Bush vs. ClintonFollow

He cant help it he read about it in the Washington Times and now has bothered to read the document and finds that it doesnt support his position and must again bluster and lie and got to everyman speak to try and retain relavency.

I meant to bring up the addressing to Congress thing too, but one thing is for sure that Gbaji didnt again bother to check his sources before regurgitaing right wing propaganda and then when I do the work for him he tries to retain his orginal position. OMG CLINTON NEVER SAID AL QUEDA, NO HE JUST STATED IT WAS A TERRORIST ORGANIZATION HEADED BY USAMAN BIN LADEN.

Hmmm Strange how now we use those things to be talking about the same thing under the current administration. Clinton was to fighting Terrorism as Bush is to blaming **** on Clinton. They are/were VERY VERY GOOD at it.

Edit cant spell

Edited, Sat Jun 5 00:50:16 2004 by flishtaco

ROUND 1!
Clinton gets friskey with a cigar.
Bush gets revenge for 911.
1 point for both yay
ROUND 2! Bush 1 Clinton 1
Clinton helps economy and gets more head.
Bush goes on a killing spree searching for imaginary wepons :(
sory bush no pt this round but clinton gets one for banging that nasty woman
ROUND 3! Bush 1 Clinton 1
Clinton lies to court (but only because his wife was right there)
Bush makes fun of himself always being right at a press confrince
clinton no points for joo
Bush were taking away your point cause your such an idiot
Round 4! Bush 0 Clinton 1
Bush frogets that he bombed our oil retailers and gas goes up to much (Bad Bush!)
Clinton eats some Mc donalds and lies some more
Bush another dock for you!
Clinton im taking your point because you ate that nasty food...

WINNER RALPH NADER!!!!!!! who has 500 points for wanting to legalize pot and help our national parks. also he gets an aditional 50 points for sleeping at a debate he was talking at. horray for old hippies!

PS If bush wins again... im off to Canada!

Huh?

There was an actual surplus. A budget surplus, not a treasury surplus.

I should have stated "proposed" instead of "projected." My error. But still, an "actual" surplus hasn't really come about. When your "surplussed" budget still adds significantly to the national debt, it's not "actually" a surplus.

Edited, Sun Jun 6 03:10:33 2004 by Jindo

If the government is running on a surplus, that means that they are taking in more taxes than they need, which is often referred to as RIDICULOUS, or overtaxed. America is not a welfare state. If you want to have the government pay for your life go to France or Sweden.

Yes it does. You see, this is not a debating society, so all your pleasant little assumptions and arguments don't mean squat.

Duh-bya did not have the academic records to qualify for a Rhodes Scholarship (or pretty much any scholarship for that matter), Clinton did. Clinton is smarter by leaps and bounds than Duh-bya.

You can spend all day spewing more hot air on the matter, and I'm sure you will, but in the end, you won't really say much, and Clinton will still be smarter than Bush.



Edited, Sun Jun 6 10:08:40 2004 by Deathwysh

'Nuff said flishtaco.

jindo check ur facts bud, smash is correct we had a surplus for a while. while this wasn't a long lasting surplus(because we r still a few trillion $ in the hole, and GWB doesn't have a very tight grasp on economic's(thus the ENRON scandal which just about everyone in this presidency had something to do with))........and technically this is considered a surplus,when u have more money than u need to spend. and because we don't have to pay back the debt anytime soon. but if u owe $2000 to the bank and have $200 in ur pocket u don't really have a "surplus" of funds, i think the same can basically be applied to any gov't/company

sorry for the short rant, just showing a little sympathy for both arguments

First off, fruitcake, the guy's name (supposedly at least) was Jesus Christ. Not too tough to spell, ********

Secondly, that's an observation on her part. It's her feeling. You don't have to agree with it and you obviously don't.

I dislike Bill Clinton. I think he was a good president overall, however. I have tremendous respect for the 1st George Bush because he saw the necessity of raising taxes when the country needed it, even though it contradicted what he stood for. He stood up and said things had changed and did what was necessary to begin an economic recovery. I respect that.

George W. Bush will go down as one of the worst Presidents in history for numerous reasons.

First, he is a thoroughly unintelligent individual. Not because he can't speak, although communication skills are sort of a necessity for the job, but because of his simplistic and asinine views of world politics.

Secondly, his economic policies are atrocious. You get out of a recession by spending, he did manage to get that part right. However, at the same time you raise taxes to help pay for what you spend. Now I know that's contrary to voodoo economics, but the fact is that the government creating jobs by improving infrastructure and putting capital into the economy isn't offset by a tax increase. They aren't counterproductive. What is counterproductive is spending yourself into a huge deficit (a small deficit is fine, but it needs to be manageable). On a scale of 1 to 10, he gets a -7 for his economic policy.

Finally, the fact is that I, and many other people, don't feel any safer by the creation of a whole new level of beauracracy to take care of a problem caused by a huge beauracracy. The Department of Homeland Security is redundant, behemouth, and worst of all, dangerous.

I don't feel safer because George W. Bush is in office. In fact, I feel much less safe. I also felt less safe BEFORE 9-11. The reason? I would like to have someone in office that has an IQ above room temperature. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until January to get one. I may not think John Kerry is the greatest guy ever to run, but quite frankly, the bar is the lowest it's been in years.

Grady

Actually, that's presicely what it is. When some people get an extra paycheck they use the money to pay down their debt. Those people would be Democrats. When other people get an extra paycheck, they use it as collateral to generate more debt and spend ten times the amount. Those people would be Republicans.

You are entitled, of course, to choose either political philosophy as your own.

I am being consistent. You're the one that said a surplus isn't like moeny that you put into your account to pay off credit card debt and such. When, of course, that's exactly what it is. Now, you could take that moeny in your account and not pay off the credit card debt and instead spend it on a weekend in Vegas. If you did, you'd be soundly grounded in Republican economic theory in doing so. Helping the economy in Vegas will help the economy as a whole and you'll earn more money and be able to pay off the debt more easily after all.

Yup. That's because (as I keep saying), there are two different concepts here, which people keep getting confused about:

1. A surplus or deficit. This is purely a yearly accounting. It's the difference between the revenue the government took in and the amount of money it spent for that year alone. There's a couple other money making bits in there as well, but that's the bulk of it (see historical data at cbo.gov if you want more detailed info on this).

2. The "national debt". This is the money we've borrowed and is a culmulative figure over time. It is related to surplus and deficit, but only in the fact that a deficit must be covered by borrowing money (and therefore increasing the debt).


We pay off the debt all the time (in small bits). Each year, we pay into it (which generally results in payment of the interest on the debt, but can also actually reduce the principle as well). All payments to the debt are budgeted. We don't just have a running account and all extra cash goes into it.


On the other hand, all debt at any given time must come from the "national debt". This number goes up continuously during the year. Anytime a budgeted project goes over budget (even for a quarter), that money is borrowed from the national debt. What this means is that it's possible that at the end of the year, you collected more money then you spent, but you still borrowed money along the way (cause individual budgets were not correctly allocated funds).

That link is actually pretty interesting. The only year where we see a reduction in the national debt is between 1997 and 1998. Note, that this was *not* a year in which Clinton had a surplus. Clearly, he budgeted funds to pay off the debt (must have or it would not have gone down), and also accurately estimated the funds for each individual budget item so that very little money had to be borrrowed throughout the year (less then he paid back into the debt).

What's doubly interesting is that for FY1999 and FY2000, the debt went up even though Clinton had a surplus at the end of the year. What that means is that he collected more money then he budgeted to spend, but his allocations within that budget were not accurate so that money had to be borrowed throughout the year.

You can think of it this way. Each month, you take put money aside to pay for various things. You have a "budget" for food, one for clothes, one for each of your various bills, one for entertainment, etc... If any of those individual budgets ends up not being enough money for the month, you take out a loan from a bank. Of course, you may have made more money that month then you budgeted, but that money is sitting in a savings account and is not touched. At the end of the year, if you didn't allocate your budgets well, you can easily have a lot of money sitting in your savings account (a surplus), but have racked up an impressive amount of loans for money borrowed throughout the year.

This is what Clinton seems to have done. It's not a "good thing". It's a mistake. He did not allocate funds correctly (or had some projects that grew more then he thought). Despite having money left over at the end of the year, he still was borrowing money all year long. That's just **** poor planning. It is certainly nothing to point to as a success.


His surplus is not the result of some brilliant economic work. It's the result of two failures. First he miscalulated the amount of revenue his government would take in that year. Second, he miscalculated the amount of money his government would spend that year. I really don't see how anyone can look at this and say it was a good thing...

No. It was a surplus. More money came in than was spent, period. Regardless of where the money that was spent comes from, it's still a surplus if more money comes in. If I win $100,000 at the begining of the year and all I spend is $30,000 on a car, but I take a loan I don't have a surplus that year by your logic.

Doesn't work that way. What I do with the surplus is wholely diffrent discussion. Should I use it to pay the car loan off? Should I "put it to use to generate more income next year" by investing it or whatever? Doesn't matter. It's still a surplus.

Clinton was wise to accomplish it and Bush was foolish to not use it to pay down the debt.

Let me say it for the 900000th time.

The only way to gurantee the long term fiscal sucess of the country is to pay down the debt. The only way to pay down the debt is to bring in more than you spend. The Debt Bunny isn't going to hop along and absolve us of it.

If we don't pay it down, the amount of each years tax revenue spent on servicing the intrest gets larger and larger and larger untill it becomes 99 percent of the budget and we're only applying 1 percent on tax revenues to the federal budget. If spending continues to outstrip revenue as it did in 2003 that 99 percent mark occurs in 2060. It's not impossible that we'll all be alive to see US Government Bonds ratings start going down because the market doesn't trust the government to be able to pay. Then all hell breaks loose with the economy.

Edited, Wed Jun 9 23:01:49 2004 by Smasharoo