Just think, America would be almost debt free today had Bush not cut taxes..

[Union Yes]

that only benefited the super wealthy.

In 2000 America's national debt was $5 Trillion. But, we were running large budget surpluses after Bill Clinton's presidency. Clinton had actually began to pay down our national debt.

Had we stayed on that pace, even with economic downturn we could've continued to balance our budget and possibly continue to pay down our debt. By now, we might even have been debt free.


But let's say we still owed $3 Trillion. That's a helluva lot better than the $13 Trillion debt that we are approaching.

Balanced budgets = a strong dollar, the foundation of our economy.


Bush was willing to sacrifice the fiscal health and stability of our nation's future to enact his fiscally reckless Reagan-tried-but-failed tax cuts that only benefited the wealthy.

Our economy has been damned since.

Zero net job growth from 2000-2010.

Tax burden shifted from the uber-rich to the Serf.

Our nation has collapsed since the 2003 Bush tax cuts.

Sacrificing your nation George, is a helluva price to pay for your fucking greed.

I hope you enjoy your worthless almighty deflating dollar.

Proves that the GOP is the fucking enemy of the people.

[annabanana]

1. When are those tax cuts due to run out, anyway?

And what is the argument building to extend them? And who is making that argument?

[HughBeaumont]

12. Sunsetting at the end of 2010.

Should have been rolled back.

I mean, Bewsh had some idiotic moves in his time . . .. cutting taxes WHILE conducting two occupations, restarting the Cold War just for the hell of it, almost privatizing Social Security. But this by far was the absolute DUMBEST, since it didn't even do what he SAID they would do.

[madokie]

2. as if any more proof is needed

[stray cat]

3. And yet some progressives are willing to sit back and let the GOP take over again

under the idea that there is no difference between Bush and Obama

[Donnachaidh]

6. now that is a total crock of shit.

But hey, mislabeling people who dissent from the continuation of wars and bailouts is a totally puke-like stance that many supposed Dems have happily adopted.

[FreakinDJ]

9. Ya - that will work out well

[WVRICK13]

18. I Am Not Sitting Back

but I have to notice we still have the tax cuts for the wealthy, two wars going on and and the Patriot Act. Still waiting for the change I can believe in.

[Donnachaidh]

4. umm, did you forget the TWO WARS Bush also started?

I seriously doubt, even if the tax cuts hadn't been done, that we would be debt free at this moment. That idiot acted like a chimp in a banana store with a platinum card, when it came to paying for his *wars*.

[ThomWV]

10. We will never run a surplus again until we end both of those wars and start no new ones

[Donnachaidh]

17. exactly! n/t

[dkf]

5. Would we be talking about social security and Medicare trust funds insolvency

If we weren't so in debt?

Bush really can say mission accomplished on that one.

[angrycarpenter]

7. I believe the housing bubble would have popped

with ruinous results no matter who was in charge. Of course without a couple wars to fight we would have been in a much better position to deal with it. A president Gore would have been powerless in the face of a republican majority and we would now be year 6 of a republican president and the Iraq war would have started just a couple of years ago. The Neo-Cons were inevitable.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

8. Most.Depressing.Post.Ever

I try really hard not to think about the difference between eight years of Al Gore and eight years of Bush. It's really painful to think of the death and debt caused by the SCOTUS and their actions in December of 2000.

It's enough to make you cry.

[NYC_SKP]

16. Ah, hell. I could write a far more depressing OP. I was thinking about it yesterday in traffic.

It started with the traffic, just local getting from a to b traffic.

Traffic, everywhere, just gets worse.

One can find a corridor where a new lane opened and it gets better, for a while, but generally, traffic just gets worse and worse.

Then I wondered, in all my 52 years has anything gotten BETTER?

Are wages or benefits higher?

Is the environment cleaner?

Are our rights more secure?

Is the world a safer place?

Is our food or water supply more secure?

Does food even taste better?

Are cars easier to work on?

Etc, etc.

I was going to write an OP challenging anyone to name anything that's gotten better in the past 30-40 years.

But I was too depressed and decided to work on my tiny 6-gallon salt-water aquarium, where I could make a difference, make things better.

:donut:

[KharmaTrain]

11. A Lot Of Assumptions...

I don't think we'd be debt free...the problem is the larger the surplus would grow, the more politicians would be anxious to tap into it. Also, economic times, as we see, dictate government spending. Clinton was fortunate to have a booming economy in the 90s where tax revenues were at their highest. The dot com bust along with the rise in oil and energy prices in 2000 slowed that economy which would have slowed revenues and the surpluses would have either shrunk or vanished altogether. As we're seeing now, government spending is needed to try to prop up a depressed economy...thus even had President Gore been able to take power, he would have faced a constricting economy, like boooshie did. The difference is that President Gore wouldn't have squandered financial and political capital on two wars for profit or allow the treasury to be fleeced like booosh allowed.

The ugly truth is defecit spending and debt are a profit center. When the government goes out to borrow, they go to the big banks who then are paid a nice interest rate. The bigger the defecit, the more money is borrowed...and now it's dobutful the government is meeting the mimimum payments on the debt, which then get compounded making even more money for the banks.

[old mark]

13. Rec. The GOP is STILL on that same course, will cut taxes on the rich even more,

while ending all social programs for the poor and middle class and leaving them in the hands of "god".

They seem to believe that if things go wrong for poor or sick people it is god's will. If they and their friends become rich and powerful that is a sign that god loves them.

mark

[Snarkoleptic]

14. A really good book on how commander AWOL ignored the advice of his Treasury Sec'y

It provides a top notch account of how the pretzeldent favored ideology over intellect.

http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com/

This vivid, unfolding narrative is like no other book that has been written about the Bush presidency — or any that is likely to be written soon. At its core are the candid assessments of former US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, for two years the administration's top economic official, a principal member of the National Security Council, and a tutor to the new President. He is the only member of Bush's innermost circle to leave and then to agree to speak frankly about what has really been happening inside the White House. O'Neill's account is supported by Suskind's interviews with many participants in the administration, by transcripts of meetings, and by voluminous documents that cover most areas of domestic and foreign policy. The result is a disclosure of breadth and depth unparalleled for an ongoing presidency.

[Union Yes]

19. Thanks for the link! Sounds like a good read, I'll check it out.

:hi:

[butterfly77]

15. Kick &Recommended!

[AwakeAtLast]

20. K & R X 1000!

:kick:

:kick:

:kick:

[Oregone]

21. Why is a strong dollar "the foundation of our economy"?

[Union Yes]

24. In the late 90's, when our economy was roaring our dollar was very strong. Around 2002 it began a..

pace of devaluation that soon saw the Canadian dollar surpass it in value. Since then our dollar has saw steady decline to near record lows.

A dollar that is too strong can put us at a competitive disadvantage by making our goods expensive to foreign markets that have a weaker currency.

We were already running massive trade deficits before 2000 with a strong dollar.

We were running massive trade deficits before 1995, before our economy began it's late 90's roar.

Bush passed his tax cuts in 2003 and yet our trade deficit still balooned with an already declining dollar. The dollar continued it's decline to this day.

And we are still running massive trade deficits.

To me it proves that a very strong dollar or a weak dollar doesn't seem to effect our trade deficit one way or another.

We've ran massive trade deficits under both strong and weak dollars. In good times and bad.

I've never seen our economy stronger then in the late 90's when our dollar was at it's strongest.

Today we're seeing America's economy at perhaps it's weakest. And it ain't looking any better any time soon. Our dollar is at it's near weakest point.

I need no more evidence.

[Oregone]

27. Correlation is not Causation

Perhaps the decline in both the economy and the dollar is due to trade policies (and resulting deficits), rather than the value of the dollar being responsible for the entire economy. The value of the dollar is a complicated composite of a variety of other factors. To think it is a primary cause of the economic state rather than a result of other conditions is very short sighted.

[Dreamer Tatum]

22. I don't think that makes much sense at all

The Bush tax cuts caused the loss of TRILLIONS in lost taxes on personal incomes since 2001? I don't think so. Billions, yes. Trillions? No.

And please explain how a strong dollar helps the economy. Are you aware that China keeps its currency weak to subsidize its output (i.e., manufacturing) sector?

[Union Yes]

25. Please see reply 24. I'd be rewriting it in a reply to you. nt

[Igel]

23. The 2001/02 downturn killed it.

All by itself, that would have killed the surplus. The surplus was premised upon the same rate of growth as in 1998/99, but we didn't get that in 2000. Leading indicators in fall '00 pointed to a recession. In fact, one of the big political discussions at the time dealt with how to project budget deficits/surpluses, should the CBO be required to assume the past predicts the future, or should it make reasonable assumptions based on more sophisticated models or taking leading indicators into account: Those who liked to boast about the size of their surplus insisted that past performance predicted future performance, those who wanted to minimize it insisted that the premises mattered.

The follow-up to the recession, the "stimulus," would have necessarily dinged the already non-existent surplus even more. It accounted for a good chunk of the "surplus" amount all by itself. And, in a recession, remember--you can never spend too much, right?

Well, not at the time. The claim was that the $300-400 billion deficit was crippling the economy, that it would destroy the economy. Of course, we heard that even in '08, when we were already in recession and Congress passed a stimulus package that added to the deficit. Nobody quite accepted that we were formally in a recession, or that a decent chunk of GDP growth was provided by the deficit. Unemployment didn't seem to be dropping (the model was a bit off), so the entire discussion involved politics. Of course, the stimulus in '08 was small (as Congress demanded), it was cash based (as * demanded), and so it was expected to stop being all that effective in, oh, 8/08 or 9/08, so things might have gotten worse just about then. Gee, such a stupid expectation. Who knows how it would have gone if * and Congress had produced a decent stimulus in '08. In any event, the '08 deficit was a whipping boy for dems in much the same way that the '10 deficit is a whipping boy for repubs--with the problem being that the dems' whipping boy is 3x the '08 one.

Making the surplus predictions from 2000 even worse was the lack of job growth/GDP growth through much of the '00s. Even discounting the less than appropriate comparison of 1/00-12/09 job figures, which compares the top of a growth curve with the bottom of a recession (it's much more useful to compare like portions of a cycle), and ignoring the effects of the recession in '01, job growth was down and while compensation packages increased in the '00s wages stayed about static for most of the period. Since the surplus projections you rely on assumed taxable growth would continue indefinitely at '98/'99 levels, well, you see where that takes you.

[depakid]

28. Yep- then there's that little matter of a three trillion dollar war....

[hfojvt]

26. I wish you would not say "only the wealthy"

almost everybody knows that is false.

[Union Yes]

30. When 95% of Bushco's tax cuts went to the top 5%.. I'll stand behind my comment. nt

[hfojvt]

32. you got a source for those numbers?

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2116

According to that, only 60% went to the top 20%

[timeforpeace]

29. It's better for America to have the money and be debt free than for Americans to have the money and

be debt free!

[applegrove]

31. And the rich will stop at nothing to highjack the country again and

get more tax cuts.

[upi402]

33. ALERT THE MEDIA !

They'll want to headline this!!!
:sarcasm: :banghead:

k/r