<I mean, the national debt tripled under "balance the budget" and "stay the course" Reagan, and Bush inherited a recession.

Tax revenues nearly doubled during the Reagan years. For every dollar brought in, though, the government spent more. There was a beautiful graph of this on the New York Times years ago that I wish I could find.

Reagan was unable to reduce the logarithmic growth of government spending forced on him by the Congress (including Republicans), and if he couldn't do it, I don't know who could. We have a democratic (small-d) society in which voters are permitted to vote money from the Treasury into their own pockets. How the heck can you stop that?

Had the Founding Fathers known that, for example, 40 percent of the Federal Budget would wind up as various retirement programs for the elderly, something they never even conceived of, the Constitution might have been more carefully worded. I'm beginning to think that the meltdown is irreversible.

As for Bush, at least the word "inherited" shows up now as a given in connection with the recession. To be fair, though, Clinton had as little to do with the recession as he did with the previous boom. Although some people trace the high-tech collapse to the attacks on Microsoft, the jury is still out on that one.

...And, my Republican neo-Carville, there are some good Democratic ideas which are good.

Name two. ;)

I will admit, there are a whole lot of Democratic ideas (most involving throwing money at the peasants) that get Democrats elected, so maybe that comes under the definition of "good" for a politician. The fact that eventually most of them will blow up in the faces of the rest of America is probably irrelevant to them.