War Movie 1988

[Leonides Suttle]

TheSoviet Union began its major deconstructing towards a mixed economy at the beginning of 1988 and began its gradual dissolution. The Iron Curtain began to disintegrate in 1988 as Hungary began allowing freer travel to the Western world.[3] The first extrasolar planet, Gamma Cephei Ab (confirmed in 2002), was detected this year and the World Health Organization began its mission to eradicate polio. Global warming also began to emerge as a more significant concern, with climate scientist James Hansen testifying before the U.S. Senate on the issue.

On the threshold of a new century, we live in a time of unprecedented technological, social, and cultural development, and a rapidly emerging global economy. This election will bring change. The question is: Will it be change and progress with the Republicans or change and chaos with the Democrats?

Americans want leadership to direct the forces of change, on America's terms, guided by American values. The next stage of the American experiment will be a new dynamic partnership in which people direct government and government empowers people to solve their own problems and to have more choices in their lives.

In 1988, we reaffirm that truth. Freedom works. This is not sloganeering, but a verifiable fact. It has been abundantly documented during the Reagan-Bush Administration in terms of real jobs and real progress for individuals, families, and communities urban and rural. Our platform reflects on every page our continuing faith in the creative power of human freedom.

Defending and expanding freedom is our first priority. During the last eight years, the American people joined with the Reagan-Bush Administration in advancing the cause of freedom at home and around the world. Our platform reflects George Bush's belief that military strength, diplomatic resoluteness, and firm leadership are necessary to keep our country and our allies free.

At the very heart of this platform is our belief that the strength of America is its people: free men and women, with faith in God, working for themselves and their families, believing in the inestimable value of every human being from the very young to the very old, building and sustaining communities, quietly performing those "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love" that make up the best portion of our lives, defending freedom, proud of their diverse heritages. They are still eager to grasp the future, to seize life's challenges and, through faith and love and work, to transform them into the valuable, the useful, and the beautiful.

America again leads the world, confident of our abilities, proud of our products, sure of our future, the pacesetter for all mankind. Moving toward the threshold of the 21st century, the American people are poised to fulfill their dreams to a degree unparalleled in human history.

Government didn't work this economic wonder. The people did. Republicans got government out of the way, off the backs of households and entrepreneurs, so the people could take charge. Once again our people have the freedom to grow. From that freedom come prosperity and security.

The restoration of our country's tradition of democratic capitalism has ushered in a new age of optimistic expansion. Based on free enterprise, free markets, and limited government, that tradition regards people as a resource, not a problem. And it works.

Something was terribly wrong, but not with the people. A half-century of destructive policies, pitting Americans against one another for the benefit of the Democrats' political machine, had come to a dead end. The Democrats couldn't find a way out, so the voters showed them the door.

Now the ideological heirs of Carter and Mondale are trying again to sell the public a false bill of goods. These liberals call America's prosperity an illusion. They fantasize our economy is declining. They claim our future is in the hands of other nations. They aren't operating in the real world.

This is not a portrait of a people in decline. It is the profile of a can-do country, hopeful and compassionate, on the move. It is America resurgent, renewed, revitalized by an idea: the belief that free men and women, caring for families and supporting voluntary institutions in a nation of communities, constitute the most powerful force for human progress.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan and George Bush called upon us all to recover from a failed political system the power tightly belonging to the people. Now we call upon our fellow citizens, at the bicentennial of our Constitution, in the words of its preamble, to "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" by opening new vistas of opportunity.

But this prosperity is not an end in itself. It is a beginning. It frees us to grow and be better than we are, to develop things of the spirit and heart. This is the direction in which George Bush will lead our country. It is prosperity with a purpose.

The Republican Party puts the creation of jobs and opportunity first. In our 1980 and 1984 platforms, we promised to put Americans back to work by restoring economic growth without inflation. We delivered on our promise:

With its message of economic growth and opportunity, the GOP is the natural champion of blacks, minorities, women and ethnic Americans. We urge Republican candidates and officials at all levels to extend to minority Americans everywhere the historic invitation for full participation in our party.

A free economy helps defeat discrimination by fostering opportunity for all. That's why real income for black families has risen 14 percent since 1982. It's why members of minority groups have been gaining jobs in the Republican recovery twice as fast as everyone else. Upward mobility for all Americans has come back strong.

Our country's 18 million small business entrepreneurs are the superstars of job creation. In the past decade, they created two out of three new jobs. When they are free to invest and innovate, everyone is better off. They are today's pathfinders, the explorers of America's economic future.

Republicans encourage the women and men in small businesses to think big. To help them create jobs, we will cut to 15 percent the current counterproductive capital gains tax. This will foster investment in new and untried ventures, which often are the cutting edge of constructive change. It will also build the retirement value of workers' pension funds and raise revenues for the federal government.

We will increase, strengthen, and reinvigorate minority business development efforts to afford socially and economically disadvantaged individuals the opportunity for full participation in our free enterprise system.

Work place benefits should be freely negotiated by employee-employer bargaining. We oppose government requirements that shrink workers' paychecks by diverting money away from wages to pay for federal requirements. These hidden taxes add to labor costs without paying those who labor. That is the liberals' way of replacing collective bargaining with congressional edicts about what's good for employees. It reduces the number of jobs and dishonestly imposes on others the costs of programs the Congress can't afford.

We call for a reasonable State and federal product liability standard that will be fair to small businesses, including professional and amateur sports, and to all who are in liability contests. We propose to return the fault-based standard to the civil justice system. Jobs are being lost, useful and sometimes lifesaving products are being discontinued, and America's ability to compete is being adversely affected. Reform will lower costs for all and will return fairness to the system for the benefit of everyone. Republicans recognize the basic right of all Americans to seek redress in the courts; however, we strongly oppose frivolous litigation. In addition, we support enactment of fair and balanced reforms of the tort system at the State level.

The remarkable resurgence of small business under the Republican renaissance of the 1980s highlights the key to the future: plant openings, thousands of them in every part of this land, as small businesses lead the way toward yet another decade of compassionate prosperity.

The Republican Party restates the unequivocal promise we made in 1984: We oppose any attempts to increase taxes. Tax increases harm the economic expansion and reverse the trend to restoring control of the economy to individual Americans.

The American people deserve to know, before the election, where all candidates stand on the question of tax increases. Republicans unequivocally reiterate the no-tax pledge we have proudly taken. While we wouldn't believe the Democrats even if they took the pledge, they haven't taken it.

The crowning economic achievement of the Republican Party under Ronald Reagan and George Bush has been the dramatic reduction in personal income taxes. The Reagan-Bush Administration has cut the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent. We got government's heavy hand out of the wallets and purses of all our people. That single step has sparked the longest peacetime expansion in our history.

We not only lowered tax rates for all. We tied them to the cost of living so congressional Democrats couldn't secretly boost taxes by pushing people into higher brackets through inflation. We took millions of low-income families off the tax rolls, and we doubled the personal exemption for all.

As a result, by 1986 the income tax bill of a typical middle-income family had declined by one-quarter. If the Democrats had defeated our economic recovery program, that family would have paid nearly $6,000 more in taxes between 1982 and 1987. Meanwhile, average Americans and the working poor carry substantially less of the burden. Upper income Americans now pay a larger share of federal taxes than they did in 1980.

Our policies have become the model for much of the world. Through the power of capitalism, governments are rushing to reduce tax rates to save their stagnating economies. This is good for America, for their recovery will make them better trading partners for our own exuberant economy.

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