Are We Completely Nuts?

[MeBelle]

Please provide a link to your pretty graph. TIA

Im sorry cleaning up their mess isnt as easy as obama snapping his fingers and creating jobs from the sky, for free. compare the first two years of recovery against the last 2 years of recovery, its clear why keynesism is the bread and butter of first world countries, and every man for himself is the mantra of the 3rd world.

think of the economy in the same mindset as if your car is wrecked. its in the shop, thats a cost you're going to have to eat. on top of that, you need to get a rental, thats how you're going to get to work and get paid. in this role the republicans are the snively teenage girl that wrecked the car (economy) with a lack of attention (low regulation) who now retorts to the complaints about how much damage her irresponsibility caused with the accusation that you're just as bad as spending all that money on the rental.

deficit and debt arnt interchangeable words, clinton came a hair short of balancing the budget, the debt did shink under lbj and carter (proportional to gdp I concede), reagans fiscal irresponsibility ruined everything.
National Debt Graph by President

whats the deficit now? 900 billion instead of 1.4 trillion?

http ://i.imgur.com/azayr.jpg Right Click on the Image.

 

[ReallyMeow]

I probably first saw it here:
22 Months of Job Growth ? Blog ? Barack Obama

but it cites the bls
Bureau of Labor Statistics Data

 

[Quantum Windbag]

" bush owns the transition from a 400 bil deficit to a 1.4t deficit too "
Oh, I don't think so, it was Obama that pushed through that $862 billion Stimulus Bill that didn't stimulate. And he's the one that kept spending going higher ever since.

Im sorry cleaning up their mess isnt as easy as obama snapping his fingers and creating jobs from the sky, for free. compare the first two years of recovery against the last 2 years of recovery, its clear why keynesism is the bread and butter of first world countries, and every man for himself is the mantra of the 3rd world.

" and the tea party has been an encumbrance on recovery efforts, not a boon. "
Oh, I don't think so but that wasn't the point. We were talking about the spending restraint that the Tea Parties bring to the table that didn't exist when Bush was president. He may well have spent money like a drunken sailor anyway, but nowhere near the extent that Obama has.

think of the economy in the same mindset as if your car is wrecked. its in the shop, thats a cost you're going to have to eat. on top of that, you need to get a rental, thats how you're going to get to work and get paid. in this role the republicans are the snively teenage girl that wrecked the car (economy) with a lack of attention (low regulation) who now retorts to the complaints about how much damage her irresponsibility caused with the accusation that you're just as bad as spending all that money on the rental.

I mean, its not like if politicians let anti union rhetoric get in the way, they will simply let bridges we know are at risk of falling down, fall down...WHOOPS.
I-35W Mississippi River bridge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

" nonsense, everytime we have a blue president, the deficit goes down. "
You've GOT to be kidding me. Let's see, is the debt lower now than when Obama took office? NO. Did Clinton lower the debt over his 8 years? NO. How about Carter? NOPE. LBJ? Nope. JFK? NO. Everytime? Oh, I don't think so.

deficit and debt arnt interchangeable words, clinton came a hair short of balancing the budget, the debt did shink under lbj and carter (proportional to gdp I concede), reagans fiscal irresponsibility ruined everything.
National Debt Graph by President

whats the deficit now? 900 billion instead of 1.4 trillion?

My only regret is I cannot give this post the attention it so richly deserves.

Some facts might be in order, except that I doubt anyone that blames a group of people that have never had political power is responsible for the fact that the economy is not recovering wouldn't pay any attention to facts even if I laid them out.

 

[midcan5]

"This is when the Republican Party set its trap. Meeting in closed sessions at the beginning of the Obama regime, the party of tax cuts for the rich, unfunded wars, and the largest deficit in the history of the country redefined itself. It suddenly became the party of deficit reduction through lean government joined to supreme confidence in unregulated financial and corporate markets. It even opposed the bail out of General Motors and Chrysler, though these actions stopped unemployment from reaching a dangerous tipping point, allowed the two companies time to reconstruct themselves, and enabled them to pay back the loans within two years–-creating one of the most successful bailouts in the history of Euro-American economic life." The Contemporary Condition: The Republican Pincer Machine


I often feel there is no sense in posting factual information as facts have no place in the minds of most people. It isn't that people are dumb, it is rather the same tired myths are repeated so often, and these same myths which only support the entitled and the privileged - who pay and support these myths - are so widespread among republicans and conservatives that reality hardly ever enters the picture. If you point out the failure of our last president you are castigated, it is as if history starts anew each four or eight years. There is a link in my sig on taxes, check it out.


"Wealth inequality. This is now at levels unprecedented in modern history, the greatest gap between rich and poor since the Great Depression. The Occupy movement's "one-percent" rhetoric is easy to deride, and their lack of concrete policy easy to dismiss, but there is no arguing with the numbers, Taking the extreme but leading example of the United States, one finds that the richest fifth of the population controls 85% of the country's wealth, while the poorest fifth controls an amount so much lower than one percent that it registers statistically as zero. Despite these facts, people remain confused about the realities of wealth distribution: in surveys a majority of Americans regularly report their belief that the top quintile controls only 60%, and further reported that the fair figure would be closer to 35%-that is, fully 50 points below the actual distribution, and against a background of commitment to free enterprise, individual effort, and success." Mark Kingwell 'Unruly Voices: Essays on Democracy, Civility and the Human Imagination'

 

[ReallyMeow]

Some facts might be in order, except that I doubt anyone that blames a group of people that have never had political power is responsible for the fact that the economy is not recovering wouldn't pay any attention to facts even if I laid them out.

No just because everyone changes hats, starts calling horses ponies and gets a fresh batch of zealot politicians doesnt mean you get to shake off the stank of the last 30 years of trickle down economics. This isnt a bold new direction, this is a doubling down of conservative ideology.
Starve the beast - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Observe what a glowing endorsement fox news (propoganda wing of the republican party) gave the tea party, say in contrast to the libertarians.
REPORT: "Fair and balanced" Fox News aggressively promotes "tea party" protests | Research | Media Matters for America

 

[Katzndogz]

The lapdog media is drumming up support for the proposition that the last remaining 2% of the population still working, can fully support the remaining 98% who have been retired since birth. If they say it often enough, people will believe it and they are pretty much correct.

 

[jwoodie]

Obama wants the closing of tax loopholes for the wealthy and for corporations, like GE, which did not pay a dime of taxes on $14.2 billion in profits, to be part of the plan to narrow the deficit. The republicans don't want to do that. They are, once again, on the wrong side of history on this. He is not, to my knowledge, asking for increased tax rates.

OK, but what is the other "part of the plan" to narrow the deficit?

reduce spending

What spending cuts? I haven't heard anything about this part of his plan.

 

[ReallyMeow]

The lapdog media is drumming up support for the proposition that the last remaining 2% of the population still working, can fully support the remaining 98% who have been retired since birth. If they say it often enough, people will believe it and they are pretty much correct.

wut?

OK, but what is the other "part of the plan" to narrow the deficit?

reduce spending

What spending cuts? I haven't heard anything about this part of his plan.

Let me google that for you

Republicans Conveniently Forget All the Cuts Obama's Already Made | New Republic

 

[Redbone]

Obama's approach is pure liberal tax and spend policy; he doesn't believe we have a spending problem, he thinks we have a revenue problem. As in raise taxes on the top 2% as much and as often as possible. As though there is no negative impact at all in doing so. And quite frankly, his entire agenda for the next two years is to win back the House for the Dems so he can have free reign for the last two years of his presidency. I don't think he cares overly much for the rest of us in the meantime, perhaps he rationalizes his approach by assuming that he'll fix everything once he destroys the GOP.

Certainly he plans on destroying the GOP. That is not all that he plans on destroying. He would like nothing better than to crash this nation. From the chaos rebirth a new European styled socialist State.

 

[percysunshine]

Almost.

 

[MeBelle]

Please provide a link to your pretty graph. TIA

Im sorry cleaning up their mess isnt as easy as obama snapping his fingers and creating jobs from the sky, for free. compare the first two years of recovery against the last 2 years of recovery, its clear why keynesism is the bread and butter of first world countries, and every man for himself is the mantra of the 3rd world.

think of the economy in the same mindset as if your car is wrecked. its in the shop, thats a cost you're going to have to eat. on top of that, you need to get a rental, thats how you're going to get to work and get paid. in this role the republicans are the snively teenage girl that wrecked the car (economy) with a lack of attention (low regulation) who now retorts to the complaints about how much damage her irresponsibility caused with the accusation that you're just as bad as spending all that money on the rental.

deficit and debt arnt interchangeable words, clinton came a hair short of balancing the budget, the debt did shink under lbj and carter (proportional to gdp I concede), reagans fiscal irresponsibility ruined everything.
National Debt Graph by President

whats the deficit now? 900 billion instead of 1.4 trillion?

http ://i.imgur.com/azayr.jpg Right Click on the Image.

Thanks Intense. I was wanting a link to where he got his graph.

 

[ReallyMeow]

Increasing as a result of anything obama was doing, or as a result of policies already in place before obama was even a household name? or simple facts of reality: people get old, the baby boomers are retiring. Where they have been working and contributing to social security, they will now be withdrawing from it.
United States federal budget - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[oldfart]

It's a more serious approach than declaring large portions of the budget off limits or stating that any tax increases are off the board. The real questions about achieving deficit reduction are do the numbers add up and how much of the reduction comes out of the hide of the people proposing any given plan.

Excuse me? How is he being sensible by declaring what he calls the single largest driver of the deficit off limits?

I'm assuming you are talking about health care costs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The ACA contained a pretty good dose of cost containment and revenue enhancement from the private health sector and laid the groundwork for more. It's not enough but it is a start. No deficit reduction program is going to work without a major overhaul of health care financing.

The part declared off-limits was benefit cuts for existing Medicare recipients. This leaves plenty of room for lowering administrative costs and promoting efficiency in the system.

So I suppose that rather than reform the system, you would prefer to simply throw grandma under the bus with draconian death panels (private sector of course) and massive cuts to benefits so that the uberrich health insurance monopolies can continue to make obscene profits?

Keep it up and you will make socialists of 98% of America, or at least accelerate the day we get to single payer, and you can spend the next forty years of your life marginalized politically like the folks who railed against Social Security in the 40's and 50's.

HINT: Revolutions only succeed when the ruling elites get too greedy and push too hard. Keep pushing all the little guys.

 

[jwoodie]

It's a more serious approach than declaring large portions of the budget off limits or stating that any tax increases are off the board. The real questions about achieving deficit reduction are do the numbers add up and how much of the reduction comes out of the hide of the people proposing any given plan.

Excuse me? How is he being sensible by declaring what he calls the single largest driver of the deficit off limits?

I'm assuming you are talking about health care costs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The ACA contained a pretty good dose of cost containment and revenue enhancement from the private health sector and laid the groundwork for more. It's not enough but it is a start. No deficit reduction program is going to work without a major overhaul of health care financing.

The part declared off-limits was benefit cuts for existing Medicare recipients. This leaves plenty of room for lowering administrative costs and promoting efficiency in the system.

So I suppose that rather than reform the system, you would prefer to simply throw grandma under the bus with draconian death panels (private sector of course) and massive cuts to benefits so that the uberrich health insurance monopolies can continue to make obscene profits?

Keep it up and you will make socialists of 98% of America, or at least accelerate the day we get to single payer, and you can spend the next forty years of your life marginalized politically like the folks who railed against Social Security in the 40's and 50's.

HINT: Revolutions only succeed when the ruling elites get too greedy and push too hard. Keep pushing all the little guys.

This is exactly what I was hoping to avoid.

 

[Foxfyre]

Obama's approach is pure liberal tax and spend policy; he doesn't believe we have a spending problem, he thinks we have a revenue problem. As in raise taxes on the top 2% as much and as often as possible. As though there is no negative impact at all in doing so. And quite frankly, his entire agenda for the next two years is to win back the House for the Dems so he can have free reign for the last two years of his presidency. I don't think he cares overly much for the rest of us in the meantime, perhaps he rationalizes his approach by assuming that he'll fix everything once he destroys the GOP.

He's certainly got his work cut out for him on that. At this point I don't see him getting there.

I dunno, it helps when you've got the media on your side. The constant hammering on the repubs does enter the public consciousness, and outside of FoxNews and conservative radio there's not a lot of the other side of the dabate. It's not unlikely that if the economy does ot do well over the next 20 months or so that Obama will use every argument and opportunity to blame it on the House repubs. They did lose some seats in the 2012 election, right? And I don't know that they're helping themselves much with their fractionated messages either. They need a leader and right now they ain't got one.

I disagree. The GOP has a lot of young, bright, competent, and extremely well informed leaders among its ranks. What it doesn't have is a friendly media and entertainment society that will allow the message to get out in any kind of coherent form. Most of the mainstream media is so thoroughly in bed with Obama and the Democrats, and is so strongly aided and abetted by the movie, television, and music industries, that they all bend over backward to present Obama in the best possible light and any prominent Republican or conservative in the worst possible light.

There is simply no other explanation for Obama's high approval rating right now. Obama supporters don't listen to conservative talk radio but draw their conclusions about it from how the Left characterizes it. Ditto Fox News. Ditto the few conservative print outlets out there. Obama supporters do follow left leaning prominent figures on Twitter, etc. though and that is how they get almost all of their information, however biased, incomplete, or dishonest that information is.

You are correct that Obama believes that the government, controlled by him, is the way to get anything done, and if he can destroy the Republican party, he will be unhampered in using the government any way he chooses to use it. And as far as I can discern, that is the ONLY clear agenda the Obama administration is putting out there.

 

[jwoodie]

The lapdog media is drumming up support for the proposition that the last remaining 2% of the population still working, can fully support the remaining 98% who have been retired since birth. If they say it often enough, people will believe it and they are pretty much correct.

wut?

What spending cuts? I haven't heard anything about this part of his plan.

Let me google that for you

Republicans Conveniently Forget All the Cuts Obama's Already Made | New Republic

You should title that link "Idiots lie about Obama spending."

What is Obama's PLAN for FUTURE spending cuts?

 

[Foxfyre]

As you can see, despite much reduced revenues in the recession, the Obama administration has outspent previous administrations by huge amounts. And with his push to raise the debt limit, it is obvious they intend to keep right on doing that. The result is continued high unemployment and hundreds of thousands of new unemployment claims every month, increasing inflation (that the administration denies), and no light at the end of the tunnel visible yet that the interminable miserable economy might improve.

As Congress has not passed a budget in the last three years, there are no projected spending cuts on paper at this time. They exist only as vague concepts in Obama's rhetoric that is gobbled up by his adoring public even as we get report after report after report that Obama refuses to even consider immediate cuts in order to get the GOP to agree to a deal and avoid sequestration.

The motive is to increase spending, avoid any cuts in spending, and blame the Republicans. It has worked for them so far. They see no reason to do it any differently now.

 

[Oldstyle]

USA Today's headline reads: "Obama Supported on Guns, Debt" and goes on to report that the public supports "Obama's Approach" to the Federal Deficit by a margin of 45% to 38%.

This is not a political rant, but does anyone know what "Obama's Approach" is? I have not been able to discern it as anything other than raising other people's taxes. Is this a serious approach to the federal deficit? Are there some other details I am missing? Seriously, I would appreciate some enlightenment on this subject.

USA Today has been in the tank for Barry for so long it's become farce at this point. Obama's "approach" to the Federal deficit is to kick dealing with it down the road for someone ELSE to fix. He can't even submit viable budgets let alone deal with runaway deficits.

We've got another four years of Barry trying to grasp simple economics...and another four years of him working to pass legislation that plays well to his base while not fixing a damn thing that's wrong with this country.

He's put Joe Biden in charge of going after gutting the second amendment? Why not handle that himself? Because he knows that there WILL be a backlash? Joe Biden has got to be the dumbest man in Washington. Seriously...he wants to run against Hilary in the next Presidential race and he let himself be talked into being the "pointman" on gun control? There is stupid and then there is STUPID!!!

 

[FA_Q2]

Increasing as a result of anything obama was doing, or as a result of policies already in place before obama was even a household name? or simple facts of reality: people get old, the baby boomers are retiring. Where they have been working and contributing to social security, they will now be withdrawing from it.
United States federal budget - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I thought you were claiming that Obama cut federal spending? I guess that now it has been shown that claim is utter nonsense you are defaulting to the blame Bush tactic. That is another asinine claim.

Here is the truth: Bush's government spending pans out to this -->

2000----1,788,950
2001----1,862,846
2002----2,010,894
2003----2,159,899
2004----2,292,841
2005----2,471,957
2006----2,655,050
2007----2,728,686
2008----2,982,544
2009----3,517,677 <-------- Trillion dollar bailout spent

Obama's
2010----3,456,213
2011----3,603,061
2012----3,795,547 estimate
2013----3,803,364 estimate
2014----3,883,095 estimate
2015----4,059,866 estimate
2016----4,328,840 estimate
2017----4,531,723 estimate

So, all those 'Bush' excuses for spending for some reason never happened on Bush's actual spending. Save for the one year that the everyone (including the dems) demanded that we spend almost a trillion on the financial industry, Bush did not top 3T in spending. Obama tops 3T every damn year. And yet, all this spending is because Bush? Sure....

Social security has just started to draw from the general fund. It has not amounted to much of that spending yet. Medicare has not increased 1 trillion in the last 4 years. These are not the smoking gun that has driven Obama's spending up. Iraq is drawing to a close. There should be some savings there. Apparently there is not.

Then there is the question on what, exactly, are you blaming on Bush? The recession? No, you cant take a recession that was decades in the making and place all the blame on Bush. There were a lot of factors that played in that downturn and it is no more Bush's fault the dot com bubble was Clintons. Both parties, indeed the entire government and the direction the people push it, were complicit in that event as well as the idiotic continuation of those policies.

Tax cuts? No, those are Obama's tax cuts. They have been since 2010. I notice, even though it was Obama that renewed then made permanent those cuts that there is no tax cut under his name. Interesting that even though Bush has zero to do with the tax cuts passing the 2010 mark you and your source are still 'blaming' the added deficit on him. I would also not that your side seems to have no problem taking credit for the fact that they were passed and peoples taxes remained lower though. It is only Bush when you have to pay the bill.

The wars? I suppose that 4 years after, Obama still has nothing to do with that. Really! Does Obama not get any responsibility for his own actions? Further, Afghanistan is not Bush. How quickly you seem to forget that WE were attacked, not the other way around. Iraq I do blame on Bush and he was a terrible president for it (among other things) but how terrible Bush was as a president has nothing to do with the reality that Obama is just as bad. You also seem so upset at the wars that Bush persecuted (with the blessing of congress) but don't care that Obama has actually expanded our wars and international meddling (mostly without congresses blessings).

Lastly, this was a conversation on the fact that Obama has NOT reduced spending. Spending and deficit are separate items. You have jumped from one to the other in the insane need to blame Bush for Obama's errors. This is outlined by the fact that the Bush/Obama tax cuts, which cost exactly nothing, are one of the things you want 'blame' Bush for creating a deficit when we are not talking about deficit but spending.

You should just admit that you were incorrect. Obama has not cut spending. The OP is correct when he states:

"This is not a political rant, but does anyone know what "Obama's Approach" is? I have not been able to discern it as anything other than raising other people's taxes."

That, in fact, IS Obama's approach summed up in one statement. He might claim that he wants to reduce spending but in reality he is not interested in reducing spending at all. I wish that I could say at least the right is interested in reducing spending but alas, that is not true either. Virtually no one in Washington is actually interested in real reductions. Otherwise we would have already had cuts.

 

[Foxfyre]

You cannot blame 2009 spending on Bush. Yes, it was a Bush budget, but a budget is not a spending bill. It is a plan to authorize spending billls and how the spending will be allocated. Just as we operating on family budgets amend the budget when a bonus is less than expected or we don't get the hoped for raise--we then scrap plans for remodeling the kitchen that year or replacing the aging car--the Congress can elect not to spend everything the budget proposes.

And every penny spent is included in an allocation bill that is developed and passed separate from the budget and sometimes bears little resemblance to the language in the budget.

Thus, even though the 2008 budget was higher than the 2007 budget, 2008 spending would have been less than 2007 if TARP had not been passed. Congress and the President have the ability to do that.

You can point to a Bush budget for 2009 spending, but it was not Bush who put out the appropriation bills and spent the money in 2009. It was the 2009 Congress and President Obama who did that.