EAllusion wrote:Buffalo -
The bulk of current running deficits relative to the surpluses at the end of the Clinton era are caused by by a few Bush policies. It's the tax cuts, the current wars, and Medicare Part D. The reason the deficit is currently is ridiculously large is tax receipts fell off the map due to the recession.
This is all, of course, utter nonsense, and no even modestly educated individual is going to fall for it. George Bush is responsible for the initial 700 billion bailout program, which Obama, upon taking office, then ballooned into a two trillion dollar monstrosity.
Within the first two years of his presidency, Obama borrowed government money created out of thin air that has now reached some 14 -15 trillion dollars over the next ten years. Then we must add another trillion for his medical reform boondoggle that will have to be paid for through further economy crippling tax hikes (which have already been planned, and which are quite extensive) or through inflation. These are astronomical sums of fiat money borrowed against the future prosperity and economic well being of our children and grandchildren that they will never be able to pay off and our economy, not matter how robust, cannot possibly grow out of.
EAllusion is either
grossly ignorant of the simply and easily acquired facts of the matter, or so brazenly intellectually dishonest and so fixated on whitewashing the behavior of this administration and its hell bent "progressive" worldview that he just cannot bring himself to even a modicum of intellectual integrity on the matter, nor to pursuing self education on the matter that would allow him a reasoned view of the situation.
Obama has expanded the running deficit with various policies, but a healthy majority of the structural shortfall is still holdover from Bush policy on top of recession effects. Stimulus spending is fading like TARP and the fannie/freddie bailouts before it. Those put a hefty strain on the national debt, but the budget deficit relative to the Clinton era remains because of these issues.
Delusion here expects one to believe that 700 billion in bailout money and the Iraq war (which in point of empirical fact is utterly dwarfed by Obama's past and projected deficit and federal debt creation) can with straight face be set side by side with 14 trillion (and growing) in federal debt against the earnings of generations of future Americans. Much of that 14 trillion is solely the responsibility of the Obama administration and its spending priorities, and has nothing to do with Bush. The utterly monstrous levels of government borrowing since Bush left office have been done...well, since Bush left office.
The CBO has been pretty clear about this, so one wonders what sort of hack Heritage foundation op-ed article he is going to link arguing otherwise. What's scary is we're getting closer to the era when entitlement revenues are too small to cover liabilities due to the baby boomers and advances in medical technology.
Actually, Heritage is probably the most prestigious think tank in the nation, well respected (among intellectual honest and serious thinkers across party lines, even if they disagree) and influential. The intellectual firepower it deploys against the Left's gaggle of interest groups, partisan smear sites (like Media Matters), and obscure, rant filled blogs is quite impressive in its own right but, when placed alongside the Democratic party's cornucopia of Soros funded 537s, blog networks, and its reliance on intellectual hacks in the mainstream media like EAllusion (Who's strong resemblance to people like Rachael Maddow and Paul Krugman who have, in the same way, sold out their intellectual integrity to the golden calf of "progressive" politics, is rather interesting) is utterly stunning.
BCSpace, being the partisan hack that he is, cited some misleading numbers to imply that Obama policy is driving the deficit because he doesn't actually care about the actual sources so much as care about blaming Democrats.
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No one blames just the Democrats, let alone bc. However, the most aggressive, determined, and primary purveyors of the progressive statist vision and its attendent policies has and continues to be, the Democratic party and its entrenched political class.
Let's look at the actual facts of the matter, shall we?
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Report ... ican-Dreamhttp://www.heritage.org/Research/Commen ... -Time-Bombhttp://blog.heritage.org/?p=24735Bush and the Republicans cannot possible escape blame for encouraging and/or assenting to the rising tide of phantom money coming from government to fund the leviathan to which they grew all too accustomed. However, the key years in all of this are 2009 onward, in which the Obama administration embarked on a post-Bush orgy of spending and debt creation of virtually unimaginable recklessness (and both theoretical and empirical emptiness. Keynesianism has been discredited for generations, but lives on within government because of its usefulness as an ideology of state power).
Obama added more national debt to our children's and grandchildren's future in his first 19 months as president than all presidents and administrations from Washington through Bush combined.
Those are the "inconvenient truths" Delusion wishes to mask with his sophistry.