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1- Deflection
2- Deflection on false premise. President Obama has put on the table EXACTLY what he ran on. What about his opposition?
And right after the election before he left on his Asia vacation, Obama promised some compromise to stop the fiscal cliff.
Where are his compromises? As a leader, he needs to propose some hefty spending cuts.
As we all know, the whole deficit could be solved by spending cuts alone, but not by taxes alone. It should not be difficult at all for Obama to figure out some wild spending that could be cut.
Back when, Bush inherited a nice suplus and left office, 8 years later with a record deficit. When this topic
comes up in this forum, so many are quick to point out that it was not Bush's fault. It's that #$%^%^& Democratic controlled Congress.
Now the tables have turned, and the same ole, same ole blame the Democrats.
Obama put forth his plan. The outcomes are negotiated. The ball is in the Republican court.
Neither party wants to take ownership and put specific cuts on the table.
Bush inherited a tech bubble, a recession, two of Clinton's sh***y trade deals, an unregulated derivatives market, GSEs that bundled subprime mortgages into unregulated derivatives, a Senate controlled by Democrats, a belligerent Iraq thought by leading Democrats to have WMDs, a neutered CIA, an al Qaeda that still hadn't been addressed and a 9/11 plot already four years underway.
It is a historical fact that when Republicans control both houses of Congress, deficits decline regardless of the party of the president.
"A Republican-controlled Congress approved the appropriations for each one of those years and Democratic President Bill Clinton signed them. In fiscal years 1994 and 1995, when President Clinton governed with a Democrat-controlled Congress, the federal government ran deficits of $203.2 billion and $163.9 billion respectively."
Taking money from the Trust Funds for programs that liberals and democrats claim should never be touched is tantamount to what? Total and utter hypocrisy.
It doesn't matter. Dollars are fungible. It does not change the actual deficit. Excluding it as part of the calculation (on the other hand) is accounting legerdemain and does not actually make hundreds of billions of dollars evaporate. It only soothes the envious delusions of right wing apologists.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigJon3475
I'm not moving goal posts like your side loves to do. I'm adding links that back up exactly what I said in the first place. The only General Government surplus was in 2000 and it was tiny.
Again... this claim can only be made by cooking the books and arbitrarily changing to accrual accounting (which governments do not and should not use).
Look, I know it actually makes your teeth hurt that Clinton delivered the first balanced budgets in a generation and that Bush then proceeded to destroy our national solvency with tax cuts, two foreign wars and a new Medicare pharmacy benefit that was never paid for. I know you hate that so much you would do almost anything to change history.
But playing games with the numbers will not accomplish that for you. Changing the accounting method from cash accounting to accrual accounting is merely another example of what Megan Kelley called "Math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better."
It is a simple objective fact that the United States had a $236 billion dollar surplus in 2000.
I'm a liberal. We're relativists for whom the answer to any question is, "It depends." Actual hypocrisy is primarily the franchise of the right wing where reasoning is too simplistic to allow for more than two options for anything. I have little fear of being an actual hypocrite. I will never be a fundamentalist preacher caught trading drugs for gay sex, or a senator tapping his feet in restroom stalls to solicit the same, or cheat on my (second) wife while leading the impeachment of the President over his extramarital affair.
Now that's hypocrisy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BigJon3475
Well then pay for the programs you tout as "progressive" achievements. If you don't want to pay for them then stop trying to use them as talking points and as vote gathering schemes.
I'm all for Social Security reform. And we don't need to lie about the Clinton era surplus to do it.
Last edited by HistorianDude; 12-01-2012 at 12:17 PM..
You even admitted that the Republicans agreed to revenue increases. Obviously that's their counter, the democrats now have to come up with significant and hopefully equal -- dollar for dollar -- spending cuts. What's so hard about that?
All this deficit could actually be solved by spending cuts alone. Entire programs and government departments could be eliminated. It doesn't take much to figure that out.
Obama could propose spending along the lines of what we had back in 1960 or some other time the deficit wasn't enormous. Simply cut out everything added since that time.
If I were Obama, I'd go back over past budgets and find one from when the country ran in the black ink. And just go with that same plan.
It's not as though Obama has to reinvent the wheel, we've had balanced budgets. We just need to revive them.
It's pretty much what most of us do when we see our debts getting out of control. Just go back to living with essentials and fewer luxuries, stop using the credit card for things we don't need.
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