Regarding the letter to the editor from Rod Livdahl ("Conservatives need to remove the blinders"): Since you can't find a liberal to explain why the Democratically controlled House and Senate failed to pass a budget last year prior to the mid-term elections, I would like to explain to the totally blind why they didn't. The liberal policies of the first two years of (as you pointed out) "The first black president" had been a total failure that increased our deficit at a rate never before seen in the history of our republic. Your courageous liberal buddies punted their responsibility to the new Congress which they knew would be loaded with new Republicans who were elected to try and change the catastrophic course liberals had put us on in just two long years. They had all the votes they needed and a more than willing president to sign any budget they sent to him. So why not get it done?
Your leaders (I use the term loosely) knew they couldn't make the tough decisions that would get things headed in the right direction, so as usual they decided to play politics and a crude game of chicken. Let the Republicans face the music and we will just sit back and refuse to act until the last minute and with the liberal press on our side we will make it look like the Republicans are the bad guys. You can't hide the truth forever because eventually it will uncover itself even when liberals try and bury it under all your self generated baloney.
Oh, and by way, presidents can't start wars without Congress; only Obama can get us in a conflict (Libya) without conferring with Congress. Liberals in Congress don't have a clue as to what it takes to run a business and create jobs. The Democratic leadership is made up of lawyers; the Republican leadership is made up of business people. Enough said! Stop passing the buck, and for once step up to plate and do what is right. Seventy percent of Americans want us to cut spending and get our house in order.
DC Porter, Chandler
Rodini posted at 8:50 am on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
What a JOKE....how quickly they forget that almost the entire deficit we have currently was run up by Reagan, George and Daddy Bush.
And it was Clinton, a despicable, good for nothing, down right rotten to the core "Liberal" who raised taxes, balanced the budget and reduced the deficit.
THESE ARE FACTS FOLKS!!!
Do these people ever actually check the facts before they sit down in front of their computers and begin typing such nonsense??
Check out these words from Bruce Bartlett, former policy advisor to Daddy Bush and the great Reagan himself: "The Bush tax cuts REDUCED revenues by $2.9 trillion between 2001 and 2011 and if you add in the interest costs, those tax cuts actually cost us $3.2 trillion and that's 27% of the fiscal deterioration since 2001.
And he notes that economic growth averaged less than 2% throughout the Bush presidency compared to over 4% throughout the Clinton presidency, after the top tax rate was raised back up to 39.6%.
These comments are from A CONSERVATIVE...one who's willing to tell Americans the TRUTH....for a change!
So please pay attention Republicans, and Please...check the facts before you make yourselves look like ......., ok?
Need more facts....check out the charts and graphs at the Congressional Budget Office....they are non-partisan and truthful....not crazy double speak!
Dale Whiting posted at 10:54 am on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
DC,
May I make a slight correction to your last sentence? "Seventy percent of Americans want us to cut spending, [reform the tax code,] and get our house in order."
Where the current house leadership calls for "balance," i.e. a balanced budget ammendment, the administration, i.e. Barack Obama, calls for a balance of spending cuts and revenue increases, increases coming from elimination of major and senseless, out dated tax subsides and loop holes, such as the subsidy to raise corn, not taxing the use of corporate jets, and allow crude oil exploration to go virtually untaxed. Elimination of these loop holes and subsidies can be balanced by tax rate decreases.
But if congress will not deal, and in not dealing lead to Obama's re-election, we can all expect him to veto any move to continue the Bush 43 era of tax decreases. After all, where are the jobs created by those cuts? The Bush era jobs I am most familiar with are defense contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seems like many of those contracts were awarded to Cheney's old company, Haliburton. Where it costs us $1,000,000 to support each and every one of those 100,000 uniformed soldiers in Afghanistan, getting out of there seems to make economic sense.
Liberals and Conservatives should stop passing the buck! They should adopt balanced approaches to reduce spending, increase revenues and get out of conflicts which have long since stopped making [if ever made] sense.
Accuracy posted at 11:05 am on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
President Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that his budget would cut the deficit by half by the end of his term. “What a JOKE....”
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, a total of $3.8 trillion in deficit spending in less than three years has been passed by Barack Obama and Congressional leaders.
For the third consecutive fiscal year, the federal government’s deficit spending has topped the $1 trillion mark. And to continue this, Obama signed the measure passed the senate which raises the 14.3 trillion dollar debt by 2.4 trillion dollars through 2012.
What’s truly amazing is that it took this long for somebody to finally blow the whistle on this nonsense. This is their mess and America needs to make them clean it up.
As DC Porter has stated in the Letter: “Liberals should stop passing (and spending) the buck”.
NothingButTheTruth posted at 11:26 am on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
Yup, once again you all want to blame Bush for all this countries ills.
The truth is that President Bush’s deficits were the product of spending, not tax cuts. In fact, Mr. Obummer could learn an important lesson for his own economic plan by studying President Bush’s two very different attempts at tax-cutting.
As the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore illuminates in his 2008 book “The End of Prosperity” President Bush’s 2001 tax cuts failed to revive an economy still staggering from the bursting of the dot-com bubble. President Bush’s strategy had been to adopt a demand-side, Keynesian stimulus, hoping that putting a few extra dollars in Americans’ pockets would jump-start the economy through increased consumption. This approach faltered, not just because Americans opted to save their rebates, but because it neglected the importance of business investment to overall growth. Predictably, the economy lagged and government revenues stagnated. What the United States needed then (and needs now) was to stimulate investment, not consumption.
In 2003, President Bush cut the dividend and capital gains rates to 15 percent each, and the economy responded. In two years, stocks rose 20 percent. In three years, $15 trillion of new wealth was created. The U.S. economy added 8 million new jobs from mid-2003 to early 2007, and the median household increased its wealth by $20,000 in real terms.
But the real jolt for tax-cutting opponents was that the 03 Bush tax cuts also generated a MASSIVE INCREASE in federal tax receipts. From 2004 to 2007, federal tax revenues increased by $785 billion, the largest four-year increase in American history. According to the Treasury Department, individual and corporate income tax receipts were up 40 percent in the three years following the Bush tax cuts. And (bonus) the rich paid an even higher percentage of the total tax burden than they had at any time in at least the previous 40 years. This was news to the New York Times, whose astonished editorial board could only describe the gains as a “surprise windfall.”
Unfortunately, Mr. Bush allowed Congress to spend away those additional tax revenues. The fact is that the increase in tax revenues that flowed from the ‘03 tax cuts could have paid for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and then some but for rampant discretionary domestic spending.
Ironically, Mr. Obummer is in danger of repeating Mr. Bush’s early economic missteps, albeit on a grander scale. Like President Bush in 2001, Mr. Obummer based much of his ill-fated stimulus package on tax rebates but compounded this error by sending checks to Americans with no tax liability and by adding in costly government make-work projects. He also increased discretionary spending in his first year in office faster than President Bush, all the while proposing a trillion-dollar health care plan and a financially ruinous cap-and-trade bill. He is now calling for a “jobs bill,” which is the White House’s new lingo for a second Keynesian-style stimulus (or third, counting President Bush’s 2008 stimulus), pushing the 2010 deficit to an all-time record level.
Worse still, Mr. Obummer's $3.8 trillion budget for 2011 would allow the Bush tax cuts to expire, imposing new prosperity-killing taxes on businesses, investors and individuals. The president would do better to follow his predecessor and embrace the winning strategy of supply-side tax cuts. He even might find that Americans would welcome this new story line. After all, liberal economic fairy tales are growing tiresome.
The democrats will always favor out of control tax and spend and government growth gone wild. In 2012 we need to throw these democrats out of office and put in place a government that knows how wealth is really created instead of this current mess that thinks wealth comes from a printing press where you just print more money as you need it.
Rodini posted at 1:23 pm on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
Please check facts before writing this utter nonsense folks!
The CBO notes that the Bush tax cuts are responsible for 25% of the current deficit...AND...the unfunded Medicare Part D plan the Republicans passed that forbids the government from negotiating for lower prices added another 25%.
That's 50% of our deficit! And the never-ending Iraq/Afghanistan wars added another 25%.
Now then. getting back to the original racist "letter to the editor" at the top.
The Democrats had only a 56-41 Senate edge in 2009
So all the Republicans had to do was filibuster or threaten to do so and the Dems were stymied. They could not put together a filibuster proof 60 vote supermajority to overcome a filibuster, since the Republicans did such a ggod job of remaining united against virtually everything Obama did. And nothing has changed since!
As to his goofy statement about needing business people in Congress...well guess what. Of the 94 new (mostly Tea Party types) representatives elected in 2010, almost half (41) were attorneys...LOL Guess we should toss them back, right?
And please explain this Mr. D.C. Porter: How is it that Bill Clinton, a lawyer managed to raise taxes, raise revenues, balance the budget and see 22 million new jobs created during his 8 yr term.
While George Bush, a businessman cut taxes, wiped out the balanced budget, reduced revenues, increased the defict, and watched as 50,000 factories closed, millions of American jobs were sent overseas, and added only one million government payroll jobs???? DAH?
Pretty hard to explain that one isn't it? And...by the way, it was the disaster inherited by Obama from President Bush that put us on the disastrous course you mention!!
By the way, these are all documented facts my friends! Be happy to see you document ANYTHING you referred to in your letter D.C....PLEASE?
Rodini posted at 1:42 pm on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
Mr. Nthing but the Truth...check out the federal governments revenue information please at http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/downchart_gr.php?year=1950_2015&view=1&expand=&units=p&log=linear&fy=fy12&chart=10-total&bar=0&stack=1&size=l&title=&state=US&color=c&local=s
You'll see the actual revenue from income taxes from 1993 to 2000 under Cinton totally eclipsed your so-called great tax revenue increase in the mid 2000's.
Business revenues spiked from 2005-2008 due to the extreme inflationary increases in housing prices through that period, which resulted in many people spending beyond their means with borrowed funds.
Total direct revenue only got back up to the same high point at the end of the Clinton presidency....before dropping like a rock to a level not seen since 1960.
Please...once again.... use government facts and figures...not nonsense supplied by questionable or partisan sources...PLEASE?
Accuracy posted at 3:28 pm on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
Rodini keeps on posting: "Please check facts before writing this utter nonsense folks!"
Rodini's criticism sound just like those from the "Liberal Democratic Underground" articles.
Totally ignoring the FACT that President Obama refused to accept the usual and reasonable six- or seven-month time frame for the debt ceiling measure, was knowing that he would surely lose the next election if that happens.
Arizona Willie posted at 3:39 pm on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
DC and other rabid right wingers are living in an alternate universe.
The debt the conservative Presidents ran up is the fault of Democrats.
America is headed down the tubes folks. With tea party / no taxers in power the country we have all known is about to disappear.
Cerulean posted at 6:12 pm on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
Libya recently reopened an embassy in Washington under the control of a Transitional National Council. This gives Libya access to its own money to support the ongoing conflict that the UN is involved in.
The debt limit was raised under Bush, several times, which increased revenue – yes. The problem is that he also cut taxes and put the money in the hands of the wealthy. Now, Republicans are telling the middle class that we have to pay for all the debt with cuts to Medicare and other austerity measures.
onerebel posted at 9:37 pm on Thu, Aug 11, 2011.
You Liberals really need to stop getting your facts from MSNBS, last night they reported as a fact that Obama truly is God. It is a FACT that Obama has put us farther in debt then even as you call him the evil George Bush, it's also a fact the Democrats would not put a budget down on paper in the years they had total control, Why? Because there would be no way to hide their tax and spend Socialist agenda and THEY know it. Also why if the Liberals are the fiscally reasonable one's would they fight so hard against an amendment that would require the Government to be fiscally responsible ? I have not talked to one person including Democrats that were against it, but then again the Democrats I know are not Socialist . The only logical explanation is because they have no intention of stopping their spending to fulfill their wish list !
Rodini posted at 10:46 am on Sat, Aug 13, 2011.
Read this please:
In a measured tone, the NYT article effectively makes clear that when it comes to economic policy, Republicans plainly have no idea what they’re talking about.
The boasts of Congressional Republicans about their cost-cutting victories are ringing hollow to some well-known economists, financial analysts and corporate leaders, including some Republicans, who are expressing increasing alarm over Washington’s new austerity and antitax orthodoxy.
Their critiques have grown sharper since last week, when President Obama signed his deficit reduction deal with Republicans and, a few days later, when Standard & Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the United States.
But even before that, macroeconomists and private sector forecasters were warning that the direction in which the new House Republican majority had pushed the White House and Congress this year — for immediate spending cuts, no further stimulus measures and no tax increases, ever — was wrong for addressing the nation’s two main ills, a weak economy now and projections of unsustainably high federal debt in coming years.
Instead, these critics say, Washington should be focusing on stimulating the economy in the near term to induce people to spend money and create jobs, while settling on a long-term plan for spending cuts and tax increases to take effect only after the economy recovers.
Republicans respond to all of this by … not caring at all. Some may want a weaker economy on purpose, some are too blinded by ideology to consider objective information, some aren’t terribly bright, and some, as David Brooks recently noted, simply “do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.”
But the bottom line remains the same: nearly everyone who understands economic policy at any level is convinced Republicans — in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail — are spewing gibberish. And in this case, “nearly everyone” includes veterans of the Reagan and Bush administrations, making opposition to right-wing Tea Party nonsense bipartisan.
Also note the scope of the concerns. Current GOP officials aren’t just wrong about stimulus, the timing of budget cuts, taxes, debt reduction, or monetary policy — they’re wrong about all of them at the same time.
In fairness, the article does note one economist — Stanford’s John Taylor — who’s willing to defend the Republican line (as he always does, regardless of merit). But to appreciate the credibility of the GOP’s go-to economist, swing by Krugman’s blog and type Taylor’s name into the search engine.
Regardless, it’s an important article about the nation’s most pressing crisis. Take the time to read it, save it, and send it around.
By Steve Benen
NothingButTheTruth posted at 6:05 pm on Sun, Aug 14, 2011.
The problem you all seem unwilling or unable to face is that the mess isn't any one parties fault, or I should say that we really only have one party, and we weren't invited. The deficit you say was created by republicans has been skyrocketing even faster under Obummer, and yet you want to try to blame Bush for what Obummer has done? Time to get over the blame game and start listening to the Tea Party. The 5% that pays all the tax doesn't need to be taxed more. What we need is a government that is willing to live within it's means. Something we haven't seen in a very long time.
Rodentini says "And it was Clinton, a despicable, good for nothing, down right rotten to the core "Liberal" who raised taxes, balanced the budget and reduced the deficit." I remember how the republicans retook the congress after 2 years of Clinton, and under Gingrich and the new republicans forced Clinton to make the cuts that balanced the budget. Get your facts straight before you spout nonsense rodent.