Technogeek wrote:
Wow, read 1/2 my posts again. I said I'm not happy with how Obama is dealing with it. If he wants to raise spending, he should raise taxes.
So you're saying that you'd be perfectly ok with the numbers if the revenue line went up and matched the spending line? So we should be increasing revenue to around 25% of GDP?
Isn't there more to this than just making those two numbers "close"? I think so. I also want both numbers to be relatively low. For most of the last 60 years, the US federal revenues and spending has trended at around 20% of GDP. When spending trended higher for periods of time, we *didn't* increase revenue to match. We adjusted what we were doing and spending came back down. IMO, that's what we need to do here.
It's not just about balancing the budget.
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And "trending" towards a balanced budget... Of course, he could have just, you know, CUT spending when he cut taxes. (You know, your hero).
He didn't need to. Spending wasn't a problem. Look at the chart you linked. Prior to 2008, the highest spending level under Bush was just a hair over 20%. The late Clinton years are an anomaly, right? You get that? Normal spending levels are 20%-22%. Bush's spending levels were not historically high at all. The late Clinton years spending (really more correctly the influence of the GOP takeover of congress), was historically low.
Put another way: Spending as a %GDP was higher for
every single year between 1975 and 1996 then it was for any year under Bush2 (until 2008). Even in 2008, we only push that back two years (it was higher for every year from 1975 to 1994). You just can't argue that spending under Bush was "high". Not unless you look only at the last few years before he took office and ignore all the decades of spending data prior to that point.
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I realize we will never think the same, and I thank Bob every day for that.
You thank Bob that you look at that chart and arrive at pretty much the exact wrong conclusions? You think spending was high under Bush2 and should have been cut. But spending is fine under Obama, it's just taxes that should be raised to match? That's some pretty amazingly selective interpretation of that data going on inside your head.
Edited, Jun 7th 2011 3:47pm by gbaji