. They handle the money. Clinton had 6 yrs of a conserative congress, point proven.

Answer 9

Hey !! stop posting facts that will only confuse conservatives and make them call you names and say your sources are unreliable .

You are just another liberal bashing conservatives on their record .
We all know the information you use is just twisted numbers to suit your evil liberal agenda to have my son wear dresses and sleep with men .

All liberals are Godless morons with baby killing on the mind .

Answer 10

Let's see.
What happens to communists, who take "rich'(people who can feed themselves) people's "extra money" (livelihood) and give it to everyone else? Mass starvation.

Seriously, tax cuts to the "rich" move just as much money in the economy as cuts of similar monetary volume to the middle class or poor. Money is called currency because it should move. If you increase taxes on everything people do, then give it to people who DIDN'T WORK FOR IT. People just want to lock that money down, keep it in their socks or whatever, and then the economy moves toward MASS RECESSION. If you have a real understanding of full economics, then you can understand that the government UNILATERALLY FAILS at nearly everything it tries. THROWING MORE MONEY AT IT HAS NEVER WORKED. Tax systems are managed poorly by both sides. But what you're saying is just plain stupid.

Answer 11

now can you go back and look up who was held the majority in congress for the economic booms?

You assume correlation is causality and on that the facts are not on your side. A 6th grader could tell you that


Generally speaking America has been on top of the food chain as far as countries go. And we are the most "conservative" minded country. Enough facts for me.
Liberal egalitarian countries depend on our free markets to survive.