I just thought he (Bush) was a closer fit to me than the other candidates.
So did I. Not only did I vote for him twice, I actively worked the get out the vote phones for him in 2000. Needless to say, I'm sorely disappointed. Not only disappointed, but betrayed. You see, I've voted Republican since 1968, beginning with Nixon. I (foolishly) bought into the conservative v. liberal, right v. left, republican v. democrat philosophy which continues to this day. I've finally seen the light and now understand all that is simply a ruse, a smokescreen, a red herring, pap for the masses.
The real story, the truth, is that this government, our government, since Reagan, has been actively shifting income from the (former) middle class to the already wealthiest.
IOW, there is and has been a huge income inequality in this country. The most direct way to illustrate that fact is by way of results.
The most telling statistic of what it all means comes from the U.S. Department of Commerce. It states that wages and salaries as of April 2006 constituted only 45.3% of GDP, a decline from 50.0% in 2001 and 53.6% in 1970. Furthermore, as the U.S. government itself estimates, each percentage point now equals about $132 billion!
In other words, the roughly 8.3% drop (53.6-45.3) in labors share by 2005 represents an annual shift in relative income today of about $1.09 trillion. Thats $1.09 trillion that now occurs every year, and is rising.
That $1.09 trillion shift is equivalent to every one of 108 million non-supervisory workers in the U.S. today writing out a check each year, every year, for $12,100 and signing it over to the other 24 million upper-class householdsabout 40% of which would go to the wealthiest 1.4 million families.
And not yet included in the $1.09 trillion annual figure are additional income transfers from labor to corporations as a consequence of employers shifting a greater share of the costs of health care to their workers in recent years; the destruction and only partial payouts to workers from the discontinuing of tens of thousands of defined benefit pension plans since the 1980s; and the transfer of hundreds of billions more every year in workers payroll tax payments (i.e. deferred wages) from the Social Security Trust fund to the U.S. general budget since the 1980s.
'Conservatism' no longer exists. We have been screwed by every administration since Reagan. I can only strongly urge you to register, and vote, Independent.