Flutterby™! : Hey, small spender!

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Hey, small spender!

2012-07-19 23:09:05.525012+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments

[ related topics: moron ]

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#Comment Re: made: 2012-07-20 07:24:55.115028+00 by: TheSHAD0W [edit history]

The first "stimulus", given to the companies that were "too big to fail", definitely falls on Bush and the Republicans. The rest, though, is Obama. A bunch of spending which was passed during Bush's reign, not signed by him, but signed by Obama when he entered office, is Obama's responsibility.

#Comment Re: made: 2012-07-20 12:18:14.876617+00 by: DaveP

There's also the small matter of most of the cost of ObamaCare not having kicked in yet. If you're going to bill the first stimulus to Bush, you've gotta bill ObamaCare to Obama.

But the fact that presidents of both parties have been spendthrifts shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. Politicians have realized that they can buy our votes with our own money. What interests me is why that started working better. Are we not paying attention? Is it not getting press coverage? Is it that we're borrowing more, so that we don't feel the bite in our taxes immediately? I'm not sure about that,

If you look at this chart of US Debt you'll see that after every war, the US Debt trended back toward zero. And usually made it to zero until the introduction of the Income Tax. But since then, we're always been a debtor nation.

More worrying after the big wars, the debt would still trend downwards, until the oil crisis in the 70s, then the defense buildup in 1980. There was a nice decrease in debt under Clinton, and Bush actually held the line reasonably well until the first stimulus, but the chart doesn't show anyone really being serious about paying off the debt since the mid-70s.