Quote (njaguar @ Mar 29 2012 08:45am)
False. The economy increased and grew. It grew both in debt accumulation and income, but it did "grow" by all economic measures that apply to the government (and that it uses for metrics). Check the source link in my post.
That's disingenuous. The economy went into a gigantic recession and pulled back out again, thats not uniform growth.
You can't just look at the two end points and compare them as if nothing happened inbetween. The debt only racked up because we needed all that economic stimulus to get us out of the triple economic drops. Every time a president inherited a fledgling economy and tried to build it up, it was with stimuluses and tax breaks and other things that would increase the debt, and that was both sides of the aisle- a postreaganomics Clinton who set the economy up to boom, a Bush who got a bubble, set up economic policies that made it a hundred times worse when he popped it, and then an Obama, who inherited bush's mess, and turned it around again. Thats 20 straight years of economic stimulus, increased spending, bush tax cuts, etc, all to spur the economy forward. YES, it grew the economy above the 1980 levels, but it cost a hell of a lot of money to do so.
We can't just say that the economy grew between 1980 and 2011, it didn't. It grew some, then shrunk some, then grew some, then collapsed to its knees, then hobbled back up, and now its growing some again. All those falls- they cost us.
If the economy had grown in a straight line, we'd have no national debt right now whatsoever.
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Again, look at the source link, and you can easily see this is untrue. People cite Clinton's "boom years" as an example, but then neglect to show how he slashed spending and increased taxes to get to that point. Something that has not happened again.
Santara just spend a thread complaining to me about how the national debt was all Clintons fault, and saying that the economy was only on track towards the end of his 8 years to reduce the debt because of Gingrich. Or maybe it was widow, but same point.
Clinton used stimuluses to get the economy going, and that worked, and we got a huge economic boom, and that started to pay off the debt, and overall reduced it, like I've been saying.
The problem, of course, being that most of that was based on the dot.com bubble, which had predictable results. But even after dot.com, we recovered and set up again briskly, and he put us on pace to kill the debt once more.
When Bush inherited Clinton's post-dot.com bubble economy, with the beginnings of the banking and housing bubbles, we were well on track to reducing the national debt and building up the economy- everything looked good
But what happened? Bush took that surplus, and turned it into tax breaks for the wealthy, instead of reinvesting it. And made the economy incredibly fragile, so that when tragedy struck, we died, stagnated, collapsed and went into full blown recession.
Instead of getting up and dusting ourselves off and going right back to work like we did in Clinton's years after dot.com burst. Bush singlehandedly destroyed this country's economy in 8 short years, with his "pay off dividends instead of reinvesting a surplus" philosophy
Clinton might have been partly to blame for setting up those economic time bomb bubbles, but it was Bush's cowboy antics that killed us
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Do the math yourself. Two competing compounds will always accelerate out of control if one is always larger than the other. This is simple elementary mathematics. Seriously, chart it out in excel yourself, and project forward. The gap will increase wider and wider until the entire thing implodes.
That only works if the two rates of growth stay equal, with no acceleration or deacceleration.
If the national debt's growth was only so high over 20 years because of economic stimulus, and the economy stays on a stable, strong course, the debt will slow down its growth, and yes, eventually it will reverse, and maybe within 30 years, be entirely gone.
We can't assume that the debt will grow with the economy even faster- social programs aren't the boogeyman, they won't rise up and eat us alive.
We can afford social security and medicare. They will grow, yes, but they aren't the driving factor behind the debt.
Whats the single largest single contributor to our national debt? The Bush Tax Cuts, of course. Wheres our biggest projected money saver in
both republican and democratic plans? Ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
If our economy keeps growing at 3% without any further bubbles, without any new giant wars or any more bush-style tax cuts, the debt, driven by only social programs, the debt will slow down, stop, and reverse.
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Please pray tell describe the exact reasons he was banned, who took the action, and why. You can assume all you want, but you're wrong on all accounts. I have never once banned a user for disagreeing with me. That you would even make such a preposterous comment shows that your character is complete rubbish.
Multiple times over the last year, when we've debated, I've actually gotten PM's from people who want to +1 me, or say I'm not alone, or throw in a good word or something. People who don't want to post, after that whole debacle. Its really a sort of chilling effect. Hell, the only reason
I'm willing to post in the first place is because I've liquidated all my effgee and would have a billion better things to do if I
was banned. I even had one guy contact me on a different site, afraid you could read PMs, or read the hearts and minds of men with your sorcerous ways, or something like that. I'm not one to take the interwebs too seriously myself though.
That whole unisex bathroom debacle spooked a ton of people here, to say the least.