Bush Opens a Double-Digit Lead!
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Bush Opens a Double-Digit Lead!
| Fri, 09-03-2004 - 3:46pm |
New York: For the first time since the Presidential race became a two person contest last spring, there is a clear leader, the latest TIME poll shows. If the 2004 election for President were held today, 52% of likely voters surveyed would vote for President George W. Bush, 41% would vote for Democratic nominee John Kerry, and 3% would vote for Ralph Nader, according to a new TIME poll conducted from Aug. 31 to Sept. 2. Poll results are available on TIME.com and will appear in the upcoming issue of TIME magazine, on newsstands Monday, Sept. 6.
http://www.time.com/time/press_releases/article/0,8599,692562,00.html
Edited 9/3/2004 4:13 pm ET ET by iminnie833

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BUSH/CHENEY 2004!
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
< Methodology: The TIME Poll was conducted August 31 – September 2 by telephone among a random sample of 1,316 adults, including 1,128 reported registered voters and 926 likely voters. The margin of error for registered voters is +/- 3% points, and +/- 4% points for likely voters. >
Hey, did you read that despite President Bush's campaign speech last night, Big Government is actually GROWING under his administration and is actually the source of much of the good job numbers? Maybe y'all should stop calling yourself Republicans and just use the term "Bush Supporters." Maybe you can start the Bush Party. There are a few election age males coming of age in the Bush Dynasty, and Florida isn't goin' anywhere.
Here's the article (and please use the link at the bottom to see the graph, which shows percent of all wages paid by the government steadily DECREASING under Clinton, and then headed straight up under G.W. Bush. Republican??? Conservative??? I don't think so. What exactly are you? Where is our country headed?)
FLOYD NORRIS
In the Bush Years, Government Grows as the Private Sector Struggles
Published: September 3, 2004
BIG government is back. And while that fact may not have been heralded at Madison Square Garden this week, it is largely responsible for the best long-term economic statistic that Republicans cited.
By one measure, President Bush has presided over a reversal of the trend to smaller government that began nearly 30 years ago. That measure is the share of wage and salary income that comes directly from governments, and its rise has helped keep the economy growing.
In the Republican platform, most of the economic statistics referred to recent months, noting, for example, that "since last August, 1.5 million new jobs have been created." Such numbers ignore the recession at the beginning of the Bush administration, and the slow recovery that followed until growth took off in mid-2003, when one tax cut - the child credit - put significant cash in the pockets of parents just in time for back-to-school sales.
But one statistic did stand out: "Real after-tax incomes are up by 9.6 percent since December 2000."
That statistic was through June. This week, the government updated it, and the figure through July is a little better, up 9.7 percent. That is a highly respectable number, and it helps to explain why consumer spending remained strong during the downturn.
The tax cuts that President Bush pushed through Congress were a big reason for the gain. Adjusted for inflation, taxes paid in July were down 23 percent from December 2000, the last month of the Clinton administration. (All numbers are at seasonally adjusted annual rates.)
What else contributed to the increase? Private businesses are paying a lot more for employee benefits, especially health care. Those costs are up 23 percent, adjusted for inflation. And government spending on its benefit programs, principally Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, is up 19 percent. All that spending counts in disposable personal income, and makes the overall number look better. But few of us feel better off when health insurance premiums go up.
In the area people think of when they hear about personal income - wage and salary payments - the picture is not as pretty. The entire increase there comes from the government payroll. Adjusted for inflation, private industry is paying almost exactly the same as in 2000. To be precise, private spending on wages is up less than 0.1 percent.
No administration back to John F. Kennedy has done as poorly. The two that came closest - a 1.4 percent rise under the first President Bush and a 3.3 percent gain in the term that ended with Gerald Ford in the White House - each ended with incumbents losing the election.
The share of wage and salary income coming from the government can be seen as a measure of the size of government relative to the economy. It began to rise in the 1950's and peaked in the second quarter of 1975, under Mr. Ford, at 21.8 percent of total wage and salary income. It declined under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, rose a little under the first President Bush and then fell rapidly under Bill Clinton, hitting a low of 16 percent in late 2000.
It has risen under the current administration. The latest quarterly figure showed 17.4 percent of all wage and salary payments came directly from the government.
Some of that is simple economic cycles. Government salary payments tend to rise less rapidly than private ones in good times and not to fall in bad times. But it also shows that this administration has not cut the size of government.
A bigger government and tax cuts are the main reasons that real personal incomes are up since 2000. The big question for the economy is whether the stimulus has been enough to produce a self-reinforcing recovery. More signs that the private economy has turned around will be needed before that can be deemed a sure thing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/03/business/03norris.html
Time magazine is the one who is first reporting it.
I guess the Democrats are upset that their Convention was such a washout compared to the Republican one, and that their candidate keeps running back to the one issue that he keeps trying to run from.....Vietnam
A refreshingly honest post!
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
Renee ~~~
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