Presidential election, 2016

[Warren Dew]

(11-28-2016, 12:48 AM)Eric the Green 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.

Certainly, the Tea Party-demanded cuts and the sequestration cut the deficit, although Obama agreed to it and so had a hand in it. But if the stimulus was "patronage," it was that toward a lot of different folks to whom the Democratic Congress gave it, not just to people on welfare. And it did stimulate the economy. It worked.

I agree a lot of Obama's patronage definitely went to people not on welfare, in particular wealthy Obama donors such as the founders of Solyndra.

Far from stimulating the economy, that extra spending just delayed the recovery for far longer than would have happened had the recession been allowed to work itself out normally.  But I suspect we'll just have to agree to disagree on that, since the left clings to bankrupt demand side Keynesian economics to justify increasing the size of government.

Quote:You referred to the deficit and said at the end of Obama's term it was twice what it was at the end of Bush's; no it was about the same level.

I referred to the debt, not the deficit.  They are two different things.  The deficit has been reduced substantially through sequestration, as you referred to, but it has still been adding to the debt all along, such that the debt is twice as high now as it was when Obama took office.