So you are actually trying to absolve Republicans of economic blame by trying to point a finger at a congress that has only had a token majority, but not an effective voting majority, for a whole year and a half, and that the countries economic ills were supposed to be solved by them in that short time with an opposing president who vetoed/amended anything that deviated from executive desires? Oh yeah, and you of course would never admit that there were economic ills to be corrected by the Dems at all, because Republicans were at the helm for the prior 6 years and that might imply that they may have done something wrong during that time.
Wow, talk about hiding from blame…do you want to try to blame Clinton next?
You realize that Social Security is still cash flow positive at the moment, don’t you?
Fixing Social Security, assuming that it is actually broken, won’t be hard. The assumptions in the model that shows the shortfall are conservative, as they should be. I wonder if the fact that no one can afford to retire now thanks to the crash won’t make the numbers a bit better. Anyhow, a small increase in the cap for the tax should go a long way to helping - though now is definitely not the time to do it.
There were about 9,000 troops there during the Kennedy years, mostly in “advisor” status. The war at that point was between the governments of the north and south, with the USSR “advising” the north. To say that the US was engaged in war in Vietnam in 1963 would be largely a semantics argument by people trying to stretch a point.
My recollection is that US national debt, as a percentage of GDP, is comparable to many developed nations, including Canada, France, and Germany, and significantly lower than others, such as Italy and Japan. To me, this suggests that this phenomenon arises from many different political sources.
You are correct but, according to the CIA Factbook, The USA had a public debt of 60.8% of GDP in 2007. This ranked it 27th highest out of 126 countries. I don’t imagine this number has gone down markedly in the last year.
Also, here is some recent information about the Canadian debt From here
* The OECD expects Canada to record the largest budgetary surplus as a share of GDP in the G7 in 2007, 2008 and 2009.
* It projects that Canada’s total government net debt-to-GDP ratio, which has been the lowest in the G7 since 2004, will continue to decline in future years.
* Canada is on track to eliminate its total government net debt by 2021. By doing so, it will be able to count itself among the few OECD countries that are in a net asset position.
God, outraged ignorance is always amusing, or it would be if it wasn’t so pathetic. The rant here is against Bush running deficits while saddling future generations with crushing debt. It’s a good point, a fair point, one that I’ve made more than once. The ignorance and the irony come into play when the OP tries to make it a partisan thing, completely ignoring that the incoming Democratic President promises that the very first thing he’s going to do after the 20th is defect spend $1 trillion dollars on top of the half trillion in deficit spending that the current budget supports, and acting like the debt is solely and completely the fault of the Republicans! That’s an…astonishing bit of self delusion. “You big bad Republicans have been deficit spending us into Bankruptcy! You suck!” “Uh…OK…your party has control now, what do you propose to do about it?” “Spend 3 times as much!!” Madness. Utter madness. Oh, and FTR, the last round of Bush tax cuts ('03) were for about $45 billion. That seems…quaint now, God help us all.
One of the joys of pop economics is that everyone loves to lump all the problems together and call it a “crisis”, when things don’t actually work that way.
The current crisis was not brought on by deficits. It was brought on by regulatory failures (absence of regulation in most areas, overregulation in a couple of isolated incidents) which - allied to poorly-chosen corporate prerogatives - fed a short-term focus across financial markets. This has led to an asset price crash, which in turn has led to poor access to credit, which is now starting to kick across to an economic downturn. Those are three interrelated, but separate issues.
None of them were caused by governmental deficits.
Government deficits will restrict the ability of economies to bounce back, and for those economies to grow in future, but that’s not the cause of any of the current crises.
The way it’s heading, eventually the US will have to default on its debt. That’s the tidal wave that’s building, but it’s not here yet. Economists who look at the situation tend to agree that it’s a matter of time - probably between ten and thirty years away unless something is done - but that’s not the problem right now. Once that happens, the interconnectedness of the global economy to that of the US is so great that no-one can really say with any certainty what’s going to happen.
The real sin was that the deficits didn’t finance infrastructure improvement, which continued to go to hell during the past eight years, or productivity improvements like money for education. It all got pissed away on tax cuts which did a crappy job stimulating the economy and which remained even when the economy recovered, and the useless war. And waste, of course.
It’s like they were trying to fuck up the economy. Let’s give tax breaks to the wealthy so that we can create a large supply without a corresponding demand, and then spend lots of money blowing up things rather than on domestic infrastructure. Christ, even if we had bombed Detroit to the ground it would have been money better spent because we’d have created jobs rebuilding.
Every damn interstate highway that I’ve driven in the past 7 years has undergone significant maintenance - if not entire reconstruction. And I have driven over 30,000 miles in each of those years. So, just which poorly maintained infrastructure are you speaking of?
I’m hardly claiming no improvements have been made, not just enough, considering that the oldest interstates are now 50 years old, and need more improvements.
To be fair, the wealthy are smart enough not to create production without demand. What did happen was the need for investment opportunities. I read somewhere, I forget where, that investment houses were under pressure to create mortgage bonds with high yields (and high real risk) - so one cause of the rush to subprimes was the demand for the bonds that got created by them.
In the electronics business there doesn’t seem to be the level of inventory writeoffs that there were when the bubble burst, and I haven’t read about contract manufacturers getting stuck with inventory. We seem to have gotten a bit smarter.
How about this?
And how much of that infrastructure is the federal government responsible for maintaining? Aren’t we taking about federal gov’t spending?
And as I said, the interstates on which I drive regularly (in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana & Illinois) have undergone vast improvements over the past 7 years.
Again, the vast majority of these bridges are not maintained by the feds.