Sqrl said:
Republicans absolutely have plenty of blame here but you're selling the Dems well short of their responsibility. Also I will say that while everyone loves to harp on Reagan's deficits they usually don't like to factor in that the cost of fighting the cold war was around $800 Billion (adj). Nobody harps on FDR for WWII defecits...so why Reagan? Another part of that is having lowered the income tax rate from 70% to eventually 28% (among other tax changes) which lead directly to economic boom after some very tough times prior to his election. He may have spent a bit more than was necessary from the strictest fiscal conservative view, but he did a fantastic job in getting the economy going and ending the cold war among several other major accomplishments - all of which are reasons for those deficits that other presidents would easily get a pass on. As for the Bushs..yeah they were far from fiscal conservatives and there isn't much worth saying in their defense... The issue right now for Obama is there is nothing tangible from his deficit and his deficit is frighteningly large (magnitudes beyond any prior president in the same time period) and he plans to spend prepostrously large amounts of money beyond that...so yeah people are going to be critical until they start to see some major results for those massive piles of dollar bills going out the door.
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Any high school government class in the country will tell you that lowering taxes and increasing spending is a great way to stimulate the economy, but it's also not substainable. And here's the thing about Cold War costs: They were only as much as the guy in charge wanted them to be. The previous presidents during the Cold War didn't rack up huge amounts of debt just because of the war, and that's been true for several wars in our past. We weren't even doing that much fighting. Are you really comparing Cold War costs to World War II costs? You know how silly that comparison is, right? And here's the thing: FDR might have created some debts or some deficit, but the numbers didn't put us in dangerous territory. Reagan's ridiculous lack of money sense started a trend so big that we're running out of numbers to count our national debt on (thank god we're so resourceful!). Reagan brought the economy up through an unsustainable model, and the country suffered for it. Reagan's strategy was great assuming that the other nations didn't expect us to pay them back. The Reagan administration defintely played a big part in ending the Cold War, but there were a lot of other forces at work responsible for the USSR's downfall.
Obama is just another idiot continuing the last 3 decades of our destruction.
