The incredible growth of the 50's-70's (and even the 90's), periods during which taxes were higher (much, much higher in the 50's-60's).

By contrast look at the previous conservative eras in American history, like the late 1800's-early 1900's, the robber baron era.  A small group of hyper wealthy and an enormous class of working poor (and of course, low-low taxes!). 

You can't make blanket statements and then ignore history. Also, it depends on how you define "growth".  If you mean growth of incomes and dividend payments for the top 10% (and especially the top 1%)  of Americans, I totally agree, taxes DO stifle growth.

Note that plenty of jobs were created in that post  New deal progressive era, so don't tell me taxes stifle job creation either.  Besides, *demand* ultimately creates jobs, not corporate welfare.  They'll find the money if they know they can make more. 

They stifle the growth of individual and corporate wealth (both of which fundamentally threaten democracy if they get too powerful).  That's exactly why something like the estate tax is so important.

The Walton family has spent millions trying to influence people into getting rid of it (they call it a "death tax") and it's no surprise that the Walton heirs alone would stand to lose something like 32 billion dollars. 

4 years of S-Chip is around 35 billion.  We need to get our priorities straight.

Yes, people are free to make lots of money.  But at some point when a fatass keeps reaching for more and more at a (relatively) limited buffet table, you tell him to sit down and eat the 10 pies he stashed at this table already. Sure, said fattie may have paid more to get into the buffet and he therefore deserves more *to an extent*, after which it becomes absurd and negatively effects others.

It's true that it's not completely a zero sum game and that *to an extent* we can increase the amount of food at the buffet (or the size of the American pie of money I should say), but ONLY to an extent.

Listen, once again you have no real response, so you're tossing another smoke bomb out there.

Why? The reason is the middle-class suffers for your current healthcare environment. They don't JUST pay the $1200 month in insurance, which a ton more than you'd pay under single-payer - they also pay thousands in deductables as soon as they use it. the leading cost of personal bankruptcy on your side of the border is medical costs... Think THAT helps the economy? Think nearly 20000 a year dying for lack of healthcare HELPS the economy?

You also end up with higher quality of care and less malpractice under universal.

That's a poor argument because ultimately *everyone* benefits if more people are healthy and therefore productive.

For example, those business owners are happy because their employees are less likely to call in sick or take a medical leave of absence.  Their employees will also be more productive if they aren't sick, worrying about their ED, not taking prescription drugs do to high cost (for physical or mental conditions) and on and on.

This is a perfect example of how shortsighted people are with regard to taxes and their benefits.

It's not as simple as "the rich working to support everyone else".  Here's just one interesting example:

Can you imagine how bad the economy would be if we didn't have an enormous pool of workers who received cheap, public education using tax dollars?  That's an ENORMOUS benefit to employers that people almost never talk about. 

There's NO WAY a totally privatized system could stay so cheap for so long and it would ultimately price out too many potential workers and would therefore end up being subsidized by business interests directly (a roundabout form of taxes) to ensure a steady supply of capable workers.

Or the fact that some corporations can pump tons of pollution into our air and water yet we the taxpayer (do poor/middle class people run those corporations or receive that much in dividends each month?) pay to deal with the cleanup AND the medical expenses from say, mercury in fish or increased rates of asthma and bronchitis.

Those passed on costs are called *externalities*.

There are plenty of other examples... 

those in need not those making 60+ a year and easily funding their own insurance.

Prove it. Show us one program that does that.  How easy is it for some one making 60K to fund there insurance. Prove it.    The average policy for a family of 4 is just under  11,000. So spending 1/5 your income on health insurance is easy? So you support wealth redistribution to the insurance companies. Hypocrite.

Your a liar, but we all knew that.

Some good ideas, some bad.  For example, carter's plan to have the US derive 20% of it's power by 2000, excellent.

Reagan came in and took the solar panels off the roof of the Whitehouse put up by Carter.  He then went on to dismantle Carter's plan and we now derive 20% or so of our energy from (drumroll) nuclear energy.  Pathetic, isn't it, especilaly considering our dependence upon foriegn oil (which by the way, helps us fund terrorists, albeit indirectly, thus making us less safe).

I'm assuming that conservatives who think we should take NO action on Global Warming also don't believe the economy or national security are important, otherwise they wouldn't be against getting us away from a potentially terrorist funding energy source that's in a dangerous area just waiting to be disrupted (to the detriment of our economy). 

I read the judgement against Microsoft when it was released, a long tedious document, and you are correct.  Microsoft got slapped down for some very anti-competitive practices against Netscape.  They did this because Netscape was acting too much like an operating system in the way it released APIs (application programmer interfaces) that allowed applications to be written for Netscape that would be operating system independent. Microsoft used their operating system monopoly leverage to block Netscape from being installed on a majority of new computers, and to prevent it from being included on vendor CDs like AOL.  They took a revenue hit to do this but reduced Netscape's market share by something like 70%.  I used Netscape almost since it's inception and I can tell you that at the time it was vastly superior to Internet Explorer.  When IE came out it seemed like a rather mediocre reverse engineering of the Netscape software.

Clinton had nothing to do with this.  The suit was filed by Netscape and other vendors in civil court.