At least you're on topic, so here:
Omegavegeta wrote:
So, their constituents voted them in to vote against spending, which they did, yet they turn around & quietly take the money/request it?
This happened in 2009, not 2011. This was before the Tea Party showed up and fielded candidates with a mandate to cut spending/taxes. These were conservative republicans who stood on that principle prior to that movement starting.
Also, that's not an accurate version of the process. They voted against the spending. They were overruled by the Democrats. Then, their constituents applied for grants based on funding from new spending. All they did was sign off on those grants essentially saying "this grant does qualify for the funding based on the criteria of the law". That's it. There's no moral decision being made in terms of whether that funding should exist in the first place.
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I get that it's politics, but it makes them out to look like hypocrites. Instead, they should have fought to compromise & gotten their money the "right" way- but they can't compromise & get re-elected so they're sneaky about it.
It's politics to make this out to be hypocrisy too. Let's look both ways before crossing the political street, ok?
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Gbaji wrote:
I have never claimed that he didn't. My argument has always been about the rate of spending increase, not that there was one. Some spending increase can be handled by the economy. Too much spending increase cannot. Bush did the former, Obama did the later. That's why we recovered after the recession in the early 2000s, but have not recovered as well from this most recent recession.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...you're lying. You've now trying to change the argument to be about the "rate" of spending increases.
Yes. Because that's what matters. How much did you increase spending relative to what it was before you made the change? How much did that change affect the deficit and ultimately the debt? What other means would you use to measure that?
Lol! Where the hell did you pull that out from? I particularly love how they compare 8 years of *actual* changes in spending/taxes during Bushs term (although they seem to have tacked on an extra 800 billion of stimulus from some magical pocket universe) to 1 year of Obama. But hey! They included "projections", which amazingly enough project that we wont pass another spending bill with a single dime more cost for the next 8 years! You don't really buy that, do you?
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So, Dubya spent "some" ($3.5 TRILLION more than Obama is even projected too), & Obama spent "too much"?
You sir, are either blind, or a partisan hack, if you believe that.
You're the one taking some partisan source's bogus chart as some kind of gospel. None of this matters. you can gussy up the numbers anyway you want to make spending look huge during Bush's term, and small during Obama's, but at the end of the day the only numbers that matter are the results. How much was actually spent, how much we actually took in as revenue, how much deficit resulted, and how much debt resulted from that. Those are the only figures which matter.
Why are you pulling out some ridiculous hacked up partisan source's chart? Why not look at the actual CBO historical data? That's what I use, because it tells us the actual numbers. And those numbers show us that absent the current high unemployment and low economic activity, the current tax rates will generate sufficient revenue. It's not a tax rate problem. It's that our spending outstripped our revenue during the recession to such a degree that we have created a second economic problem in the form of looming debt.
No amount of providing bogus charts changes that clear fact. Spending has been abnormally high since Obama took office.
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I saw where Dubya & Obama increased spending after the 2008 recession & how now, it's started to level off. Funny how you can't see that.
No, I do see that. The problem is that it has "leveled off" at a higher level relative to GDP than it was prior to the recession. Had spending increased and then dropped back down to pre-recession levels, there wouldn't be a problem. But spending increased
and has stayed increased. That's a problem. We've turned a short term economic problem into a long term economic problem. And that's because of spending.
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Gbaji wrote:
That's the wrong question: Who increased spending at a greater rate? Answer: Obama.
Hahahaha, it's only the wrong question because you want it to be a different question, as when asked "who increased spending" everyone knows they both did. But since that's inconvenient to your worldview, you're crying, "But Obama increased spending at a higher rate!".
It's not inconvenient to my worldview, it's an utterly irrelevant argument. What you're doing is the equivalent of countering an argument that a fat teen is fat because he eats 2000 calories more food than the skinny teen by arguing that they both eat more than they did 5 years ago.
Let me clue you in (again!): Every single president has spent more than every single president before him (in dollars). It doesn't mean anything. What does matter is spending as a percentage of the whole economy. It also matters how suddenly you introduce changes. Obama spent too much over too short a period of time. I believe that this is why our economic isn't recovering like it should.
Why do *you* think unemployment has leveled off at around 9%?
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Or very real things like tax cuts that cost us more than Iraq, Afghanistan, & defense spending combined. When you take that much revenue out of the tax system, it's a small wonder that there would be a deficit for Obama to inherit.
Sigh. Why do you repeat the same arguments based on the same debunked assumptions without bothering to address the counters I've already posted?
First off, taxes don't "cost us" anything. They decrease the amount the government costs us. We are not the government. It's a semi-unrelated ideological point, but I'll make it anyway.
Secondly, as I have already said at least twice in this thread: There is no one to one correlation over the long term between tax rates and tax revenue. Your argument is based on the assumption that if we'd kept the rates at a higher level, that the economy would have acted exactly the same as it did with the lower rates. Revenue is the combined total of the dollar amount of each economic action times the tax rate for that action. Raising rates tends to decrease the dollar amount of action in that area. Lowering them tends to increase them.
The point being that you can't just apply the amount of tax dollars we collected in each economic area and increase them by the increase the tax rates would have applied and call it a day. It doesn't work that way. Your argument is just as flawed as insisting that a business can just double the cost of everything it sells and make double the money. I assume you know why this wont work?
That calculated "cost" of the Bush tax cuts is simply vapor-revenue. It's a math trick. Similarly, the calculated increase in revenue if we eliminated the Bush rates (on whomever), are also illusory. We wont get that money. What will happen is that economic activity will decrease in the areas where we increase tax rates. After 2-3 years, the resulting revenue will be about the same as it was before changing the rates.
It's just amazing that I keep pointing this out, no one has argued against it, yet you continue to make arguments which assume the very case which I've debunked. If you think that the Bush tax cuts actually "cost" us that much money, then you need to counter my argument in some way. You need to explain to me why, back when the top marginal rate was 70%, we collected the same relative tax revenue as we did during Bush's term when the top rate was exactly half as high. The data clearly shows that changes to tax rates (especially the top marginal rate) has basically zero correlation to changes in revenue.
If you can't counter that, then please stop trying to count tax rate change revenue like it's money in the bank. It's not.
[quote]
Gbaji wrote:
How do you conclude this? Let me point out that in 2007, the deficit was only $160B dollars. That deficit had been falling for 3 years straight. To say that Obama "inherited a deficit" is a gross misstatement.
How? Clinton paid off the deficit while Dubya was running one before 9/11. It is the very definition of truth to state that "Obama inherited a deficit from Dubya", & Obama has since added to it.[/quote]
Gah!!!! The very fact that you used the phrase "paid off the deficit" shows that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
A deficit is the yearly calculation of the difference between that years spending and that years revenue. That's it. You don't inherit a deficit. It doesn't carry over. Deficit adds to debt (which does carry over), but the deficit itself isn't "paid off", or carried over. Now, spending and revenue trends can carry over, but those things can also be changed. Here's the deal though, Obama was not handed an economy with 24-25% spending relative to GDP. He just wasn't. He didn't inherit that. He choose to increase spending from 20.7% of GDP to 25% of GDP in one year. Some of that is GDP shrinkage, but most of it is spending increase.
But if we want to talk about debt. Bush inherited a debt that was 32.5% of GDP. Over 8 years, he increased that debt to 40.3% of GDP (most of that jump in the last year because of the recession). Obama increased the debt to 53.5% in his first year, and then up to 62.1% in his second year. It will certainly be higher this year as well.
The point being that even though his spending "leveled out" in 2010 compared to 2009, it leveled out at too high a level. That's why our debt keeps going up at an unsustainable rate.
Let me also point out that prior to the recession hitting us, the debt percentage had stabilized and was actually going down. It hit a previous high of 36.9% in 2005, and then shrunk in 2006 and 2007 down to 36.2%. The point being that the spending/revenue ratios present in the Bush economy were sustainable. The spending he did via TARP in 2008 was a one time expense (and we got the money back), so we should have seen a jump in debt as we borrowed and then a return to lower deficits and shrinking debt in subsequent years.
What happened instead was that Obama was elected and the Dems took full control of congress and they went on a spending spree. The result is that right now, unless we reduce spending we will keep adding more debt to our total every single year. It will not stop. There is no balance possible. Raising taxes is the other side of the coin, but as I pointed out earlier, it's counterproductive in the long run. For every dollar of increased revenue we might gain from raising taxes, we may chase other dollars out of the economy. There's a strong point of diminishing returns with tax increases.
It was spending which clearly changed. We should change it back if we want to fix things. I'm not sure why this is so hard for some people to grasp.
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Gbaji wrote:
The deficits which occurred as a result of the housing bubble had nothing to do with the tax rates. It was purely because of losses as a result of the recession (and actions taken during it as well).
No, it was a combination of decreased tax revenues due to BOTH Dubya's tax cuts & lower recession related tax revenues.[/quote]
Sigh...
No it wasn't!!! How many times do I have to produce the exact same data to prove this wrong. In 2007, we collected revenue of 18.5% of GDP. That is an historically high revenue rate. That same year, we had only a $160B deficit, and the resulting debt% was shrinking. The Bush tax cuts had
absolutely nothing to do with the lost revenues in 2009 and 2010. Zip. Zero. Nada. You need to stop repeating this false assumption.
[quote]If you cut taxes, you cut tax revenues.[/quote]
In the very very short term. Like 2 or 3 years. How many times do I have to show you the data? Revenues are not directly correlated with tax rates. I know that many liberals don't want to believe this because it's inconvenient for their positions, but it's absolutely provably true. I already listed off a whole series of period of times, the top marginal tax rates, and the resulting revenues during those time periods. There is no correlation. None.
If you cut taxes, you reduce the dollars you gain for each dollar of a given economic activity. But, since the rates are higher, people often perform more of that activity than they might have otherwise. You don't want to believe this because it was the argument made back in 2001 when the Bush tax cuts were put in place. So even though the data overwhelmingly proves that Bush was right, you don't believe it exactly because it would require admitting that Bush was right about something. Your partisanship is blinding you to the truth that is right in front of you.
[quote]If you give people free money, which Obama ALSO continued, you cut tax revenues. If there's less money being made because of a recession, there's less money to tax. Now, all of these things were done to help spur the economy (& it's debatable on whether or not they did), but they ALL contributed to an increased deficit.[/quote]
Anything which increases the difference between spending and revenue will increase the size of that years deficit. It's simple subtraction. I'm not sure what your point is here. The point being that revenue dropped 3.6% between 2007-2009, while spending increased by 5.4%. Can we agree that the total spending change was greater that the total revenue change? Again, this is simple math? And when we account for the fact that a good percentage of that revenue loss was actually "spending" in the form of Obam's BS stimulus "tax credits" (which you'll recall that conservatives opposed despite liberals insisting that since it was a tax cut they should have liked it), that comparison is skewed even more.
We spent too much money. I just don't understand how it's possible not to accept this. I'm using direct CBO data. There's no fudging, or selective accounting. I'm looking at total spending and total revenue. I'm comparing relative level over time. it's not hard math. You have to work really really really hard to figure out a way to manipulate the numbers to make it show anything other than that we spent too damn much money.
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Gbaji wrote:
Also, as I have pointed out repeatedly in this thread, the revenue losses in this recession, while high historically were similar to those in 2001-2003. Yet, the job market recovered quickly from that one, and hasn't from this one. What is the difference?
There was a housing market boom post 9/11 until the bubble burst in 2007.[/quote]
And there was a massive tech-stock/dot-com boom from the mid 80s until the bubble burst in 2001. What's your point? Are you actually going to try to argue that the false revenue from the housing market was so much greater than the false revenue generated by thousands of dot.com IPOs for companies that didn't actually produce any products at all? The houses those mortgages represent at least have real physical value. The sheer volume of money flowing around in the tech market in the late 90s over nothing but "buzz", most of which turned out to be worth nothing at all was staggering.
Yet, even though revenue impact was very similar, we managed to recover from that without any problems at all.
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Spending increased from 2001-2011 & only started to level out in 2011, so that isn't why the job market hasn't recovered.[/quote]
You can't compare the spending increase between 2001 and 2007 to that from 2008 to 2010 though. You just can't. We went from 18.2% to 19.6% over 7 years. So about .2% increase per year. The year the crisis hit (2008), we jumped up to 20.7%. So a 1.1% increase in one year. Then, we jumped to 25% in 2009. That's a 4.3% increase
in one year. In 2010, we actually dropped to 23.8%. But projections for 2011 show us going back up again. The point being that we've "leveled out" about 4-5% higher than we were before the crisis started.
That's not good. It's too much spending. I don't know how many different ways I can show you the same data to get you to see this.
[quote]Hell, it's only been what it has been for the last 2 years, in part, due to Obama's stimulus that created some unsustainable jobs.[/quote]
But there's no indication it's going to drop. That's kinda the problem. We passed a bunch of stuff supposedly to stimulate the economy, but much of it is actually long term spending, which isn't going away and will almost certainly continue to increase. We need to cut that spending "soon" before it become institutionalized and it's much more painful to do later.
