Here is the latest post on Political Animal, a leftist blog sponsored by Washington Monthly, a leftist magazine.
Political Animal
Blog
August 06, 2011 11:05 AM
A timeline of events
By Steve Benen
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
1980: Ronald Reagan runs for president, promising a balanced budget
1981 – 1989: With support from congressional Republicans, Reagan runs enormous deficits, adds $2 trillion to the debt.
Reagan did not have a Republican Congress during his two terms. He did have a Republican Senate for his first six years. Bob Dole was Majority Leader, which was no help in cutting spending.
Lie #1
1993: Bill Clinton passes economic plan that lowers deficit, gets zero votes from congressional Republicans.
Bill Clinton passed a tax increase which Republican predicted would slow economic growth. Bush had also raised taxes at the insistence of Democrats and a recession cost him re-election.
1998: U.S. deficit disappears for the first time in three decades. Debt clock is unplugged.
The fact is that Republicans took over both houses of Congress in 1995, the House for the first time since the post-war era. The stock market took off and revenues poured in from a good economy and the internet bubble which burst in 2000.
2000: George W. Bush runs for president, promising to maintain a balanced budget.
2001: CBO shows the United States is on track to pay off the entirety of its national debt within a decade.
In fact, the national debt kept climbing and the “surplus” was on paper only. Bush inherited the recession that followed the bursting of the internet bubble in 2000.
2001 – 2009: With support from congressional Republicans, Bush runs enormous deficits, adds nearly $5 trillion to the debt.
The Bush deficits were declining the last two years of his term and the Democrats took over Congress in 2007. The Bush deficit in his last year was 10% of the present deficit. Notice Steve Benin doesn’t provide numbers.
That shows the deficits Obama inherited. Notice the increase after the Democrats took Congress in 2007.
2002: Dick Cheney declares, “Deficits don’t matter.” Congressional Republicans agree, approving tax cuts, two wars, and Medicare expansion without even trying to pay for them.
This is a matter of policy choices. I am no fan of Bush in the spending department. He should have vetoed some spending bills that Hastert told him to sign. It was no fluke that Hastert’s district, after he retired from Congress, was won by a DEmocrat.
2009: Barack Obama inherits $1.3 trillion deficit from Bush; Republicans immediately condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.
The condemnation was of his plans to spend wildly.
2009: Congressional Democrats unveil several domestic policy initiatives — including health care reform, cap and trade, DREAM Act — which would lower the deficit. GOP opposes all of them, while continuing to push for deficit reduction.
No one with any economic knowledge would believe that Obamacare and Cap and Trade would lower the deficit. The most serious effect Obama has had thus far is the avalanche of regulation that has descended on business making anyone with money unwilling to invest. That is where jobs come from and the economy is stalled.
September 2010: In Obama’s first fiscal year, the deficit shrinks by $122 billion. Republicans again condemn Obama’s fiscal irresponsibility.
The economy may have begun to recover on its own, which is what usually happens in the absence of an activist government. Then came the impact of Obama’s and Pelosi’s spending.
October 2010: S&P endorses the nation’s AAA rating with a stable outlook, saying the United States looks to be in solid fiscal shape for the foreseeable future.
An exaggeration.
November 2010: Republicans win a U.S. House majority, citing the need for fiscal responsibility.
December 2010: Congressional Republicans demand extension of Bush tax cuts, relying entirely on deficit financing. GOP continues to accuse Obama of fiscal irresponsibility.
The left does not understand that government does not create wealth. Raising taxes in a recession is what Hoover did. I wouldn’t think they would want to copy him but they learn nothing.
March 2011: Congressional Republicans declare intention to hold full faith and credit of the United States hostage — a move without precedent in American history — until massive debt-reduction plan is approved.
July 2011: Obama offers Republicans a $4 trillion debt-reduction deal. GOP refuses, pushes debt-ceiling standoff until the last possible day, rattling international markets.
This is another lie. Obama and Boehner were close to an agreement and then Obama insisted on tax increases after agreeing not to do so. He responded to complaints from the left which is fixated on tax increases.
August 2011: S&P downgrades U.S. debt, citing GOP refusal to consider new revenues. Republicans rejoice and blame Obama for fiscal irresponsibility.
Another lie. The S&P report said the debt levels are too high and the agreement did not do enough to cut spending.
The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. We could lower the long-term rating to ‘AA’ within the next two years if we see that less reduction in spending than agreed to, higher interest rates, or new fiscal pressures during the period result in a higher general government debt trajectory than we currently assume in our base case.
There have been several instances since the mid 1990s in which I genuinely believed Republican politics couldn’t possibly get more blisteringly ridiculous. I was wrong; they just keep getting worse.
Steve Benen is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly, joining the publication in August, 2008 as chief blogger for the Washington Monthly blog, Political Animal.
There was a time when Democrats understood economics. Those days are over. They have convinced themselves that money grows on trees. They are destroying this nation’s finances, with help from many Republican professional politicians. The only hope is the tea party and turning Obama out in 2013.
The following essay expresses my feelings better than I can.
a lot of people have entertained the idea, that Mikhail Gorbachev was to the late great Soviet Union, what Barack Obama is to the surviving United States — the leader who reforms so many things so quickly that his country suddenly disappears. One recalls the speed with which the first Soviet head of state to be born after the October Revolution became its last head of state. It took him about three years: just less than the time of one U.S. presidential term. (Though he had already taken three years to warm up, as General Secretary of the Communist Party.)
It is, today, a little-known fact that Gorbachev did not bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union, on purpose. Those who still detect a glint in his eye would do well to respect his persistent denials. He was sincerely trying to reform the place. He was walking a dog with powerful jaws, but rather loose teeth; he tried to adapt it to a vegetarian diet; it died.
The poor dictator inherited not only an economy going bankrupt by even socialist standards; but a war in Afghanistan that was being lost, against an utterly disorganized enemy from another century; to say nothing of half-a-dozen other imperial missions, in exotic third-world locations, that were not going well. By merely liberating the little West Indian island of Grenada, President Reagan was able to send a hollow sound through the hearts of aspiring Communist revolutionaries all over the world.
The comparison between Gorbachev and Obama is apt on few levels. The chief difference is between the U.S. of 2009, and the USSR of 1985; between a huge, decentralized, open economy, and the society it serves; and a much smaller, very centralized, command economy, and the society serving it. These circumstances are not even remotely comparable, and one must be a fool indeed to play with a moral, economic, or ideological “equivalence” between the two old superpowers. Which is not to say such fools aren’t numerous.
Nor are the two men, themselves, remotely comparable in their backgrounds, or political outlook. Gorbachev, for instance, had come up from tractor driver, not through elite schools including Harvard Law; he lacked the narcissism that constantly seeks self-reflection through microphones and cameras, or the sense that everything is about him.
On the other hand, some interesting comparisons could be made between the thuggish party machine of Chicago, which raised Obama as its golden boy; and the thuggish party machine of Moscow, which presented Gorbachev as it’s most attractive face.
Both men have been praised for their wonderful temperaments, and their ability to remain unperturbed by approaching catastrophe. But again, the substance is different, for Gorbachev’s temperament was that of a survivor of many previous catastrophes.
Yet they do have one major thing in common, and that is the belief that, regardless of what the ruler does, the polity he rules must necessarily continue. This is perhaps the most essential, if seldom acknowledged, insight of the post-modern “liberal” mind: that if you take the pillars away, the roof will continue to hover in the air.
Gorbachev seemed to assume, right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and then beyond it, that his Communist Party would recover from any temporary setbacks, and that the long-term effects of his glasnost and perestroika could only be to make it bigger and stronger.
There is a corollary of this largely unspoken assumption: that no matter what you do to one part of a machine, the rest of the machine will continue to function normally.
A variant of this is the frequently expressed denial of the law of unintended consequences: the belief that, if the effect you intend is good, the actual effect must be similarly happy.
Very small children, the mad, and certain extinct primitive tribes, have shared in this belief system, but only the fully college-educated liberal has the vocabulary to make it sound plausible.
With an incredible rapidity, America’s status as the world’s pre-eminent superpower is now passing away. This is a function both of the nearly systematic abandonment of U.S. interests and allies overseas, with metastasizing debt and bureaucracy on the home front.
And while I think the U.S. has the structural fortitude to survive the Obama presidency, it will be a much-diminished country that emerges from the “new physics” of hope and change.
Tags: Clinton, Democrats, economics, financial, Obama, politics
Thank you for responding to the nonsense with a more accurate account of the events.