Re: A Reagan quote

From: quibbler (quibbler247_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 06/10/04 

Date: Wed, 9 Jun 2004 22:14:08 -0600

In article <ca7h5s$2vv$1@home.itg.ti.com>,
mikecombs@nospam.com_chg_nospam_2_ti says...
> "quibbler" <quibbler247@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:MPG.1b30c57e6dcfd121989841@news.individual.net...
> >
> > You should blame him. He wasted trillions on weapons to prepare for
> > the mythical battle of armageddon, which many of his supporters were
> > convinced would occur at the millennium.
>
> I'd say money spent running communism into the ground was hardly a waste,

That's a complete myth. You can't spend a communist into the ground,
because they are not functioning in a market economy. They had plenty
of oil and natural resources. Hint: look at the size of the soviet
union. Furthermore, the soviets knew that they always had nuclear
deterrence sufficient to wipe us out, so they didn't need to match us
dollar for dollar. The soviets wanted to restructure far before Reagan
even wanted to deal with them. Reagan was one of the last people to
give up his militaristic ambitions and accept that we would have peace
with the soviets.

> whether it got applied to the task of fighting a nuclear war or not.
>
> > If it hadn't been for his
> > religious kookery and bizarre voodoo economics then we might have had a
> > lot more money for space exploration.
>
> Since Apollo, how many new space initiatives have come from Democrats? How
> many from Republicans?

Actually, I'd bet you that ever single president, both democrat and
republican has had some kind of space initiative. Kerry is on the Space
Subcommittee. Republicans have long claimed to be against big
government, so it's kind of hard for them to support big spending in
space. Repubs were instrumental in getting things like SETI killed.
Plenty of democrats have supported high levels of NASA funding, despite
the occasional one who complains about having other pressing priorities.
Things like the Apollo program, in adjusted dollars really were enormous
expenditures, so it's not surprising that we eventually had to cut back
that level of spending to some degree.

>
> 

-- 
      Quibbler (quibbler247atyahoo.com)
"It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the 
threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, 'mad cow'
disease, and many others, but I think a case can be 
made that faith is one of the world's great evils, 
comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to 
eradicate."  -- Richard Dawkins

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