> Anyway, dealing with the whole speech. I was amazed at the number of social reforms that Bush wanted to enact. He spent a lot of time talking about the economy, of course, and saying how we needed to create more jobs and increase stock holding and such. Then he tried to explain how cutting taxes and spending billions of dollars overseas and on social reform would help to create that ideal situation.

Increasing spending overseas of course isn't an effort to boost our own economy. If anything, it would hurt it, although I don't know what potential economical benefits there might be on the world market (if any) by strengthening our humanitarian record. The idea, I believe, is that, yeah, strengthening our economy is an important concern, but if that many millions of people are enduring suffering that we can help prevent, that's a greater concern.

It's a balancing act: putting money in one place means not putting it in another, so you put the money in the places that seem to yield the most benefit, whether that benefit is future revenue potential, something purely humanitarian, a defense measure, etc. The hardest part is that it's not possible to know in advance where the money is best spent, because we often only know the consequences after the fact.

Anyway, yes, we can assume that Bush's proposals to the Congress make up something close to what he personally thinks is the best we can do. But I wouldn't go so far as to assume that every proposal directly acts to better all areas.

> Is it feasible to expect that this will work? He sounded convinced, but years of learning about politics make me very doubtful about programs which decrease taxes and increase spending. It seems to be a very republican idea...

That I have to disagree with. On the spending side, Republicans and Democrats both like to spend and cut, and the difference is where. In a very broad generalization, Democrats like to spend more on social services.

You go on to talk about defense. It's true that this is one area that Republicans would like to spend more money on than Democrats do. But I'm at a loss as to why. If September 11th didn't tell us we aren't spending enough money on defense, nothing will; but in any case, what many people don't realize is the sheer volume of benefits defense spending gives us *aside* from "defense." You might be surprised to know the number of household conveniences that resulted from defense research. Most relevant to RinkWorks, the Internet evolved out of the Department of Defense.

> I must admit, the idea of hydrogen powered cars...

This would rock, but I don't know how close those things are to hitting the market at an affordable price. I want to know how it's going to happen, because you know that oil companies will spend every last dollar they have to prevent it from happening. But if it did, we wouldn't have to walk on eggshells around the Middle East, which would be absolutely wonderful. Not that we're doing that now, of course.

> The entire discussion of the Iraq conflict and Saddam's actions seemed very biased to me. People I talked to after said that Bush skirted a lot of the pertinent issues in order to make Iraq look as bad as possible.

What issues? His speech had a slant to it, and I know that nothing is purely black and white. But regardless of whether it means we should go to war or not, I don't know how the Iraqi government can be considered anything but evil. It is a fact that it oppresses its own people, up through and including using weapons of mass destruction against them. There really isn't another side to that.