Did it ever dawn on you to watch the natural up and down cycle of our economy and see where it fell with the various administrations and their efforts to control it? From my years of observation it's seemed pretty obvious that presidential economic policy has no more effect than a tiny blip on a huge sine wave.

In my opinion, tax cuts have always been a political tool and not an effective economic tool. Even if they make the afore-mentioned blip that can be construed as a spur to spending, the balance has to come somewhere and is often offset by basic human nature. It's what creates the up and down cycle in the first place and the only net effect of trying to interact with it is that it increases the peaks and valleys.

What an intelligent society would try to do then is to anticipate the rise and fall and try to flatten out the effect to where the growth follows naturally with the rise in population. What both parties seem to do instead is exactly the opposite. When times start going good, everyone jumps on the bandwagon full steam ahead overbuilding and overmortgaging. When the eventual fall occurs it's twice as bad as it needed to be to compensate for the greed of the good times. Government should be like an engine governor working opposite to that part of human nature. As the economy rises and people start spending, tax rates should follow along, with the caveat that much of the windfall goes into rainy day funds, infrastructure enhancements, research and developmnet, things that will carry you through the calamaties. The government should be discouraging overborrowing during the period. If interest rates need to rise to accomplish that, so be it.

Big business would scream but that's where leadership comes in. We seem to not have the political will to block out the screaming for the eventual good that would come of control. It's what I'm looking for from our leaders, the ability to project policy out decades instead of looking at the short term policital gain. I have this nagging feeling that our society as we know it cannot survive without that type of forethought.