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发帖数: 29846 | 1 George Will：左派认为只有46年历史的医疗项目Medicare是美国的本质属性，却认为
宪法是持续
变化的文件，随着左派的新意向而进行不同的解读
By GEORGE F. WILL
Posted 05/11/2011 06:30 PM ET
Outside the venue where Rep. Paul Ryan recently spoke in Madison, Wis., a
university town never lacking protesters, one product of America's education
system shouted that Ryan's budget proposal would return America to the bad
old days of the "18th-century robber barons."
The young man, full of zeal and destitute of information, does not know that
those capitalists of whom he disapproves — the ones who built the railroads
and other sinews of the nation's industrial might — operated in the second
half of the 19th century, not in 18th-century agrarian America.
Last month, Barack Obama was asked by an interviewer from Texas why he is so
unpopular there. Obama replied: "Texas has always been a pretty Republican
state, for, you know, historic reasons." Well, yes, "always" — if you
believe, as many baby boomers seem to, that the world began when they became
more or less sentient. But, for the record:
Texas, one of the 11 states of the Confederacy, was, for historic reasons,
part of the solidly Democratic South for almost a century after the Civil
War. Deeply Protestant Texas voted for Republican Herbert Hoover against Al
Smith, a Catholic New Yorker, for president in 1928, but it did not vote for
a Republican presidential candidate again until Dwight Eisenhower carried
the state in 1952 and 1956.
It did not do so again until Richard Nixon in 1972. Four years later, it
embraced Jimmy Carter. Other than during Reconstruction, Texas did not elect
a Republican senator until 1961 (John Tower) and did not elect a second one
(Phil Gramm) until 1984, and there were not as many as three Texas
Republicans in the U.S. House until 1968. Republicans were not a majority of
the state's congressional delegation until 2005.
Responding to Ryan's budget proposal, Obama said it "would lead to a
fundamentally different America than the one we've known certainly in my
lifetime. In fact, I think it would be fundamentally different than what
we've known throughout our history."
Well. It is unclear what "fundamentally" means to Obama, but consider some
possible metrics of what is, and is not, different than what we have known
"throughout our history."
Defining Progress Down
Ryan's plan would reduce federal spending as a percentage of GDP from the
2009-11 average of 24.4 to 19.9 in 10 years. It was not until the nation was
158 years old — in the Depression year of 1934, with the New Deal erupting
—
that peacetime federal spending topped 10% of GDP, and it did not reach 12%
until the war preparations of 1941. |
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