Reagan/Bush debt. Let's blame Clinton THE BUDGET STRUGGLE; CLINTON WINS APPROVAL OF HIS BUDGET PLAN AS GORE VOTES TO BREAK SENATE DEADLOCK ...But Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, said the increased taxes in the program would devastate the economy. In the House Thursday, every Republican voted against the economic plan, and all Republican senators had announced their opposition before the Senate debate began. Phil Gramm of Texas, who may run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1996, declared: "I believe this program is going to make the economy weak. I believe hundreds of thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. I believe Bill Clinton will be one of those people." ---------- The 90's were horrible. Complete and utter devastation.
Lets see...It took 8 years for Bush to put us just under 4 trillion in extra debt. It took Obama 4 months to put us another 1.3 trillion in debt. Also, if you look at historical averages, Every 10 years we increase our debt by 50%. So if we never had 9/11 and it was just business as usual for those 8 years he was in office then by 2008 we should've had a deficit of 8.6 trillion...just by historical averages. Yeah we were a little over, but dont tell me you didnt support a full on war on terror right after 9/11. That you didnt support strengthening our borders or the creation of Homeland security. I didnt hear 1 american speaking up about how wrong it is to go to war or how we should not tighten our borders. Americans were screaming to go to war after 9/11. It wasnt until later they all changed their mind. At obamas rate, he will have the deficit at over 20 trillion by the time he is out of office (in 4 years)
clearly, he and quite a few other good minds believe that the spending is NECESSARY FOR the economy to recover. if you recall, this exorbitant spending to fix the then mutilated economy started back in October with Bush signing the $700 billion tarp so he must have believed in this type of unprecedented spending too. besides, it seems as if the consensus is that the economy is actually starting to turn with all this talk of the recession ending sometime this year. i am not saying the Dem agenda, health care, etc. is not being pushed along with the other expenses but freeing up the credit markets by injecting huge amounts of cash was needed. i am also not saying it will work or not but it is the best option considered the frothy cesspool that he inherited.
Isn't it ironic that the Republican disaster has no bottom, and yet the party has more than its share of assholes?
FIRST YOUR NUMBERS ARE INCORRECT. OBAMA GAVE OUT MONEY THAT BUSH SIGNED BEFORE HIS REPUBLICAN PARTY WAS KICKED OUT BY THE VOTERS. Bush approved more than 1 Trillion in hidden costs that were passed on to the new administration. Just like Bush and his 1 Trillion + war never shows up on the budget radar because he mis-appropriated the money separate from the budget. Now to move on and high light more of your failed logic. Bush had a BUDGET SURPLUS and a booming economy when he was SELECTED by his fathers supreme court for office. Obama has TWO wars and 8 YEARS OF BUSH DEBT to deal with. You are comparing a Idiot taking over 8 years of a well managed economy and a country with a BUDGET SURPLUS run by a Brilliant President to A brilliant president barely 6 months into 8 years of MIS-MANAGED ECONOMY now a ECONOMIC DISASTER and TWO WARS caused by a IDIOT president in office. It will take many years, NOT 6 MONTHS, to RECTIFY 8 years of FAILED economic planning caused by Rampant Deregulation and BUDGET DEFICITS while increasing the govt. bureaucracy to historical proportions. Now take your meds for your dementia and post your garbage in chit chat where it belongs. ALL Your plagiarized garbage should be relegated to chit chat where you and your trailer buddies can then commiserate on why you're still getting your welfare checks.
This analysis is worse than laughable. These aren't Obama's deficits, lol, he didn't lose 1.8 million jobs during his first six months, no he 'saved' six hundred thousand that would have been lost, lol, etc. Get ready for scads more of this type of garbage analysis over the next 3.5 years. After all, if being best friends with racists, terrorists, anti-semites was swept under the rug to get him in office, don't expect little things like trillion dollar deficits and double digit unemployment to see the light of day going into the next election, either. This country is going to have people like you to blame for being complicit in this gargantuan disaster.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?no_interstitial Americaâs Sea of Red Ink Was Years in the Making Sign in to Recommend comments (357) Sign In to E-Mail Print Reprints ShareClose LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy DAVID LEONHARDT Published: June 9, 2009 There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years. Skip to next paragraph Multimedia Graphic How Trillion-Dollar Deficits Were Created Related Economix: How We Crunched the Deficit Numbers (June 9, 2009) Readers' Comments Share your thoughts. Post a Comment » Read All Comments (357) » The first is that President Obamaâs agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested. The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the countryâs choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it. Mr. Obama â responding to recent signs of skittishness among those lenders â met with 40 members of Congress at the White House on Tuesday and called for the re-enactment of pay-as-you-go rules, requiring Congress to pay for any new programs it passes. The story of todayâs deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years. You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bushâs policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama. The first category â the business cycle â accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. Itâs a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economistsâ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years. About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicare prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt. Mr. Obamaâs main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies â together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama â account for 20 percent of the swing. About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obamaâs agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas. If the analysis is extended further into the future, well beyond 2012, the Obama agenda accounts for only a slightly higher share of the projected deficits. How can that be? Some of his proposals, like a plan to put a price on carbon emissions, donât cost the government any money. Others would be partly offset by proposed tax increases on the affluent and spending cuts. Congressional and White House aides agree that no large new programs, like an expansion of health insurance, are likely to pass unless they are paid for. Alan Auerbach, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a widely cited study on the dangers of the current deficits, describes the situation like so: âBush behaved incredibly irresponsibly for eight years. On the one hand, it might seem unfair for people to blame Obama for not fixing it. On the other hand, heâs not fixing it.â âAnd,â he added, ânot fixing it is, in a sense, making it worse.â When challenged about the deficit, Mr. Obama and his advisers generally start talking about health care. âThere is no way you can put the nation on a sound fiscal course without wringing inefficiencies out of health care,â Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, told me. Outside economists agree. The Medicare budget really is the linchpin of deficit reduction. But there are two problems with leaving the discussion there. First, even if a health overhaul does pass, it may not include the tough measures needed to bring down spending. Ultimately, the only way to do so is to take money from doctors, drug makers and insurers, and it isnât clear whether Mr. Obama and Congress have the stomach for that fight. So far, they have focused on ideas like preventive care that would do little to cut costs. Second, even serious health care reform wonât be enough. Obama advisers acknowledge as much. They say that changes to the system would probably have a big effect on health spending starting in five or 10 years. The national debt, however, will grow dangerously large much sooner. Mr. Orszag says the president is committed to a deficit equal to no more than 3 percent of gross domestic product within five to 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office projects a deficit of at least 4 percent for most of the next decade. Even that may turn out to be optimistic, since the government usually ends up spending more than it says it will. So Mr. Obama isnât on course to meet his target. But Congressional Republicans arenât, either. Judd Gregg recently held up a chart on the Senate floor showing that Mr. Obama would increase the deficit â but failed to mention that much of the increase stemmed from extending Bush policies. In fact, unlike Mr. Obama, Republicans favor extending all the Bush tax cuts, which will send the deficit higher. Republican leaders in the House, meanwhile, announced a plan last week to cut spending by $75 billion a year. But they made specific suggestions adding up to meager $5 billion. The remaining $70 billion was left vague. âThe G.O.P. is not serious about cutting down spending,â the conservative Cato Institute concluded. What, then, will happen? âThings will get worse gradually,â Mr. Auerbach predicts, âunless they get worse quickly.â Either a solution will be put off, or foreign lenders, spooked by the rising debt, will send interest rates higher and create a crisis. The solution, though, is no mystery. It will involve some combination of tax increases and spending cuts. And it wonât be limited to pay-as-you-go rules, tax increases on somebody else, or a crackdown on waste, fraud and abuse. Your taxes will probably go up, and some government programs you favor will become less generous. That is the legacy of our trillion-dollar deficits. Erasing them will be one of the great political issues of the coming decade. E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com