Do Republican voters understand deficit demagoguery?

[NYcarbineer]

Sure, Carby, the OP was gonna take me to school by throwing out ideas wrong out in the trillion column.

Sure.

You want to debate whether or not the expansion of the federal debt was greater under Reagan and Bush than it was under Carter Clinton?

You want to debate whether or not Reagan and Bush increased defense spending?

You want to debate whether or not Reagan and Bush cut taxes?

Let's hear it, because otherwise the OP is right and you are wrong.

Quite a bit of information missing from the op.

Why is there no mention about the democrats lying to Reagen about reducing spending three dollars for every dollar of the tax increase. Inconvenient?

Ah, this classic flip flop,

Reagan goes from being the greatest conservative President EVER!!!!!!!! to

a helpless impotent innocent bystander who really just sat in the whitehouse doing nothing while Congress ran the country.

I guess Congress won the Cold War then too.

 

[antagon]

the partisan hack will always operate a funhouse wherein anything positive will be reflected on their leadership and anything negative on the opposition. this virtuous president, naughty congress shtick is a favorite among their ranks.

 

[Full-Auto]

You want to debate whether or not the expansion of the federal debt was greater under Reagan and Bush than it was under Carter Clinton?

You want to debate whether or not Reagan and Bush increased defense spending?

You want to debate whether or not Reagan and Bush cut taxes?

Let's hear it, because otherwise the OP is right and you are wrong.

Quite a bit of information missing from the op.

Why is there no mention about the democrats lying to Reagen about reducing spending three dollars for every dollar of the tax increase. Inconvenient?

Ah, this classic flip flop,

Reagan goes from being the greatest conservative President EVER!!!!!!!! to

a helpless impotent innocent bystander who really just sat in the whitehouse doing nothing while Congress ran the country.

I guess Congress won the Cold War then too.

So you have no explanation, just excuses and deflections.

 

[Greenbeard]

Reagan goes from being the greatest conservative President EVER!!!!!!!! to

a helpless impotent innocent bystander who really just sat in the whitehouse doing nothing while Congress ran the country.

I guess Congress won the Cold War then too.

Tip O'Neill: Conservative Icon.

 

[washamericom]

Do Republican voters understand deficit demagoguery?
`

does your team get that "the cinton surplus" myth was fueled by the it bubble creating trmendous excess paid to social security, which by law he had to apply ?
that the i.t. bubble burst in march of '01 thereby rendering the entire clinton presidency "QUITE LAME" just like newmans new years eve party.


craigsteiner.us

 

[Truthmatters]

How I wish truth mattered in this country.

 

[washamericom]

How I wish truth mattered in this country.

good morning, it does, i just love that nice doggy... i'm making my dog into an avatardoggie..... soon

 

[antagon]

maybe this was what TM was referring to:

Do Republican voters understand deficit demagoguery?
`

does your team get that "the cinton surplus" myth was fueled by the it bubble creating trmendous excess paid to social security, which by law he had to apply ?
that the i.t. bubble burst in march of '01 thereby rendering the entire clinton presidency "QUITE LAME" just like newmans new years eve party.


craigsteiner.us

here's a truth-based remedy i'll recycle from another thread on the clinton budget:

the budget offset itself entirely from receipts not inclusive of borrowing (from auctions or from SS/other trusts), and inclusive of debt service in 99 and 2000, leaving a surplus which was largely contributed to debt service, according to the treasury's 2001 financial statement.

1999 statement

2000 statement

check it out for yourself.

if only we maintained that sort of fiscal performance.

 

[washamericom]

that's the point of the thread, dumbass: that what republican leadership says is taken over what they do. reagan ushered in the era of deficit spending which we are bound up in, and oversaw a massive expansion in the consumption of entitlement partly due to his policy. clinton cleared that up with the opposite... partly due to his policy.

simple.

if you are out to paint the republican fiscal conservative record out to be better than that across the aisle, you are an obstinate ignoramus jerking off to reagan on youtube. you are not historically accurate, however.

hey ant, i tried to "friend you", since the last time we conversed, but there's some technical problem, i'd still love to have to write for my site, i could use a strong liberal voice. cheers mate.




The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II November 23rd, 2008


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QUICK OBSERVATIONS

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Graph - New data online, updated automatically

ColoradoPols Demonstrates Liberal Cluelessness - Demonstrating why Republicans won, and why America is broke






Ever since I wrote an article that demonstrated that President Clinton never had a surplus, people have been skeptical. After all, Clinton's alleged surpluses have been accepted by the media and repeated so much that it's taken as gospel truth.

The claim is made that in Fiscal Year 2000, President Clinton ran a budget surplus of $236 billion. My previous article demonstrates that far from a surplus, the government had to increase the national debt by $18 billion. How can you claim a surplus when you have to borrow more money?

Indeed, citizens that hear about the Clinton "surplus" but also know the national debt never went down may legitimately ask, "How can the national debt increase even when the government supposedly has a surplus?" This article will provide a detailed explanation of how Clinton claimed a surplus even when the government borrowed $18 billion more the same year.


The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II

 

[antagon]

i think we are friends, americom... dunno.

its not a matter of what bloggers say, it is the fact of the matter.... not a myth. follow the links to the federal balance sheets. you will find that for the first time in decades, in 99 and 2000, the government spent less money than they collected in tax.

the logic that the budget is not balanced because the debt increased is forgivable ignorance. its just too bad so many 'genius' bloggers have butchered the matter to put a partisan shine on it. it's simple; the government builds debt to SS recipients and that debt is included in the national debt. until 2017, this number will go up; after that point, the debt will be paid out faster than it accrues. worse really in terms of cash flow. this does not change the plain facts in those official treasury links above.

that's the real deal, not what some guy who wants to make the most fiscally responsible administration since the 50s seem like something its not.

i wouldn't call myself a liberal. nobody i know would think that. maybe my brother. the bottom line is that by endorsing clinton's and the congress' handling of the budget in the late 90s, that would make me a fiscal conservative. not in words, but the real deal.

check out the links to the treasury and see for yourself how the system works. those blogs are not offering raw hard reality.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

"Reagan and the Bushes expanded the federal debt significantly more than Carter and Clinton. This is mostly because they increased defense spending, lowered taxes (revenue)..."

I stopped reading after that.

this is your answer, Londoner. obstinacy.

why be informed and pragmatic when you could just be ignorant and ideological?

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcddKciP22c[/ame]

 

[antagon]

see?

 

[washamericom]

i think we are friends, americom... dunno.

its not a matter of what bloggers say, it is the fact of the matter.... not a myth. follow the links to the federal balance sheets. you will find that for the first time in decades, in 99 and 2000, the government spent less money than they collected in tax.

the logic that the budget is not balanced because the debt increased is forgivable ignorance. its just too bad so many 'genius' bloggers have butchered the matter to put a partisan shine on it. it's simple; the government builds debt to SS recipients and that debt is included in the national debt. until 2017, this number will go up; after that point, the debt will be paid out faster than it accrues. worse really in terms of cash flow. this does not change the plain facts in those official treasury links above.

that's the real deal, not what some guy who wants to make the most fiscally responsible administration since the 50s seem like something its not.

i wouldn't call myself a liberal. nobody i know would think that. maybe my brother. the bottom line is that by endorsing clinton's and the congress' handling of the budget in the late 90s, that would make me a fiscal conservative. not in words, but the real deal.

check out the links to the treasury and see for yourself how the system works. those blogs are not offering raw hard reality.

we're friends, i thought you was a lib, sorry. how conservative is your brother? i'll work on the treasury numbers, i've heard they've been used to argue both sides. but i have to tell you, you sound as if you know what you're taliking about. what about the it bubble burst ?
it effected the balance of the next president, no? what about 911 ?

 

[mdn2000]

Five threads on taxes, maybe we need a tax forum, is there one.

 

[antagon]

we're friends, i thought you was a lib, sorry. how conservative is your brother? i'll work on the treasury numbers, i've heard they've been used to argue both sides. but i have to tell you, you sound as if you know what you're taliking about. what about the it bubble burst ?
it effected the balance of the next president, no? what about 911 ?

i associate the lib/con thing with a decision to promote a set of values whether or not they fit with reality, history or with a real solution to a problem. i'm not either one. i wouldn't consider my brother a conservative in that vein either, but i think he does subscribe to the reaganite values we were raised with without as much consideration as i've likely put to them. i'm more the philosopher/political philosopher. he's also not lived in the US since the 1994. he's scarcely equipped to comment on america, but having lived in the UK for a decade, just being a thatcher/reagan american banker amid a crumbling clandestine socialist experiment makes him pretty affirmed in conservative supply-side thinking. i'm to the right of what's going on there, too.

generally, i have policies in mind which defy a single left or right characterization. i'm pretty critical of diametric conservatism or liberalism because both are disasters in application.

without a question the bust of the dot-com bubble and 9/11 affected bush's budgets, particularly during the recession itself. his fiscal record defies a reduction in revenues due to recession. it was the single largest increase in structural government growth and expenditure for decades. his decision to go to war in iraq in addition to afghanistan was utter disregard for fiscal discipline. so was his failure to veto virtually anything... what many people vote for a republican president for. on top of the spending, his tax policy was not a recession beating stimulus (which i put beyond tax cuts altogether), it outlasted his term and forced the remainder of his administration and the first two years of the one to follow in a guaranteed red.

lil bush was not a fiscal conservative. neither was reagan who i'd call a deficit supply-sider. this became the american model ever since. bush sr. didnt like it much. clinton didnt either, and was the only president to defy that trend. bush took it overboard despite clear signs that it was unsustainable or artificial.

 

[Toro]

The biggest intellectual fraud hoisted onto the American public over the past three decades was that cutting income taxes leads to smaller deficits. My guess is that at least half of all Republicans believe this bullshit. Even today, in this time of $1.3 trillion deficits, you have these moronic Republican politicians saying we are going to cut taxes and eliminate the deficit while cutting "waste and fraud." It is this dumbass thinking that has created monstrous deficits in the United States, and this is mainly the fault of the Republicans since they did little to curb spending, even when they were in power. I give the Democrats more of a pass on this because they're not holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal discipline, unlike Republicans who are peddling an intellectual fraud.

So why believe them now? It's hard to, but the deficit is becoming serious, and at least Republicans are asking the right questions.

America has to have an adult conversation on fiscal policy. People are going to have to make sacrifices, including spending on themselves. People who oppose spending want spending cut for other people, not themselves. We can't have a serious discussion until we realize we are all going to have to make sacrifices.

That includes taxes as well. Too few people are paying income taxes. More of the burden has to be spread around. Taxes are going to have to go up.

But this is mainly a spending problem. Most of the sacrifice is going to have to come on the spending side.

 

[Toro]

Reagan goes from being the greatest conservative President EVER!!!!!!!! to

a helpless impotent innocent bystander who really just sat in the whitehouse doing nothing while Congress ran the country.

I guess Congress won the Cold War then too.

Tip O'Neill: Conservative Icon.

Tip cut taxes.

Only Congress passes the budget, you know.

 

[Toro]

that's the point of the thread, dumbass: that what republican leadership says is taken over what they do. reagan ushered in the era of deficit spending which we are bound up in, and oversaw a massive expansion in the consumption of entitlement partly due to his policy. clinton cleared that up with the opposite... partly due to his policy.

simple.

if you are out to paint the republican fiscal conservative record out to be better than that across the aisle, you are an obstinate ignoramus jerking off to reagan on youtube. you are not historically accurate, however.

hey ant, i tried to "friend you", since the last time we conversed, but there's some technical problem, i'd still love to have to write for my site, i could use a strong liberal voice. cheers mate.




The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II November 23rd, 2008


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------




QUICK OBSERVATIONS

Federal Reserve Balance Sheet Graph - New data online, updated automatically

ColoradoPols Demonstrates Liberal Cluelessness - Demonstrating why Republicans won, and why America is broke






Ever since I wrote an article that demonstrated that President Clinton never had a surplus, people have been skeptical. After all, Clinton's alleged surpluses have been accepted by the media and repeated so much that it's taken as gospel truth.

The claim is made that in Fiscal Year 2000, President Clinton ran a budget surplus of $236 billion. My previous article demonstrates that far from a surplus, the government had to increase the national debt by $18 billion. How can you claim a surplus when you have to borrow more money?

Indeed, citizens that hear about the Clinton "surplus" but also know the national debt never went down may legitimately ask, "How can the national debt increase even when the government supposedly has a surplus?" This article will provide a detailed explanation of how Clinton claimed a surplus even when the government borrowed $18 billion more the same year.


The Myth of the Clinton Surplus, Part II

It is fair to argue that the budget surpluses under Clinton were padded by the Tech Bubble and capital gains tax revenues were greater than they otherwise would have been had the bubble not occurred. Had the Tech Bubble never happened, then revenues would have been less, and so would the surpluses, and there may have even been deficits. (Of course, the same argument could have been leveled during the Bush years, which was driven primarily by the Housing Bubble. Had the Housing Bubble not occurred, deficits would have been much bigger under Bush.)

However, the total net debt issued outstanding by the United States Treasury fell in the final years of Clinton's term because more debt was being redeemed than was being issued. Alan Greenspan gave a speech during his Humphrey-Hawkins testimony in 1999 arguing that falling Treasury supply could hamper the operations of monetary policy. This is because the budget was in surplus.

The government does not "borrow" from the trusts in the conventional sense. There are no tradeable securities in the trusts. There are no Treasury bonds or stocks or real estate, like in a typical pension fund. It doesn't borrow money from the trust by issuing debt to the public, then spends it, which is what the government does with Treasury issuance. Instead, the government merely adds to the liabilities owed. Essentially, the government says "This year, we are going to add another $X billion to what we owe to the fund" even though they don't actually borrow this money. This is why the total debt rose under Clinton, even though marketable debt, i.e. Treasury bills, notes and bonds, fell.

More here and here.

 

[JFK_USA]

Why don't Republican voters see this?

Answers, please.

I stopped reading after that.

There is your answer

Republicans are convinced that anyone who says they are republicans are fiscally conservative. Also big business benefitted so much under Obama, yet call him anti-business. Geez, you just can't with these people.

 

[DiamondDave]

The biggest intellectual fraud hoisted onto the American public over the past three decades was that cutting income taxes leads to smaller deficits. My guess is that at least half of all Republicans believe this bullshit. Even today, in this time of $1.3 trillion deficits, you have these moronic Republican politicians saying we are going to cut taxes and eliminate the deficit while cutting "waste and fraud." It is this dumbass thinking that has created monstrous deficits in the United States, and this is mainly the fault of the Republicans since they did little to curb spending, even when they were in power. I give the Democrats more of a pass on this because they're not holding themselves out as paragons of fiscal discipline, unlike Republicans who are peddling an intellectual fraud.

So why believe them now? It's hard to, but the deficit is becoming serious, and at least Republicans are asking the right questions.

America has to have an adult conversation on fiscal policy. People are going to have to make sacrifices, including spending on themselves. People who oppose spending want spending cut for other people, not themselves. We can't have a serious discussion until we realize we are all going to have to make sacrifices.

That includes taxes as well. Too few people are paying income taxes. More of the burden has to be spread around. Taxes are going to have to go up.

But this is mainly a spending problem. Most of the sacrifice is going to have to come on the spending side.