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Read up on the spankin’ new budget from the current Prez which will apparently usher in “A New Era of Responsibility.”
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Not being an expert, but leaning towards a capitalist/market solution to things capital and of the market==its becoming clearer to me that the banks should have been allowed to fail completely.
Transitional credit could be supplied by the Feds thru remaining banks, the Freddies, new programs, reformed old bank systems.
Giving thieves more money can still be avoided. I hope Obama wakes up.
#29 Answer the question. WHO was in charge of spending bills prior to the Clinton “surplus”, who was in charge of same that resulted in the “surplus”.
Quit babbling.
#30–Paddy-Zero==wrong. The problem is unregulated/misregulated capitalism. Arguing for an international system of finance to be based on the barter system simply goes back too far to times that didn’t work as well as you imagine they did.
This crash is caused by many of the same factors that caused the crash of 29 and re-establishing the rules that were put into place and worked for 60 years to prevent another crash will be rediscovered and re-established again==all to the howls of crooks, bankers, capitalists, and gold standard goons.
As we see by the chart, most of the time the government spends more then it takes in. This is the norm.
# 33 bobbo said, “Arguing for an international system of finance to be based on the barter system”
I suggested no such thing. Quit babbling.
Paddy-Zero==what else do you think “the gold standard is?” It is barter based on gold with paper money being a lighter symbol. Your knee jerk reaction to this accurate characterization indicates just how wrong you are and the value of labeling:
“Gold”—hmmm, good.
“Barter”—hmm, Bad!
Frankenstein no like FIRE!!!! hah, hah. Barter systems take you only so far and usually “magic bullets” are made of silver–not to confound the metaphor too much for you but your understanding of finance is “beastly.”
So we all agree… it’s the idiot lawyers in charge. These blood suckers need to be voted out of office. I wish there were more technical people involved in politics. I guess they’re just too smart to participate in the cesspool that is our gov’t.
# 36 bobbo said, “what else do you think “the gold standard is?”
1) I didn’t talk about the gold standard.
2) Gold standard was totally eliminated by Nixon I believe.
3) The FED problem is separate from the gold standard problem.
4) No gold standard is NOT equal to a barter system.
Quit babbling.
Thinking about the gold standard is making me wonder if the US is experiencing a post-war type of deflation? I say “type” because the US hasn’t pulled out of the mid-East yet but has been at war for close to 8 years – which is far longer than most modern wars.
Paddy… You should quit babbling now and move to the next topic. Really. Cut your losses now – sell!
Just want to help you preserve what little dignity you’ve got left dude. We can only tolerate so much hand waving. Keep it up and you’re gonna take flight! The numbers don’t lie, man.
Paddy-Zero==I’m sorry. You are right. I gave you a whole lot more credit (sic) than you are due.
At #30 you said: “The fiat currency is at the heart of this”–that is usually a reference to a desire for a return to the gold standard.
So, what do you mean by that phrase???
QB–deflation? Usually that refers to the economy at large meaning things are getting cheaper, everything I buy is more expensive than a year ago except for gas and computer parts? The value of our money is deflating meaning we have to pay more dollars for the same thing. I’d be guessing to say post war periods tend to be inflationary but every combination of trends can be seen at various times in history. Economics is highly variable–meaning no one actually understands it, except maybe the Padded One.
bobbo, deflation doesn’t necessarily mean that an individual has more buying power. Is your house worth more? Can you get a better deal on a car than a year ago? Are your investments worth the same? Are interest rates going up or down?
To finance the wars and the tax breaks (double whammy) the US basically printed money. The money supply has dried up and the “real price” of goods and services is dropping.
The last “fiscal conservative” President that was elected was Herbert Hoover.
FDR proved, once and for all, that you could always get re-elected if you spend, spend, spend.
Funny how Clinton’s budget surpluses exactly coincide with the US trade deficit falling off into the abyss, never to recover.
“The United States has posted a trade deficit since the late 1960s and it has been rapidly increasing since 1997.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_deficit
(See their pretty graph.)
RBG
#42–QB==right you are. It all depends on exactly what you are talking about, the time frames and so forth. My house and car are paid for so I’m not in that market and I believe both those major items are not included in the CPI, but I could be wrong.
Likewise with timing. Last year was the year of the bust. Everything bust related is cheaper==for instance Bank Stocks. Heating oil/gas is cheaper than last year but not cheaper than 4 years ago, or whenever.
So–define your terms, I you’ll get agreement from 90% of folks. I’m pretty sure most of the Iraq war was carried on with borrowed money (a fiscal policy venture) and not by printed money (a monetary policy venture). Both can result in deflation in the value of money with pure printing almost always doing so. As always, other factors do play into the formula and most of those other factors don’t look well for the USA either.
If you choose to disagree with me, I will immediately concede. I don’t take stands on economic issues ((other than simple definitional terms)). Too murky, undefined, variable.
More typical Liberal bullshit. No one said The Bushes were fiscal conservatives, while Clinton’s uptick was driven by the far right.
And yet even before the Fed system we had recessions and depressions.
I’m not a defender of the banking system, but show me when this utopia-Ayn-Rand system of laissez faire capitalism existed.
More to the point, let say we all agree that the Fed needs to be abolished and the income tax, and the dollar repegged to gold.
Whatever the long-term outcome would be, the short-term we can all agree would be massive bank falures, massive increase in inflation and massive unemployment. Joe Biden got hammered over asking for the number of a website. Do you not think Limbaugh would hammer Obama everyday for 20% unemployment?
I love Libertarians and their little fantasy world (actually, they have good points that do need to be worked into the fabric of our county), but to think that any politician in this day and age would sit back and not do anything while possibly the Greatest Depression unfolds is a whole new level of dreamland.
Yes, the gov’t is spending trillions. And if this doesn’t work, they will spend trillions more next year. If the Repubs were in power, they would do the same… they just have the luxury of being a minority right now.
“If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?” – Jefferson
I love that quote! Putting lawyers in charge of writing law is exactly like putting foxes in charge of the chicken coop.
Comparing absolute numbers is meaningless. If you earn $10k one year and borrow $9k you are in much worse shape than if you earn $100k in a year and borrow twice the amount or $18k. Though the amount that Obama is going to be spending is going to leave a very big mark for a very long time.
The problem is, there haven’t been fiscal conservatives in the Republican party for decades. All parties spend like there’s no tomorrow because their job is no longer representing the best interest of American citizens, but in getting re-elected at any cost. Any politician that went to their constituents and said “sorry, we’re out of money, all those programs you want will have to wait” would get voted out of office. They don’t want that, therefore they spend money whether they have it or not and let the next guy worry about it.
Look where this has gotten us. We’re in the worst financial mess since the Great Depression as all of the fiscal irresponsibility across the board has come home to roost. But don’t tell the politicians that, they’re still trying to buy your loyalty and your votes by putting your children and grandchildren into permanent hock.
Figures lie and Liars figure. The graph is meaningless since it includes the excess Social Security revenue that has been used to “offset” other spending. The IOU is much larger in each of the years in the graph when you add in the borrowing from Social Security. Most of the surpluses in the Clinton years were actually deficits if one used standard accounting.
The sniping about which party is better at handling the federal budget is nonsense. They’re both terrible, and neither is willing to face the problem head on.
Obama’s call for us not to “kick the can down the road” is actually reminiscent of Bush II pre-9/11. Interesting to me that the 9/11 hiccup isn’t even acknowledged by the current administration. It kept Bush&co from even approaching the long term problems. It probably also forestalled the current economic disaster with all the deficit spending that followed. I always laugh about complaints about money “spent in Iraq”. Sure, some huge truckloads of bills were sent over there (and mishandled horribly), but most of the spending could be characterized as economic stimulus in the good ol’ USA. Paying the armed forces, defense contractors, etc. Isn’t that what got us out of the Great Depression?
This is a nice propaganda piece that has been floating around liberal sites. It’s similar to the recession chart Pelosi released a few weeks back. Just statistics showcased in a way to trick the public.
Replace the name of the president with the party that controlled the Congress you’ll get a better idea of how liberal vs conservative works on budgets.
Also anyone who thinks Bush was conservative was a lunatic.
#51
The graph is not biased toward either party. While one graph may not tell the whole story, at least it isn’t pushing an agenda of comparative prejudice.
Uncle Dave,
Maybe you can find similar charts that show environmental positive/negatives under each party. Or citizen deaths from terrorists, war, highway safety issues or hurricanes. Or happiness index. Or freedom index. Or execution quotients. Or number of lawyers shot in the face index, etc.
I think that Republican -ism is like that Road To Hell they keep talking up in asphalt class.
Just so we are all clear, Obama’s recently signed budget is worse than all of the budget deficit’s run by *both* Carter *and* Reagan **combined** (12 years!). It almost worse than all of the deficits listed for Bush II **combined**. Myth indeed. Obama is the first true liberal since Truman or perhaps Roosevelt (Clinton was a moderate) and look at the result out of the gate. The graph would have to be four times taller in order to even show Obama’s first budget deficit.
If they took the chart out further with their projections, you would see that it took A Democratic Congress <4 years to double the national debt from 2006.
Paddy is mostly correct. The only economy that can exist is one based on production and consumption.
All else is a fantacy of free money for no work, and free money is expected “right now” by everyone who has grown up in the US. Like anything that requires no work, free money has no real value. However, that is what everyone expects.
How about some real numbers for Bush 2? Projected for 2006? That’s 3 years ago.
I suspect the real numbers are much larger.
#52 Jason Miller:
“Replace the name of the president with the party that controlled the Congress…”
Thank you. Why did the thread go thst long before someone said this?
Do the numbers for the G.W. Bush years include the wars in Iraq and Afganistan? As I recall, his administration never did include the cost of those wars in any of their yearly budgets.