Mike Lester for February 04, 2015

Who created the deficit?Didn’t your President Clinton hand over an economy in surplus to your President Bush?

@Ottodesu

The deficit and debt are two different things. The deficit is the difference between spending more than you bring in. The debt is the accumulation of all the deficit spending. Obama has created more debt than all other (43) presidents before him.

He now wants $458 billion to spend on infrastructure when he had all that stimulus spending that was to be spent on infrastructure. The stimulus money was given to liberal concerns and unions (ie, slush fund) for the democrats. Where do you think this new money would go??

Everyone knows that we Americans just print dollar bills in the form of securities, whenever we need money. This money is not based on any form of labor involving produced goods, or the result of any paid for services, as it is the case in most other countries, but just printed out like Monopoly. That’s why we owe billions to the Chinese, but it’s a two-way street; they profit and we profit.We’ve been doing it for years and getting away with it because the dollar is the standard currency very often used in international transactions. It is actually much more complicated than can be dealt with in a short explanation, but the point is:THE DEFICIT DOESN’T MATTER. The deficit helps fund our economic recovery, and through the growth that occurs from the recovery, the deficit will drop by itself

I love the fact that all of the conservatives who didn’t give a sh-t about debt or deficits during the Bush administration are now bitching about Obama’s spending. Said budget bitching comes despite the fact that the deficit is 1/3 of what it was when they didn’t care about it. It’s almost as if Republicans only fuss about spending when they’re not the ones doing the spending.

General George S Patton Jr once remarked that any politician who votes for a bill, then does not vote for the tax measure to pay for it should be impeached!

Well, debt is not a non-issue. Just ask Argentina for one. In fiscal 2013 we paid 420 billion in interest on that debt. And we have historically low interest rates (10 year treasury was 1.91% in 2013). Over the last 20 years the average rate was 4.59% (got up to 14.5% in 82). So if we go back to average the rate will be 2.4 x higher which takes debt service to 1 trillion a year. That would buy a lot of whatever you feel is the “right” thing to spend tax dollars on. And that outlay does NOTHING to REDUCE the debt.I’d also argue that an outlay of that magnitude has to impact the economy. Without it I expect the economy would do better.

At least President Obama is reducing the deficit. Let’s not forget it was Dubya who blew it through the roof, after receiving a surplus from President Clinton.

But the Republicans have to have their wars…

The cost of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is now estimated they will cost us 7 trillion dollars. This includes the cost of caring for all disabled vets.Bush gave a tax cut when we went to war. The Iraq war was told to us that it would not cost us anything but be paid by the Iraqis. Bush and the Republicans were handed a balanced budget and a deficit that was projected to be gone eventually. Bush and the Republican had control of the both houses and the presidency for 6 years.I don’t agree with Republican policies but they squandered and only increased the deficit in those 6 years. It would have been nice for them to have put their “principles” into action but they didn’t.https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/ http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/press-past/2013/03/20/the-underestimated-costs-and-price-tag-of-the-iraq-war

Great toon. Spot on, it is.

Put the money in the worker’s hands, they will spend it, it will ’trickle up" and the world will be a better place.

You must have missed my post in Lisa’s comic, so I’ll repost it here, since you repeated your post from there to here with the same logical errors.Republicans didn’t create this debt on their own. And the portion under Obama was 0% on the Republicans, because they didn’t have control of the budget until relatively recently. I’m not saying that Republicans aren’t responsible for any of this, but I am saying that it’s not only their fault.I know you grabbed those numbers under the presidents, but you also need to look at who had control of congress at the time of those additions to the debt.Here is a great chart showing who controlled congress during various presidencies. As you can see, under Reagan, we had a very heavily-leaning Democratic base in the house, with Republicans in the senate. Democrats, in fact, controlled the purse strings for 40 years, just prior to republicans getting the majority under Clinton (where the debt was reduced and a surplus was generated).In fact, when you are talking about the debt, Republicans were in control of both houses when there was a surplus, and major deficits were generated under Democratic leadership in Congress.One other fallacy to your argument is that you are using raw dollars, instead of percent of GDP. By those figures, Obama and the Democrats are really not winning any arguments. You will notice that in direct correlation to the chart I referenced above, the Republicans were the ones who brought spending down as a percent of GDP, and Democrats were the ones to cause it to spike. Indexing it against the GDP removes inflation from the mix, and links it to the direct activity of the economy, which is what we should be focusing on.And last, but not least, let’s not forget that during just about the entire tenure of the Democrats’ leadership from 2007 to to 2013, there was no operating budget. Why? Because of politics; they didn’t want there to be any ammunition that could be used against the POTUS in the election.The presidents are not directly responsible for spending bills, Congress is. The president simply approves the bills.

Thanks for the example of the liberal sheeple math!!! Hey what ever helps you sleep at night!

Sorry for killing the discussion.