What the Republicans hope you don't know and if you do they hope you"ll forget.



In 1992, Clinton inherited a federal budget deficit of $290 billion, which he turned into a budget surplus his last four years in office, including a $240 billion surplus his final year. When George W. Bush took office in January 2001, the Congressional Budget Office predicted a $5.6 trillion budget surplus for fiscal years 2002 through 2011.

Clinton’s presidency ended with no ongoing war except enforcement of the Iraq no-fly zones.

In short, that was a period of peace and prosperity.

Contrast that situation to what Bush left to Obama. The United States was fighting two wars which were never paid for, and the country lost more than four million jobs in Bush’s last six months. He almost doubled government spending and left Obama a $1.2 trillion deficit because of a tax code that was skewed toward permanent deficits and because of Bush’s TARP program which added another $700 billion deficit to Obama’s first budget.

Bush apologists like to cite statistics as if Bush’s "term" ended with FY 2008 (Sept. 30, 2008) because it ignores the $700 billion TARP program signed on Oct. 3, 2008, and therefore charged to Obama, (i.e., in FY 2009) and the 750,000 jobs lost every month during Bush’s last quarter in office.

Of course, no president can control everything that happens to the economy. But the president and Congress control fiscal policy. It was Bush’s decision to seek repeated tax cuts while fighting two wars and passing a Medicare entitlement program, all financed with borrowed money, that led to $5.6 trillion in additional debt. Bush’s Medicare prescription drug program alone, according to the CBO, will cost $1.1 trillion over the next 10 years, and add more to the debt than the combined costs of the Bush’s TARP bailout, the Obama Recovery Act and the health care law. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, made the astonishing but true statement that during Bush’s presidency "it was standard practice not to pay for things."

As Nobel economist Joe Stiglitz has written, "The fact that we were running large deficits in the period of our boom was unconscionable." If you run up the deficit in good times, as the Bush administration did, it leaves little room for maneuver in bad times.

But fiscal irresponsibility continues to be a hallmark of today’s Republican Party. They are advocating extending the Bush tax cuts, at the cost of $4 trillion more in red ink, and propose repealing the health care law, which would actually increase the deficit by more than $100 billion over 10 years, according to the CBO. Deficit hawks or deficit peacocks?

There are times when it is necessary to stimulate the economy and other times when the Fed must rein in price growth, using its control over short-term interest rates. But in hard times, both monetary and fiscal policy must be brought to bear. When Obama took office, the country was facing a deflation cycle potentially as serious as the great depression. As Martin Fackler wrote in the New York Times Oct. 16, deflation "makes individuals and businesses less willing to use money, because the rational way to act when prices are falling is to hold onto cash, which gains in value. It becomes a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle: As prices fall further and jobs disappear, consumers tighten their purse strings even more and companies cut back on spending and delay expansion plans."

Since the Fed’s discount rate was close to zero, lowering interest rates to stimulate the economy was not possible. The least-bad remaining option was a Keynesian spending and tax-cut program, Obama’s Recovery and Reinvestment Act, to stem the job loss and get more money circulating into the economy. Although many Republican politicians ostensibly favored the Herbert Hoover balanced-budget approach, sure to drive the economy further toward a Japanese-style deflation trap, essentially all mainstream economists recognized what had to be done, despite the bigger deficit it created. The challenge will be to recoup that money when the good times reappear.


http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/10/25/913557/-Deficit-growth-started-under-Bush

Poll after poll shows that many Americans believe the country is in decline. The current economic recession — which really bordered on a depression – has created pessimism about the country’s prospects, which seems to meld into anger about government debt and spending.

This is a remarkable change from even 10 years ago. During the last six years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, according to Politifact.com, unemployment fell from 6.8 percent to 3.9 percent; personal income grew an average of 7.5 percent per year; and industrial production grew by 5.6 percent per year. More than 22 million jobs were created during Clinton’s two terms.

Polls show America is in decline?Over 4 years with a Democratic majority running this country I can see why they feel that way.

The answer lies within the text.

Don't you just love the lengths a Repub will go to avoid the truth?

It's a rather telling point.

The daily Kommie left out the dotcom bubble bursting in 1999 and Bush inheriting a recession.

What lengths the dumbos will go to hide the truth

Bush did not inherit a recession.

yeah the dotcom bubble never burst and there was no recession..

fning hilarious

Bush did not inherit a recession.

W will go down in history as one of the worst if not the worst American President up to 2010. Everybody knows it and his mishandling of the economy is a big part of it.

Although Bush is not the only one to blame, the deficit could have been
mitigated even avoided by better management during his 8 years.

Clinton on the other hand is likely to go down as one of our best Presidents to date.

Only way he could have 'migigated' it would have been to disband F. Mae and F. Mac. (can you imagine the Democratic furor THAT would have created).

Clinton will be remembered for a few things... His biggest legacy when history is taught in 2060 or so will be for getting blow jobs in the oval office.

We might as well face facts...

No president since JFK has really been worth the time and money it took to get them in office. NOT ONE.

The decline began with LBJ, and has been on the decline ever since.
Although one could argue that Reagan and Clinton both had more economic prosperous presidencies.

Its true that Clinton left with a surplus, and Bush messed it up!!

But Obama has worsened what Bush already made bad, and is still continuing in that direction.

The decline in the modern era began with Wilson (the dollar has lost 97% of its value just since 1913). It has gotten worse with every successive regime-even the Clinton regime.

You can see a chart of the value of the dollar in real terms (that is, compared to gold) since 1800 here-http://mises.org/images/SeanMaloneRiseFallDollarLarge.jpg

How do you explain,
McCain's economic adviser Phil Gramm describing the current economic downturn as a "mental recession" and saying America had "sort of become a nation of whiners."

That was in July of 2008.
Americans were losing their jobs and the Repubs were still denying it.
Phil Gramm and his ENRON Executive wife were the Authors of the bill deregulating the Mortgage Industry.
Granted Clinton was President but Gramm and his wife slipped the bill in while the rest of congress were in recess. Most had already left Wash, and weren't present when the vote was taken.

Just like Americans were still losing their jobs last summer, but Obama and Biden were telling us that we were in recovery....

Yeah boy!
When them Repubs screwed the pooch they screwed her good.

Surely you aren't one of them who thought the economy could be fixed in 30 days. I doubt it will be fixed in 10 years.


Tell me you didn't expect it could be stopped without some Fed investment.
The Repubs, if you read the article, passed the first 700 billion bailout and didn't even track it.

This 700 billion,
they coyly shuffle off, their contributions to the debt,(plural,) onto Obama's and the Dem's.

No the experts told us.
The numbers told them.
We are in recovery.
A proper recovery.
Slow and sustainable,
with a strong foundation.
Not a 30 day shake-n-bake recovery
that falls apart again in a few years.

The damage was stopped
Had the Repubs had their way
Unemployment would be three times as high
and the Unemployed would be left to suffer with no help.

If you've ever lived through a few recessions
you'd know this leads to an increase in crime.
Desperate people resort
to desperate measures.

The deficit will never be fixed. Sure the dirty Repubs did the first bailout, but the dirty Dems did the same exact thing.
You're trying to place blame on one side without acknowledging the blame for the other.

It cant be done. You can scream bloody murder at the Repubs all you want, but the Dems are just as much to blame.