Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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1. From your post #64
Enter Bill Clinton. When he left office in 2000, that 55.9 percent had risen only slightly to 58 percent, and, amazingly, the public debt had actually dropped to 35.1 percent. An increase in the gross debt of only 2.1 percent (in eight years!) combined with a public debt decrease of 6.9 percent.
2. I scoured this post, above, and can find naught in defense of your 'Clinton' post...
3. Since you decided to change the subject, I guess that means that I beat the pants off you, huh?
Yechhhhh.....what a disgusting visual that is!
Get back in there and put something on!
Here's your word for the day: context
Post #64:
When Ronald Reagan took office, the gross national debt sat at 33.4 percent of the annual GDP. The public debt stood at 26.1 percent. That was the total accumulated national debt the New Deal, World War II, Vietnam, all of it.
During the cheery Decade of the Gipper, gross debt skyrocketed to 55.9 percent (of the annual GDP) and public debt increased to 42 percent.
Enter Bill Clinton. When he left office in 2000, that 55.9 percent (of the annual GDP) had risen only slightly to 58 percent, and, amazingly, the public debt had actually dropped to 35.1 percent. An increase in the gross debt of only 2.1 percent (in eight years!) combined with a public debt decrease of 6.9 percent.
If you are still confused, refer to post #72
1. Reagan made the flourishing economy that you and Clinton are taking credit for....
2. Clinton presided over a 41% increase in national debt.
The End.
The End? Really...such a right wing authoritarian-ism...LOL
Ronald Reagan only created 'flourish' for the elite and misery for the rest of us. Ronbo the great socialist, the reverse Robin Hood, the pied piper on the road to serfdom transferred wealth from the poor and the middle class to the opulent. He began the evisceration of 50 years of democratic (little d) exceptionalism and returned America to the Gilded age. It IS what conservatives do and it IS what conservatism has always done. Construct aristocracies, plutocracies, oligarchies and monarchies. Even the father of Reaganomics sees the light. But your dogmatic ideological mind is too busy reading to gather ammunition that supports your ideology instead of what intelligent people do, read to learn.
Wall Street Targets the Elderly
Looting Social Security
By Paul Craig Roberts - Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as a co-founder of Reaganomics.
Hank Paulson, the Gold Sacks bankster/US Treasury Secretary, who deregulated the financial system, caused a world crisis that wrecked the prospects of foreign banks and governments, caused millions of Americans to lose retirement savings, homes, and jobs, and left taxpayers burdened with multi-trillions of dollars of new US debt, is still not in jail. He is writing in the New York Times urging that the mess he caused be fixed by taking away from working Americans the Social Security and Medicare for which they have paid in earmarked taxes all their working lives.
Wall Streets approach to the poor has always been to drive them deeper into the ground.
As there is no money to be made from the poor, Wall Street fleeces them by yanking away their entitlements. It has always been thus. During the Reagan administration, Wall Street decided to boost the values of its bond and stock portfolios by using Social Security revenues to lower budget deficits. Wall Street figured that lower deficits would mean lower interest rates and higher bond and stock prices.
Two Wall Street henchmen, Alan Greenspan and David Stockman, set up the Social Security raid in this way: The Carter administration had put Social Security in the black for the foreseeable future by establishing a schedule for future Social Security payroll tax increases. Greenspan and Stockman conspired to phase in the payroll tax increases earlier than was needed in order to gain surplus Social Security revenues that could be used to finance other government spending, thus reducing the budget deficit. They sold it to President Reagan as putting Social Security on a sound basis.
Along the way Americans were told that the surplus revenues were going into a special Social Security trust fund at the U.S. Treasury. But what is in the fund is Treasury IOUs for the spent revenues. When the trust funds are needed to pay Social Security benefits, the Treasury will have to sell more debt in order to redeem the IOUs.
Social Security was mugged again during the Clinton administration when the Boskin Commission jimmied the Consumer Price Index in order to reduce the inflation adjustments that Social Security recipients receive, thus diverting money from Social Security retirees to other uses.
We constantly hear from Wall Street gangsters and from Republicans and an occasional Democrat that Social Security and Medicare are a form of welfare that we cant afford, an unfunded liability. This is a lie. Social Security is funded with an earmarked tax. People pay for Social Security and Medicare all their working lives. It is a pay-as-you-go system in which the taxes paid by those working fund those who are retired.
Currently these systems are not in deficit. The problem is that government is using earmarked revenues for other purposes. Indeed, since the 1980s Social Security revenues have been used to fund general government. Today Social Security revenues are being used to fund trillion dollar bailouts for Wall Street and to fund the Bush/Obama wars of aggression against Muslims.
Having diverted Social Security revenues to war and Wall Street, Paulson says there is no alternative but to take the promised benefits away from those who have paid for them.
Republicans have extraordinary animosity toward the poor. In an effort to talk retirees out of their support systems, Republicans frequently describe Social Security as a Ponzi scheme and unsustainable. They ought to know. The phony trust fund, which they set up to hide the fact that Wall Street and the Pentagon are running off with Social Security revenues, is a Ponzi scheme. Social Security itself has been with us since the 1930s and has yet to wreck our lives and budget. But it only took Hank Paulsons derivative Ponzi scheme and its bailout a few years to inflict irreparable damage on our lives and budget.
Whole article