That was Dick Cheney's quote regarding deficits.  As it is now, every politician is now driven by getting reelected.  Everyone kept living like it was short-term only and it kept going on and on and on.

then Republicans are doing a great job of scaring everyone but me and u i guse lol. or how ever you look at it lol.

the blind leading the blind to never see the light.

...it's not just republicans.  democrates, teapartiers, but mostly the guys behind the scene dumping hundreds of millions of dollars into their elections.

It is easy.

If (President.Party == "Republican")
{
deficitsMatterFlag = false;
}
else
{
deficitsMatterFlag = true;
}

Except Reagan's deficits are exactly why the economy started going south near the end of his term and during Bush's term. (The good Bush.)

Aside from which, they were fighting the cold war.  Hence why it wasn't a bad move politically... and the deficits weren't nearly as bad.

That's one thing I always found funny though.  People who count WW2 as Keynsian economics... but don't count the Cold War.

If you want to call this partisan, where is the Democrat's outrage over the 3 wars, Guantanamo Bay, Patriot Act, Globalization, or Global Warming? On top of this, why aren't they saying that "Barack Obama doesn't care about black people" based on his abysmal handling of the economy which is disproportionately hurting minority groups?

Why were Democrats so outraged with how George W. Bush was spending like a "Drunken Sailor" when his deficits were (in the range of) 3% of GDP, and so willing to support Barack Obama's deficits at 10% GDP?

The fact that you can't see that there is a difference between deficit spending that is roughly equal to GDP growth where the eventual fallout (if there is one) is 50 to 100 years away, and a deficit that is several times GDP growth and the eventual fallout is 4 to 10 years away demonstrates that you're the partisan.

Gee, whatever happened to "the peace dividend"?  It went up in smoke, due to an economic slowdown that was dwarfed by what we have now and also said "Muslim menace" that was made out to be far worse than the "Russian menace" back in the Cold War.  A crisis is used to justfiy everything.

Apparently people who have been schooled in only Keynsian economics (with no exposure to the Austrian criticism), fail to see what stimulus effect running deficts have on the economy.  When times were good or better, there was time to get the deficit paid down so you can run deficits in times of a large scale slowdown, as it is now, to help a country retool itself for the future.  But heck, in the long-run everyone is supposed to be dead anyhow (Keynes).

yea i knnow i just hate the teaparty and republican'ts more lol.

with both parties agendas looking to never change imagine wht the world would look like 2 decades after we die.

we both know nobody goes to congress to change anything but the amount of money they make for themselves. i fill Obama went to washington to change things only to see nothing get done. whts bipartisansip when everybodies in it for themselves?

The "benefits" of running a deficit are similar to the "benefits" of adding debt for an individual ...

As long as it is under control and at a reasonable level you can increase your standard of living for quite a long time, unfortunately it makes retiring difficult. If your debt is growing at too rapid of a rate you will rapidly approach a point where you have to declare bankruptcy, and your short term increase in standard of living (Keynsian stimulus) will be followed by a long term period of austerity.

Well, as Keynes himself said

"I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago."

Every single attempt at a stimulus has always had the same keynsian statement afterwords.  "It wasn't big enough."

Focusing on the single datapoint where a stimulus did "work".  World War 2.

Oddly enough i can't find a good explination WHY WW2 got us out of the great depression, other then... "It did."

At best guess I would have to think it was that WW2 greatly crushed imports coming into the United states, and greatly increased exports via us selling guns to our neighbors.  In otherwords, nothing to do with actual government spending.

Regardless, if somewhow it was government spending that did the trick apparently we'd need to be spending between 39% and 45% of GDP to get out of  a recession... for extended periods of time. (39% i believe being our spending vs GDP during the high point of the stimulus.)

That's just... impossible basically.  Considering we've gotten more socialized since WW2, actually that 45% high end, probably isn't the high end anymore, and infact would probably need a much higher number.  Before WW2, Goverment spending as a part of GDP was around 10%.

Now it's 20-25%, so does that mean we'd need to spend 55%-60% GDP to get the economy back on track?

How was the average person's life in WW2 for that matter.  From what i've heard it didn't sound too prosperous.  If anything, it'd seem like the only thing WW2 did, is what deficit spending does in a smaller degree... mask the underlying indicators of the economy so it becomes unreadable.

Just how buying your friends dinner at your own restruant constantly masks your revenue flow... you can boost aggregate demand all you want... G isn't going to increase C.  So once G dries up....