Text 2899, 96 rader
Skriven 2006-06-27 11:31:00 av Robert E Starr JR (3372.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
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On Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:55:32 +0000 (UTC), Rob Perkins
<rperkins@usa.net> wrote:

>Josh Hill wrote:
>
>>>Yeah. Really funny. Not that the Dems really did any better when they 
>>>were in power. They didn't do any *worse*, but there you are.
>> 
>> 
>> This table, United States National Debt and the Presidents Who Are
>> Responsible For It, tells a very different story:
>> 
>> http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm
>
>Yes it does. But the table is not adjusted for inflation

Doesn't make a difference, I think. Forex, inflation was high under
Carter, and lower at the end of Reagan's term.

I suspect that you'll find the real key to the Democratic successes
here if you chart this against two factors:

1. The economy does significantly better under Democratic presidents,
increasing tax revenues

2. Reagan and the Bushes slashed taxes for the rich

>and most of 
>the datapoints are so close to the bottom of the scale that no 
>comparisons are possible.

?

We're talking solid numbers here, so AFAIK there's no significant
statistical uncertainty.

> Except the plainly obvious one that there is, 
>now, far too much federal debt compared to the GDP.
>
>In any case, I don't blame the President for federal debt. I blame the 
>House of Representatives, and the President only in part for not vetoing 
>the borrowing.

I blame Bush for a) his fiscally irresponsible tax cuts, which are
responsible for a big chunk of the deficit b) his refusal to properly
finance the war, the Medicare drug plan, and extraordinary expenses
such as Katrina c) fiscal policies that have slowed the economy d)
encouraging and failing to discourage the Republican-controlled
Congress's unprecedented pork barreling and corruption e) ditto for
his own Administration's, of which the shameful diversion of even more
anti-terrorism funds from the cities that need them (New York has no
monuments of national significance?) to cornfields in Iowa.

Not that I let Congress off the hook -- this is one of the worst in
memory. And while there can be no doubt that the Republican Congress
was very anti-deficit when Clinton was in office and then signed on to
Bush's pro-deficit policies and joined the feeding frenzy, many or
most of the Democratic administrations in that chart /didn't/ have
split government and they still managed to keep the national debt
under control. In fact, one of the most justifiable complaints about
Roosevelt is that he didn't make enough use of the then-new Keynesian
economics to end the Great Depression.

Sorry to be so overtly partisan, but it really does bug me some that
we as a nation have gotten used to overlooking facts. What happened
happened and what works works. It's hard enough to identify the former
and enact the latter; what hope do we have when our policy is based on
politically-motivated wishful thinking or lies? And among the most
pernicious of those lies is that the parties aren't different, that
they're equally bad, that they don't stand for different priorities
and that they don't have different records. It would be wrong to
suppose that they're completely antithetical, that one party is always
right or honest or effective, but it is equally wrong to suppose that
they're the same.

-- 
Josh

"I love it when I'm around the country club, and I hear people talking about
the debilitating
effects of a welfare society. At the same time, they leave their kids a
lifetime and beyond
of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer.
And instead
of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds."

- Warren Buffett
                       
--- SBBSecho 2.11-Win32
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