Interesting how you make claims about a group which is in fact not true of a whole group. I supported Afghanistan under both Bush and Obama.
which puts you in the distinct minority. you, of course, know that, which makes one wonder why you chose this response, but oh well. the speed with which the left turned from the "we want to pull out of evil george bush's war in iraq so we can send those resources to the good war in afghanistan" to opposing the surge and continued US presence in the afghan theater was mind-boggling.
If you are trying to suggest that the cost of the wars was small, that is stupid.
it would be, but I am not. what I am suggesting is that blaming our debt on them is foolish. in 2007, as Bush was launching the surge into Iraq, our annual deficit was about $160 Billion dollars. this year, our deficit will be about 9 times that size.
More likely you are just trying to downplay the cost of the wars,
they deserve to be downplayed from where he placed them, and put into their proper context.
i've noticed you sling this around a bit. project much?
You know better than this. Tax receipts where higher, but not necessarily higher than they would have been had the tax cuts not happened. In fact, probably the opposite is true and the tax cuts reduced revenue below what they would have been without the cuts.
if people were robots, instead of self-interested, self-directing actors, that would have some logic behind it. unfortunately for your argument....
And so help me god, if you break out that retarded Hawser's law or whatever it is called that has proven to be inaccurate just by the last 2 years of data, I will laugh at you.
every time you get bent out of shape about the
reality of revenues, and we get into that debate, you lose and walk away. revenues aren't a direct function of tax rates
because people are self-interested. GDP and the relative size of government are the two largest determining factors - again, and again, and again.
The largest single factor for the collapse was deregulation, which started under Reagan, he and every president and congress since share that blame.
If you want to trace the housing push to its'
start then you are talking about Carter, and if you want to talk about the removal of the Glass-Steagal Act, then you are talking about
Clinton.
irrespective, the largest factor wasn't deregulation, but rather an over easing of the monetary supply that flowed where the government pushed it - into housing. for democrats, it was cheap loans for poor minorities, and for republicans, it was building an "ownership society", but for both, it was malinvestment thanks to the assumption that price signals don't reflect reality as much as political pressure does.
You are half correct, and could have made part of it stronger. NAFTA and GATT(1 or 2 T's, I forget) where championed by Clinton. Whether they actually led to low unemployment is debatable, though I will conede they probably did contribute to it at least for awhile.
free trade absolutely increases employment - just as trade barriers decreases it. our problem with NAFTA et. al. is not that we have multilateral free trade agreements (we should expand them), it is that we have made it expensive to hire workers here at home while
at the same time allowing the importation of a large populace of low-skill workers who are able to circumvent the system that we have in place to increase the costs of American labor.
Coming in below budget does not mean inexpensive. Further, it is a big government socialist program...OMG!
it's certainly corporatist - and it is also an unconscionable expansion of government's size and reach, I agree; which is why I opposed it and it's on the list of things I send back to the RNC every time they send me a letter asking for money. however, the one great giant silver lining of that program is that, by coming in
so dramatically under the static predictions that you place so much faith in above and by holding the rise in healthcare costs in its' field
so much lower than the rest of the healthcare industry, it has shown us how to reform the rest of Medicare in order to continue to provide benefits while lowering expenditures to something that we can afford.
