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Since Ronald Reagan, until the present, we have run up $13 trillion dollars in debt. The only President to balance the budget was the conservative Democrat, Bill Clinton.
When Reagan took office, the debt was less than $1 trillion dollars. When Bill Clinton left office, the debt was about $5.5 trillion. When George W Bush left office, the debt was about $11.2 trillion dollars. At present, it is about $14 trillion. Barack Obama has presided over about $3 trillion dollars of debt in less than 3 years.
Of course, the deficit is the cost of government programs minus the revenues coming into the government. The last deficit of George W Bush was about $1.2 trillion dollars. Barack Obama has not been able to make a dent in that inherited deficit. Why?
This is the point where Republicans and Tea Partiers stop thinking. It does not compute. To them, Barack Obama is a reckless, big-spending, dangerous liberal.
There was no economic collapse. The stock market did not sink like a rock. People did not lose trillions of dollars in the stock market. Everything was just fine until Barack Obama came along.
There was no need to spend money on a stimulus. Never mind that we were losing jobs at a rate of 750,000 per month! Never mind that no one was investing. Never mind that the brightest economists, conservative and liberal, agreed that the economy was freezing up rapidly and needed a stimulus. Republicans and Tea Partiers do not buy that argument.
The economy and the stock market should have been left alone. The invisible hand of the market would have worked. We would be in a much better place today if Barack Obama had not interferred with the marketplace. The automobile companies should have been permitted to go under. That is what the Tea Party believes. Bet the farm. Put all the money on the table. Little Jo from Kokomo. Baby needs a new pair of shoes. Roll the dice!
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