"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...

Yeah, a socialist, which is why his cabinet is packed with Wall
St.-friendly business leaders.

Huh? Obama's cabinet has exactly ONE Wall Street type.

I didn't say "Wall Street type", I said Wall St.-friendly, like the head of
the EPA who in a similar job in New Jersey was widely considered to be
pro-business. And then there is Tim Geithner (sugar daddy to Wall St.),
William Daley (banking), Peter Orzsag (banking), Jeff Immelt (CEO of General
Electric) although I grant you he isn't actually in the cabinet. Exactly
one? Okay, "packed" was excessive on my part.

Regrettably, Bush did add significantly to the national debt.

LOL, he doubled it, something you denied until several folks posted the
figures to prove you were wrong. So now it's he did "add significantly" to
the nation's debt, that's hilarious.

Most economists, however, felt that an average 5-6% growth in GDP could
easily accommodate that debt load. Unfortunately,

First among them being Dick Cheney, who told then Sec. of the Treasure
O'Neill that Reagan had proved deficits no longer matter. So as long as it
was Republicans spending like drunken sailors it was okay, but once
Democrats got control of Congress and (God forbid!) the White House,
suddenly guys like you discovered massive overspending was a problem--talk
about dark comedy.

http://www.ontheissues.org/2004/Dick..._+_Economy.htm

"Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill was told "deficits don't matter"
when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.
O'Neill, fired in a shakeup of Bush's economic team in December 2002, raised
objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president balked at his
more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting
scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key
constituency.

O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget
deficits-expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year alone-posed a threat
to the economy. Cheney cut him off. "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits
don't matter," he said, according to excerpts. Cheney continued: "We won the
midterms (congressional elections). This is our due." A month later, Cheney
told the Treasury secretary he was fired.

The vice president's office had no immediate comment, but John Snow, who
replaced O'Neill, insisted that deficits "do matter" to the administration.

Source: [X-ref O'Neill] Adam Entous, Reuters, on AOL News Jan 11, 2004"

the Democrats took over Congress in 2006 and such laudatory growth figures
became a thing of the past.

Riiiiiight, that massive real estate bubble that was growing for the past
decade had nothing to do with it, the massive fraud taking place on Wall St.
where companies sold each other securities full of toxic waste and then laid
bets they couldn't afford to pay that none of it would ever go wrong had
nothing to do with it, running two wars off the books by borrowing the money
from China had nothing to do with it--it all happened because the Dems got
control of Congress and bang! the economy went bust just like that.

Then the Democrats took over the White House in 2008 and in the first WEEK
of the new administration, the deficit of the all the Bush years became a
small thing compared.

A small thing huh? No comparison huh? Oddly enough the Congressional
Budget Office doesn't see it that way, and according to both parties the
nonpartisan CBO knows what it is doing.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...rNF_story.html

Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to
massive debt

By Lori Montgomery, Published: April 30
The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice,
not a crisis.

In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the
Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses
indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would
have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.

Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the
apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and,
for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed
funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete
Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first
tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.

Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal
government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the
end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the
economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly
after World War II.

Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary
federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in
defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the
financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.

The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered
largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the
economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and
to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in
anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from
projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their
lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.

Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12
percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion
in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients
contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank
bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several
legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost
nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.

Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame
Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the
total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew
Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about
$1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis
of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for
more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar
annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.

As Congress prepares this week to launch a high-stakes battle over whether
to raise the legal limit on borrowing, the analyses offer a clearer view of
the drivers of the debt — and of the difficulty of re-balancing the budget
without new tax revenue.

Most Republicans reject raising taxes as part of the solution; House Speaker
John A. Boehner (Ohio) has called it a “non-starter.” But Democrats won’t go
for a proposal based solely on spending cuts. The“Gang of Six,” a bipartisan
Senate group dedicated to debt reduction, is expected to unveil a strategy
as soon as this week that couples sharp spending cuts with a rewrite of the
tax code that would raise additional revenue.

(The debt ceiling, set at $14.3 trillion, covers all federal debt, including
money the Treasury owes other federal entities, such as the Social Security
trust fund. The CBO data focus on the portion of the debt borrowed from
outside investors. The debt is the accumulation of annual deficits; if
annual budgets are in surplus, the nation can pay down the debt.)

The annual surpluses that set the nation on this course emerged in the final
years of the Clinton administration. In the typical American household, a
surplus comes as welcome news. But the White House is not a typical
household. When Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin saw the budget shift into
the black in 1998, he immediately warned President Bill Clinton that,
politically, it was a mixed blessing.

Rubin wanted to use the surplus to start repaying the debt, which was then
just more than $3 trillion. The White House billed it as “saving Social
Security first,” viewing the surplus as an opportunity to shore up the
nation’s finances before huge numbers of the baby boom generation began
claiming federal retirement benefits. “The problem was a whole other part of
the political spectrum wanted to use the surplus for tax cuts,” Rubin said
in an interview. “They said they wanted to give the people back their money.
Of course, it was also the people’s debt.”

What to do with the surplus became a central issue of the 2000 presidential
campaign, with Vice President Al Gore arguing that much of it should be put
in a “lockbox” to protect Social Security and Medicare. Bush pushed for a
broad tax cut, arguing that taxpayers at all income levels were owed a
refund. “Some say that the growing federal surplus means Washington has more
money to spend, but they’ve got it backwards,” Bush said as he accepted the
GOP nomination in August 2000. “The surplus is not the government’s money.
The surplus is the people’s money.”

As soon as he took office, Bush pushed Congress to make good on his tax
pledge. Less than a week after his inauguration, he got a boost from Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified before the Senate Budget
Committee that “tax reduction appears required” to prevent the federal
government from accumulating too much cash. Greenspan feared that large
surpluses would turn the government into the nation’s largest investor,
creating distortions in the markets.

A chorus of skeptics warned against spending the surplus. Some stressed the
inherent uncertainty of the CBO projections. Others said a big tax cut would
unleash pent-up desire in both parties to pursue expensive priorities
without the pay-as-you-go restraints that had helped produce the surplus.

Congress approved a $1.35 trillion tax cut in record time. A second package,
worth $350 billion, followed in 2003. Together, they constituted one of the
largest tax cuts since World War II, according to the conservative Tax
Foundation.

Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, resigned after the White
House decided to pursue the 2003 measure. “I believed we needed the money to
facilitate fundamental tax reform and begin working on unfunded liabilities
for Social Security and Medicare,” O’Neill said in an interview. But the
White House, he said, was focused on improving economic growth for the
fourth quarter of 2004. “They wanted to make sure economic conditions were
great going into the president’s reelection.”

Proponents of tax cuts argue that the legislation merely returned tax
collections to their appropriate levels. They note that the CBO’s 2001
forecast assumed that tax collections would stay above 20 percent of the
nation’s gross domestic product (defined as the total of all economic
output) — well above the historic average of 18 percent of GDP.

“It’s not obvious that America was ready to have taxes at a level this high
persistently,” said Donald Marron, a former CBO director who now heads the
nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “Some degree of tax cutting was inevitable.”

But some key advocates of the tax cuts now say such a large reduction was
probably ill-advised.

“Nobody would have thought that all these things would have happened after
you cut taxes,” Domenici said. “That you’d have two wars and not pay for
them. That you’d have another recession. A huge extravaganza of
expenditures” for the military and homeland security after the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks. “You would pause before you did it, if you knew.”

Bill Thomas, the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman who helped
shepherd the tax cuts through Congress, defended the 2003 package as “fuel
for the economy.” But he said in an interview that the 2001 measure was
larded with “stuff that I was not all that wild about,” including bipartisan
priorities such as a big increase in the child tax credit and a break for
married couples — provisions Thomas believes did little to promote economic
growth and amounted to “throwing money out the window.”

“I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Thomas, a California Republican who
retired in 2006. “You’re the candy man when you advocate those kinds of tax
cuts.”

In the end, Bush cut taxes and spent more money. Good times masked the
impact, as surging tax revenues reduced the size of year-to-year deficits
during the first three years of his second term. But after the economy
collapsed during Bush’s final year in office, deficits — and therefore the
debt — began to explode as Obama sought to revive economic activity with
more tax cuts and federal spending.

Today, the CBO forecasts are unrelievedly gloomy, showing huge deficits
essentially forever. As policymakers grapple with the legacy of the past
decade, a demographic wave of senior citizens is crashing at their doorstep,
driving up the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

William Hoagland, who was for years a top budget aide to Domenici and other
GOP Senate leaders, said it is simplistic to think today’s fiscal problems
began just 10 years ago. In 1976, as a young CBO analyst, Hoagland produced
a long-term simulation that showed entitlement costs gradually overwhelming
the rest of the federal budget.

“This situation really goes back to long before [the Bush administration],
which is to say to old dead men that have long left the Congress,” he said.

Still, Hoagland said, the abandonment of fiscal discipline in the wake of
the surpluses clearly didn’t help. “Nobody pushed for paying for this
stuff,” he said. Not even after “it became very clear in the middle of 2003
that the line had turned on us. And the surpluses as far as the eye could
see were no longer there.”

On May 3, 7:29*pm, "DGDevin" wrote:


Yawn. All that went on in the past. So, what you haven't answered
is why Obama and the Dems have taken the excessive spending during
the Bush years and doubled down on it. Obama is spending ever
MORE money. His budget is $3.8Tril, while Bush's last was $2.7tril.
IF the Republican deficits were so bad, what about Obama's? His
budget calls for deficits averaging $1 tril a year for the NEXT
DECADE.
That will take the national debt from $14tril to $24tril, past levels
seen during WWII relative to GDP. In other words, this country
will be finished.

And when the Republicans wanted to cut a mere 75bil, or 2% from
this years budget, Obama and the Dems screamed that it would
be the end of the world. They haggled the Republicans down to
an alleged $38bil, or a mere 1%. Then, a few days after passage
the CBO rates it as only $350mil in actual cuts, or .1% (point 1% )
That;s right. The country is on the road to financial ruin and
Obama's solution is cut .1%.

What about that?