Barack Obama

[The Conquistador]

The amount that W spent on the war since it first kicked off to when he left was roughly 900 billion.

Zero just spent 10x that on handouts for his cronies, "stimulus spending" that was supposed to "jumpstart the economy" and pay increases for the politicians(professional bullshitters) who voted on the stimulus bill.

Originally Posted by transjen

Since you don't want to pay tax to dry up the red ink then stop crying about the debit since it appears since you don't want to help pay it down then you must not be as worried about it.

Oh I am quite concerned my dear. There is quite alot of pork that they are spending our money on and instead of cutting back on useless programs and other such nonsense, they are going to pass the products of their wasteful spending on us and hold us responsible for a debt they created.

The Gov. has been notorious for their wasteful spending such as $100,000 on an oak desk, $750 on a toilet seat, and $50 for a flathead screwdriver and you expect them to be fiscally responsible with money that they take from you?

Originally Posted by transjen

The upper tax brackets made out like bandits for 8 yrs so they can afford to start paying the tab that was rung up for all there perks, I say start hitting making them pony up and pay there fair share

Hahahahaha! Those with more money have more influence and will not write legislation to lose that money/influence. They are going to pass the buck onto you while they find a way to skirt around it. They always have and will continue to do so. Even if you do manage to get something like that passed, they will lose so much that they will just pull their investments out of the market and do business elsewhere. And once the major players in the American markets who keep the economy up leave, we will be fucked.

You are advocating for the same type of bureaucracy that got us into this financial mess in the first place. The less Gov. meddling there is, the quicker things can get fixed.

[randolph]

By Paul krugmen

November 27, 2009, 10:03 am
Deficits: the causes matter

"Jim Hamilton has a post challenging my optimistic view about current deficits. I won't go through it in detail, except to notice that Jim seems to be slightly rewriting history about his earlier analysis, which I critiqued back in August. What was then a seeming demonstration of the impossibility of servicing the debt - but in fact demonstrated no such thing - has now become just an effort to "personalize" the issue. OK, I guess.

But rather than get into a he-said-he-said, let me try to focus on what I think is the key point: the source of the current deficit matters when you try to figure out what kind of problem we have.

Broadly speaking, there are two ways you can get into severe deficits: fundamental irresponsibility, or temporary emergencies. There's a world of difference between the two.

Consider first the classic temporary emergency - a big war. It's normal and natural to respond to such an emergency by issuing a lot of debt, then gradually reducing that debt after the emergency is over. And the operative word is "gradually": it would have been incredibly difficult for the United States to pay off its World War II debt in ten years, which Jim apparently thinks is the right way to view debts incurred more recently; but it was no big deal to stabilize the nominal debt, which is roughly what happened, and as a result gradually reduce debt as a percentage of GDP.

Consider, on the other hand, a government that is running big deficits even though there isn't an emergency. That's much more worrisome, because you have to wonder what will change to stop the soaring debt. In such a situation, markets are much more likely to conclude that any given debt is so large that it creates a serious risk of default.

Now, back in 2003 I got very alarmed about the US deficit - wrongly, it turned out - not so much because of its size as because of its origin. We had an administration that was behaving in a deeply irresponsible way. Not only was it cutting taxes in the face of a war, which had never happened before, plus starting up a huge unfunded drug benefit, but it was also clearly following a starve-the-beast budget strategy: tax cuts to reduce the revenue base and force later spending cuts to be determined. In effect, it was a strategy designed to produce a fiscal crisis, so as to provide a reason to dismantle the welfare state. And so I thought the crisis would come.

In fact, it never did. Bond markets figured that America was still America, and that responsibility would eventually return; it's still not clear whether they were right, but the housing boom also led to a revenue boom, whittling down those Bush deficits.

Compare and contrast the current situation.

Most though not all of our current budget deficit can be viewed as the result of a temporary emergency. Revenue has plunged in the face of the crisis, while there has been an increase in spending largely due to stimulus and bailouts. None of this can be seen as a case of irresponsible policy, nor as a permanent change in policy. It's more like the financial equivalent of a war - which is why the WWII example is relevant.

So the debt question is what happens when things return to normal: will we be at a level of indebtedness that can't be handled once the crisis is past?

And the answer is that it depends on the politics. If we have a reasonably responsible government a decade from now, and the bond market believes that we have such a government, the debt burden will be well within the range that can be managed with only modest sacrifice.

OK, that's a big if. But it's not a matter of dollars and cents; it's about whether America is still America."

This is a very very big IF considering the behavior of our political parties.

[randolph]

Biden with party crasher blonde babe. Hilarious! What ever happened to security! Heads will roll over this.