"It’s also important to remember that it’s a bit silly to attribute all of the increases — or decreases — in the national debt to a president’s policies. It’s not as if everything magically changes the moment a president takes the oath of office; in Obama’s case, he inherited a recession that sent government revenue plunging in the first months of his presidency. Bill Clinton frequently brags about creating a budget surplus, but that was partly a result of the gusher of revenue that accompanied the technology boom in the mid-1990s."
"Case closed? Nope. The biggest problem with this kind of calculation is that every president inherits a debt from the previous one, making it virtually certain that the pile of debt is going to grow. So raw numbers don’t tell you much; what’s important is the percentage change in the time period being measured."
"So under Obama, the debt has increased 70 percent after nearly six years. But let’s look at what happened under Republican hero Ronald Reagan, using the fiscal year numbers in the White House’s
historical budget tables.
Size of national debt when Reagan took office: $1 trillion
Size after six years: $2.3 trillion (130 percent increase)
Size at the end of his presidency: $2.9 trillion (190 percent increase)
In other words, when the numbers are placed in context, the national debt grew faster under Reagan than it has under Obama. But even he was a piker compared with wartime presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson."
When has our federal debt EVER hurt us? In 1947, our debt-to-GDP ratio was far higher than it is today and yet the U.S. became the most powerful, prosperous nation in history over the next 60 years.
The fact is that our debt has never hurt us in any way and we have never had to pay it off either despite 80 years of heavy debt load. Rather, our debt has benefited us greatly by financing massive infrastructure projects and a strong military that has protected us all these years.
Priebus and the GOP should address these facts before they lament our debt
Neglected to note an important benchmark: interest on debt.
When Obama came into office, we were spending $400 billion per year on interest on the national debt. That's money spent on the debt of previous presidents.
Federal deficit for FY2014 is $483 billion. That means that while the debt has risen, the debt burden is not gaining dramatically thanks to Obama's fiscal policies.
republicans lie ... any way they can ... every where they can ....
The bipartisan immigration reform bill passed by the Senate would shrink the deficit by $197 billion estimated in a reportover the next decade and $700 billion during the 10 years that followed, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/cbo-immig...
so the House sits on the Senate Immigration reform bill for 500+ days ... and counting ...
instead of putting a putting a Immigration reform Bill on the President's desk ... they pass a bill to rebuke him
“Finding fault is easier than finding answers.” To quote an earlier Mitt Romney
