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cloudboy -> RE: U.S. Default Seen as Catastrophe Dwarfing Lehman’s Fall (10/7/2013 6:26:53 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FatDomDaddy
Stop borrowing against our future and pass balanced budgets like we did when President sat down with the Republican Congress.
It seems easy enough to me.
The most important achievement in political economy in the Clinton yeas was reducing the federal deficit. Just before his inauguration Clinton held an economic summit in Little Rock, at which academic, business executives, and financiers one after another moaned about how huge federal borrowing to cover debt was making capital too expensive to allow industry to grow. One year later Clinton had rammed through a tax-and -budget bill that turned a chronic deficit into a surplus.
The anti-deficit drive was controversial within the Democratic Party, because Clinton seemed to be truckling to financial markets rather than spending more for education and health. It was bitterly resisted by the Republicans; every single Republican member of Congress voted against the new taxes in the plan. It was an enormous gamble on Clinton's part: he had Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. The historical judgment has to be that it paid off, for Clinton, and, of vastly more importance, for the country.
--James Fallows
But two things stick out so far from the normal that they will probably be remembered no matter what happens. One of them is the sheer insensate virulence of his critics. If size can be measured by the lip-frothing frustration of one's enemies, Clinton is right up there with Moby-Dick. The other is the five-minute standing ovation Clinton received at the UN at the height of the Monica madness. The applause couldn't all have been for adultery--not even the applause from the French Ambassador.
And even if, as his critics maintain, its was all a trick both at home and abroad, the trick had worked wonderfully well. But he couldn't have gotten all five minutes without Kenneth Starr.
James Fallows
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I honestly wish you Right Wingers would stop living in the fantasy world reflected by your own post here. Not only did Clinton raise taxes, he cut military spending. Republicans tried to impeach him, and opposed and criticized him at every turn.
In Contrast to Clinton, BUSH started two ill conceived / mismanaged wars and cut taxes. Where was the Tea Party Insurgence during this ruinous era?
In Contrast to Clinton, Obama had to contend with the great recession and still contends with an economic demand problem created in large measure by the skewed distribution of the BUSH tax cuts (which did not help the economy, BTW.)
Had the Tea Party Caucus been in the Congress in 2008, the US and world economies would have melted down b/c TARP would have been DOA. Your 401(k) would be half to a quarter of what' its worth today and you very well might have lost your job and house as well. All this would have happened based on rigid, ideological opposition to government and a fantastic view of the free market.
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