Captain's Quarters Comments - Latest Comments in USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Lethologica — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:15:19 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Lethologica — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:08:53 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Lethologica — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:25:41 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

E1701 — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:37:43 -0000

I swore I would never use this phrase, but your response demands it:

Concession accepted.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

TJM — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 10:18:44 -0000

No ability to find a link, means there's no credibility in
anything you say. Please go back to your Democratic
playpen.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Oldcrow — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:51:59 -0000

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:

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:41:57 -0000

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.

Correcting A Picture In A Thousand Words

NO link , no credibility TJM. Them's the rules.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

TJM — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:10:15 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

TJM — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:23:06 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:02:49 -0000

"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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

TJM — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:29:20 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

HongKongFluie von AH_C — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:39:40 -0000

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?

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:29:01 -0000

A lot of words to re-write history and regurgitate debunked GOP talking points.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:27:44 -0000

Kerry : We Must Strengthen our Military to Meet Today?s Challenges

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

E1701 — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:47:57 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:28:04 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

TJM — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:16:40 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

SaipanDrunkenSailor — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:50:04 -0000

What, eat the elderly?

They are full of gristle and besides that, they vote.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:01:15 -0000

"On the other hand, I don't believe the Omnibus bill was responsible for much,"

Of course you don't.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

njcommuter — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:10:38 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

showbiz111 — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 07:08:59 -0000

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?

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Lethologica — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:55:47 -0000

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...

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Lethologica — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 01:42:06 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

Scrapiron — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:37:18 -0000

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.

Re: USA Today: Who Pays The Bill?

nightjar — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 23:39:18 -0000

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.

Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 - Wikipedia, the free ...