For example, say you are ignorant. And I come up with a chart showing you that spending per pupil in the public schools has no correlation with performance. Physical proof right there that more spending does not equal better education. And you choose to disbelieve me or my figures and write it off as some statistical quirk and continue believing in your religious ideology. What was the point of showing you the chart, let alone doing the research to show it to you?
Or, say you are evil. You know full well more spending doesn't equal better education, but you don't care because you benefit from having more money spent on education. However, you can't acknowledge that fact, so you lie to everybody even though deep down inside you know you are lying just to extract more money from them. I could show you charts all day, prove to you time and time again, but since you are evil and have no problems denying reality so you can benefit from it, you will knowingly find excuses as to why the chart is the way it is.
In either case, I simply waste my breath and finite life because it's only going to be a disastrous collapse of the system that will convince you otherwise. But for posterity's sake I am going to document one small issue here so for those of us who do have intellectual honesty, we can KNOW for a FACT what the reality is.
In short I wanted to know who was to blame for the deficits we have now that ARE going to destroy this country. I knew intuitively by looking the general deficit figures who is to blame, but you know liars and ignorants, they'll come up with whatever they want to believe. I want to KNOW.
So even if you go with the premise Bush is to blame for the economy and dropping revenues, how far did revenues drop? Well, going from the PEAK of federal revenues to the absolute trough, Bush can only be blamed for a drop of $480 billion (and that is ignoring the FACT that revenues still dropped under Obama's watch, but I'll just give that one to the left).
And what are the current deficits today?
Eh, $1.4 trillion.
This leaves roughly $900 billion SQUARELY in the hands of Obama (per year I might add).
Now, this ought to tell you who is to blame for our current fiscal crisis. And it should provide context to when he spews his unicorns and ponies blather about actually going about solving the deficit problem.
The only question is if he's evil or ignorant.
9 comments:
I'll post a mildly dissenting response. Bush started the avalanche leading to the horrible deficit. Obama just hasn't stood up and taken action to stop it. In fact, his presidency can be characterised by not taking a strong stand anywhere and instead letting things get much further out of control.
So, while Obama is to blame for not turning things around, Bush is to be blamed for getting us started down this road.
Started, agreed, but not amplified. That's why I differentiated the drop in revenues vs. the increase in spending. This is Obama's through and through.
As I recall it was Bush that allowed the huge government bailout of banks, which has showed up in an Obama budget. TARP accounts for a fair amount of the deficit.
We can thank Mr "Atlas-Shrugged" Greenspan and other conservatives/libertarians for their cations which catalyzed bank/mortgage mess.
Libertarians seem to think that the economy can correct itself. I thought the Depression proved to most that cannot happen.
Oh, and in case you have forgotten the huge amount of deficit spending engaged in earlier conservative presidents:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_BrNJocQYWtw/R1RGTtWTP1I/AAAAAAAAAAY/l8IcY8aOU4s/s1600-R/national%2Bdebt%2Bchart.gif
Explain why there is a relatively flat line in your chart while Regan/Bush I were in office, when its clear they greatly increased the deficit
Dropping revenue has been a part of the problem from the recession caused by the collapse of the government induced housing bubble. However, ever increasing spending is the biggest part of our deficit.
I hate to lay out the "partisan" facts, but they are important. Bush and the Republicans were bad, bu tthe Democrats have been worse.
Spending in the last fiscal year with a Clinton / Republican House approved budget was FY 2001 at $1.9 trillion.
Spending in the last fiscal year with a Bush / Republican House approved non-budget was FY 2007 at $2.7 trillion.
Spending in the last fiscal year with a Bush / Democrat House approved budget was FY 2009 at $3.5 trillion.
Spending in the last fiscal year with an Obama / Democrat House non-budget was FY 2011 at $3.8 trillion.
6 years of Bush with Republican House = $800 billion or $133 billion / year.
2 years of Bush with Democrat House = $800 billion or $400 billion / year.
2 years of Obama with Democrat House = $300 billion or $150 billion / year.
4 years of Democrat House = $1100 billion or $275 billion / year.
Bush was the biggest government spender of all time (until Obama). In his first term he did not veto one single spending bill. He increased government on a scale not seen since the Great Society, or FDR`s federal expansion.
To top it off he started a war, and handed out a tax cut. This was the first war in human history, that started with a tax cut.
Cheney was quoted as saying, "deficits do not matter". I guess they don`t really matter, when your eight year term will end before the bill becomes due.
I think a lot of people have concluded; the Dems and the GOP are two wings of the same bird.
This has given rise to the Tea Party. Bush`s run away spending pushed fiscal conservatives out of the GOP. Bush also started the entire bailout scheme, then Obama iced the cake.
Americans do not seem to have any idea, how many empires have simply gone broke. Instead of moving into a fiscal reality, they bicker about who is the worst spender, Obama or Bush.
I think you're right on the substance (we don't have a deficit problem, we have a spending problem) but that you're not addressing an obvious counter to your argument.
The left will claim that the appropriate revenue metric is not the difference between max and min *actual* revenues, but between the revenues that *would have been collected* (a number that is conveniently unobservable) had the Bush tax cuts not gone into effect and the revenues actually collected. The left will claim that the "WHBC" numbers are giganormous enough to make the deficit problem go away, and fund free unicorns for everyone.
They're stupid and/or lying, of course, but that's what they'll say.
I'll be a mild devil's advocate. I don't think you can blame Obama for most of the drop in revenue early in his term (ie. the quarter ending 7/1/2009). Yes, the specter of "change" probably prevented some investment, but I don't think that the president (any president) has as much influence over the economy as we think, at least not in the short run. That said, Bush and Congress did a poor job balancing the budget. They spent like drunken sailors. Unfortunately, Obama and the Democrats are spending like an entire drunken navy.
Interesting. Can you pinpoint on the chart when we went off the Gold standard? I believe it was under Nixon in the late 1960s.
It seemed we ran a decent budget up until going off the gold standard...
Post a Comment