In the middle of a recession, or even just barely out of one and only sloooooooooooooooooooooowly creeping back up at a snail’s pace, and particularly when unemployment rates are high, it is NOT the time to “tackle major spending issues”.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, at (what was, before the downgrade) current interest rates, it would cost the U.S. $25 billion in interest to borrow $1 trillion.
That $1 trillion could then be put to use employing people to do infrastructure projects, like repairing decaying roads and bridges. That would naturally raise revenues from individual income taxes that could then be applied to the interest payment, possibly covering ever dime of it, with some to spare, which then could have gone towards the principal balance. Win/Win/Win all the way around; roads and bridges are safer, people are working again so they can buy things again and things can be made again, and everyone’s happy. Well, except for most Republicans who don’t understand Macroeconomics.
But… If instead, you scream and yell and kick and flail and demand that that $1 trillion be paid back to the creditor, we may have less debt on our books, but now we still have 10 million unemployed who are costing us $250 billion over the course of that same year. Now we’re out $250 billion and have absolutely nothing to show for it.
http://www.johnson.cornell.edu/About/News-Publications/Article-Detail/ArticleId/477/Rachel-Maddow-breaks-down-the-debt-debate-with-Johnsons-Bob-Frank.aspx
That characterization of Democrats as unwilling to touch entitlements is pretty inaccurate, when you consider that Clinton slashed Medicare quite a bit and Obama did offer them up several times to Boehner, but Boehner backed away because he didn’t want his party to be painted as the ones who actually passed a bill that cut Medicare. Not to mention, cuts to Medicare are in the trigger, but they are cuts to providers, not recipients of services. But regardless where the cuts happen, they’re cuts and they save money for the U.S. government and therefore the taxpayer. And Obama put them in there and then left entitlements on the table for the Super Committee, as well.
Show me where Democrats have signed a pledge to an unelected third party that swears an oath never to reduce Medicare costs a single penny in any way, shape or form. When you can show me that, then we’ll have parity.
I’m sorry, but this is disingenuous, too. I’m not saying that Democrats haven’t added a dime to the deficits; they obviously have. Nor have they gone out of their way to reduce them in the 2 1/2 years out of the past nearly 13 that they had any actual control over them. But, again, those 2 years were not the time to start slashing spending, and the additions to the debt burden are substantially greater from the Republican side than the Democrats.
On the day that Bush was sworn into office, the national debt was $5.73 trillion.
On the day Barack Obama was sworn into office, the national debt was $12.037 trillion.
We just hit the debt ceiling at $14.3 trillion. The math is simple. Bush added $6.343 trillion to today’s current debt. And though you might be tempted to say that Obama has therefore added $2.263 trillion to it, the fact of the matter is that much of that increase is a direct result of major Bush policies; namely, the tax cuts, Medicare Part D spending (also unpaid-for) and the war in Afghanistan. Sure, he could have refused to extend the cuts (and cost millions of people their unemployment benefits) and pulled out of the war all willy-nilly, but you and I both know that Republicans would never have allowed either of those things to happen, and in fact used unemployment extensions as their bargaining chip to keep the Bush tax cuts in place, so the effects of them are just as much theirs during Obama’s time in office as they were when they were actually enacted under Bush.
When you add to that the fact that Dick Cheney told then-Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, when he objected to another round of tax cuts, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms (congressional elections). This is our due,” I don’t know how it makes sense to try to claim the fault lies even/steven.
