Replies

You might consider that Bush has adopted the FDR receipe of priming the economy with deficit government dollars.

That's not entirely accurate. Dubya's deficits more closely mirror LBJ's "Great Society". He's spending money like a drunken sailor on BOTH "guns and butter".

Not only that but he cut taxes in a time of war, a first in American history. The added effect of that can be seen in the following graph (whose numbers come from a just-released CBO analysis):

The actual numbers and sources can be found at http://home.att.net/~rdavis2/cbobud05.html. As can be seen, the deficit is projected to shrink below $100 billion in 2012 only if the Bush tax cuts expire as currently scheduled. Otherwise, it will grow, surpassing a half trillion dollars a year by 2014. As the second graph at the above URL shows, this is projected to cause the gross federal debt to increase from the current 64% of GDP to 81% of GDP by 2015. All this will be just in time for the Boomer retirement.

the deficit is projected to shrink below $100 billion in 2012 only if the Bush tax cuts expire as currently scheduled.

Thanks for the heads up on the update.

Your take seems incomplete-- I get that you don't like things the way they are and the way they're going. Sometimes it seems like everyone has a big list of things they hate, and no ideas as to what they want. I like my spending the money I earn as I choose, so I say we should either cut taxes or at least not raise them. I hear you try to warn me that if I don't let you raise my taxes that the economy will collapse and our kids will starve. I doubt that, but even if it were true, we first need to agree on how much we want to reduce the deficit (please tell me what you want) so the debt is cut to (by how much).