MrRodgers
Posts: 10542
Joined: 7/30/2005 Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Phydeaux quote:
ORIGINAL: MrRodgers quote:
ORIGINAL: DesideriScuri quote:
ORIGINAL: MrRodgers Over an 80 year period, it's more objective as the authors and Forbee editors agree, than any other study done before or since. Just how was the study slanted one way or the other ? Plus, a 'Chevy lover' is obviously biased toward Chevys. I didn't say it was (or that it wasn't) biased. I simply pointed out that a biased metric applied over any time period is still a biased metric. quote:
Clinton may have gotten lucky with the Internet and the Dot.com boom but what matters is what was done with federal revenue and no matter how it was obtained. Not for tax cuts for the rich or wars but to pay down the 'debt owed the public' and see the debt limit unchanged for 3 or 4 fiscal years. Yeah, may have. If they would only raise the debt limit to $100T, we'd never have to raise the debt limit again!!! Bush passed tax cuts so the cuts would go back to the people, rather than be spent on new or expanded programs, and to "stimify" the economy. By the end of Bush's 2nd term, the wealthy shouldered a larger burden of Federal Income Taxes, and there were more people no longer owing having a Federal Income Tax liability. Unless you think he knew about 9/11 and the resulting wars in the Middle East, the plan may not have been a bad idea at the time. The EGTRRA of 2001 had a handful of Democrats voting in support of it. The JGTRRA of 2003 had fewer Democrats voting in favor, and Cheney had to break a tie in the Senate. Going into Iraq even some repubs feel, was the worst foreign policy decision in American history at least since Vietnam, maybe of all time. Still, going into Afhgan. to get the Taliban which had nothing to do with 9/11 and staying 10 years in two wars where we totally destroyed their society and spent probably at least $2 trillion...was insane. Most of the public was against both wars and called traitors by the right wing media deluge. Even the CBO said that if our tax and spending regime had remained in place, we'd be out of debt or very close and certainly by now. This kind of crap is so partisan and so ridiculous. Even including war-spending supplements and terror-war expenditures on top of the normal defense budget, combined the afghan and iraq warsr comes to about 6.2 % of GDP. Actual direct costs for the war were 1% of GDP. Vietnam was 10% of gdp. The Korean War 15% of GDP, Civil War 12%, WW2 37.5% http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_spending https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22926.pdf http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/04/AR2008020402043.html Vietnam had 58,220 casualties, and 211,000 wounded. .03% of the population. Iraq & Afghanistan combined 6,717 deaths, 57,600 wounded. .002% we have 32,500 fatalities a year on our highways for crying out loud. Don't get me wrong - Iraq democracy was poorly conceived. Reconstruction and the exit were ridiculously poorly done. Afghanistan - is another question - this was the war that Barack called - the good war. And yet we are smack dab in the middle of losing it. 75% of the fatalities and 90% of the casualties have been under BHO. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ As for the CBO - the CBO never said any such thing - at least not recently. Not that CBO projections are worth a hill of beans - they are forced to used the baseline assumptions given them by Congress. Which was why the CBO forecasts for Obamacare were so far off. This is the same organization that predicted the gulf war costs at $14 billion. Currently at 1.7 trillion.... off by a factor of.. oh.. 30. But here is what the CBO did say quote:
CBO Director Keith Hall told reporters, “This is an unsustainable path here for federal debt. Social Security will begin to draw on its trust funds in 2018 (in actuality, all monies collected to pay for future S.S. payments have already been spent on other programs, and the "trust fund" merely contains IOUs from the government to itself — so deficits will rise), and overall deficits will skyrocket past one trillion dollars by 2022. It is a stark commentary on the magnitude of just how much federal deficits have exploded in recent years, that this last year’s deficit was forecast to “fall” to $426 billion, the lowest level of the Obama presidency. The record annual deficit was $1.4 trillion in 2009, the first year of Obama’s tenure, when the government dramatically increased spending, following flawed Keynesian economic theory in a futile attempt to pull the country out of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. What is particularly alarming about the new deficit projection of $544 billion is that the CBO originally predicted the figure to be $414 billion. So much for accuracy on the CBO. commentary from new american. Actually, soc. sec. (trust fund redemption) is drawing money from the general fund as we write and has been since 2010. I think the latest figure is $49 billion. It is shame and there should be a large enough public outcry for congress to fix it. But we both know, they will punt.
_____________________________
You can be a murderous tyrant and the world will remember you fondly but fuck one horse and you will be a horse fucker for all eternity. Catherine the Great Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. J K Galbraith
|