rdmcandie wrote:
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That $80B increase was about a 50% jump in total cost (it went from $190B to $272B)
80is not 50% of 190. It is 42% which is still large but not about 50, its really more about 40.
Yes. I was estimating dork. It's still a pretty significant jump in spending.
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But you can thank Mr. Bush and his crack team of retards for not addressing economic issues which were brought up in 2006, 2 years before the sh*tstorm, that cost a lot of people their jobs, their health coverage and forced a migration to government assisted health services.
Even if I accepted your blame of Bush for the economic collapse of 2008 (I don't), it didn't cause the current debt crisis. See. That's the part that I keep pointing out and you all keep failing to see. The reason we're in so much trouble right now is because our federal government spent too much money in response to that crisis. We made it
worse by overreacting to it. Had we just done TARP and stopped right there, the banks would have recovered and paid us back (just as they did), the market would have recovered (just as it has), and businesses would have gone back to expanding and creating new jobs and unemployment would have come down (as it hasn't).
Why didn't that last piece happen? Because business investors (as opposed to commodity investors or market players) are worried about the spending/deficit and whether and how much our tax laws are going to change to pay for it. This is keeping them from investing in ventures which tie their money down in businesses with offices and work sites and
jobs. That's why we haven't recovered fully. It's because we didn't stop at TARP. We went on with the stimulus bill, and added tons of new spending in the 2009/2010 omnibus bills, and tossed in yet more spending in our energy bills, and tossed even more spending in every direction we could in nearly ever bill that came through congress in 2009/2010.
That's what caused this current crisis. By all measurable factors in the finance market, we are fully recovered from the crisis which started this. One has to wonder why the rest of the economy, and specifically the job market, hasn't. It's not because of mortgage securities failing, or banks going under. It's because of the debt problem. And that's because we spent too much. It's not really that complicated.
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I find it funny as hell that you and a lot of people put Obama on the hot seat when he inherited the most @#%^ed up economy the states has seen since the 30's.
It's funny because it really wasn't that fu
cked up. TARP fixed it pretty easily. Had we left it alone, the impact to middle and working class america would have been minimal. It would have been a two to three year dip in our economic fortunes from which we'd recover and move on, just like any of a number of similar economic crashes we've had over the last 30 years or so. Interestingly enough, the last time we got "stuck" in a hole like this was in the late 70s. Which was also the last time that the Dems so completely controlled the government. That's not a coincidence btw.
It's interesting you talk about the 30s though. There's a lot of good arguments, that the New Deal policies of FDR, while they did address the symptoms of the economic problems of the day, actually dramatically lengthened the time it took to recover because it put the government in the front seat of the economy and it struggled to get out of the same tax and spend cycle it's going into right now. That's exactly where we're headed. The initial economic crash isn't what caused the Great Depression. It was bad fiscal/spending policies by the government in response to that crash which did. Similarly, it was no single crash or event in the 70s which led us into such dire straights by the end of that decade, but a series of bad fiscal decisions (again involving spending our way out of it) that caused it. And the Obama administration is repeating the exact same mistake again. It's like the left never learns the lessons from history.
Actually, as I've stated on this forum in the past. The left does know this. But they also know that they can't use the tools needed to actually recover the economy fully. Their social ideology gets in the way of what needs to be done economically. They cannot ever acknowledge that money held in the hands of private industry is what grows the economy and creates jobs (even though that should be obvious to us all really), thus they can't implement the correct solution to an economic downturn like this (stop spending on government programs and let the free market correct the problem on its own). They're like a kid with ADHD trying to push a ball down a hill. They can't help but constantly push it this way and that way, and cant trust that if they just let it roll on its own, it'll get to the bottom faster.
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Its gotten better, be it because of Obamas economic policies, or natural correction remains to be seen, but one things for sure, the mandatory spending increases, are hardly his fault, that is a result of bad economic choices pre 2008, and the resulting collapse of 90% of the economic powers in the world.
What mandatory spending increases were created pre-2008 and are affecting us today and causing this debt crisis? Do you know? Or are you just repeating something you heard and hoping no one will call you on it?
I've run the numbers in two different threads now. The *only* mandatory spending increase you could possibly blame on Bush would be increases in Medicare and that was like an $85B/year increase. That's hardly what's causing us to have over $1T in increased yearly deficit. So what mandatory spending increases are you talking about? And what the hell do you think the Dems were doing for two years? I mean, the GOP attempted to oppose bill after bill warning that the Dems were spending too much money. And now we find out that we're spending too much money and are in a debt crisis. Are you seriously saying you can't put 1 and 1 together here?
Edited, Apr 22nd 2011 4:39pm by gbaji