I don't like what the graph shows. I'd cut spending massively if it was up to me.

BTW, stealth, so the US debt went up 4 trillion in 8 years of Bush, and 3 trillion in one fiscal year (and some change) of Obama. Gotcha.

As for the red/blue thing, why do YOU always go off the looney edge? Red and blue have preexisting meanings in the US. Reds are communists, and the democrats have always had a communist component. In the military, blue means the good guys.

I'd prefer to see the press alternate the use of red and blue.

If instead of colors they assigned "good guys" and "bad guys" I'd equally want the press to alternate. I suppose the current use might rehabilitate the color red, which is otherwise associated with mass murder, among other things (that being the principle business of the extreme left—like national socialist Germany and the CCCP).

Thought so.

Firstly, how?
Secondly, how on earth would you get it passed?

They should pass a balanced budget amendment that forces spending to be equal to some running average of tax receipts as a function of GDP (not just the previous year, maybe a 3-year running average).

The critical problem is entitlements. I'd keep SS for anyone above a certain age, then phase it out towards a privatized system as an option, and for those that opt in, keep it what it was supposed to be—insurance. Reset retirement age so that it actuarially matches what it was when first [passed. Meaning if the typical person only lived 2 years past 65 on SS, I'd make the retirement age 70 or something. Ditto medicare.

The goal should be that total government spending should not exceed around 20% of GDP under any circumstance save war.

War spending would be about the only thing I'd allow to go deficit, but with maybe a 3/4 vote of both houses.

The military could trim a bunch if they were allowed to close bases as they'd like. All the US bases are a function of having them porked into place. Everyone wants cuts, just not in their district.

Civics 101.

Congress controls the nations purse strings. Debt is created by them, not the administration.

Well said, sir.

Thanks but it goes both ways. Obama really can't be blamed for spending those trillions today either.

So debt is in no way influenced by the actions of the administration in office... they can do absolutely nothing that will completely screw up the "purse strings" of the nation, nevermind the "purse"... right lol.:roll:

The President can't spend dime one without approval from congress. That is one of the balances of power.

The President asks (and you better believe that he asks, Presidents don't tell congress crap.) congress for appropriations. Congress controls the purse strings. :yep:

People are misdirecting their ire. It is congress we need to be bitchin about. :yep:

I didn't say that at all. Congress has many influences, certainly not the least of which is the sitting administration, but ultimately it is Congress who spends the money. So if you're going to play the blame-game then it rests squarely with the party that controls Congress, not which party controls the White House.

$4 trillion? You haven't been paying attention. That was in September 2008. In ONE MONTH, by October 7, 2008, it had reached past the $5 trillion mark. When he left office in January, the total was $10.627 trillion.

http://agonist.org/amc/20090123/bush..._national_debt

$10.627 trillion to $12.759 trillion. That's not $3 trillion, that's $2.132 trillion... which, even when rounding to the hundred millions, still doesn't come anywhere close to $3 trillion.

:03:

Not really. At least, not as far as the sane ones amongst us are concerned.

If you live in the 1950s Cold War United States, which ended nearly 20 years ago. It's time to stop being so paranoid and insulted about being called a "Red". Republicans always have been represented by the color red, Democrats by blue... is this really news to you? If so, that's... disturbing to say the least.

I thought they were Socialists. Obama's supposed to be a Socialist anyway.:06:

Though we don't use blue military combat uniforms anymore... and we haven't since the final quarter of the 1800s...

That's too bad, because nobody is going to change it just because you or I want it to be changed. And, for the record, I don't. Because I don't really care. They're COLORS FFS. Are you really going to argue over something so petty as color representation? Seriously?

How about just "Democrat" and "Republican"?

Huh. Might as well remove it from the flag then since it represents mass murder... not the blood of patriots... oh wait- that's right. That's EXACTLY what's it's always represented in American politics: the blood of patriots.

Actually, National Socialist Germany was very right wing. Indeed, the entire concept of National Socialism is center-right.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

The reason why Hitler attached the term "Socialism" to his ideology was because it appealed to the Germans of the time, because they were convinced it would change their country for the better and make them prosperous (that's what they were promised by the heads preaching it). They were in horrible conditions. It could easily cost 500,000 marks to buy a loaf of bread in the market. The wheelbarrows weren't big enough to carry the money in. People burned it for heat, threw it out in the streets, and even ate it. It was no different for the Russians after they rebelled against the Tsarist Absolutist Monarchy (why Lenin's version of Marxism appealed to the majority, I mean; the Whites were against it, but we're not talking about them right now). Didn't you study this in school?

When Hitler came into the scene of politics, he preached Socialism to attract followers. As I said, a lot of people really believed it could change Germany for the better. And many believed the same about Communism. Following his arrest and rise to power, he endorsed Nationalism officially into the party, pulling away from his Socialist roots. Some members believed that he had lost the way and had to be removed, particularly Ernst Rohm and the SA (Rohm headed them, by the way; he was also a homosexual). Hence, this is why Hitler had Rohm murdered and the entire SA disbanded (the homosexuality Hitler knew of before he appointed Rohm head of the brownshirts; it wasn't that which concerned him the most; I just threw that in there because it is relevant to the man).

You do know the Germans executed Socialists and Communists as political enemies during the Second World War, right? The Dolchstosslegende (Stab-In-The-Back Legend) taught that Imperial Germany had been sabotaged in World War I by the Jews, Socialists, and Bolsheviks, and people ate it up (especially Socialists, which were said to have sabotaged the previous government, Ebert's Weimar Republic). These groups were just scapegoats; they had done nothing of the sort. The Germans lost the war because of they decided to dig in for the winter of 1914, hence setting on a deadlock between the Entente, her allies, and the Central Powers. They had lost the tactical advantage and ability of rapid movement. A quick war was totally out of the question, hence why they resorted to naval and aerial tactics.

Now Russia under Lenin and Stalin, it was far left. But it was also Authoritarian, not Libertarian like we are. Socialism and Communism are supposed to be Libertarian. It's assclowns like Lenin and Stalin, however, that made it anti-Libertarian. Leninism and Stalinism are the most radical forms of Communism, not at all true to the original Marxist theory envisioned by Old Karl.

Though you never bothered putting it in.

Thank you for finally stating it to be so.

Quite.

They spend it, but more often than not it's the Executive Branch that decides what they're going to be spending on. They're the ones who make the most proposals. Like devoting more resources to the wars in the Middle East, stimulus packages, military expenditures, etc. It's not like they're powerless when it comes to funds. Far from it.

But you just said that the administration in the White House has a big hand in controlling the finances of the country...

"certainly not the least of which is the sitting administration"

...and now "it rests squarely with the party that controls Congress"... shouldn't they both be to blame if they both have a lot of power in it? Which is it: Congress, the White House, or both?

Quit yanking my chain. You know that controlling is NOT at all the same thing as being an influence. A guy who posts all those long messages with the fancy charts and diagrams can not be that obtuse.

Congress controls the money. Congress votes in new laws. Congress is the one responsible for the nations debt. End of story.

Even if half the process is dictated by their influence? Give me a break. The decisions and actions of the president and the Executive Branch affect the country just as much as the decisions and actions of Congress/the Legislative Branch do.

"Fancy" charts, eh? "Long" messages? Like it or not, you're going to have to read these "fancy" charts and "long" messages when you're dealing with debates. That's how the process works. Evidence. It's all about the evidence and facts.

And it has nothing to do with the actions the president/Executive Branch make... lol.

Votes in? Only when there's a veto by the president that sends it straight back to Congress. The president otherwise has the power to sign it into law... or do a pocket veto, but that falls under the aforementioned category.

Hate to burst your bubble (well- ok not really "hate"), but you have a lot more to blame than just Congress for the economic meltdown. The appropriate citations/sources are attached to the guilty parties listed.

The Federal Reserve, slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

109th Congress, supported a mortgage tax deduction that gave consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses (the .pdf is of the bill Congress and the president agreed to in September 2005).

Home buyers, took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Mortgage brokers, offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, he encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Real estate agents, most of whom worked for the sellers rather than the buyers and earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

Wall Street firms, paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, failed to provide much-needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market due to clamors to deregulate them more to eliminate government influence.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up; a parallel of the thoughts held about the stock market just before the Wall Street Crash of 1929 hit (Black Tuesday, that I mentioned earlier).

YOU said:
I subtracted the two. You didn't provide other data.

Since you said "on bush's watch" I toook your ending number, above, and subtracted from the obama number YOU posted.

12.759-9.849=2.91

Yeah, I rounded it up to 3.

Sorry, I didn't look the numbers up, just used what YOU posted.

Yeah I did. You just didn't investigate any of my sources.

http://agonist.org/amc/20090123/bush..._national_debt

When "W" left office on January 20, 2009, the national debt was $10,626,877,048,913.08.

But you didn't figure up the total increase; you didn't check any of my sources to see what they said or not. While that's a peeve, if you would have, you would have seen the final figure when he left office. I simply rounded it to $10.627 trillion (the $887,048,913.08 up).


What's with the "YOU"? I haven't done anything wrong. YOU just didn't read any of my sources to find out the information they had in them. I was simply showing the change from when he took office to September 2008, two months before the election.

Look, generalizing your argument to include any and all affects upon the country does not at all support your statement that Obama inherited the national debt from Bush. As Platapus points out the President asks Congress for appropriations. Congress can refuse and has done so many times in the past.

Throw all da bums out!

When in doubt
Vote them out

As far as the position of presidents are concerned, it does. This isn't hard to understand. When Bush left office, the debt was at $10.627 trillion, raised half of what it had originally been. When Obama came in, the debt level was at $10.627 trillion and had been raised half of what it had originally been. Again, this isn't hard to understand. It really isn't.

Just like the 109th Congress could have rejected the idea of mortgage tax deductions. But, they didn't. Read the proposal that was approved by the House, Senate, and president:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d051009sp.pdf

Furthermore, the Executive Branch does have the power to provide government watch over the markets... which it did not do when the first bank crashed in 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financi...7%E2%80%932010

The reason why we are where we are at now and who's watch it happened on are two different things. Do not think I'm trying to mesh them together here. There are multiple parties at fault for the reason why it failed; who's watch it began and happened on, however... well, you already know.

Its the Theodore Kaczynski method, when you feel you have a really big thing to say write it in big letters

Texas ! But Taxes ?

Yeah go Texas, and the rest of the USA !

You cannot tax big companies, they are the job makers !
You cannot tax the middle class since they are doing the job !

Tonight, Jon Stewart overviewed the media's reaction to a report that many poor households don't pay federal income tax before comparing it to the non-reaction over the fact that Exxon Mobil also doesn't pay. Inside, video of Stewart's magnificent juxtaposition

http://tv.gawker.com/5516642/jon-ste...ated-reporting

So tax the poor !
What, they do not earn enough in a 40-hours week to pay taxes ? Kill them all !
:rotfl2:

Greetings,
Catfish