Well, their budgets will be true-to-form, balanced on the backs of the middle class.
They will really need to figure out the "loopholes" the "wealthy" are using and close them. One of the biggest is the home mortgage "loophole". At least we bought our house long enough ago that we can continue to live there. Maybe we will see a national sales tax, so they can sip from the cup after they've sipped from the pitcher that fills the cup.
Who knows?
TJM
· 1 year ago
Their budgets will be "balanced" based in part on higher taxes for the middle class, but the wealthy will also see their already larger share of the tax burden grow even greater and may cause many of them to move even more of their wealth off shore beyond the US Congresses' ability to tax it. Raising taxes have real consequences and the first thing that will happen if taxes are raised is that the economy will tank and exarcerbate the problem. There will be less revenue not more. The problem has been, and continues to be, is Congressional spending. If every taxpayer sent all of their income to the feds, the feds would find ways to spend it. Someday, probably sooner than we think, the American people are going to have to come to grips with what truly are federal obligations (the military certainly fits that description both historically and constitutionally) and what obligations should be shouldered by the states and individuals.
njcommuter
· 1 year ago
Having more and more of "government" spending paid by fewer and fewer people has another problem too: as more and more people realize that they can vote themselves more in benefits than they will pay in taxes the spending becomes less controllable and moves closer and closer to Bread and Circuses.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
Boilerplate GOP response. If dems go to the Bread and Circuses as you call it, then they've gone to far. The 12 years in the wilderness may or may not have taught them a lesson. We shall see. And I'm sure if that happens, you guys will be there to remind the electorate. The entitlement crisis coming will have to include a similar multi issue compromise as REagan did it in the 1980's,
nightjar
· 1 year ago
You mean like raised to the tax rate level of Bill Clinton that brought about a decade of peace and prosperity and an end to budget deficits. Could it be the Clinton years reducing significantly the size of the federal government and welfare spending. Or could it be the Clinton economic boom that was based on maintaining a strong dollar. Not the cotton candy economy running on tons of tax cut money with a weak dollar,. Now the sugar candy is running out and the middle class who were left behind in all the supply side gop mania will be speaking on this issue next Nov. Tax levels returned to pre Bush for the upper middle and upper class, not the rest of America.
Yes, I know the GOP congress was a partner in this, although often reluctantly. And we have the current GOP talking points about the Clinton stock market bubble and recession that sometimes blamed on 9-11 . The realty is Bush and the GOP congress spent like drunk rabbits in order to bribe the people to reelect them in 2004. and it worked. What do you think the Medicare script law was about, aside from wingnut welfare for big Pharma.
jr565
· 1 year ago
Clinton gutted the military and intelligence to get his decade of peace and prosperity. Rememeber the peace dividend? Also Clinton had a dot com boom to work with whiich helped speed along his economy.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
The peace dividend was also supported by many republicans and saved a few billion dollars per year. The size of the federal government was reduced which also lowered spending and pay go rules in congress were in effect. The military was not gutted although reduced in size. Yes we are at war as of 9-11 and Bush is the first prez in history to drastically reduce taxes in wartime. Why hasn't he done more to increase the size of the military in 8 years as dems have pleaded? Notwithstanding recent meager increases. What kind of shape is the military in now after 5 years of war in Iraq?
As for the dot com bubble opinions vary among experts as to how much it really contributed to the 2001 recession, which was small, if it occurred at all. And so what if the dot com boom helped his economy. Bush could have had benefited from a new Green boom in alternative fuels and other new technology, instead of his and repubs ideological roadblocks and patronage to big oil. It's something that is coming and now it looks like dems will be the beneficiary .
The truth is aside from national defense spending repubs exploded the debt with gifts of tons of treasury cash for the rich and big business. And when the treasury cash ran out, they just borrowed it from Chinese loan sharks.
Math_Mage
· 1 year ago
Dems pleaded with him to increase the size of the military? So now THEY'RE the war hawks? Or are you merely talking about their reflexive opposition to the light footprint strategy because it's what Bush proposed? It would be nice if you provided something resembling a link...
And yet revenues increased when the tax rates were cut. If those were "gifts" the treasury was paid back and with interest.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
Some of it was. But not all that much. The problem is all that extra cash swelled the accounts of big business and very little made it to the wage earners who are also the consumer and the demand side driver of the economy. At the same time,, the middle class wages stayed little changed and they get squeezed by all sorts of local tax increases and inflation. So what you have now is a debt ridden tapped out consumer demand engine with a lot of industry flush with cash but with falling demand and slowed consumer spending for their products.. The only thing keeping things going as well as they are is increased global markets.
Anyway that's my non expert rantings on the subject.
njcommuter
· 1 year ago
The removal of double taxation on dividends changed the price balance between growth and dividend-bearing stock, and probably for the better (making stock bubbles like the Clinton Bubble less likely).
The USA has one of the lowest savings rates in the world. This is offset somewhat by investment rates, which are high in part because of defined-contribution pension plans.
A 50-year-old who has $800,000 in a defined-contribution pension plan may look richer on paper than someone who has a defined-benefit plan waiting for him in five years. He's not.
E1701
· 1 year ago
There is so much wrong there it causes me physical pain to read.
The powerhouse economy of the nineties (much of it eventually built on dot-com hot air) was in *spite* of the Clinton tax rate, not because of it. And even there it took a focused opposition GOP Congress to keep it from bloating on the back of a mess like Hillarycare. The nonsense began for the GOP when Gingrich left and they got the Presidential rubber stamp as well, and forgotten why they'd been elected in the first place.
The "decade of peace and prosperity" also happened to include the Somalia mess (Bush Sr did get us involved initially under UN auspices, but Clinton's the guy on whose watch it blew up in our faces), the first WTC bombing, a decade of failed containment of Iraq, the Kosovo mess that is *still* a low-grade civil war, the bombing of the Cole, attacks on our embassies, and the planning of 9/11. The prosperity, as it usually is, was generated by domestic production and a healthy world economy, not by anything the President did (Presidential power over the economy is peripheral at best anyway), and the peace was largely an illusion that amounted to American shoving their fingers in their ears and shouting "La La La, Can't hear you!"
The weak dollar has more to do with a weakened global economy and increasing confidence in the Euro and in the future potential of the Chinese and Indian economies than a collapse here... and none of it really is affected by the President. Our biggest domestic issue was the housing bubble burst, which anyone who was watching that market for the past several years knew was inevitable, subprime mortgages aside. But what really makes the economy swim is consumer confidence - the media has more impact on that than any President could wield. In a lot of ways, the economy is a self-perpetuating entity... when people *think* the economy is doing well, they invest more, spend more, and the economy does do well - and when they think it's doom and gloom, they divest, hoard their money, and the economy suffers for it. On a macro scale, that's what helped turn Black Tuesday into the Great Depression... the economy was salvagable right up until people panicked and made a run on the banks.
At the same time, we're also dealing with the entire face of the economy making a major shift. Except for specialized equipment, industry is just too damned expensive to be affordable here, so those jobs get outsourced to more affordable pools of labor - the only way my company can afford to keep their manufacturing here is because dental equipment is always in demand, we're diversifying our products, and most of our equipment sells in the $20-30,000 price range. The real bulwark of the economy is becoming the service and retail sectors, which requires a much higher volume of educated workers with specialized skills. Right now that passes the manufacturing sectors to nations with large, unskilled work forces. But as those jobs move to those regions, their economies improve, education becomes more widespread, and their expenses increase. Japan used to be the manufacturing center of Asia, but as their nation got wealthy, they too saw themselves becoming a service economy as manufacturing fled to China, Taiwan, and Korea. In the long run, this is good for everyone - but in the short term, it means a lot of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in those developed nations have to either learn new skills and adapt, or be left behind. That's why the hollow and impossible Democratic mantra of "we'll bring jobs back here!" is so immensely popular in the Rust Belt and among union workers (more and more white collar and service-sector workers are giving unions the bird as anachronistic and corrupt).
So when talking about the economy, Clinton, Bush, and whoever the next one will be, don't really have the ability to do all that much. If you want to give Clinton credit for anything, it's for being smart enough to leave Greenspan in place as chairman of the Fed. That's an executive agency, but most Presidents are smart enough not to meddle with it.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
A lot of words to re-write history and regurgitate debunked GOP talking points.
E1701
· 1 year ago
I swore I would never use this phrase, but your response demands it:
Concession accepted.
MarkJ
· 1 year ago
Excellent analysis, but you forgot something: both Hillary and Obama seem to think Al Qaeda, for one, will hit the snooze button and roll over on January 20th, 2009. Both Obama and Hillary are acting as if they won't have to deal with other international crises or even wars during the next four years. And we all know what happens we assume: it makes A.S.S. of U. and M.E.
That's what Obama and Hillary can't, or won't, understand: they've already painted themselves into a corner with their proposed spending increases. They've undoubtedly made so many promises to so many interest groups that if they don't deliver the goods, and pronto, they're f***ed. And they will have no margin for error: one major crisis (e.g., a Kosovo war in the Balkans, Iran gets nukes, etc.) and their spending plans, such as they are, will go buh-bye.
In my mind, it's not a question of either Obama or Hillary will be one-termers: nope, the big question is whether they'd even manage to get through their first term if they massively screw the pooch.
AW1Tim
· 1 year ago
Speaking of fuzzy math,
That $100 billion dollars a year in Iraq is part of the problem. That fails to consider that we are already paying for our military, whether it is in Iraq or not. Take out the actual costs of salary for those deployed, plus the day-to-day maitenance costs, the daily costs of feeding them regardless of where they are, medical, etc, and that $100 nillion drops dramatically.
Another part of the problem is that it cost us untold billions more to REBUILD our military AFTER the Clintos dismantles a good chunk of it as part of their false "Peace Dividend". What a crock.
It costs more to rebuild than to maintain what you have and add on as technology and missions change and/or develop.
Respects,
jr565
· 1 year ago
I mentioned the peace dividend above, but I'd love nighjar to comment on that.
showbiz111
· 1 year ago
we all know that when lib democrats speak of the rich it means families earning over $75,000 per year. It seems that like everything else dems remain fixated in the sixties when $75,000 was a meaningful amount of money though by no means did it make one rich. And how does someone who claims to be a uniter fall so easily into classic liberal class warfare tactics?
TJM
· 1 year ago
have you figured out yet if I got the constitutional authority wrong for budgets and spending, Nutjar? And the Dems I know put out their little fictional statistics on the economy. The facts are the facts. Clintoon inherited a growing economy whereas Bush the younger inherited the Clintoon recession. Maybe you don't own stocks (companies are evil) but the Nasdaq lost 40% of its value in 2000. That's an indisputable fact (unless you suffer from BDS). Lastly, Lyndon Johnson was the clown who in 1967 got Congress to start this little fiction of including Social Security surpluses into the revenue column to fraudulently mask the growing federal deficit. Even St. Franklin de Roosevelt wasn't that dishonest (the last Democrat I liked). Now go back to Neverland where you can bask in your socialist dreams.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
You wouldn't know a fact if one jumped up bit you on the ass, TJM. You claim Six percent GDP when Clinton took office. I would ask you to provide links and evidence, but you can't, cause it's a lie.
TJM
· 1 year ago
I was off a bit. GDP increased 5.6% in 1992 the last year Bush senior was in office. That is still very robust. In contrast, the first year Clintoon (Mr. Economic Miracle) was in office it only went up by 5.1% over the prior year. Still very good. The point is, and remains, that Clintoon was riding on the coattails of an economic recovery that the lefty press wouldn't give old Bush credit for. By the way, I made the mistake of voting for Clintoon the first time and it was his big lie about economics which turned me against him. In 1993, once he was in office, a White House reporter all of a sudden discovered that the economy was doing fine and asked him why. He said, even before he had submitted his first budget to Congress, that his economic policies were already working. I knew enough about economics and the markets to know that the economic switch doesn't go on and off that easily. By the way, you can find substantiation for my facts at the U.S. Census Bureau, Stastical Abstract of the United States:2003. I know you won't bother to look because it will burst your bubble.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
"I was off a bit. GDP increased 5.6% in 1992 the last year Bush senior was in office."
Where is your evidence TJM. Please provide links to support your wingnutty ravings.
TJM
· 1 year ago
Are you such a simpleton that you can't go to the US Census Bureau like I did? Typical Democrat, you want everyone to do your work for you instead of doing it yourself. I can see you're just chicken and don't want the facts.
TJM
· 1 year ago
I suspect Nutjar is still trying to navigate the internet to find the US Census Bureau or if he's found the site, is crafting a right-conspiracy theory to debunk the statistics I cited.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
Gdp is released by the BEA Bureau of Economic Analysis. I stand by the linked article from Gene Spurling I provided earlier in this thread.
No ability to find a link, means there's no credibility in anything you say. Please go back to your Democratic playpen.
Math_Mage
· 1 year ago
TJM, the proper etiquette is to source your own work rather than generally giving the agency providing the numbers and forcing your readers to look up the rest themselves. However, Nightjar, I'll make up for that and more.
First, the Census Bureau sources the BEA, to answer the implied question about the validity of TJM's sources. I went to the BEA for this post, as my link (!!!) at the bottom demonstrates.
Next, the article you reference is correct that GDP growth in the first quarter of 2003 was but 0.5%. However, even assuming Bush's policy was responsible for the poor quarter (unlikely), this inaccurately suggests that the same was true of 2002, which is a better indicator of the economy Clinton inherited by virtue of larger sampling. Your friend Sperling uses the Third Lie to misrepresent history. Here's the analysis:
In yearly real growth, the BEA gives 1991 as -0.2% and 1992 as 3.3%, as compared with the Reagan values of 3.5-7.5% (ignoring the leftover recession from the Carter years), the Clinton values of 2.5-4.5% (particularly the 1993 rate of 2.7%), and the Bush values of 0.8-3.9% (but the two worst years, 2001 and 2002, have an obvious cause that's not Bush). Using these numbers, TJM's claim appears correct, as 1992 has a higher growth rate than '93.
However, that's not the whole story, and here's where it gets tricky. The quarterly values don't agree at all with the yearly values. For example, the quarterly values for 1991 were -2.0%, 2.6%, 1.9%, and 1.9% respectively, which certainly don't equate with the -0.2% total. These numbers, along with the 1992 numbers, suggest that the economy was getting back on its feet by mid-1991 (assuming seasonal growth of .5% can be considered "back on its feet"; that gives a yearly growth rate of 2.1%, so it's somewhat sluggish, but not horrible).
Furthermore, the discrepancy between yearly numbers and quarterly numbers can be explained by guessing that the yearly values are based on the last quarter of the previous year and the first three quarters of the given year; adding the -3.0% of 1991 quarter 4 to the equation and removing the 1.9% of 1992 quarter 4 makes the total equivalent to the 1991 yearly total. This would explain why the yearly number indicates that the economy did extremely poorly in 1991, while the quarterly numbers tell a different story.
This means a recalculation is in order. If we take the quarterly numbers of each year and put them together, 1991 had about 1% growth (still nothing to write home about), but '92 featured a 4.2% growth rate, as compared to the 1993 rate of 2.5% (Clinton's first). So while TJM's claim is correct, it goes further than that; Clinton's first year in office featured a growth rate that was less than 3/5 the rate during Bush's last year. And unlike him, I have a link. Feel free to check my numbers yourself - I'm doing a standard rate-of-growth calculation.
This doesn't excuse Bush Senior from the '91 recession (assuming that he was responsible for it rather than outside factors as in 2001), but does indicate that it was over before the media and the Democrats could plausibly use it against him. Furthermore, it utterly refutes the idea that Clinton somehow achieved an economic miracle; all he did was approximately match the 1992 rate (at his best).
My only worry about my calculations is that they still incorrectly attribute the first quarter of 1993 to Clinton. If I remove it from the calculation and add the 4.1% rate given from 1994 quarter 1, Clinton gets a little less than 3.5% - not bad, but no miracle given the 1992 numbers.
Scrapiron
· 1 year ago
You go to war with the military you have, not the one you wish you had. VP Chaney Actually Slick Willie did gut the U.S. Military and it took months simply to manuf enough small arms ammo to hold out in Afganistan. Ammo plants near me had to go on 24-7 shifts just to keep up until more plants could be configured. If we had been attacked by even a small military you would see a whipped country today if the armed citizens couldn't have turned the tide. Brings forth the question, Why do democrats want to disarm the citizens? Are they in fact on the other side? As far as tax increases, the Global Poverty bill (billions to the U.N, criminals) is in congress right now (proposed by your very own Islamist Obama) and will require massive tax increases on every working American. All we need now is for Exxon to say screw you and move out of the country. They alone pay more federal tax than the bottom 50% of american workers. Fact not fiction. Talk about a doubling of taxes on the workers, it would take that just to maintain todays budget without Osama Obama/ShrillaryHliter's proposal to take care of the world.
AH_C
· 1 year ago
Ditto.
Don't forget that corporations large & small really don't pay taxes, consumers do. To whit, the gas we pay for at the pump includes our share of the State/local tax, Federal tax, PLUS the "corporate" tax that Exxon pays. A windfall tax only means that consumers will pay more at the pump, while Exxon and the neighborhood small businesses alike raise their prices to ensure their target profits are met. Otherwise, what's the point of being in business, if not for profit?
Math_Mage
· 1 year ago
Two problems. First, Exxon's taxes simply get pushed on to workers through higher prices at the pump, so it's not like Exxon's paying taxes for workers right now. In fact, such a tax is highly regressive, especially in the case of the oil/gasoline industry, since it's essentially an indirect sales tax - one wonders who the Dems are trying to help. Don't waste that argument by arguing for corporate taxes now. Second, we can do without the Godwin's Law violations and Osama comparisons, particularly since we're in such a huff about the whole Bushitlerhalliburton nonsense. Muir's is acceptable because it satirizes the Bushitler crowd. Casual use just gives the Democrats more ammunition.
TrollFeeder
· 1 year ago
It would be nice if the Dems would discuss the question of what is needed to raise government revenues separately from their vitriol against "the rich" and "big business." They might possibly realize that increases in overall revenue resulted from decreasing specific rates.
However, their party is more interested in punishing people (even if it means punishing themselves, too) than they are in finding the most effective solution to our national financial issues.
Similarly to how they are more concerned with restricting other people's right to say anything offensive than they are with preserving their own to speak as the wish. Or others' rights to be armed than their own rights to self-protection.
Pathetic, Euro-sissy, and explicitly anti-Constitutional. Three cheers for hope and change.
Oldcrow
· 1 year ago
Who's going to pay the tab? Well we will of course. Here is my theory the withdrawal from Iraq is a smoke screen, think about it if you pull all our troops out of Iraq then claim Afghanistan is the priority and we are doing just fine there with somewhere around 20,000 troops wella! You no longer need a large military right? The majority of Dems don't believe there is a terror threat so you cut the defense budget in half instant piece dividend which then gets funneled into the entitlement programs.
CoRev
· 1 year ago
Old Crow, only one addition. Whichever party is in power after Jan 2009, we will be tested again. Probably fairly soon after taking office. I pray it is another minor attack, <= to 9/11. I fear that if we are seriously attacked, the world, the ME, will change dramatically. It won't be pretty.
Bishop
· 1 year ago
Yes, there will a serious effort to eradicate the threat and the naysayers won't be heard because no one will give a damn what they have to say. The ME will be changed negatively (if thats even possible) and we and/or the west will just have to deal with it.
TJM
· 1 year ago
NIghtjar,
Here are a few "inconvenient truths" that maybe even you can understand.
In terms of Clintoon's "prosperity" and "balanced budgets" I note the following:
1) Clintoon inherited an economy, that notwithstanding the big lie in the mainstream media, was already on an upward trajectory when he took office. The stock market, generally the most reliable bellweather of economic activity, was rising throughout the last year of Bush senior's term. Morever, GDP was running at an annual rate of 6% or more when he turned the White House over to President Slimeball.
2) What also was of great help to Clintoon, was his masterstroke of turning Congress over to the Republicans for the first time in 50 years ( he must of planned it, that economic genius) which placed a real damper on his ability to spend (err, invest) which also aided the economy tremendously. Last time I checked the Constitution, it is Congress, not the President who enacts spending bills. The President can propose spending which is hardly the same thing. I just wish that the Republican Congress had acted that way when Bush junior came into office. We probably would all be getting even bigger refund checks funded by another tax cut if they had.
3) There were no budget surpluses during the Clintoon years no matter how much OMB published that fairytale because to balance the budget they masked the deficit by including Social Security "trust funds", money that is supposedly earmarked to pay social security payments and not to cover routine governmental spending. If a private businesses balanced its books that way, Congress has and would call that fraudulent accounting.
4) Lastly, Clintoon conned the Republican Congress in the late 1990s to raise taxes which caused the economy to lose steam towards the end of his administration and guess what, the economy began to constrict, the tech boom ended, and the Nasdaq lost 40% of its value in the year 2000, the last year of the "Clintoon" economic miracle you allude to.
Those are the facts, not talking points. But stay in your alternate universe of reality, it won't change things for those of us in the real world (you know, the one that the New York Slimes doesn't recognize).
Math_Mage
· 1 year ago
Actually, the last major piece of tax legislation I can find is the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997, which passed with bipartisan support and reduced the capital gains tax as well as instituting a tax credit of $500 for children of everyone but "high-income families." Somehow I doubt that was a big factor in the bubble bursting, but taxes weren't raised at the end of the Clinton Administration.
On the other hand, I don't believe the Omnibus bill was responsible for much, either, given that the main engine driving up revenues during the '90s was, IMHO, the tech boom. So whatev.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
"On the other hand, I don't believe the Omnibus bill was responsible for much,"
Of course you don't.
nightjar
· 1 year ago
First off, the Clinton tax increase occurred in 1993, called among other things The Deficit Reduction Act. Not in the late 1990's
Second, not including the SS surplus has been standard for all president for several decades.
Third. Your figures about 1992-93 is disputed by dems as is the notion that Clinton inherited a booming economy. Correcting A Picture In A Thousand Words Come back with more than wingnut fiction next time TJM.
Your disputation is disputed - see the actual numbers, which I posted above. That's another reason why I question the role Clinton's extra taxes played in the '90s boom.
Oldcrow
· 1 year ago
Bingo found Obama on video in his own words.
From a Washington Times article:
But his backers, including a former Air Force chief of staff, say the rookie senator believes in a strong military, and with it, a larger Army and Marine Corps.
"Any military person who concludes he's a left-wing, hair-on-fire, Kumbaya child of the '60s has sadly misunderestimated him, to use George Bush's term," said retired Gen. Merrill McPeak.
Really well in Obama's own words he is going to make massive cut in the military, don't believe me? Here is the video at Powerline:
Now people better understand something the Army's Future Combat Systems is whats going to keep soldiers alive in tomorrows extremely lethal battle fields, this guy scares the hell out of me I have to tell you.
gmax
· 1 year ago
Everyone is equal, just some are more equal than others. And words mean exactly what I want them to mean, no more and no less. Now bend over.
krome
· 1 year ago
Perhaps there will be a Swiftian "Modest Proposal" coming to deal withthose expensive Baby Boomer retirees.
NoDonkey
· 1 year ago
What, eat the elderly?
They are full of gristle and besides that, they vote.
olddeadmeat
· 1 year ago
David Walker is leaving his post as the nation's Cassandra, er.... excuse me, Comptroller. This is regrettable, as he has been the only federal official openly saying that the nation is heading towards bankruptcy.
I'll give kudos to USA today for at least raising this issue, but they are ignoring one other lissue looming large - the Army has to be rebuilt- we have expended vast amounts of material and personnel, and that has to be replaced. Right now, we have few infantry units that could be deployed anywhere in a crisis.
As you noted, Cap'n, we have also added a lot more veterans who needed extended care.
If anything, we should now be calling for greater cutbacks, not new programs.
The GOP could seize the high ground by all current members of Congress committing to forgo pork barrel projects on pain of losing all support from the Republican party in their next re-election.
Something like that could be dramatic enough to highlight Pelosi's utter failure to deliver anything in this area.
A dramatic gesture of fiscal self-discipline would be rewarded in the general election, and would also throw the other's side hypocrisy in their face.
All Comments
They will really need to figure out the "loopholes" the "wealthy" are using and close them. One of the biggest is the home mortgage "loophole". At least we bought our house long enough ago that we can continue to live there. Maybe we will see a national sales tax, so they can sip from the cup after they've sipped from the pitcher that fills the cup.
Who knows?
Yes, I know the GOP congress was a partner in this, although often reluctantly. And we have the current GOP talking points about the Clinton stock market bubble and recession that sometimes blamed on 9-11 . The realty is Bush and the GOP congress spent like drunk rabbits in order to bribe the people to reelect them in 2004. and it worked. What do you think the Medicare script law was about, aside from wingnut welfare for big Pharma.
Also Clinton had a dot com boom to work with whiich helped speed along his economy.
As for the dot com bubble opinions vary among experts as to how much it really contributed to the 2001 recession, which was small, if it occurred at all.
And so what if the dot com boom helped his economy. Bush could have had benefited from a new Green boom in alternative fuels and other new technology, instead of his and repubs ideological roadblocks and patronage to big oil. It's something that is coming and now it looks like dems will be the beneficiary .
The truth is aside from national defense spending repubs exploded the debt with gifts of tons of treasury cash for the rich and big business. And when the treasury cash ran out, they just borrowed it from Chinese loan sharks.
Anyway that's my non expert rantings on the subject.
The USA has one of the lowest savings rates in the world. This is offset somewhat by investment rates, which are high in part because of defined-contribution pension plans.
A 50-year-old who has $800,000 in a defined-contribution pension plan may look richer on paper than someone who has a defined-benefit plan waiting for him in five years. He's not.
The powerhouse economy of the nineties (much of it eventually built on dot-com hot air) was in *spite* of the Clinton tax rate, not because of it. And even there it took a focused opposition GOP Congress to keep it from bloating on the back of a mess like Hillarycare. The nonsense began for the GOP when Gingrich left and they got the Presidential rubber stamp as well, and forgotten why they'd been elected in the first place.
The "decade of peace and prosperity" also happened to include the Somalia mess (Bush Sr did get us involved initially under UN auspices, but Clinton's the guy on whose watch it blew up in our faces), the first WTC bombing, a decade of failed containment of Iraq, the Kosovo mess that is *still* a low-grade civil war, the bombing of the Cole, attacks on our embassies, and the planning of 9/11. The prosperity, as it usually is, was generated by domestic production and a healthy world economy, not by anything the President did (Presidential power over the economy is peripheral at best anyway), and the peace was largely an illusion that amounted to American shoving their fingers in their ears and shouting "La La La, Can't hear you!"
The weak dollar has more to do with a weakened global economy and increasing confidence in the Euro and in the future potential of the Chinese and Indian economies than a collapse here... and none of it really is affected by the President. Our biggest domestic issue was the housing bubble burst, which anyone who was watching that market for the past several years knew was inevitable, subprime mortgages aside. But what really makes the economy swim is consumer confidence - the media has more impact on that than any President could wield. In a lot of ways, the economy is a self-perpetuating entity... when people *think* the economy is doing well, they invest more, spend more, and the economy does do well - and when they think it's doom and gloom, they divest, hoard their money, and the economy suffers for it. On a macro scale, that's what helped turn Black Tuesday into the Great Depression... the economy was salvagable right up until people panicked and made a run on the banks.
At the same time, we're also dealing with the entire face of the economy making a major shift. Except for specialized equipment, industry is just too damned expensive to be affordable here, so those jobs get outsourced to more affordable pools of labor - the only way my company can afford to keep their manufacturing here is because dental equipment is always in demand, we're diversifying our products, and most of our equipment sells in the $20-30,000 price range. The real bulwark of the economy is becoming the service and retail sectors, which requires a much higher volume of educated workers with specialized skills. Right now that passes the manufacturing sectors to nations with large, unskilled work forces. But as those jobs move to those regions, their economies improve, education becomes more widespread, and their expenses increase. Japan used to be the manufacturing center of Asia, but as their nation got wealthy, they too saw themselves becoming a service economy as manufacturing fled to China, Taiwan, and Korea. In the long run, this is good for everyone - but in the short term, it means a lot of unskilled and semi-skilled workers in those developed nations have to either learn new skills and adapt, or be left behind. That's why the hollow and impossible Democratic mantra of "we'll bring jobs back here!" is so immensely popular in the Rust Belt and among union workers (more and more white collar and service-sector workers are giving unions the bird as anachronistic and corrupt).
So when talking about the economy, Clinton, Bush, and whoever the next one will be, don't really have the ability to do all that much. If you want to give Clinton credit for anything, it's for being smart enough to leave Greenspan in place as chairman of the Fed. That's an executive agency, but most Presidents are smart enough not to meddle with it.
Concession accepted.
That's what Obama and Hillary can't, or won't, understand: they've already painted themselves into a corner with their proposed spending increases. They've undoubtedly made so many promises to so many interest groups that if they don't deliver the goods, and pronto, they're f***ed. And they will have no margin for error: one major crisis (e.g., a Kosovo war in the Balkans, Iran gets nukes, etc.) and their spending plans, such as they are, will go buh-bye.
In my mind, it's not a question of either Obama or Hillary will be one-termers: nope, the big question is whether they'd even manage to get through their first term if they massively screw the pooch.
That $100 billion dollars a year in Iraq is part of the problem. That fails to consider that we are already paying for our military, whether it is in Iraq or not. Take out the actual costs of salary for those deployed, plus the day-to-day maitenance costs, the daily costs of feeding them regardless of where they are, medical, etc, and that $100 nillion drops dramatically.
Another part of the problem is that it cost us untold billions more to REBUILD our military AFTER the Clintos dismantles a good chunk of it as part of their false "Peace Dividend". What a crock.
It costs more to rebuild than to maintain what you have and add on as technology and missions change and/or develop.
Respects,
That is still very robust. In contrast, the first year Clintoon (Mr. Economic Miracle)
was in office it only went up by 5.1% over the prior year. Still very good. The point
is, and remains, that Clintoon was riding on the coattails of an economic recovery
that the lefty press wouldn't give old Bush credit for. By the way, I made the mistake
of voting for Clintoon the first time and it was his big lie about economics which
turned me against him. In 1993, once he was in office, a White House reporter all of a sudden
discovered that the economy was doing fine and asked him why. He said, even
before he had submitted his first budget to Congress, that his economic policies
were already working. I knew enough about economics and the markets to know
that the economic switch doesn't go on and off that easily. By the way, you can
find substantiation for my facts at the U.S. Census Bureau, Stastical Abstract of
the United States:2003. I know you won't bother to look because it will burst
your bubble.
Where is your evidence TJM. Please provide links to support your wingnutty ravings.
I did? Typical Democrat, you want everyone to do your work for you instead
of doing it yourself. I can see you're just chicken and don't want the facts.
Census Bureau or if he's found the site, is crafting a right-conspiracy theory to debunk
the statistics I cited.
Correcting A Picture In A Thousand Words
NO link , no credibility TJM. Them's the rules.
anything you say. Please go back to your Democratic
playpen.
First, the Census Bureau sources the BEA, to answer the implied question about the validity of TJM's sources. I went to the BEA for this post, as my link (!!!) at the bottom demonstrates.
Next, the article you reference is correct that GDP growth in the first quarter of 2003 was but 0.5%. However, even assuming Bush's policy was responsible for the poor quarter (unlikely), this inaccurately suggests that the same was true of 2002, which is a better indicator of the economy Clinton inherited by virtue of larger sampling. Your friend Sperling uses the Third Lie to misrepresent history. Here's the analysis:
In yearly real growth, the BEA gives 1991 as -0.2% and 1992 as 3.3%, as compared with the Reagan values of 3.5-7.5% (ignoring the leftover recession from the Carter years), the Clinton values of 2.5-4.5% (particularly the 1993 rate of 2.7%), and the Bush values of 0.8-3.9% (but the two worst years, 2001 and 2002, have an obvious cause that's not Bush). Using these numbers, TJM's claim appears correct, as 1992 has a higher growth rate than '93.
However, that's not the whole story, and here's where it gets tricky. The quarterly values don't agree at all with the yearly values. For example, the quarterly values for 1991 were -2.0%, 2.6%, 1.9%, and 1.9% respectively, which certainly don't equate with the -0.2% total. These numbers, along with the 1992 numbers, suggest that the economy was getting back on its feet by mid-1991 (assuming seasonal growth of .5% can be considered "back on its feet"; that gives a yearly growth rate of 2.1%, so it's somewhat sluggish, but not horrible).
Furthermore, the discrepancy between yearly numbers and quarterly numbers can be explained by guessing that the yearly values are based on the last quarter of the previous year and the first three quarters of the given year; adding the -3.0% of 1991 quarter 4 to the equation and removing the 1.9% of 1992 quarter 4 makes the total equivalent to the 1991 yearly total. This would explain why the yearly number indicates that the economy did extremely poorly in 1991, while the quarterly numbers tell a different story.
This means a recalculation is in order. If we take the quarterly numbers of each year and put them together, 1991 had about 1% growth (still nothing to write home about), but '92 featured a 4.2% growth rate, as compared to the 1993 rate of 2.5% (Clinton's first). So while TJM's claim is correct, it goes further than that; Clinton's first year in office featured a growth rate that was less than 3/5 the rate during Bush's last year. And unlike him, I have a link. Feel free to check my numbers yourself - I'm doing a standard rate-of-growth calculation.
This doesn't excuse Bush Senior from the '91 recession (assuming that he was responsible for it rather than outside factors as in 2001), but does indicate that it was over before the media and the Democrats could plausibly use it against him. Furthermore, it utterly refutes the idea that Clinton somehow achieved an economic miracle; all he did was approximately match the 1992 rate (at his best).
My only worry about my calculations is that they still incorrectly attribute the first quarter of 1993 to Clinton. If I remove it from the calculation and add the 4.1% rate given from 1994 quarter 1, Clinton gets a little less than 3.5% - not bad, but no miracle given the 1992 numbers.
Don't forget that corporations large & small really don't pay taxes, consumers do. To whit, the gas we pay for at the pump includes our share of the State/local tax, Federal tax, PLUS the "corporate" tax that Exxon pays. A windfall tax only means that consumers will pay more at the pump, while Exxon and the neighborhood small businesses alike raise their prices to ensure their target profits are met. Otherwise, what's the point of being in business, if not for profit?
However, their party is more interested in punishing people (even if it means punishing themselves, too) than they are in finding the most effective solution to our national financial issues.
Similarly to how they are more concerned with restricting other people's right to say anything offensive than they are with preserving their own to speak as the wish. Or others' rights to be armed than their own rights to self-protection.
Pathetic, Euro-sissy, and explicitly anti-Constitutional. Three cheers for hope and change.
Here are a few "inconvenient truths" that maybe even you can understand.
In terms of Clintoon's "prosperity" and "balanced budgets" I note the following:
1) Clintoon inherited an economy, that notwithstanding the big lie in the mainstream media, was already on an upward trajectory when he took office. The stock market, generally the most reliable bellweather of economic activity, was rising throughout the last year of Bush senior's term. Morever, GDP was running at an annual rate of 6% or more when he turned the White House over to President Slimeball.
2) What also was of great help to Clintoon, was his masterstroke of turning Congress over to the Republicans for the first time in 50 years ( he must of planned it, that economic genius) which placed a real damper on his ability to spend (err, invest) which also aided the economy tremendously. Last time I checked the Constitution, it is Congress, not the President who enacts spending bills. The President can propose spending which is hardly the same thing. I just wish that the Republican Congress had acted that way when Bush junior came into office. We probably would all be getting even bigger refund checks funded by another tax cut if they had.
3) There were no budget surpluses during the Clintoon years no matter how much OMB published that fairytale because to balance the budget they masked the deficit by including Social Security "trust funds", money that is supposedly earmarked to pay social security payments and not to cover routine governmental spending. If a private businesses balanced its books that way, Congress has and would call that fraudulent accounting.
4) Lastly, Clintoon conned the Republican Congress in the late 1990s to raise taxes which caused the economy to lose steam towards the end of his administration and guess what, the economy began to constrict, the tech boom ended, and the Nasdaq lost 40% of its value in the year 2000, the last year of the "Clintoon" economic miracle you allude to.
Those are the facts, not talking points. But stay in your alternate universe of reality, it won't change things for those of us in the real world (you know, the one that the New York Slimes doesn't recognize).
On the other hand, I don't believe the Omnibus bill was responsible for much, either, given that the main engine driving up revenues during the '90s was, IMHO, the tech boom. So whatev.
Of course you don't.
Second, not including the SS surplus has been standard for all president for several decades.
Third. Your figures about 1992-93 is disputed by dems as is the notion that Clinton inherited a booming economy.
Correcting A Picture In A Thousand Words
Come back with more than wingnut fiction next time TJM.
Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 - Wikipedia, the free ...
From a Washington Times article:
But his backers, including a former Air Force chief of staff, say the rookie senator believes in a strong military, and with it, a larger Army and Marine Corps.
"Any military person who concludes he's a left-wing, hair-on-fire, Kumbaya child of the '60s has sadly misunderestimated him, to use George Bush's term," said retired Gen. Merrill McPeak.
Really well in Obama's own words he is going to make massive cut in the military, don't believe me? Here is the video at Powerline:
Link to video
Now people better understand something the Army's Future Combat Systems is whats going to keep soldiers alive in tomorrows extremely lethal battle fields, this guy scares the hell out of me I have to tell you.
They are full of gristle and besides that, they vote.
I'll give kudos to USA today for at least raising this issue, but they are ignoring one other lissue looming large - the Army has to be rebuilt- we have expended vast amounts of material and personnel, and that has to be replaced. Right now, we have few infantry units that could be deployed anywhere in a crisis.
As you noted, Cap'n, we have also added a lot more veterans who needed extended care.
If anything, we should now be calling for greater cutbacks, not new programs.
The GOP could seize the high ground by all current members of Congress committing to forgo pork barrel projects on pain of losing all support from the Republican party in their next re-election.
Something like that could be dramatic enough to highlight Pelosi's utter failure to deliver anything in this area.
A dramatic gesture of fiscal self-discipline would be rewarded in the general election, and would also throw the other's side hypocrisy in their face.