11-30-2016, 02:08 PM
(11-30-2016, 01:54 PM)David Horn Wrote:(11-27-2016, 09:17 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: The discussion was about the debt, not the deficit.
However, it's to be noted that the highest deficit on your chart was in 2009, Obama's first year, due to his patronage, er, "stimulus" spending, and it went down mostly after the partial shutdown that the Tea Party folks forced.
The big money drivers of the 2009 deficit:
It's hard to fault any of that.
- Entitlements: UI, SNAP and other automatically triggered programs went into hyper-drive because they had a huge influx of newly entitled recipients. If they hadn't been available, we would have had the GD all over again.
- Tax Receipts: If income drops, taxes decline too, so this was not unexpected.
- Bailouts: The initial round of bailouts was relatively large, and all on the Uncle Sam credit card.
- Discretionary Stimulus: Several programs were instigated, including Cash for Clunkers and some infrastructure projects.
Such was so. The Keynesian multiplier effect practically ensures that efforts to increase tax revenue or cut spending directly do more harm than good -- even to the budget.
People spend unemployment insurance; SNAP is use-it-or-lose-it, and it goes back into the economy through grocery purchases.
The bailouts were necessary for preventing another Great Depression.
Cash for Clunkers? It got huge numbers of gas-guzzling vehicles off the road and supported the American auto industry that had done nothing wrong.
The choice was clear: begin the recovery in early 2009 (the equivalent of early 1931 in the Great Depression) or perhaps late 2010 (the equivalent of late 1932).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.