The 'Fair Tax' sucks. It still allows for far too much control of the Feds and the IRS. NO, 'prebate' checks. Eliminate the IRS, get rid of their Remington shotguns.
Seriously Layout, the IRS is gone gone gone with the Fair Tax, read about it don't assume what you are hearing.
We were productive in the 30s? Hmm... thought we were in the middle of a depression.
Individually productive, not as industrial productivity, even then we were more productive than the 70's. The individual did more with less than he/she is doing now, one thing that overshadows today, more people then did what they could without the government than we could imagine. BUT even then, our tax rate was higher than now when it is adjusted and more people produced more money than now.
You're forgetting what we did from the 40s thru the 80s... rebuilding a world devastated by war, and protecting everyone from the "evil empire".
Actually when did we rebuild anything ourselves?
I don't remember reading about the boatloads of people embarking to go off to Germany or Japan but rather we gave money that we ended up making through our productivity as a nation and as individuals.
As for protecting anyone, that was something that we had to do for a while, by 1953, we were not really needed in Germany, they had a formidable force that would have been alright alone and so did France for that matter.
Don't forget that by 1954, France was rejecting our aid and even in I think '55 they wanted to replace the dollar with the Franc or something like that. We were in trouble in '55 and '56 when we had a recession of sorts and a lot of people lost their jobs and pensions due to the diverse production that companies were led to believe would continue in the 50's and didn't.
Damm Reagan for collapsing the Soviets!
All he did was out spend them, we are paying for that now if you didn't notice. There were other players involved, those who Reagan could not inspire or move to help with the downfall of the Soviets. Our mistake is the same thing that we normally do, leave it alone when we are done.
By the way, I can't understand how anyone can call Reagan a conservative when all he did was spend money.
Fact is we made a lot of other countries just like us, so they started supplying to the rest of the world what we used to. We became obsolete as an industrial power.
I don't know where we made anyone, China? Japan? Germany? Not really, because it wasn't our ability to spread our form of democracy or what ever you call it or give them ideas on how to produce, Japan and Germany were producing up to the end of the war, and Germany more specific had some of our help getting off the ground but from 1948 forward, we had nothing to do with them.
We gave that title to China. And now the student becomes the master.
Well that's partially true but see China is a different world and has a different way of looking at things, both as a country and individually, it may not be a bad idea to see what their outlook is at this point.