It's not the economy stupid.Follow

I'm not sure what this has to do with the statement I made, but you're forgetting/ignoring some key points.

First off, you're confusing "national debt" with "debt held by public". They're not the same thing. The debt that matters is debt held by public. That figure only increased by $2.5T during Bush's entire 8 year term. It increased by $3.2T dollars just between the end of 2008 and the end of 2010. That's two years in which we borrowed more money to pay for our budget shortfalls than the entire 8 years Bush served. The amount of deficits we've run just in two years under Obama equals the total debt racked up by President Bush and President Clinton and the latter half of the first President Bush. We have to go all the way back to 1991 to reach a point $3.2T lower than the debt was when Obama took office. So let's stop pretending that it's the GOP that spends too much here, ok?

Secondly, there's an inflation effect in there. When Reagan took office, debt was 25.8% of GDP. Remember though, it was "low" because we were experiencing such high inflation (and interest rates) in the 70s, that our debt stayed low relative to GDP, but the rest of the economy suffered horribly (it's not just about debt% in other words). Tracking the turning points, debt% increased over time and reached its high point of 49.2% in 1994. It then dropped to a low of 32.5% in 2001. Then it increased to a high of 36.9% in 2005. Then dropped to a low of 36.2% in 2007. Then reversed course and went to 40.3% in 2008, 53.5% in 2009, and then 62.1% in 2010.

If projections are to be believed, we'll likely hit/exceed 70% this year. That's a pretty massive problem, don't you agree?



Sigh... There's no such thing as "unpaid-for-wars". You are falling for a word trick liberal pundits use. They point at the fact that much of the funding for the wars as unbudgetted (meaning that congress didn't allocate funds for them prior to the year starting) and then make you think that this means that it wasn't paid for. That's simply not true. Over the course of the year, congress passes appropriation bills to fund things that aren't allocated funds in the budget. That money is spent that year. It's accounted for that year. It's paid for that year. And those costs show up in the historical budget data that I use. It's why I use them. They aren't projections of what we plan to spend, but how much we actually spent.

I've also debunked the tax-cut bit several times in this very thread already. That claim is just plain false! It's a lie. We had the same tax rates the entire time Bush was in office, yet we didn't have such massive deficits as we've had in the last two years. In fact, excepting 2008, the highest year deficit was in 2004 ($412B). The deficits for 2005, 2006, and 2007 were all lower. Similarly, the debt% shrank in 2006 and 2007. All while those same Bush tax cuts were in effect. Therefore, it wasn't the tax rates which caused us to go into massive deficit. It was a combination of the direct economic effects of the housing bubble collapse *and* the massive spending that followed it. And honestly, more of it was from the spending than the collapse. The most our revenues were down in any year since 2007 was about $400B. Yet, our deficits were $458B in 2008, $1412B in 2009, and $1294B in 2010. Even if we'd kept things the same from when Bush left, we should have seen $850B deficits in 2009/2010 just from TARP spending and revenue loses.

The numbers don't lie. There's a massive spending increase which occurs in 2009 (and is sustained in 2010 and likely 2011 as well). There's just no other way to explain the additional $500B or so in additional deficit in each of those two years.



Yes, it is. You do understand that there's an amount of debt which you can maintain without hurting yourself and an amount which will overwhelm you, right? 30-40% debt% is sustainable. 60%+ isn't. More importantly, there's an amount of yearly deficit which is manageable and an amount which isn't. Deficit adds to debt. But debt is relative to GDP. So if the economy grows at some rate, your debt can grow at a similar rate and you are no more in debt relatively speaking than before. At the size of our economy, we can reasonably handle yearly deficits in the $200B range without hurting ourselves. We can handle modestly higher (like up into the $400B range) for short periods of time, as long as we have a plan to reduce them (which Bush did, and which did work).

What we can't do is run $1.3T to $1.5T yearly deficits. It's not the first quantity of spending that kills you. It's the amount which pushes you over that edge that does. Your argument is like blaming the guy who drove the car up near the edge of a cliff and parked it without driving over, while excusing the guy who grabbed the keys, put the car in gear and stomped on the accelerator, driving the car over the edge. Or somehow blaming the first 2000 calories of healthy food you ate for you getting fat, and not the additional 4000 of cake you stuffed in your face after that. No! It wasn't the pastry I ate which got me fat, but the garden salad I ate earlier in the day!!! I better stop eating salad, I guess.

At the end of the day, that's just a lame *** excuse. Obama and the Democrats knew exactly what the existing tax rates were and exactly how much the bills for the current wars were when they made the decision to spend all that money in various stimulus bills and amendments over those two years. They knew how close to the edge of the cliff we were and choose to drive over it. The GOP told them how close they were. They told them not to do it. They told them exactly what would happen if they did. But the Dems just called them fear mongers and did it anyway.

So no, now that exactly what we conservative predicted and warned would happen is happening, I'm not going to sit idly by while the left once again attempts to excuse the Democrats while blaming the GOP for this one. You almost can't get a more clear cut case of one party being in the right, and the other being in the wrong.

I always tought the Mantra on he hill was from a Dem perspective, increase revenue (higher taxes), increase spending. Where as the Conservatives are fans of Decrease Revenue (reduce taxes) and Increase spending).

Too bad I already addressed and disproved your flawed scientific method, nullifying your theory in it's entirety.

Must be tough to groom yourself in front of a mirror then.

You do realize that, for someone to take all your talk about your scientific method serious, you should probably not make things up. Go back up and reread what I actually said versus what you wanted me to have said to make you right. They're completely different things.

I'm sure you also believe that the only rung on a ladder that matters is the highest one you step on, too.

If that's the step that causes the ladder to become unstable and tip over, absolutely! You apparently know nothing about ladders.

You take missing the point to a whole new level.

And you just float up to that last rung, right?

No. But it's safe to step on the first X steps on the ladder, and unsafe to step on the ones higher than that. Are you really that confused about this?

It's cute you think that's what is going on. Again, your much vaunted method of coming to positions based purely on research and facts at work.

You missed the part where lolgaxe agreed with me on my main point, but quibbled over some irrelevant bit that didn't matter to me (I'm still not sure what exactly he means by insisting that they didn't have "nothing to do with it", but whatever), then someone else repeated exactly the false statement which lolgaxe agreed wasn't true, but when I pointed this out to that person lolgaxe jumped in and defended what that person said.


Lolgaxe "agreed" that the wars and tax cuts were not the cause of our current economic problems. That's the claim I'm refuting. He agrees with me. Great! But it doesn't explain why when someone repeats that exact false claim, he starts waffling.





You "condensed" out the important parts though.