Obama Quarterly Report

[Sqrl]

MontanaHatchet said:

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.

 

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.

Except I never actually made the comparison between WW2 costs and CW costs, I made the comparison between leeway given for FDR's war spending as opposed to the complete lack of credit given to Reagan's - credit being inherently proportional.  I gave a hard number on the expenditures for the cold war and it is a sizable chunk of his deficit that people complain about (it's more than the stimulus bill we just passed) - its his war costs versus his deficit I am comparing (and that cost is over 1/3rd of his deficit - and I'm only counting costs above the defense baseline).  As for the cost being "whatever the guy in charge wants it to be" this is pretty naive...the issue was a whole helluva lot more complicated than that and Reagan was hands down the largest factor in its resolution - granted there were plenty of other major players but in terms of presidents nobody really held a candle to Reagan on making progress and resolving this issue.

As for Reagan's deficit spending being so dangerous for the country I would agree to the extent that it can't go on forever, but I would also point out that Reagan doesn't even hold a candle to what Obama is doing.  The worst year for Reagan was ~$220 Billion in budget deficits with his best being ~$100 billion.  Even once those are adjusted this is no where near the Obama plan.  If Reagan's model is unsustainable and dangerous then by the same standard Obama's plan is prepostrous and catastrophic.

Really the aspect of Reagan's model that was unsustainable was that he didn't reign in other spending to offset and he went a bit too far with the tax cuts. If you want to make the case you're making you should be making it against Bush Jr because Reagan had a Democratic House throughout his 2 terms (and as I'm sure you know the house has the coin purse), and thus little control over bringing down excessive entitlement costs and government waste/fraud to offset his costs (which is what you expect someone of his ideology to do).  George W had 6 years of complete control (note the Jeffords move ended up being meaningless due to 9/11) and he still managed to break his dad's budget deficit record which his dad had stolen from Reagan (note Bush Sr. had a 100% Dem congress).

As for Obama being just another idiot? Well this is a good visualization of why this is simply not the case:

Highlights

• FDR goes 40 mph
• Truman goes -20 mph
• Reagan goes 50 mph
• Bush Sr goes 63 mph
• Clinton goes 18 mph
• George W goes 64 mph
• Obama goes 174 mph!

And if you don't like that he is using Obama's extended estimates we can use just 2009 and 2009 through 2010:

For just 2009 Obama is going somewhere between 206 mph to 345 mph.  If we factor in the Obama estimate of $1.132B (Which excludes "Overseas Contingency Operations") for 2010 and split the difference for 2009 we clock Obama at 235 mph for his first 2 years.  This would mean his first 2 years have him outspending Reagan's entire 8 years by 17.5%.

You know that song "One of these things is not like the others"..yeaaah...Reagan might be to blame for setting a standard with the Bush presidencies but Obama is off doing his own thing right now.

Of course neither Truman or Obama are like the others, but I don't think anyone is upset about Truman's driving =P