Most people who vote repuglican do so because they think - and I'm using the word to make a point - tax cuts means they'll be making more money. What they fail to understand is the fact for every cut in spending to give tax cuts, a user fee in either implemented or increased to offset the loss of general revenue from taxes that supported the privilege. Either way, you end up paying to exercise a privilege. The only problem is fees are not considered taxes and therefore there is no limit to how high they can go. So in the long run, we're better off paying taxes to keep our out of pocket costs at a minimum whereas user fees are user based - the total costs divided by the number of participants; the few participants means a higher fee. Now if there was some way to get this simplistic point across the the repuglican base ....................

The reason we can't have two reasonable parties is that we have a large number of ignorant no-nothings who can be whipped up to oppose anything that resembles good sense. A few very wealthy individuals have spend their lives and much of their fortunes whipping them up. The techniques were carefully laid out by Lenin and practiced by the Fascists in the 20's and 30's. That group of no-nothings (extreme right-wingers, fundamentalist religious evangelicals and Libertarians predominantly) led by wealthy money suppliers has taken over the Republican Party.

The leaders of those ideologies (all extremist) along with the money-men negotiate the terms of alliance to run the party and choose the top leaders. They trade off support for each others policies, as we have seen the evangelicals get the judicial reforms they want in exchange for their organized warm bodies. The trade off also has given the wealthy individuals and Libertarians the absence of government oversight They want. The wealthy individuals provide funds, and the Libertarians are another group of motivated warm bodies (see Grover Norquist.) The right-wing extremists have gotten military policy and foreign policy, which makes the money men happy to get the Military-Industrial complex funded by taxpayer money. You will notice, by the way that this is a prescription for a top-down party run from the center. The foot soldiers are mostly what Bob Altemeyer has called 'authoritarian followers.'

The sensible politicians have effectively banded together to hold the know-nothings at bay. They make up the Democratic Party. But the splits that would normally split the sensible politicians still exist, so the Democrats have both Liberal Democrats and Blue Dog Democrats. The one thing that really holds them in the same party structure is a common agreement that government should be run on the basis of good sense. That unifies the two groups enough to allow them to provide a counter-weight to the conservatives. Usually. When things get desperate.

Should the know-nothings self-destruct so badly that the wealthy crazies like Coors and Scaife and the religious crazies can't maintain the party (the inability of the Republicans to find a Presidential candidate acceptable to both the social conservatives and the money conservatives in 2008 as well as the apparent abandonment of political goals by many evangelicals suggests that is happening), then the two wings of the Democrats will do much as the two wings of Thomas Jefferson's party did after he eliminated the Federalists. The Democrats will split into the two natural parties which are currently melded into one party structure because they have to in order to defeat the no-nothings.

That is, at least, my best guess regarding the answer to your question. It is reasoning by analogy and has all the weaknesses of that technique. That is my best guess regarding the answer to your question. It is reasoning by analogy and has all the weaknesses of that technique. But it does explain a lot of the history of the 2008 Presidential campaign.