Really? I saw my portfolio start to nosedive around April of 2001, recover slightly, take a big hit in September 2001 after the attack, recover again, and then completely tank about midway through 2002.
Well, you also left out an important part of the story: taxes also were raised under Reagan. So, you know, that helped revenue increase.
And revenues did not increase from tax cuts to “pay for themselves” as the WSJ long claimed would be the case, and as you have left ambiguous (of COURSE revenues will increase somewhat with the economic bounce that comes from tax cuts: but increase from the cut level, not from the original level). That hasn’t happened under Bush2 either.
What was “illusory” about the economy, exactly? We had a bubble, but not one big enough to account to the boom itself. In fact, the bubble was caused by the boom, as most bubbles are.
Wait, wait, wait.
It’s the CONSERVATIVES that have gone nuts, when Libby-Champ Rjung makes the painfully over-simplified claim that the entire recession is directly due to the actions of Republicans?
Or does Rjung mean something different than the rest of the universe when he says “Republican”? Wouldn’t surprise me, really, but… ::ahem:: Seriously, what the fuck?
I gotcha. I suppose YOU’RE gonna explain to me why it’s okay to say “Republicans All Fault!”, yet when someone questions that retarded logic, it’s met with… ::ahem:: Seriously, what the fuck?
Man, if THAT was the last straw, I’d hate to see how infinitessimally insignificant the FIRST straw was.
Not wading into this shitstorm again, but I have to point out that there is no federal line-item veto. One was created in 1996, Clinton struck out a few relatively innocuous line items and several members of Congress successfully sued. SCOTUS found the LIV law unconstitutional because it contravened the veto process spelled out in the Constitution.
Sorry, the case under which the LIV was struck down was not one brought by members of Congress. IIRC some members of Congress who had projects in their districts vetoed also sued but my cite doesn’t reference them. The case SCOTUS ruled on was brought by some Idaho potato farmers and New York City.
Then, immediately following, the Constitution explicitely spells out those things which the central government is authorized to do:
Beyond this list, we get into the territory of unconstitutional usurpations of power. Somehow I don’t think that Hillary’s idea of what she wants to take our money for.
Four years of defending George W. Bush will do that to you.
The strain is starting to blow those gaskets: Dick Cheney’s F-bomb, Paul Wolfowitz’s House Armed Services Committee meltdown, Donald Rumsfeld’s memos authorizing the use of torture… just add SPOOFE’s ranting incoherence to the list.
Let’s stay focused, kids.
I do find myself in a surreal space when recent history indicates that having a democrat in the white house leads to fiscal responsibility and having a republican there leads to (IMHO) fiscal madness. But then I realize that what really drives restraint is having the white house in one set of hands and congress in another. The push and pull of budgetary conflict appears, on the evidence, to lead to neither side getting to exercise their more fatuous tendencies.
I well understand the ‘cut taxes and watch economic growth offset the revenue cut with increased economic activity’ crowd and, to a certain extent, I agree with them. Obviously an absurdum form of that argument has us paying for everything easily with no taxes whatsoever! Woo!
But I find that, regardless of the proponents good intentions, (and I generally think most people do have good intentions) where the theory breaks down is on the spending side. Their simply isn’t any real desire for fiscal restraint on either side of the aisle. So cutting taxes, which has the desire of promoting economic health, actually ends up working against the country in the long run through deficit spending.
Given that, I see little practical purpose in large-scale tax cuts if not accompanied by spending cuts. Far better to leave taxes where they are until we can acheive some form of consensus on spending cuts. Just doing half the job seems to be counter productive.
Sort of like this:
Which is better? Tax and spend or no-tax and spend?
Ugh. Any way you look at it you lose.
I don’t think this explains it, JC. As noted earlier, we had 40 years of Congresses controlled by Democrats prior to the flop during Clinton’s era. And almost wholly Republican presidents during that time. Only 4 years of Carter and about 3 years of JFK on the opposite side. And yet, we had huge and growing deficits all through that period. You may argue that the deficits might have been even greater if both of these branches of the gov’t had been controlled by a single party, but there’s no evidence of “restraint” that I can see in those 40 years. And certainly none now, either.
Would it kill the Democrats to admit that there are areas in this government that could actually be cut? All I ever hear around here, and in general, is that cutting taxes is bad - raising taxes is good. How bout a combination of the two?
Maybe raise taxes and cut spending?
Cut taxes and reduce spending?
Why aren’t the Dems for cutting programs, cutting taxes and bringing the whole spending thing under control? Oh, because it means cutting government jobs,-can’t do that…Let’s just knee-jerkily raise taxes all the time to bring the level of income up to the same level that we’d like to see the spending at. Let’s continuously add new programs without getting rid of the old outdated boondogle-money sucking programs (like the IRS). The governments primary concern should be to serve and protect. Anything else takes a back seat.
Yes, I realise the Republicans in Congress are also to blame, but I see most of the Dems on this board wishing for higher taxes and most of the Pubbies on this board wishing for lower taxes and cutting programs.
What’s UP?
First of all, I didn’t see him say that. I may have missed it, though, so feel free to provide a link.
Second of all, irregardless of what rjung did or did not say, could you (or any other intelligent conservative) explain to me how cutting taxes during a war and recession is consistent with the previous fiscal conversatism that was a hallmark of the Republican party? Are you guys for a balanced budget or not? How do you feel about the $500 billion deficit? If you were president, would you have instituted all the same tax cuts? Gone to war unilaterally (thus footing the entire bill)? Should the government be spending way more than it takes in?
Your one-dimensional stereotypes are false. I know a lot of Democrats. All of them are opposed to Bush’s tax cuts. It has nothing to do with wanting to keep taxes high. All of them were in favor of a tax cut, just not the ones Bush proposed. Most Democrats I know wanted a smaller tax cut (since the projections of future tax revenues were largely based on the boom times and thus somewhat unrealistic) which benefitted the middle and lower classes more.
No one likes paying taxes. But we do like having a society where we don’t let old people starve to death, where we have emergency rooms available if we have a heart attack, and where we have roads and parks and all that good stuff. Democrats in my experience value the social programs more than Republicans, while Republicans tend to value military programs and business subsidies more. Both are expensive. You can’t have all these things and low taxes, so hard choices have to be made. Spending more than you bring in is not a viable solution, nor is saying someone likes raising taxes when they want to stop doing this.
OK, you said: “We got deficits [in the Reagan years] because the Democrats in Congress spent it all faster thatn it came in.”
Excluding the payroll tax, which is dedicated to Social Security and Medicare, revenue increased by 5.3% per year from 1981 to 1989.
Excluding Social Security and Medicare, defense (since Reagan was pushing the defense spending increase) and interest (for obvious reasons), spending increased by 3.3% per year over the 1981-89 period.
Which demonstrates that Congress didn’t create the Reagan deficits by spending the revenues faster than they came in. Q.E.D.
And Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away, hey hey hey. 
Jesse Helms wants higher taxes too:
That’s what I meant when I said that most politicians use vague language, rather than Hillary’s I Intend To Mug You remark.
No, the deficits waxed and waned through that period. But (going with the ‘on-budget’ numbers, as is my wont) the deficit went from $74B (=15.8% of revenue) in 1981 to $208B (=45.9% of revenue) in 1983. Since WWII, there’s no remotely comparable jump like that in the numbers. (Until Bush II, of course, but we’re talking about the 40 years of Dem Congresses here.)
At any rate, Unc, it does blow a hole in JC’s notion that having Congress and the White House in control of different parties is the secret to balanced budgets. My problem was with your description of those 40 years as a slow, steady rise in the Federal deficit.
:snicker:
Did you have a point with your schoolboy snicker, RT? Or was your sole purpose in this thread to exhonorate Ronald Reagan’s economic policies?