[bigbang123]

By Rex Nutting, MarketWatch

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Of all the falsehoods told about President Barack Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree.

http://www.marketwatch.com/Story/sto...E-002128049AD6

[bigbang123]

Who’s Really Concerned About This Country’s Debt?

http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast....-vote-gop.html

And who is just full of it and a crazy and unreasonable Obama hater?

[The Barbarian]

Regardless of who is to blame (and yes the huge increase in 2009 was Bush's doing), the total debt is still a fact. "Starve the Beast" was the idea, to so wreck the federal budget that liberals couldn't use money for social programs. The idea was first floated in the Reagan administration, but Reagan wasn't on board with it.

Bush made it happen.

With the attendant economic consequences. Still, it's what Obama has to deal with, and I'm not convinced he did it very well.

[RevTestament]

It is a reckless spending spree when you purposefully do things to increase the shortfall in revenue - like increase tax refunds, but increase the spending even a little so as to continue to run a 2 trillion dollar deficit. Is it not reckless to increase the national debt from 5 trillion dollars to 14 trillion in 4 short years? When interest rates rise even 4-5 % the government will be spending more than half its revenue just to pay the interest on the debt, which they will not be able to do without selling even more debt. No one will buy all this debt even now, which is why the Federal Reserve owns well more than half of it, and is printing trillions of dollars to buy it. If this doesn't scare the hell out of U.S. citizens then we are in a sad state indeed.

[aCultureWarrior]

Regardless of whose "fault" it is, here are the facts:

As of Oct. 17 [2011], here is a snapshot of what's different, compared with Jan. 20, 2009:

-- The U.S. debt increased by an average of $4.2 billion per day. The total rise in that time breaks down to more than $13,000 in additional debt for every single American.

-- The government has spent more than $9.6 trillion, about 60 percent more than what Washington took in.

-- The country racked up as much debt in the last 1,000 days as it did in the first 79,135 days. (That's from 1776 to 1993.)

-- In the last 1,000 days, America spent $1.2 trillion in interest on the debt. By itself, that would represent the world's 15th largest economy.

-- On the economic front, 2.22 million jobs have been lost.

-- More than 2.4 million homes were repossessed for failure to pay mortgages.

-- The unemployed are staying out of work longer -- on average about 40.5 weeks, more than double the typical bout of joblessness in January 2009.

-- The jobless rate has been at or above 9 percent for 840 of the last 1,000 days.

-- Thirty-seven states have higher unemployment rates.

-- Washington has spent almost $380 billion on federal unemployment benefits.

-- Since January 2009, 7,076 new final regulatory rules were issued.

-- About 12 million more Americans are on food stamps.

-- Gas prices are up by more than 80 percent. The price-per-gallon has exceeded $3 every day in 2011.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011...rst-1000-days/

It appears that we got our "change", let's "hope" that we don't get 4 more years of this clown.

[HisServant]

Capital gains tax rates are our biggest problem when it comes to the deficit.

[bigbang123]

Originally Posted by aCultureWarrior

let's "hope" that we don't get 4 more years of this clown.

4 more years of Obama will be better than Romney and the Republicans both of whom want to give more money to the Pentagon than they are asking for and more tax cuts for the wealthy that they don't need.

[RevTestament]

4 more yrs of Obama will ruin the country for good, as we become a socialist state. The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money. Every socialist nation formed in the last century has driven its people broke, or they are on the way, or they gave up being socialist like China and Russia. The socialist countries in Europe are the poor ones or the ones currently driving themselves into bankruptcy.

I agree we don't need any tax cuts right now. What we need is sensible economic policies and not Obama policies to drive up energy costs. We have enough natural gas to last a very long time. It is clean burning and cheap. Drilling it and putting in pipelines would put our unemployed to work. Using it in our cars would eliminate most of our trade deficit as we stop enriching muslim countries with oil money and eliminate much of our greenhouse gases. Under Bush oil companies were able to maintain the status quo - under Obama -- well what can I say? He seems to want to put us all in the poorhouse with his backward "pipedreams" energy policy "investing" in unproven expensive technologies etc.

Our current mess is not Obama's fault. It started with the socialist idea of right-to-housing under Clinton and the resulting easy lending changes democrats instituted, and continued and even progressed under blind Bush with repeal of Glass Steagall.

What we need is to tighten down the hatches so to speak and change the energy policy. It would be a bit painful and thus politically unpopular so probably won't happen - we seem destined to happily spend ourselves into future ruin, while driving away investment and capital improvements with stupid policy.

[Morpheus]

What seems to be slipping by so many is the difference in focusing on spending and focusing on increasing debt. Increasing debt can be caused by two very different things. It can either be caused by increased spending, it can be caused by reduced revenue, or a combination of the two. What we have seen is an actual flattening in spending. What is causing the increase in debt is the loss of revenue due to the depression.

Once programs have been established it is near impossible to eliminate them, especially if they are necessary to ease the impact on the populace from a depressed economy. Programs implemented to keep families from starving or dieing do not need to be targeted simply because the economy increases the demand for them. If anything, now is the time when those programs are most necessary. Cuts need to be directed toward the more unnecessary outlays, such as subsidies for big oil companies that have been raping the economy to collect record profits; yet that is precisely the kind of spending protected by the Republican party.

Consider this. Immediately after the 2008 election House and Senate Republicans vowed that their primary goal was to keep Obama from winning a second term. The economy had already crashed and unemployment had already climbed sharply, yet their primary goal was to keep Obama from winning a second term. Since then they have coerced every member of their caucus into lockstep and said no to anything the President suggested that might actually have done some good. Obama has not failed to improve the economy; the Republicans in Congress have. And before you say that the Democrats had 2 years with a majority, remember that Democrats are allowed to vote their consciences, and that it only took a small handfull of them voting with a Republican block to stop a proposal from passing.

Before engaging in your next anti-Obama rant, I suggest that you google two phrases. One was already mentioned by The Barbarian; it was "starve the beast". On that one you will likely have to look at a few to actually find the original strategy begun in the late 70s and early 80s by Republicans. The second is related to "starve the beast". It is the "two Santa Clause strategy". There are several good videos explaining that one. Both these terms were two parts of an overall Republican economic/political plan intended to crash the economy in order to eliminate every progressive program of the last 100 years, while grabbing perpetual Republican control of government, both state and federal.

[RevTestament]

Originally Posted by Morpheus

What seems to be slipping by so many is the difference in focusing on spending and focusing on increasing debt. Increasing debt can be caused by two very different things. It can either be caused by increased spending, it can be caused by reduced revenue, or a combination of the two. What we have seen is an actual flattening in spending. What is causing the increase in debt is the loss of revenue due to the depression.

In '08 the Fed budget jumped by 1/2 trillion dollars largely because of the emergency stimulus bill - Obama's govt has maintained it at that level since that time - ie basically continued emergency stimulus even while revenue fell dramatically. I consider that a spending spree. Emergency is over. Cutbacks will hurt but should be implemented at least a little, but this is politically unpopular so won't happen.

Once programs have been established it is near impossible to eliminate them, especially if they are necessary to ease the impact on the populace from a depressed economy.

That's why they should be cut now.

Cuts need to be directed toward the more unnecessary outlays, such as subsidies for big oil companies that have been raping the economy to collect record profits; yet that is precisely the kind of spending protected by the Republican party.

agreed

Consider this. Immediately after the 2008 election House and Senate Republicans vowed that their primary goal was to keep Obama from winning a second term. The economy had already crashed and unemployment had already climbed sharply, yet their primary goal was to keep Obama from winning a second term. Since then they have coerced every member of their caucus into lockstep and said no to anything the President suggested that might actually have done some good. Obama has not failed to improve the economy; the Republicans in Congress have.

Republicans always try to keep the Democrats from winning and vice versa - says nothing. I am still saying no to Obama care - it sets a horrible precedent of the abuse of government power - to force people to buy health insurance hardly has anything to do with interstate commerce. What will they force next? They are exercising all too much power.

Before engaging in your next anti-Obama rant, I suggest that you google two phrases. One was already mentioned by The Barbarian; it was "starve the beast". On that one you will likely have to look at a few to actually find the original strategy begun in the late 70s and early 80s by Republicans. The second is related to "starve the beast". It is the "two Santa Clause strategy". There are several good videos explaining that one. Both these terms were two parts of an overall Republican economic/political plan intended to crash the economy in order to eliminate every progressive program of the last 100 years, while grabbing perpetual Republican control of government, both state and federal.

Republicans want to crash the economy? Ha ha. This is exactly the economic system the Republicans want - free - although it is quickly becoming less so - that is the problem. It is the democrats who believe in a new world order type of crap. Read Al Gore's book.