Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] national debt

["Christian M. Cepel" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

I find it interesting that there's no mention of Clinton in this mix.

We have Carter, Bush, 8 years of um. who? and then Bush.

Besides destroying our economy and handing it to Bush to fix, which he 
did with all time lows for inflation and unemployment and highs for 
housing and other indicators.

Where does Clinton fit in here Mike?   By mere omission it seems that 
perhaps he's so bad that you didn't want to mention him as it would be 
damaging to your tirade... Of course you could have more innocuous 
reasons, but it seems suspicious.

How does Clinton fit in?

Jonathan King wrote:
> On 1/5/07, Mike Miller <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> > So that means that 5 years of Bush and friends increased the debt by 
> > about
> > a third.  Most of the rest came from Reagan and papa Bush.  The $2.7
> > trillion is more than the total debt when Carter left office.  In other
> > words, GW Bush and the Republicans in the Congress added more to the 
> > debt
> > in 5 years than had been added in the 205 years from the Declaration of
> > Independence to the first year of Reagan's administration.
>
> I will not argue that GW Bush has not been fiscally irresponsible. I
> will point out that the kind of argument you are making is not
> necessarily very strong. When you have a country like the US that is
> now about 100 times larger than it was when it was founded, absolute
> numbers for correlated attributes will likely grow. A lot. Further,
> nominal dollars is a questionable measure to use here because
> government spending (and taxes) go up due to inflation. (Yes, there's
> a feedback loop whereby spending can cause inflation, but it's a
> relatively minor effect here I think.) Or, to put it another way, you
> always here some twit demagogue about how the tax increase that his
> opponent voted for was the largest in history (or the cut was the
> largest in history). But guess what: that's almost always true if you
> just use nominal dollars, and it's pretty meaningless.
>
> I'm fairly happy, though, that you mostly use per capita numbers,
> since that's more reasonable. I think a better way is to track this as
> a percentage of both total indebtedness and the size of the economy.
> So one way to increase government debt is to institute policies that
> make corporations less indebted; that's not necessarily a very good
> idea, but it's a different scenario. Similarly, you, me or the
> government might choose to increase our indebtedness as our incomes go
> up, because more debt is more manageable.
>
> Needless to say, when I've seen the numbers in the form I like to see,
> Bush's tenure still looks quite bad, especially compared to Clinton,
> but I think most of the ratios are still better than they were at the
> beginning of G. H. W. Bush's term (or, rather, just after the S&L
> bail-out).
>
> jking
>
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Christian M. Cepel - Thistledowne Productions - http://thistledowne.org
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