What was the vision of our early presidents?

[Geee]

Human Events:

 

On Presidents’ Day this year, let’s remember the remarkable commitment of our early presidents to building the financial integrity of the United States. George Washington set the tone. He knew that liberty, sound money, and balanced budgets were the keys to prosperity and national greatness.

In his “Farewell Address,” Washington urged Americans to avoid “the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertion in time of peace to discharge the debts which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.” In other words, let’s pay off all our debts from the Revolutionary War, and do it in our generation and not impose them on our children.

The next presidents agreed with Washington’s high caliber of statesmanship. Jefferson and Madison kept taxes low and still managed to whittle down the national debt. By the time of President Andrew Jackson, the U.S. paid off the whole debt, and began briefly running surpluses. As Jackson made clear, the new political issue was what to do with all the cash left over at the end of the year (Congress decided to give it back to the states, with the larger states getting the most).

Even presidents who struggled during their time in the White House kept their commitment to sound money and balanced budgets. Franklin Pierce, for example, waffled on the slavery issue, but he did muster the courage to veto a federal subsidy to the Collins Steamship Company, which was trying to win the nation’s shipping competition with taxpayer dollars, not good service. Even if we give Pierce a “D” on the slavery issue, we must give him an “A” on fiscal integrity. He is the only president in the last 160 years to cut the national debt in half during his presidency.

[Valin]

@Geee

HISTORY? Did someone mention HISTORY!

 

 

Sometimes our early presidents paid a price for their leadership. Grover Cleveland, for example, vetoed 414 bills during his first term—and was voted out of office when he ran for reelection. But the voters came to their senses after a term with Benjamin Harrison, who spent more than Cleveland in the hopes of winning votes. When Cleveland ran against Harrison a second time, Cleveland won and became the only president in U.S. history to serve two terms non-consecutively. He trusted Americans to support fiscal integrity in the longer run and he was right.

 

Here we see a valid criticism of George W Bush. He signed everything that came across his desk when the Republicans controlled Congress.

 

 

Could it be said as Herbert Hoover was to FDR, so George W Bush is to Barack Obama?

[Draggingtree]

October 19, 2016

The Whigs Are Back, and Cowering More Than Ever

By James Lewis

The American Founders often wore wigs, at least in their official portraits. The term "Whigs" became a label for the Founders' intellectual elite of highly (self-) educated men like Jefferson, Washington, Madison, and the others, who saw themselves as English gentlemen in the New World and who therefore insisted on the legal rights of Englishmen as well. That is what the Declaration of Independence insisted on. When the Declaration was refused, the moral and legal basis of the American Revolution was established.

 

Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, and soon after came a popular revolt: Jacksonian Democracy. Ultimately, the Jacksonians gave rise to the greatest Jacksonian of all, Abraham Lincoln, a great man who, in the end, transcended parties and constituencies, at enormous cost in human pain and suffering, including his own assassination.

 

Well, conservatives have their own Whig establishment today, people who refuse to support Donald Trump the Vulgarian – George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Paul Ryan, and Bill Kristol prominent among them. In this do-or-die election between a radical-left fanatic (Hillary) and a commonsense conservative (Donald Trump), our Whigs are priggishly sitting out the fight. It's a breathtaking 50-50 election, and their systematic betrayal may bring us another four to eight years of Hillary Clinton, symbolic daughter of Betty Friedan the Communist.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/10/the_whigs_are_back_and_cowering_more_than_ever.html