“The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents – #43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.”
-Barack Obama 2008
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kuTG19Cu_Q]
Reblogged this on The Firewall.
The hard truth is, we do need to get on top of our huge debt problem. What is amazing is that Republicans want people think it all started with Obama’s election. When Clinton left office in 2001 our economy was in great shape. Seven years into the Bush/Cheney reign our economy was collapsing. Obama inherited not just a flatline economy but also the fiasco of two unfunded wars that Republicans just put on the credit card, and then blamed Obama for the dept. Can you smell the stench of hypocrisy? To really get at the debt dliemma we are going to need to swallow some tough cuts AND.. higher taxes. We have to tackle the problem from both ends.
Bush inherited a recession, maybe you are not old enough to remember the Dot com Bubble. Then we had the 911 attacks that shut down the air lines and sent the economy into a further tail spin. Next, after Bush repeatedly warned congress about the housing debacle, it happened.
Facts Avery, not leftist spin.
Thanks for conceding its not all Obama’s fault.
What about your false assertion that Bush was to blame? Sure looks like the Democrats are the real problem.
Grow up Avery.
Obama is by far the worst president in history.
In your humble opinion.
The reason we’re in slowest recovery from a recession in U.S. history has everything to do with Obama and the progressive agenda. It is called lack of economical sentiment by those who contribute to economical growth within our society.
Devious and immoral attempts by this administration to smother growth is apparent to everyone who’s paying attention.
Until the people believe that the central planning machine is slowing down, there’ll be little hope for the economic engine to come back to life.
OK Avery, first tell us what tough cuts do you propose and even JFK had enough sense to know raising taxes is wrong headed.
Clinton didn’t reduce the deficit and even bring it into negative territory Newt Gingrich did that. Clinton fought it and Newt wouldn’t allow spending more then we took in.
Bush’s total increase in the debt was 2 trillion not 4 trillion. He was decreasing it yearly until 1996 when the voters gave him a Demcrat congress.
Obama’s total debt for his 8 years is on track to be between $11 and $12 trillion.
Reagan is the all time percentage winner 980B to 3.8 T. Him and the 2 idiot Bushes owned 92-93 percent of all the debt prior to the fool we have now. I am Libertarian so don’t hit me with a D label.
Complete bullshit. Reagan had 10% interest rates left over from the peanut farmer before him. Obama has accumulated as much debt as everyone else put together.
Without the fake low interest rates under Obama, the debt would be well over $20 trillion now, Printing money only goes on for so long before everything goes up in smoke all at once.
I would add that Reagan’s massive defense spending broke the Soviet Union. But yes, like GW, Reagan inherited problems for which he cannot be blamed.
And I am a Libertarian too. 😉
Did the spending break the USSR or would it have fallen anyway? Regardless it broke us as well because it started the road to ruin. As for interest rates that was due to Nixon taking us off the gold standard. Volker went to Carter and told him I need to raise interest rates to save the currancy but Carter would lose the election. Carter said do what is best for the country don’t worry about me. Carter was lots of things but dishonest wasn’t one of them. He was not a good President overall though. In comparison to what we have now though he was great.
“Reagan’s conviction that the Soviet Union was both a dangerous military power and a collapsing economic system derived not from any deep knowledge of the Soviet Union. Yet he proved to be the proverbial right man in the right place at the right time. By whatever means he arrived at his views regarding the Soviet Union, he drew from them policy directions that were devastatingly effective in undermining the rotten Soviet edifice.”
http://wais.stanford.edu/History/history_ussrandreagan.htm
“The surge in interest rates was due to a number of factors, two of which dominated events. The first was a tight money policy implemented by the Federal Reserve in October 1979, in an effort to contain the inflation, which was reaching epidemic proportions. I discuss this Fed initiative in detail at a later point. Consider for the moment the second, the immediate event that triggered the panic that overtook financial markets: the announcement in January of an upward revision in the budget deficit forecast for the fiscal year still in progress.
“I remember distinctly how it started,” Stuart Eizenstat has written.
I was in my West Wing office in December, 1979, when Bo Cutter, Deputy Director of OMB (Office of Management and Budget), came to tell me that the budget office had an updated forecast of what the deficit was likely to be for Fiscal Year 1980, the fiscal year that began in October 1979, and lasted through September 1980. Since OMB had consistently overstated the deficit in the president’s budgets in the early years of the administration because agencies were not spending as fast as had been anticipated—a trend that began in the Ford years—I assumed once again we would have a smaller deficit than initially projected. I was shocked to learn from Bo that instead the deficit would be almost 50 percent higher than anticipated. . . . When the announcement was made public shortly before we submitted the budget for the next fiscal year, Fiscal Year 1981, in January, 1980, the financial community was equally shocked.[26]
The explanation for the change in the deficit forecast was reasonable enough. Most of the increase, as Bo Cutter was to explain later, “was caused by either drastically changed economic circumstances or defense increases that generally were approved of by the financial world. But the 1980 budget no longer seemed to represent a policy of restraint, rather it appeared symptomatic of the uncontrolled appetite of the federal monster.”
http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/218
Looks like David is wrong on both counts. Reagan was the right man, with the right policies to break the Soviet Union and, Nixon had little if anything to do with Carter’s high interest rates.
Why can’t a fellow Liberarian see this? Hmmmmmm.