Blinkered evenhandedness is one of the most insidious problems facing the country. Newsflash: the strengths and weaknesses of both parties are not mirror images, notwithstanding the naivite of your typical journalist.
Remember that all Republicans --even so called “moderates” – will vote in budget-busting tax cuts. Recall that to their shame not a single Republican voted for the 1993 Clinton tax increase that formed the foundation of the decade’s prosperity.
Now I won’t rule out the possibility that John McCain might tolerate some tax increases if elected President. But the sole foundation for that possibility lies in his willingness to on occasion buck conventional Republican matters of faith. I am not aware of any W tax cut that he voted against.
The Democrats, on the other hand, are made up of a majority of deficit fighters and a minority of the deficit indifferent. With them, bona fide fiscal conservatives have a fighting chance of having their views at least partly represented.
minty: In all seriousness though, Eisenhower ran surpluses. Nixon ran one surplus. The Republican Party didn’t enter the realm of fantasy until 1980, when the supply siders annointed Ronald Reagan. Now Reagan himself was willing to partially reverse some of his tax cuts, when the budget deficit exploded. But lasting damage was done: the national Republican Party has yet to shake their belief in free lunch: they believe that federal spending can grow and grow while taxes rates need only ratchet downwards.
The House and Senate, however, were both Republican. Clinton, when he and the Democrats controlled the federal government, tried to increase the deficit. The Republicans stopped him.
Which is pretty straightforward nonsense. Bush Sr. agreed to a tax increase in return for promised spending cuts by the Democrats. The tax increase went thru, the Democrats broke their word and increased spending.
What seems to work is when Republican economic policy is actually implemented. That tends to happen only when Republicans control two of the three branches of government.
What seems to have happened is that the Democrats controlled Congress thru out the 70s and produced stagflation and general malaise. Reagan and the Senate went Republican in 1981, and produced the economic boom of the 80s and 90s. The economic boom continued, but Congress went Democrat and thus non-military spending increased, worsening the deficit. Then there was a recession under Bush Sr., which lasted long enough to pass the White House over to Clinton. He made a lot of noises about a middle class tax cut, but was lying about that, and tried to increase the deficit. Republicans, as I mentioned, stopped that. Then the Contract with America passed Congress over to Republicans, and they balanced the budget (although they had to shut down the government briefly to achieve it - Clinton fought them tooth and nail).
Then the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 hit. We have since recovered from the recession, and the economy is growing at a rapid clip. But the increases in non-military spending have grown the deficit.
The words “Democrat” and “fiscal responsibility” don’t belong in the same sentence. The Medicare bill that Bush passed (irresponsibly, in my view) - the only complaint Democrats had about it was that it wasn’t big enough. They had no issues with the cost of the Homeland Security legislation - except that it didn’t have enough pork for unions. Former Klansman Bob Byrd doesn’t have any objection to wasteful government spending, provided it funds some bridge with his name on it.
The Dems trot this crap out every few years, telling us they are going to “focus like a laser beam” on the deficit. Then they raise taxes, increase spending, and blame it on someone else.
Savings, my sticky unwashed ass. The so-called “trust fund” held by the SSA is nothing more than that a drawer full of IOUs the goverment has written to itself. All “surplus” revenue garnered by the SSA is by statute “invested” in government bonds. These bonds constitute the “trust fund.” The revenue used to purchase the bonds goes right into the federal general fund, and it doesn’t linger there very long at all. As is quite evident from the current deficit, that money is immediately spent. You’re trying to describe intragovenmental debt as an asset. It ain’t; it’s a liability. Just like your own debt.
Federal treasury bonds, again, are not an asset. They’re at best revenue neutral - only if the funds used to purchase the bonds are conserved. Which they ain’t.
A bold statement to be sure. What evidence can you show us that increasing federal revenue leads to prosperity - even prosperity of the short-term type that existed during Clinton’s tenure? History is going to (and actually already does) show that prosperity to be nothing but a mere stock bubble. The Dutch had a nifty little bubble between about 1626 and 1635. The Brits had one in the early 1700s which burst in 1720. If short-term run-ups ending in huge crashes can be called “prosperity,” then yeah, we were prosperous here in the U.S. in the 1990s. But “prosperity” is a quite a stretch.
What’s more, if you insist on labeling the dot-com bubble “prosperity,” it can even more easily be called all-hogs-to-the-trough-greed. I remember the liberals screaming about “unfettered greed” in the Reagan years. That greed pales in comparison to the “prosperity” of the dot-com bubble which you’d have us believe is an achievement of Clinton.
Super. Please point us to something other than an opinion that this is true - some sort of data based analysis that concludes that the prosperity of the 90’s was due to a stock bubble.
Bosda-I really hate the sentiments you are expressing in this thread.
I’m a card carrying liberal that has opposed the war and Bush’s policies since Day One.
However, I am also a fallible human being at has made mistakes before and I am not going to excoriate anyone that has the integrity and honesty to admit that they were mislead.
You are simply creating more divisions with your childish and petty attitude of “niener niener niener.”
It seems like the Gov’t does best when we have one Party controling the House, another the White House, and the Senate very very close. Then, in order for a budget to pass, it has to satisfy both parties. Currently, the GOP can cram the budget full of crap they want (and in the past, when the DEMs had control, they did the same) and no one can stop them. It’s not so much that one party is better than the other, it’s that one party really shouldn’t control the entire government.
True, some dudes are feeling blindsided as the GOP used to push itself as the party of “tax cuts and decreased spending” whereas the Dems were portrayed as “tax & spend”. In reality, that was just GOP propaganda, and when they have had control they are the party of “borrow & spend”.
Recent history (Reagan on) shows pretty well that the budget follows the presidency - trends in deficits and spending are explainable in terms of presidencies, regardless of who controls either house of congress.
Under Clinton we had the most consecutive years of economic growth in the history of the country.
Even when the dot-com bubble ‘burst,’ we landed a hell of a lot higher up than we had been in 1992. Good grief, my salary more than doubled in nominal terms, and because inflation’s been so low, it probably doubled in real terms.
Moreover, Clinton kept the unemployment rate lower than Reagan claimed was ‘zero unemployment’ (which he pegged at about 6%) for 8 years.
‘Unfettered greed’? That I answer in terms of widespread growth. Hell, we’re Democrats, not communists. If the GDP rises and it helps the vast majority of the population, yay! What I, and many Democrats took issue with was trickle-down crap - give money to the richest people, because that will supposedly help everybody.
We’ve already spent time in this thread on the “split government issue.” Go back a page or so and check it out!
[url=http://traxel.com/deficit/deficit-percentage-50-years.png]Here’s one of Jonathan Chance’s charts (BTW JC, I was hoping you might come back to the discussion of your charts, but you seem to have abandoned them. Anyway Dr. Deth, as I noted there, 9 of the top 10 deficits occurred under split governments, with four of them occuring under your model of one party controlling the White House and the other controlling the House.
Again, though, static numbers are perhaps less helpful. Look at the chart I linked to above. You’ll see that the Democrats controlled all three branches of government 14 times. Half the time (7 of 14), they either reduced or kept even the deficit (and 6 of 14 times they reduced it). If you so choose, you might set aside the Viet Nam War related increases, meaning that 7 of 11 times, an all-Democrat government reduced or kept even the deficit (6 of 11 times reducing it).
On the other hand, by my count, a split government led to deficit reductions 18 times out of 34 instances (52%), which is not meaningfully different from the 50% rate of the all-Democrat governments, and worse than the Viet-Nam-War-excluding 64% rate of all-Democratic government deficit reductions. (For the split government, if you exclude the Vietnam war era, the numbers are 16 of 30, or 53%.)
Stop the Mantras! Split governments aren’t magic, and perform at least equally, if not more poorly, than all-Democratic governments! The economy does better under Democratic presidents! Look at the data, please.
Right. Which explains the then record numbers of foreclosures and bankruptcy filiings in the period immediately following the bursting of tech stock bubble? And the vast number of jobs lost in 2001?
Right. Which explains the then record numbers of foreclosures and bankruptcy filiings in the period immediately following the bursting of tech stock bubble? And the vast number of jobs lost in 2001?
So I still think, though a painful fall, we were better off at the end of Clinton’s presidency than the beginning.
Squink - good point about 9/11 hurting the economy, but in fairness, the recession had aleady started. That just made it worse, and BushCo’s policies made it much worse.
If you recall, during the final months of the Clinton administration the news was filled with reports on the prospects of achieving a ‘soft landing’ from the high flying 90’s economy. The government was trying to slow growth without causing recession. The precise date at which control was lost, the wheels came off and the nose hit the runway is still open to question.