It would help a lot of the government wouldn’t keep stomping them down.
But you can’t waste a crisis, and if you haven’t accomplished everything you want with it yet politically, you have to sustain it, just as the Roosevelt administration did, for years. Let’s hope that we’ll be on to them this time around.
[Update a few minutes later]
Will we be saved by California?
The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat…
…The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.
The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.
Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.
Well, it does to some of the economic illiterati in my comments section. As I said, let’s hope the rest of us figure it out by next November.
I used to think McCain couldn’t have been this bad because he would have been trying to gt his Republican-branded nanny-state programs through a Democrat Congress afflicted with “not-invented-here” syndrome.
Now I’m starting to suspect McCain couldn’t have been this bad simply because he couldn’t have been this bad.
It would also be nice if anyone in government positions of influence seemed to recognize that the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression was caused by too much bad lending and that “More bad lending!!” is not the answer to that affliction.
Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.
Obama is following the same economic plan that made the Weimar Republic and Zimbabwe international economic powerhouses. Just as today’s socialists claim that prior socialist governments failed because “the right people weren’t in charge” (meaning them), I’m sure Obama believes that because he’s in charge, everything will work out fine this time. To quote Rocky, “But that trick never works.”
They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for a different outcome. I’m not necessarily saying that Obama and the Democrats in charge of Congress are necessarily insane, just monumentally arrogant and stupid at the same time. That’s a dangerous combination that makes me worry about my grandchildren’s future.
“They say that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and hoping for a different outcome. I’m not necessarily saying that Obama and the Democrats in charge of Congress are necessarily insane, just monumentally arrogant and stupid at the same time.”
You are so wrong! The stimulus isn’t WORKING and WE need a YET bigger stimulus! And Mr. Ahmadinijad is the duly elected leader of Iran, AND we need to move forward on negotiating an end to their atomic program by offering nothing of value TO them in RETURN! And Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin, who are in reality two different people but you rightwingnuts are too dense to KNOW this because you can’t read Russian, need to CUT out THAT return to the Cold War! Global WARMING (or is it now Climate Change?) is a clear and PRESENT danger, and we need to fight it BY promoting uselessly intermittent forms of power generation in place of proven nuclear power.
I’ve had an epiphany… it IS Bushes fault!!! You can’t blame these idiots in charge for being idiots. They are what they are. The problem is we let things get to the point where they could take power. That means those that let the left use taxpayer money to insure their election because they got a few scraps themselves. That means all those ‘conservative’ talking head that become apologists for the left. That means all parents that let the school system reeducate their kids to hate America and think America owes them a living.
I never in my life thought this country would elect a marxist to be it’s leader but they are what they are… the one’s responsible are the one’s that know it’s wrong.
The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S.
Hardly. At least 90% of the 2009 deficit is due to Bush policies and the financial crash/recession — click my name for the details.
[Reagan] may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.
So it’s okay to run record deficits as long as you have a story that turns out to be false?
Obama has no story.
Nonsense. The Obama story (repeated ad nauseum for the last 2 1/2 years to anyone who’d listen): by investing in infrastructure, education and clean energy we position ourselves to rebound from the recession with stronger growth that is based on real productivity, not bubbles. By reforming health care we save money (keeping Medicare solvent), make the economy more efficient, and protect public health.
Jim, I mean this sincerely, if you’re stupid enough to believe all that nonsense then you deserve whatever happens to you. My grandchildren don’t deserve the economic carnage that Obama is doing. Printing bogus money to spend on political graft and favoritism is the act of a despot, not a leader.
larry j: The point is that Obama isn’t “doing” any “economic carnage.” That’s hysterical scapegoating by a Republican party and a conservative movement that failed in their efforts to lead the country, and now seemingly have nothing to offer but predictions of doom and assignments of blame. They seem to have given up hope of being held in positive regard by the voters, so their only strategy is to try to get the Democrats to be held in even lower regard.
Stories like the one above don’t even try to engage with the Democratic agenda on the merits. Instead they’re all speculation (“federal slips of paper”), mind reading/wishful thinking (“Democrats in Washington trembling”), and ad hominem attacks (“The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether “).
That may appeal to the already convinced, but they don’t persuade anyone else.
Printing bogus money to spend on political graft and favoritism is the act of a despot, not a leader.
If Obama is a despot for favoring some kinds of government spending over others, every president has been a despot, and the label has lost all meaning. Name one example that sets Obama apart from his predecessors on this score.
I’ve had an epiphany… it IS Bushes fault!!!
Ken, I’ve made the exact same arguments with several conservative friends over the last few months. However, I wouldn’t lay all the blame on Bush, it is really the GOP as a whole’s fault — both the office holders and the electorate that put them there. Bush is just the best example of how poor the lot is. By electing mush heads who managed to say the right things in the weeks prior to an election, but abandoned all conservative principals after the election that is the root of the GOP problems. The GOP voters tolerated this for years. By fearing to yield any short term power to the Dems and accepting mediocre candidates only ensured the long term lock on power the Dems now enjoy.
As a longtime contributor to the GOP, I won’t give a dime to them now. My parents taught me not to reward failure and incompetence.
Now, if the GOP had to the b*lls to cut the eight House members who voted for Cap and Trade off at the knees and run new candidates against them I just might change my stance, but I don’t expect that to happen thus I’ll keep my money, thank you very much.
Will we be saved by California?
The arguments made by Kevin Hassett in that link don’t give me the warm fuzzies. After the astronomical cost and dismal failure of the so called stimulus bill (what exactly did it stimulate again?) I honestly don’t think the Dems really care if Health Care is paid for by worthless paper. I really don’t. They will do anything to seize and grow their power over the short term — even if it means following Obama over a cliff. Of course, it will eventually be their undoing, but they will drag this country through hell and back first before that happens. There is a good chance that by then much of the damage will be permanent.
They walk among us, and they vote.
“Hardly. At least 90% of the 2009 deficit is due to Bush policies and the financial crash/recession — click my name for the details.”
But what about the deficit in 2010? And the year after that? And the year after, and after that? It is deficits as the eyes can see on a scale that make Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush look like pikers.
If a person believes that intermittent wind power is the foundation for any kind of bubble-free economic growth, I have some Florida swamp land I can get that person a good deal on.
They walk among us, and they vote.
They even comment on blogs. And they don’t know they’re dead. At least brain dead.
You guys lay off Jim. He’s just following orders.
“Name one example that sets Obama apart from his predecessors on this score.”
Everything Jim. It’s the scale of it. Never has one man spent so much for so little. If you don’t understand trillions, have the math experts here explain it to you. We’ll be slaves to our national debt for the next 70 years.
70 years? You are being a tad optimistic there.
Hardly. At least 90% of the 2009 deficit is due to Bush policies and the financial crash/recession — click my name for the details.
Jim, the ARRA alone contributes more than 10%. And Obama helped worsen the recession with these idiotic policies.
If Obama is a despot for favoring some kinds of government spending over others, every president has been a despot, and the label has lost all meaning. Name one example that sets Obama apart from his predecessors on this score.
The takeover of the banks and the car companies. Cap and trade. Actually having a chance to implement universal health care. At best, you can claim he’s no worse than G. W. Bush which is damning with faint praise.
Nonsense. The Obama story (repeated ad nauseum for the last 2 1/2 years to anyone who’d listen): by investing in infrastructure, education and clean energy we position ourselves to rebound from the recession with stronger growth that is based on real productivity, not bubbles. By reforming health care we save money (keeping Medicare solvent), make the economy more efficient, and protect public health.
So when is he going to get around to doing this plan? Need you remind us again that most of the ARRA doesn’t take place in any reasonable timespan, that preserving union jobs are more important than building infrastructure, and implementing universal health care is more important than “reforming” health care (ie, cutting medicare/medicaid/Social Security benefits).
Never has one man spent so much for so little.
No. Would the deficit be picture be appreciably better if Mitt Romney was president? Or Mike Huckabee? Or John McCain? The answer is no. Obama inherited 90% of the deficit — the part that’s his is dwarfed by what Bush and Reagan did. And the part that’s his is going towards things like clean energy, medical research and infrastructure — things that lay a foundation for future growth. Bush spent trillions to give us a shaky democracy in Iraq (and an emboldened Iran) in place of a toothless dictator; that’s what I call spending a lot for less than nothing.
It’s the scale of it.
The scale of the recession is large; the scale of Obama’s discretionary spending is not. Obama’s proposals are not substantially larger than Bush’s Medicare drug plan, or Clinton’s domestic programs, even though they address larger problems.
If a person believes that intermittent wind power is the foundation for any kind of bubble-free economic growth, I have some Florida swamp land I can get that person a good deal on.
Tell that to the people building turbines. Unfortunately, many of them are in Denmark instead of the U.S.
But what about the deficit in 2010? And the year after that?
Obama’s 10 year deficit projection is better than what we’d have with a continuation of Bush policies. And it will be much better if health reform passes and puts the brakes on health care inflation.
Obama’s 10 year deficit projection is better than what we’d have with a continuation of Bush policies. And it will be much better if health reform passes and puts the brakes on health care inflation.
Sheesh Jim, you really are an Obamabot. Bush’s deficits were bad enough (they stank), but were nothing compared to Obama’s. About the only thing that will keep the deficit down is if Obama actually succeeds in cratering what is left of the economy and we turn into the corruption ridden, 3rd world, banana republic, cesspool that he seems to want to turn us into.
“Tell that to the people building turbines. Unfortunately, many of them are in Denmark instead of the U.S.”
It is so easy to engage in snarky retorts of that kind when engineering and environmental data doesn’t get in the way.
The people using wind turbines in Denmark have instead told me a thing or two with their data and real-world experience generating wind power on a large scale. If it were not for Denmark actually going ahead and installing a large amount of wind generation capacity, this would be another speculative discussion. Wind isn’t working in Denmark — their capacity factor is too low.
They generate a lot of wind power that they ship to Germany to satisfy whatever kind of Green Party (think California) stuff is going on, but they import power on account of wind variability. Their imported power is their backup power, where in the case of wind, the backup has to be 80% of the total power need.
The claim is that parts of the US have a steadier wind than Denmark. Perhaps. But the Danish capacity factor in practice is well below what they thought they were going to get.
John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, an Obama supporter, told an audience in Madison, WI, that “wind is essentially a natural gas play”, meaning that with wind power, the bulk of the electricity (like 80 percent) will be generated in gas turbines, with wind used to make the gas turbines, on average, somewhat more energy efficient. That wind is intermittent means that beyond a capacity factor of 20 percent, wind is not economic, meaning that the remaining 80 percent comes from fossil fuel.
But it gets worse. Do you build a straight cycle gas turbine plant at 50 percent efficiency and rely on supplying 80 percent from that, 20 percent from wind, to get an effective 60 percent efficiency from gas combustion? Or do you take the money used to build wind turbines and instead build a combined-cycle natural gas plant at 60 percent efficiency? Or do you raise electric rates substantially to do both, getting an effective 75 percent efficiency out of gas? You are still basing your global warming alleviation plan on a scarce fossil fuel — natural gas.
What is going to save Obama’s bacon is that engineers have recently figured out how to get natural gas out of domestic shale beds — has anyone looked at their gas bill lately? But the Green Revolution is going to be powered with non-renewable natural gas because Mr. Obama won’t go for nuclear, and the wind mills will mainly a visual display to go on the covers of glossy annual reports.
“By reforming health care we save money (keeping Medicare solvent), make the economy more efficient, and protect public health.”
One of the simplest means of reducing healthcare costs would be tort reform. Another would be a tax credit for people who purchase their own medical insurance when coverage isn’t provided by their employers.
Being a government program, Medicare is wasteful and rife with fraud. It will never be solvent.
danae – I am not sure what a tort is, but if I understand you correctly the argument here is that health care costs are inflated by unnecessary tests and procedures carried out entirely for the purpose of covering the doctor legally in case something goes wrong. Am I right?
Of course an incompetent doctor should be punished where it hurts – in the wallet. However, there is far too much incentive to treat an unfortunate outcome as being caused by incompetence. Ambulance-chasing lawyers are a real problem.
In the UK, up to about 15 years ago “no win no fee” agreements with lawyers were against the profession’s rules. One could be struck off for it. Then the Lord Chancellor, a lawyer himself, changed that rule – with the entirely foreseeable consequence of the cost of insurance for all sorts of things going through the roof and also the cancelling of many of my little country’s traditional events – because the insurance became unaffordable.
Shakespeare had it right, as he so often did, in Henry VI part II.
Obama inherited 90% of the deficit
Not true. As I noted earlier, the ARRA alone contains spending for this year (as well as the next three years) that is greater than 10% of the deficit.
As mentioned in Wikipedia:
$185 billion alone is a touch over 10% (assuming rather generously that Obama policies don’t decrease remaining tax revenue further for this fiscal year). Further, the links in Rand’s main article above contain examples of further spending and tax base reduction implemented by the Obama administration. Plus the estimate above is from the CBO. They likely are underestimating the fiscal impact of the bill.
With respect to tax base reduction, it’s worth remembering that the majority of tax revenue collected for this fiscal year comes after Obama assumed office. Even though personal revenue is mostly for 2008, it can be deferred for current conditions (eg, more people and businesses take tax deferments or bankruptcy). Further businesses, excise taxes, and many other taxes and fees are collected throughout the fiscal year (most of which takes place after Obama assumed office).
So it is reasonable to consider that Obama’s heavily negative impact on the US economy is in turn reducing tax revenue and increasing the deficit.
I still think people are giving into Jim’s argument when discussing the President. The fact is, Obama inherited a deficit from the Democratic Congress’ failed policies of the last 2 years.
Go look at the economy in 2006, when we were told the Republicans spent us into a mess. When RINO’s were voted out, rightfully so. We had unemployment below 5%. We had a Dow Industrial around 14,000 points. Deficit spending was starting to come back down after the 9-11/Afghanistan/Iraq jump.
Karl Hallowell:
Not true. As I noted earlier, the ARRA alone contains spending for this year (as well as the next three years) that is greater than 10% of the deficit.
First of all, thanks for trying to actually introduce facts to the discussion. Most of the posters in this thread seem to think that fiscal policy is a matter of impressions and emotions, rather than actual arithmetic.
Unfortunately, your statement above is not supported by the link you posted. The CBO estimate referred to by Wikipedia includes all of the ARRA, including $64.8B in tax cuts, such as the extension of the Alternative Minimum Tax fix. Click my name and scroll to Table 1 for the CBO estimate of fiscal 2009 spending; it totals $120B, or about 7% of the 2009 deficit.
The link I posted earlier refers to two separate, independent analyses of Obama’s budgets, one over three years and one over 10 years. One concludes that Obama’s policies are an insignificant part of the deficit outlook, the other that Obama’s policies actually improve the deficit picture. Is anyone going to engage with those facts?
Not to be obtuse, but I count tax revenue reductions too. Also we’re ignoring that Obama wasn’t forced to keep the entirety of the Bush spending in place. There’s no indication that Obama has tried to recover any of this budget.
The link I posted earlier refers to two separate, independent analyses of Obama’s budgets, one over three years and one over 10 years. One concludes that Obama’s policies are an insignificant part of the deficit outlook, the other that Obama’s policies actually improve the deficit picture. Is anyone going to engage with those facts?
I don’t buy either one. The study over three years simply is wrong just in light of the ARRA boost. Dropping the Bush tax breaks probably won’t cover the increased spending (people are remarkably adept at exploiting tax loopholes that are about to go away). And neither study takes into account the damage Obama is doing to the economy and tax revenue over those time frames.
I also wonder how much spending will increase over the next couple of years. Obama is remarkably ineffective at dealing with a same-party Congress. Both ARRA and the cap and trade bills had way too many compromises and pork. There’s plenty of time for spending to balloon before January 2011 (when a new Congress steps in).
Not to be obtuse, but I count tax revenue reductions too.
Fine, but your words were: “… ARRA alone contains spending….” If you’re talking about more than spending, say so.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Obama for the ATM fix — it has been part of every budget for years, and would be part of the 2009 budget no matter who was president.
There’s no indication that Obama has tried to recover any of this budget.
Yes, he has. See for example his proposal for reforming student loans.
I don’t buy either one.
Ah, the ever-popular “argument from personal incredulity.” They are professional, independent assessments. Can you point to any alternative analyses with similar credibility?
“Obama is bankrupting the country” is like “Al Gore said he invented the Internet” or “Sarah Palin said she can see Russia from her house.” A lot of people repeat it, but that doesn’t make it true.
There can be several hundred percent blame for the deficit because any spending cut in any part of the budget, asset sales or revenue increase can reduce the deficit. In particular, Bush and Obama both can be responsible for 1000% of the deficit amount for the actual spending and revenue contributing to the deficit if one proposed and the other signed the exact same budget which is 9.1% more spending than revenue.
I personally am in debt about 5 times my income to live in a house with a mortgage. We can regard a US federal debt of 5x tax revenue as irresponsible spending, but not yet a threat to the future. At a real rate of interest of 5%, that means debt service costs are less than a quarter of federal receipts. For a person, about.com says “most lenders will tell you 36% or less is healthy.” With the government’s credit rating, it can probably go higher and not alarm the lenders too much.
Our kids will inherit an economy with twice the per capita GDP as the one we had so they’ll earn an average of $90k/year in today’s dollars in 2040. Their federal debt service costs per $1 trillion that is rolled over to their generation will be $125 dollars per person per year.