Re-inventing the languageFollow

It's amazing that no matter how many times this is debunked, some people keep repeating it. That's not how appropriations work. Or how budgets work. The yearly costs for those wars are included in the final budget tallies of those years. Just because funds are pre-allocated in a budget bill does not mean that we don't account for them in that years budget calculations. This is exactly why I always use the CBO historical budget data sheets. Those include all the appropriations that occurred over the course of the year in question. It is how much we actually spent over the year, not just what was projected.

No part of the deficits we're running right now is the result of pushing the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to later years. The only effect we could apply would be the deficits from those years and the degree to which they affected the debt. But as I've shown previously, that debt was stable and sustainable right up until the mortgage crisis caused a meltdown in 2008. They are not why our spending is so ridiculously high right now and it is dishonest to suggest that they are.




And they were accounted for in the deficits during those years. They do not hide for years and then magically appear. What process do you think would cause that to happen? Engage the brain and think about this. It's a lie. Stop repeating it.



The amounts we're spending on those things are absolutely tiny in comparison to the other spending increases in recent years. That spending has gone down over time. Perhaps we should be looking at what spending has increased? 4 years ago we were spending more on Iraq and Afghanistan than we are today, and yet the deficit was relatively small (like 1/8th the size of today) and the debt ratio was shrinking. Today, the deficit is huge and our debt ratio is out of control.

Clearly, this had nothing to do with Iraq and Afghanistan.



Yeah. What Joph said. You clearly don't have even a basic understanding of what happened.



Hahahah! That's funny. You do understand that the money "handed to wall street" has actually been paid back, with interest? The only parts of TARP which is still in the red is the money handed out for teacher pensions and for the auto industry. So basically, they bailed out the evil big businesses and got their money back, and they bailed out some union run organizations as well and are still waiting to get that back.

Um... But all told TARP was more or less a success. It did prevent a whole slew of bankruptcies and did allow companies to recover and was more or less deficit neutral over time (although the payments we got back were unfortunately swallowed up in more debt incurred in 2009 and 2010 so we didn't really see it). The disasters were the Stimulus bill passed in 2009, and numerous follow up bills and bits of "recovery targeted" legislation and amendments slipped into all sorts of things over those two years. Those have cumulatively not just spent trillions of dollars in the short term with nearly zero effect, but have in many cases committed us to continued spending going forward.

Even many parts of the stimulus which are theoretically "one time" expenses are likely to continue to cost us. That's because the stimulus bill didn't just inject money into various segments of the economy in an attempt to help things along, but rather created "systems" for creating government subsidized work projects and funding. If history is any indicator, those programs wont be magically shut down when the initial stimulus money runs out. Once people and businesses become dependent on those funds (which they inevitably will), they'll cry about ever cutting them. We'll be looking at extensions for these new "necessary programs" sometime around 2019.

Maybe we'll have the will to cut them then, but maybe we wont. In any case, his method of dealing with a short term problem has saddled us with both short term debt (and lots of it) and long term spending commitments. And that was all 100% the Dems doing. The GOP opposed this stuff every step of the way.

Edited, Apr 14th 2011 4:53pm by gbaji

Except it does. The change in spending can absolutely be traced to stimulus spending. That's basic economic theory, too. Spending increases and tax breaks on workers in bad times, spending cuts and tax increases in good times. That's the government's role in the economy, to lessen the severity and pain from the regular down cycles of the economy and pay for it with the regular up cycles of the economy. We've tried the system with no regulation and no intervention when the house of cards falls apart, and it's disastrous for the average citizen. Reaganomics is ********* get over it already.

Edited, Apr 14th 2011 7:47pm by bsphil

I heard Boehner call the plan to replace Medicare with a voucher system a "transformation". I suppose it's transforming it from something into nothing...

Can you please address my post?

I heard on the radio today that in 1835 we fully paid off the national debt. That was the only year we've ever been debt free. The following year began the longest depression in US history. Paying off the debt didn't cause the depression itself, but poor management of the surplus by the states did. Interesting history.
thank you NPR

Interestingly enough, Jon Stewart mocked Obama for this exact topic last night on the Daily Show. Unlike gbaji, however, he also talked about the plan (and apparently Stewart actually listened to the speech, as he didn't try to make the ridiculous claim that it's all about raising taxes). This came two days after ripping parts of Ryan's plan, especially how changing Medicare was exactly the same idea as "Obamacare," and how cutting Medicare/Medicaid would have almost the same effect as letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

I need to watch the Daily Show more often - I think maybe that was the fifth episode I've ever seen!

What part of my explaining at length that various spending bills (including the stimulus, but not limited to it) in 2009 included a combination of direct appropriations *and* programmatic spending schedules for future years. That's kinda been one of my key points here, that the spending wasn't "one time", but is ongoing.

My follow up point is that it's clear that the graph you presented (which I've seen many times before btw), clearly doesn't tell us the whole picture, or we should expect to see significant spending decreases starting this year. We're not, are we? In fact, what we've seen historically is spending jump in 2009, then stay flat in 2010 (but it appears smaller relative to GDP because GDP started growing again). And now in 2011, when the spending for stimulus should be starting to taper, we're seeing it increase again. As I keep saying, there's more spending going on than just the one time stuff the Dems keep claiming was necessary to save the economy. They used the emergency to spend some one time stuff, but also used it to slip in a hell of a lot of ongoing expenditures that we can't afford.

That is abundantly clear from the data totals. Funny how the totals contradict the table you linked to, but you accept the table as showing us the whole picture anyway. I guess that study was right after all!

Could have re-stated the question instead of making me search for it. I'm assuming you're referring to this post:



Frankly, I'm still not sure what your question was, much less how it related to the data I was presenting, or the point I was making, but I'll take a stab at it anyway (and give a lesson on debt calculations in the process. Yay!).

The problem is that "debt" can be calculated several different ways. National debt is the total amount of outstanding treasury bills. Some people will use that number as though it has something to do with how far "in debt" we are, but that's not really accurate (and it makes the issue confusing because people are using different numbers). National debt comes in two parts: Intergovernmental Debt and Debt Held by Public.

Intergovernmental Debt is not "real". It's an accounting measure. Each year, the government passes a budget. That budget includes funds that are mandated (non-discretionary), and estimates of discretionary spending for various areas of government spending. This money is pre-allocated because a budget bill is law. When it's passed, the government must provide those programs with that money. This is most relevant for non-discretionary spending areas, since those represent past laws which mandate specific spending for various things. So you might have a federal budget for "school lunch programs" (just an arbitrary example btw). And we might have passed a law which mandates that this program must receive 100 Million in funding each year. But what happens if we only spend 80M? Well, the government accounting office periodically audits government programs and compares their projected spending (or mandated spending) to their actual spending. And when there is a surplus, it takes the money out of the programs account and puts it in the treasury. But since that money is given to that program by law, they can only de-allocate the money by law. We can't pass a law every time this is done (literally thousands of times each year), so what the treasury does is put treasury bills into the account for that program in the amount of the surplus. That way, the treasury owes that program that money, so it didn't really take it. In the meantime though, we can spend that money on other things (like costs that pop up throughout the year that we didn't anticipate when we passed that years budget).

The point is that it's not "real debt" because all we did was move it from one place to another. The program was over budgeted in the first place. It didn't need the money, and next years budget will allocate another batch of funds, so it's never going to miss it. It's just like shifting money from your checking account to your savings account. You didn't actually lose any money, and you don't "owe yourself" money. The need for printing of treasury bills is purely because of the legality of the move, it doesn't represent money we actually owe. Now obviously, if we spend that money it counts as money that was spent. But it was budgeted to be spent, so aside from an accounting measure, it doesn't affect the total amount of spending at all.

Over time, the amount of intergovernmental debt can become quite large (in fact, during the middle of the Bush administration it accounted for about 2/3rds of the national debt). So congress periodically passes an accounting bill which erases this debt from the books (remember when I said it can only be done by passing a law?). Of course, the money isn't real, and the debt isn't real, so this is all a formality. Of course, some ignorant people will inevitably claim that the government is cheating somehow by just "erasing debt" by passing a law to make it disappear. The reality is that there never was any actual debt in the first place, so there's nothing untoward going on.


Debt Held by Public is real debt. When the government actually spends money it doesn't have, it must borrow it. So after borrowing money it already has from programs that don't need it (see above), if there still isn't enough revenue coming in to cover costs, the government has the treasury print up treasury bills and offer them for sale to the public (this process actually goes on all the time, but I'm trying to simplify things here). The public (which is anyone *not* the US government) buys the bills. This is how we managed deficits. If the government spends 200B more than it took in revenue that year, it must sell 200B worth of treasury bills to cover the difference. It gets the money it needs to operate, and the people who paid that money get a bill that will hopefully pay them back with interest later.

This debt has to be paid off eventually (with interest). Congress can't just erase this with a stroke of the pen. This is the debt figure I've been talking about. You can look at it simplistically as the cumulative value of all past deficits. It's not quite that simple since we're constantly paying off those debts to those holding t-bills and then borrowing more, but you can view it as just a cumulative number since it more or less works out that way. What this means is that if you run a 200B deficit in one year, your total debt will increase by 200B (both national debt and "debt held by public" obviously).

It's debt held by public that is the problem. If that debt gets too high, then the nation may suffer negative effects, just as if you borrow too much. Of course the question is "how much is too much?". This is why the only sane way to measure that debt is to compare it to GDP. Since GDP represents the total "size" of the nations economy, it's the best yardstick to measure the total public debt.


I have no clue why numbers given by various pundits may differ. I can only show you the historical data I use and go from there. The numbers I presented come from the CBO and since they are historical, they are accurate (ie: not projections or predictions). These are accountings of how much we actually spent and how much we borrowed, and how much we owed on that debt at the end of each year. IMO, it's the best method to view government spending trends, and that's why I use them.


Was there a specific question you had? As I just said, my position and opinions on this issue are based on looking at the actual data from the cbo and doing math. I don't just listen to what some pundit said (in fact, I generally ignore their numbers because they are almost always wrong on both sides). I look at the actual data and make up my own mind. And what I'm doing in this thread is posting those numbers and attempting to show how they don't match up with the claims being made right now. It's why I don't put stock in pundits. They tend to focus on one set of numbers that benefit their point of view while ignoring the "big picture". What I'm showing is that big picture. No cherry picking. No clever math. Nothing even particularly complex. Here's what we spent. Here's what we got in revenue. Here's what we borrowed. Here's the resulting debt figure. From that you should be able to draw some easy conclusions.


At least I hope people can. To me, these numbers aren't that complex.

Um... Wow! This chart doesn't say what you seem to think it does Joph.

I didn't say we'd see a $350B drop between 2009 and 2010. I honestly have no clue where you're getting this stuff. Are you just making things up to argue against now?

What I have been saying is that the stimulus and other "one time" (or short time at least) spending programs clearly don't tell us the whole picture. It's why just looking at this graph by itself is meaningless. The historical data doesn't match.

If that graph told us the whole picture, then spending should have gone up between 2009 and 2010. But it didn't. It stayed flat. And spending should have gone down between 2010 and 2011. But it didn't. It's projected to increase pretty dramatically again. So. That graph, while pretty, obviously doesn't tell us anything about the total spending going on. Which is what I've been saying all along.




Because I'm not focusing in on just one bill Joph. I'm looking at how much we actually spent. How about you explain to me how our spending increased by $550B dollars between 2008 and 2009? If that spending increase isn't accounted for in that one bill you found a pretty graph for, then the obvious conclusion is that that one bill doesn't tell us the whole story. Because no amount of pretty graphs changes the fact that spending increased by $550B dollars between 2008 and 2009.

Since we can assume that any massive spending increase during that time frame was in some way related to "stimulus" (whether in that one bill or not), my statement is correct. I'm just not getting caught up on the exact laws passed which approved the spending. I'm looking at how much was spent and when. It's just amazing to me that I can show you historical charts of what we actually spent and you'd attempt to refute them with a silly graph showing projected spending for one spending bill.


Really? Haven't I just spent several posts now talking about how projections are nice, but they are no substitute for going back after the fact and looking at how much we actually spent, and actually taxed, and actually borrowed?

Way to totally fail there Joph!



I'm not talking about how spending bills work. I don't really care about that. I'm looking at the big picture. I'm looking at how much we actually spent. How the hell can that not be more relevant than the silly little stuff you're trying to argue? I don't care what bills the spending was in, whether it was appropriated, or allocated, or budgeted. At the end of the day, what matters is that our spending increased dramatically once the Dems took control, and instead of it dropping back down as we'd expect if it was just a temporary measure resulting from the economic meltdown of 2008, it appears to be continuing to increase.


And that it itself only part of a larger point showing that tax rates didn't go down during this time period. Cute charts aside, no tax law changes were passed. Thus, the problems were in right now are not the result of tax cuts, but are because of spending increases. Thus the idea that we should solve this problem with tax increases *and* spending cuts is ludicrous. We should solve it with spending cuts. Period. Anything else simply rewards the Democrats for racking up spending and putting us in this situation in the first place.

Yeah, so anyway...

Nice try.

Typed a whole lot of words though so at least you got the secretarial practice in.

If I hadn't said "probably" in the first place, it would have been a presumption. Statistically, it is a fact that I probably stand to lose more than anyone here. However, if I were to equivocate, I could accuse you of being presumptuous for being bold enough to inquire about my finances. :P I won't do that, though. That's just silly.

I'd point out why your assumption was incorrect but you've clearly been quite oblivious to the reasons up to now despite the fact that they've been very clearly stated in the past, so I'll just continue to leave you to your blind assumptions.