Where did our debt come from? When did massive debt become part of the American economy?
Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!
And where was all this angst and concern about debt from conservatives when Bush and Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for almost a decade??? When Bush was starting a 3 trillion dollar war of ideology in Iraq, there was not a ******* PEEP from you right wingers, just cheers and 'bring 'em on'... And where was this less government mantra? You right wingers LOVED BIG government and government intervention into people lives... the Patriot Act, trashing habeas corpus, the Geneva Conventions and the US War Crimes Act.
And what was the concern in the Bush administration about debt and deficits? NONE...Bush's solution was to eliminate the voices of concern.
Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.
The president had promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office, he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president after the mid-term elections in 2002, O'Neill argued against a second round of tax cuts.
"Cheney, at this moment, showed his hand. He said to O'Neill: 'You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.' Â… O'Neill was speechless."
"It was not just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's resources to improve the condition of our society," says O'Neill. "And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction."
Why is it that you people persist in trying to blame previous administrations for what's going on today, right now?
You know, it's not working and nobody is fooled. People aren't buying that Obama isn't culpable in the economic malaise we're seeing currently. A poll out this morning from The Hill reflects an
'it's the policies, stupid' belief that is absolutely correct.
The Hill Poll: Majority of voters blame president for bad economy - TheHill.com
It's not partisan cherry-picking to understand why Reagan was able to work Keynes but Obama is not. There are common sense REASONS why Reagan was successful but Obama has failed. It does no good to try to
stimulate growth with an influx of money if your policies are poised to stifle any growth that might occur. Reagan
exuded American optimism and his policies on taxes and regulations were likewise designed to create optimism in the business climate. Obama is just the opposite. He stood back and allowed Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to treat our treasury like a Democrat candy store and then attached himself firmly to policies across the board which make the business environment less stable, all the while yammering on about
"shared sacrifice". Higher taxes, more regulation, Obamacare, Card Check, Cap-n-Tax... all these things poison the well, and that's when he's not straight up
demonizing Wall Street.
You wanna know when Obama sealed his fate with the American people?... it was the day he signed Porkulus, just three weeks in.
IF he had sent back that bill and told Nancy Pelosi not to bring him another such partisan piece of crap, he'd have kept the true mandate given him by the people. Barack Obama promised a
post-partisan,
post-racial,
"new way of doing business in Washington". He was sent there to clean up corruption and cronyism, not to give us a gargantuan new healthcare entitlement. If people will bother themselves to remember, the only real difference between his platform and Hillary Clinton's was that he was
against a healthcare mandate.
But he never understood the TRUE mandate of the people. And that's because his high-blown rhetoric on the trail was just that... rhetoric; just crap one says to get elected before falling back on the socialist ideology he
actually believes in. You can't be a
leader if you aren't a man of your word. You can't set a new tone of bipartisanship and healing in Washington if your attitude is
"I won". Of course, those of us who were paying close attention already knew that he would fail, that he was lying about who he was. But average voters who don't follow politics daily were quite taken in, because underneath it all, as a people, what we really want most is for somebody to "drain the swamp". Instead, Obama crowned himself Alligator King, and he's going to pay for that in November.
I know I pointed this out earlier, but once again... George Bush left office with an approval rating on only 29%-30%. You're not even carrying your own party with numbers that low. So, no... we didn't like the fact that he spent too much and grew government by too much, even though we liked him as a person. He was who he said he was. He didn't try to fool us into believing he was someone else.
So, your supposition that their was no "angst and concern" about Republicans expanding government and spending taxpayer money has no basis in fact. You appear to be forgetting that Republicans were reprimanded for their misdeeds as late as 2006, when we stood aside and let them take their medicine at the polls. Unlike Democrats, they don't receive slavish devotion for everything they do. Conservatives don't roll like that, and while we might make a "lesser of two evils" vote, when we're LIED to, we see evil.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, Barack Obama has doubled down on every behavior Bush received criticism for on the left. Spending, making war, abrogating freedom... and his devoted followers make excuse after excuse. Where's
your "angst and concern"? This guy is more George Bush than George himself was.
