huffingtonpost.com — The next president will inherit a record budget deficit approaching $490 billion, a Bush administration official said Monday. The official said the deficit was being driven to an all-time high by the sagging economy and the stimulus payments being made to 130 million households in an effort to keep the country from falling into a deep recession.
Jul 28, 2008 View in Crawl 4
sandhogJul 29, 2008
That individual statistic does not make 8 years of bumbling mismanagement and outright criminal behavior OK. I'm just sayin'.
hipnerdJul 29, 2008
Clinton had a Democratic Congress his first two years, he still reduced deficits at the same rate. That Democratic Congress was active under Bush Sr., when deficits were soaring. The Republican Congress Clinton had for the majority of his term did nothing to hold down spending under Bush. The truth is that Presidents set the budget and Congress just approves it. Clinton ran a legitimate surplus his last few years, even counting disasters or whatever. You're confusing the national debt with a budget deficit. Those are two different things. The national debt still went up because the money from the surplus was not fully dedicated to paying it off and interest makes it rise over time even if we don't add to the principal of the debt. Some of it went to pay back Social Security instead, and Bush gave the rest back as "rebates" when he took office, retroactively erasing the surplus from existence in the first of many wise economic decisions.
hipnerdJul 29, 2008
Sure: <a class="user" href="http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/09/27/clinton.surplus/">http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/0 ...</a>"It is the third year in a row the federal government has taken in more than it spent, and has paid down the debt. The last time the U.S. government had a third consecutive year of national debt reduction was 1949"<a class="user" href="http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa100600a.htm">http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa100600 ...</a>"BUSH: I want to take one-half of the surplus and dedicate it to Social Security, one-quarter of the surplus for important projects, and I want to send one-quarter of the surplus back to the people who pay the bills. I want everybody who pays taxes to have their tax rates cut."<a class="user" href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E5D61F3EF93BA15751C0A96E958260">http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0 ...</a>"Speaker Newt Gingrich said today that the Government would run a budget surplus this year for the first time since 1969 as tax receipts surged."The media thought there was a surplus, Newt Gingrich thought there was a surplus, George W. Bush thought there was a surplus. This is a prime example of rewriting history because it's inconvenient to your argument. Clinton ran a surplus. It's a historical fact. Conservative pundits who are good at partisanship and bad at economics keep trying to rewrite history to erase that fact, but they can't.
bobcat7407Jul 29, 2008
Nice try. Did you read those articles? Or did you just think that I wouldn't. The CNN article quotes Clinton, not the final numbers. In the CNN article Clinton says "the $5.7 trillion national debt has been reduced by $360 billion in the last three years -- $223 billion this year alone." This is a plain lie. Look at the numbers. The debt never went down. Obviously Clinton was not the most reliable source. The article you quote Bush from was talking about a debate with Gore over future surplus use starting in 2000 for 10 years. I'm not sure if you misrepresented this on purpose or just didn't read the article. The last article is from projections, which proved to be wrong. So, the media quoted Clinton, who had an agenda and the numbers prove that he lied by saying the national debt was paid down; Newt, who was going off of projections; and Bush who wasn't even talking about the Clinton mystery surplus. The facts are right in the numbers. The last link I provided explained how the truth was skewed by only looking at half of the national debt, not at the whole thing. The U.S. Treasury numbers don't lie. I have no interest in rewriting history, but I base history off the facts, not what a politician or the media said were the facts. The numbers don't lie. Politicians do. You really should look at the numbers for yourself rather than relying on the media. Here's the links again for you to check them out again:<a class="user" href="http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt_histo4.htm">http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/hist ...</a><a class="user" href="http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/NPGateway">http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/NPGateway</a><a class="user" href="http://www.letxa.com/articles/16">http://www.letxa.com/articles/16</a>
hipnerdJul 29, 2008
Oh and I do agree that Clinton was the beneficiary of the dot-com bubble, but he married it with sound fiscal policy, restoring taxes that the previous two administrations had slashed and reducing spending in a way that they were never able to do. He chipped away at the deficit every year he was in office until he ran a surplus.
bobcat7407Jul 30, 2008
By the way, the US Department of the Treasury, my source, has this as their job description: "Serve the American people and strengthen national security by managing the U.S. Government's finances effectively, promoting economic growth and stability, and ensuring the safety, soundness, and security of the U.S. and international financial systems. "Sounds like the accounting arm of the federal government doesn't it? <a class="user" href="http://www.ustreas.gov/education/duties/">http://www.ustreas.gov/education/duties/</a>
bobcat7407Jul 30, 2008
That is interesting. I don't know how the numbers can be different, except to say it's the government. IMO the treasury department is the official source, but we're kind of at a standstill on that because there are other pretty official sources that have different numbers. It seems to me that if he ran a surplus, then the national debt would go down. I don't see a way that doesn't happen. Even in the reports you link to, the national debt goes down. I don't see how the debt would go up by any significant amount while we still run a surplus. I know it depends on what they do with the surplus, but they put most of it to paying down the debt. Here's a link to the US Treasury summary file, similar to the White house one you linked to. <a class="user" href="http://fms.treas.gov/bulletin/b40.pdf">http://fms.treas.gov/bulletin/b40.pdf</a>On page 13 it shows what you're saying, that there was a surplus. But on page 23 it shows the total debt and the debt consistently goes up. The surplus numbers that have been seen on each document match the amount of the debt held by the public as it goes down, but the government accounts go up by more. So it seems like the surplus numbers come by saying that the debt held by the public went down, even though the debt held by the government still went up even more, still resulting in a increase in the national debt. It looks like the surplus in debt held by the public was wasted by raising the amount owed in government held debt. That is what the right wing analysis said, and it seems reasonable to be a reasonable explanation. The difference between the surplus generated by lowering the debt held by the public is less than the deficit generated by raising the debt held by the government. That's what it looks like to me anyway. I don't mind getting dugg down because then I know you've responded when I look at "my profile", rather than having to come to this thread every time. I think you and I are the only ones still paying attention to this thread and I just see the digging down as a way of saying, "your turn". I don't mind stopping though.
wojtykAug 20, 2008
>> I wonder how much we could save if weNot even 20% as much as if we eliminated Social Security.
uthmanJan 7, 2009
"wonder how much we could save if we1) Left Iraq.2) Consolidated and solidified our efforts in Afghanistan3) DID AWAY WITH "HOMELAND SECURITY"4) ..And stopped giving f**king tax breaks to the wealthiest people in the country.Bet we could cut our deficit in half in two years."In response to your question, we would probably have about as much money as, eh... as much as we gift Israel yearly.