Regards,
John Marovich
Chicago
Republicans want bigger government.
Good article.
I ask the following question to my GOP friends.
Can you name one single city, county, or state controlled by the Republicans, that has reduced the size of government, as measured by the budget, year over year? Just ONE!
I am from Florida and usually go on to say. In Florida, the Republicans control the state house, the state senate (both by a wide margin) and we have a republican governor. Last year the budget went up by $2.2 billion to $50.4 billion.
The republicans can do anything they want in Florida, and what they want is bigger government.
Some republicans respond by saying that the number of state employes has declined. This is true but still just a ploy used by the GOP to placate the "useful idiots" among the GOP faithful. For instatnce, the state of Florida has outsourced the payroll department. Instead of writing many checks to the state payroll department employees, the state just writes one to the company that now has the same employees working for them.
Name just ONE!
Tom Lundy
Why not Libertarians for a change?
Dear Mr. Doherty:
One big difference between the Libertarian Party and the Green Party and how they respectively compare to the Republican and Democratic Parties is that the Libertarians differ from Republicans qualitatively whereas the Greens differ from the Democrats primarily in what could be considered a quantitative manner. That is, for the most part (one can always find exceptions, but of course they don't make the rule) Greens are merely a more extreme version of Democrats, a far left party compared to one that is slightly left. The same cannot be said of the Libertarian relationship to Republicans, at least not across the entire spectrum of issues.
Two conclusions result. One is that while I would suspect the vast majority of Green voters would prefer most Democratic candidates to most Republican candidates (exit polls for the 2000 election confirmed this somewhat, and I suspected ahead of time that many Nader voters would keep their preference for Gore a secret from pollsters--consciously or otherwise--in order to help justify their maverick ways), while it is a much more open question regarding whether Libertarian voters would necessarily prefer Republicans.
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