And Patty Hearst went on a crime spree right afterwards.
Clinton hit an aspirin factory thinking it was connected to aQ when it wasn’t. Bush hit a whole country.
Don’t laugh. I read a column by a conservative columnist (not Anne Coulter) saying that Teddy Kennedy asked for all sort of spending, and Bush, being a nice guy, couldn’t say no. I think she was serious.
Y’know what cracks me up? If a Republican president gets criticized for his spending policies, you are quick to claim that he doesn’t bear the reponsibility for the budget (which is horseshit, by the way), but in this thread, when you are lauding Ronald Reagan, you are quite happy to give him all the credit for “building” the military. I guess the president is responsible for the budget, but only when it’s convenient to the argument you’re making at the time, eh?
There’s nothing wrong with being a conservative, but people like you who pretend to be impartial while denying being wildly partisan, really chap my hide.
Nobody has addressed the (apparent) confusion in the first couple of posts.
The United States has, since Polk’s presidency, had a standing debt. That’s what the ‘deficit’ is. The balanced budgets of Clinton’s later years meant that the annual budget was in the black - that is, the standing debt was not growing.
Now, on to the debate part.
Under Reagan and Bush I, the deficit tripled in real terms, and quadrupled in nominal terms. That was with a Democratic House and Senate.
Under Clinton, the annual budget got better each year (8 for 8). It moved from red to black. That was with both Democratic House and Senate, and then Republican House and Senate.
When he left office, the standing debt was about the same as when he entered.
Under Bush II, we went back to the deficit growing, and the budget going in the wrong direction every year. That’s with a Republican House and Senate.
Empirically, Reagan/Bush economics grow the standing debt.
I know where you’re going, but “deficit” refers to a negative balance between revenues and expendatures in any given year, and “debt” refers to the total of all past deficits.
And the Senate was in the hands of the Democrats from May 2001 to January 2003.
And the debt increased by about $1.4 trillion between 1993 and 2001.
And welcome to the Boards. 
I’ll second Ravenman and ask if we can keep the terminology standardized here. For the budget in any given year, you can have a “budget surplus” or a “budget deficit.” You can also have an aggregate debt.
So far, we’ve never needed a word for the opposite of “debt” because we’ve almost always had some on the books. One of the concerns with the budget surplus was that if we began to pay off our debts (such as privately held bonds) and ceased issuing new ones, the financial markets would freak out because all of the U.S. Savings Bonds would be paid off!
Hard to believe that, absent 9/11 and a President willing to pay down the debt, we could have lived in a world with no U.S. Bonds. Bizarre.
Not so fast. Total life expectancy takes into consideration things like infant mortality. The thing you have to look at is life expectancy at various ages. The implication of the statistic that you’ve provided is not that few people lived to be older than 62 and collected SocSec.
But it is true that increased life expectancies (for all ages) since that time have put lots of pressure on the system.
But you’re leaving out the fact that the rate at which the debt grew slowed dramatically from 1993 to 1997, and then reversed for the first time since the 1960s. So after 1997, the debt got smaller, a feat which supply-side economics has never accomplished.
Well, Ravenman was just rebutting a very specific thing I said, which was from memory, and wrong. He(?) didn’t claim my overall point was wrong, nor that the standing debt grew much faster under the last four Rebublican administrations than the two Democratic ones.
By the way, just to make things even a little more complicated, there are also two types of deficits/surplusses that are sometimes quoted. The more common one, and one for which Duckster gave figures here, is for the total budget. But, another one that people sometimes will quote is for the part of the budget excluding the social security (and medicare?) trust funds. That’s because the trust funds are in surplus and thus we have been borrowing from the trust funds even in most of those recent surplus years. The only year we didn’t have to do that was year 2000 when the surplus in the total budget was so large that this surplus was even (very slightly) larger than the surplus due to the trust funds.
Huh? I’m saying that Reagan had a lot to do with the military as we have it today, and that Republicans are PERCEIVED as strong on defense and Democrats are PERCEIVED as weak because of their priorities in the past for defense spending. Sorry that you didn’t get this (then or now), as it seems to be pretty cut and dried to me. Its certainly debate-able, and I conceed that…but what the hell are you talking about " guess the president is responsible for the budget, but only when it’s convenient to the argument you’re making at the time, eh?" Got zero idea how one thing connects to another frankly, certainly not in the context of the thread you quoted from.
You’ve been trying to pin the lable ‘conservative’ on me for a long time now (unsuccessfully) simply because I’m not lock step with most of the rest of this board and I ATTEMPT to be as unbiased as I can and actually try and look at the various issues in an as objective of a way as I can. This is like the CNN thing all over again…someone who is close to the center is perceived as a right wing wananbe by someone of your obvious left leaning positions.
Wildly partisan? snort Certainly most of the real conservatives on this board don’t consider me a kindred spirit as I’ve been in several threads where they tried to lable me ‘liberal’. I’m sorry that you equate the fact I fail to parrot the standard anti-Bush party line in every thing I say to the fact I’m some kind of closet Conservative Bush supporter. While I’m in mental anguish over your chapped hide, I’ll try and muddle through somehow in the hope you discover some kind of skin conditioner in your future…
-XT
I’m going to propose a standard for who bears primary responsibility for a budget, and why; feel free to shoot it down.
Regardless of what the Constitution may say, the budget originates with the President. One man can come up with a plan for how the Federal government should handle the money it collects from us, but a 535-headed monster can’t.
Once the President’s proposed budget is introduced in Congress by one of his political allies, Congress is of course free to modify it, ignore it, or whatever. There may have been once during the Reagan administration where the Dems more or less started over and came up with their own budget, but I’m not sure about that, even. (It was portrayed that way in the papers at the time.) Suffice it to say that it’s a rare event. The only reasonable expectation is that the President will get his budget, with some modifications.
If the budget’s too modified, the President can always veto, and start over again. But the political realities are that a President really can’t veto his own budget, no matter what’s been done to it.
So here’s the deal: * primary responsibility for any changes in the budget between proposal and signature belong with whatever combination of factions effectively controls Congress. Usually that will be a single party, but sometimes it will be a minority party, along with the centrist wing of the other party.
Primary responsibility for the rest of the budget lies with the President. * He wrote it, he got it, Toyota.
That’s how I see it, at least.
Not surprised you got zero idea. Let me dumb it down for you. Either the president is responsible for the budget, or he isn’t. If he is, you can’t defer the BLAME when things go wrong. If he isn’t, you can’t give him the CREDIT when things go right.
You have tried to DEFER the blame for defecit spending AWAY from Bush, yet in an earlier thread, you gave Reagan the CREDIT for increasing military spending. I have no idea why that’s so difficult for you to understand.
If you are responsible for something, you get both the blame AND the credit. If you are not responsible for something, you get neither. You want it both ways.
Why do you keep denying your own politics? Of course I’m politically left of you; that’s the point. And conversely, you are politically right of me. Why do you keep trying to deny it? I’m not gonna play the “I’m in the center and you’re on one side” game - that’s just childish. The fact is that you consistently defend Republicans and consistently bash Democrats. You can call yourself whatever you want, but it’s obvious where you stand.
Dude, they do that to anyone left of Hitler. You ain’t no liberal.
Well, I don’t know exactly what your malfunction is, but you constantly defend Bush, even when you have to blatantly contradict points you’ve made in previous threads. Not sure why you always feel compelled to do so.
As opposed to Clinton.
I’ll grant you that 9/11 changes the equation, but the wording you used to start off the “apples to oranges” demonstration could have been better.
No, the debt did not get smaller. But yes, its growth slowed dramatically.
To wit, public debt numbers at the end of each fiscal year:
1992: 4,064,620,655,521.66
1993: 4,411,488,883,139.38
1994: 4,692,749,910,013.32
1995: 4,973,982,900,709.39
1996: 5,224,810,939,135.73
1997: 5,413,146,011,397.34
1998: 5,526,193,008,897.62
1999: 5,656,270,901,615.43
2000: 5,674,178,209,886.86
2001: 5,807,463,412,200.06
2002: 6,228,235,965,597.16
2003: 6,783,231,062,743.62
From the Office of Public Debt.
Look, I agree with the overall point that Clinton did a far better job handling the budget, and that surpluses are a good thing. It was silly how Bush came into office being anti-surplus: he simply preferred tax cuts to paying down the debt. But it just seems that there’s a fair bit of misinformation about the specifics of how good the good thing was in the 90s.
Well, hold on now. Let’s lay out the process of how the budget really works.
The first week of February, the President sends Congress his budget. This contains proposals for revenue and spending (both mandatory and discretionary). Congress then creates a budget resolution, which contains similar information, but may be different than the President’s proposals. This budget resolution, once approved, is NOT sent to the President. However, the budget resolution is a blueprint for spending that may “require” that Congress take other actions (cut taxes, reform Medicare, etc).
Congress doesn’t really have to take action with respect to taxes, entitlement reform/mandatory spending, etc. If they don’t, tax rates and entitlement/mandatory spending is on autopilot from the last year. For discretionary spending – things like education, defense, homeland security, transportation, etc., Congress has to pass 13 appropriations bills. If the bills don’t pass, those programs shut down.
So, how much power does the President have to control spending? He can veto any of those 13 appropriations bills, but let’s get real – that’s not really where the money is. This year, those appropriations bills will contain something like $830 billion in a budget around $2.4 trillion. The President can’t veto the mandatory spending which is far and away the bulk of government spending – it’s on autopilot until the Congress acts.
But the President does have the upper hand in continually being able to call Congress a bunch of big spenders. Not to diminish the potential s***storm if this President tried to cut Medicare (like Gingrich did in the mid-90s), but the White House has focused pretty much exclusively on cutting taxes. Even the most powerful man in the world has only so much political capital.
Budget surpluses shouldn’t be viewed as exclusively good things.
Firstly the budget is nothing more than a spending plan for the Federal Government.
A budget deficit is when you plan on spending more than you receive in revenue.
A budget surplus is when you plan on spending less than you receive in revenue.
Extremes on either end of the spectrum (huge surplus/huge deficit) are both what I would consider bad.
A huge surplus just means that the government has taxed the people *far more than they needed to be taxed. As an American I have no problem paying into Government services that we all benefit from. However if we are running a surplus of several hundred billion dollars, I think that stands as proof that we are paying far more in taxes than we should be spending.
There are advantages to having a surplus, though. For one it gives the government a good degree of flexibility. It can also allow government to pay down some of the national debt.
However it also gives government a chance to expand spending, and ultimately continue in an upward spiral of expanding taxes. Now since most posters here are fairly leftist, that doesn’t bother you.
But do remember that roughly half of this country is conservative and probably 10% of those people know enough about Government spending to be able to call themselves fiscally conservative.
So that’s why many conservatives don’t laud the Clinton surpluses as a great achievement. We just see it as government overtaxing us and then bragging about it.
A surplus is definitely a better situation than a deficit, although again I will say that an extremely high surplus is probably not preferable to a small deficit.
The perfect “equilibrium” situation for me would be a budget where we have a surplus that is large enough to cover the interest payments on the national debt, and then a little bit more, so that we are slowly pushing the debt back.
Now, under current conditions, that would be quite a large surplus. But under my ideal budget, government spending would be much reduced so the raw numbers involved wouldn’t be quite as large.
Of course there is also the debate as to whether or not the national debt is a bad thing. There are a lot of people that have significant portions of their retirement tied up in U.S. Treasury Bonds that probably don’t realize how much they are benefitting from being creditors to the Federal Government.
As an interesting historical sidenote, back in the Reniassance/late Middle Ages nations would use national bankruptcies as a debt management technique. Of course such things would be globally disastrous in today’s financial system.
To get back to the discussion of the surplus.
Firstly, it should be explained how a surplus comes about.
There are a few ways:
- Spending is reduced (cut programs.)
- Revenue is increased via a tax rate increase.
- Revenue is increased via a strong economy.
Now, the Clinton surplus was basically a type 3 surplus. Clinton did cut some government programs in his Presidency, but nothing of any great significance. He did redo welfare and reduce the CIA’s budget but overall his surplus wasn’t a result of decreased spending.
He also didn’t really raise the tax rate.
A surplus of the third type is basically just the result of an unexpectedly strong economy.
To breifly explain, imagine Dave is a CEO, he’s in the highest income bracket so he pays close to 40% of his income to the IRS.
Now, before the dot com boom lets say Dave made $2m a year. During the boom his company, an IT firm, expanded rapidly, and he began making $60m a year.
That’s an increase of 30 fold in Federal revenue from this guy.
Now take into account with the dot com boom we had tons of multimillionaires like Dave pop up. And we had tons of companies pop up that had huge revenues and accordingly paid a huge amount out in corporate taxes.
Now ultimately for reasons I’m not going to get into here, the President never has nearly as much impact on the economy as any of the political pundits or news agencies seem to say.
Clinton had little to do with the economic boom of the late 90s and little to do with the resulting bust.
Same goes for Bush.
Clinton ran a surplus because our economy had an unexpected boom that increased tax revenues beyond spending, simple as that.
Bush ran a deficit for several reasons. One being that even if he kept all spending exactly the same as it was under Clinton, he would have had to raise the tax rate dramatically to create a surplus. Because income across the board had gone down.
Other reasons are issues 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Homeland security.
Expenses arising from 9/11 were unavoidable, and expenses arising from increased homeland security were also unavoidable. Afghanistan and Iraq are issues that are at debate and there’s no point in getting in to them now. I’ll just say that during wartime, running a surplus is just never going to happen.
Now, Clinton and Bush differ on how they handled the economic situations they were given.
Clinton wanted to respond to the surplus in two ways, 1) debt management (which I agreed with) and 2) beefing up of certain programs/pork barreling (which I disagreed with.)
Bush wanted to respond to his deficit problem by ignoring the situation and saying it would correct itself in 10 years. And that “tough times come for tough measure.”
It’s true that we cannot expect a surplus due to the economic climate (which cannot really be attributed to Bush) and certain spending increases. But the answer to such a problem is not to lower taxes and increase spending.
It’s the old guns and butter example and Bush is trying to get both.
Bush definitely has not handled the budget as good as Clinton. But at the same time, he hasn’t lead the country into deficit, the country was going to have a deficit almost no matter what. What he did do was allow it to grow more than he should have.
That’s an extremely sensible and balanced post Martin.
Say, aren’t wars, generally speaking, supposed to help the economy? (That is, the economy of a country that is involved in the war but doesn’t actually have the fighting take place on its soil.)
Not as far as I’m aware. It certainly didn’t help in most of the wars the US has been involved in. Vietnam is a good example of this…it hurt the economy from what I remember. The only war I can think of off the top of my head that helped the US economy in any measurable way was WWII…and that was mostly because it helped shake off the last effects of the depression.
Agree completely. Its one of the reasons I dislike Bush so much in fact is that he is trying to do both things at once and is ineffective at either. Your guns and butter example pretty much hits it on the head. I also agree that Clinton was more effective than Bush was at handling the budget, but that we were headed for deficit reguardless (though not as BIG a frigging deficit as what we have under Bush).
Instead of ‘dumbing it down’ for me, check back when you get a clue as to the process of how the budget is worked between Congress and the President, then maybe you will understand my own simplified point and how it relates…and how I can ‘give credit’ to Reagan for his decisions to enhance the military while blaming Bush AND the Congress for the current deficit mess.
Interesting. Because I blame both Congress and Bush for the current mess, but try and give some balance to the arguement by stating there are real reasons for the deficit you think I’m DEFERing blame away from Bush. And I have difficulty understanding, ehe? Facinating…
Simply wrong and incredibly simplistic. Of course you can both get credit for something and blame also. It happens all the time.
Why do you keep trying to tell me my politics? Of COURSE I’m right of you…hell, most of the country is right of you blowero. Doesn’t make me a conservative. I never denied I have some conservative leanings. Certainly I’m fairly conservative fiscally. However, the preponderance of my political philosophy puts me pretty well smack dab in the center. I lean left on some subjects and right on others. But reguardless, its YOU being childish by this continued effort on your part to tell ME (and everyone else) where I stand.
I’d like a cite from you if you are going to continue this where I ‘consistently defend Republicans and consistently bash Democrats’…and I want a VERY public retraction from you on this when I show you that I’ve bashed Republicans and defended Democrats in the past on this board. Conversely I’ll come out publically and declare to all and sundry (not that most people give two shits) that I’m a right wing conservative if you prove my consistantly. Care to play?
Dude, I never claimed to be a liberal. I certainly am not (though some of the right wingers on this board have stated I was in the past). I’m a centrist with leanings to the right on some subjects and left on others. To the right I’d say my fiscal policies. To the left would be my positions on things like abortion and public funding of research, highways, etc. Centrist would be my stances on things like gun control where I’m in favor of things like registration and waiting lists, but still in favor of private owning of fire arms. You know all this because we’ve clashed (and agreed sometimes) in past threads, so this trying to portray me as something I’m not is ridiculous as you (should) know better.
Again, you know better so I’m unsure why YOU feel compelled to continue this. You and I don’t agree on pretty much anything. That doesn’t mean that I agree with Bush though. Most times I don’t agree with what EITHER party is doing.
At anyrate, I’m tired of this hijack by you trying to fit me into a box of your making. Feel free to pit me if you want and we’ll see how ‘consistant’ I’ve been in defending the Republicans and attacking the Democrats.
-XT
That’s your explanation? It’s because of the “process of how the budget is worked”. No shit? Simplified is right. Great job, man. :rolleyes:
But you are doing so selectively based on whether it fits your right-wing ideology.
See? That shows your bias right there. You believe youself to be like the Earth of the Medieval Church - always in the center. And by your flawed reasoning, everything else must be to one side of you. But like I said, I’m tired of playing the “I’m the center” game. I don’t know why, but right-wingers always want to portray themselves as centrists. I guess it makes you guys feel good or something. Whatever.
I didn’t say you did. Please try to read my posts.
Sure you’ve disagreed with Bush - about as many times as I’ve disagreed with Clinton. So fucking what? You make the ridiculous claim that “most of the country” is right of me, yet place yourself in the center. Utter nonsense.
I really don’t give a rat’s ass what your politics are, as long as you’re honest about it. You need to admit you’re on the right and stop being in denial. You’re not impressing anyone.