The problem I see is that they do not include the debt owed to federal entities in the debate. These are things such as Social Security, which were introduced by Democrat's.

Sure you can say that the War is increasing the national debt, but so are the many federal entities introduced by the Democrat's.

This is by far my most favorite article:
The Impact of Social Security on the National Debt

I believe that in order to save Social Security, we're going to HAVE to raise the retirement age to at least 70. One of the reasons it's such a huge drain to the economy is that, when it began, people were not living as long as today. It was never designed to provide for retirees for 15-30 years. The system just can't handle that.

You are measuring the dollar value of the national debt. This number is meaningless. The national debt is properly measured as a percentage of the GDP. Let me reference some of my previous posts in this thread, where I had discussed this:

http://www.defendingthetruth.com/bud...html#post69496 (The Clinton / Bush Recession)
http://www.defendingthetruth.com/bud...html#post69594 (The Clinton / Bush Recession)

If nothing else, look at the graph in that second link. It will answer the questions you posed.

As I stated in my original post, the terrorist attack on 9/11 was part of the cause of the recession. I do not mind fighting a war to prevent that attack from happening again. However, the war in Iraq was not related to 9/11 and was a bad decision, especially considering that we were debatably still in Afghanistan. Furthermore, the war is not the only place Bush increased spending. Where are his spending cuts? He left that to Clinton, I guess.

Why is this number meaningless?? Is it meaningless because Democrats only look good when you look at the numbers measured as a percentage of GDP?

I always hear about the national debt clock that's always rising, but when I talk about the national debt which rose every year during the Clinton Administration, it's now a completely different story??

Democrat presidents have traditionally underfunded the military. Roosevelt, Carter, and Clinton all allowed the military to become drastically depleated. Roosevelt by necessity built up the military (WWII). President Reagan and President George W. Bush needed to spend a lot of money to bring our military up to necessary levels to do their job.

And now that our military is built up once again, it looks like no countries have wanted to *uck with us on American soil.

That's not what I said.
That's not what the articles I quoted said.
In fact, if you actually READ what was being said, you'd see that Reagan WAS getting credit for "hastening" the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But he did not CAUSE the collapse.
And the SCALE by which he "hastened" the collapse is seen on the scale of months.
Not CAUSING the collapse, but "hastening" the collapse by months.
Got it?


And the CONTEXT of these statements is where???
Were they talking about fearing Reagan's finger on the button?
Or were they actually talking about how his policies would lead to the Soviet Union's FINANCIAL down-fall?
Funny how no mention of economics is present in your quotes...


History is written by the victors.
Plain and simple.


I NEVER EVEN MENTIONED half the things you're babbling on about.
Yet somehow I am "excusing their ignorance"...

When you rejoin reality and want to discuss what I ACTUALLy said, let me know...



Yeah. That's OBVIOUSLY what I was saying...
NOT!

Just out of curiousity.
Is THIS the segment of the Keynesian model that Republicans use???

Keynes and redistribution
Keynesians and redistributionists tend to associate with each other. Keynes, in the twenties, wrote about a hydro-electric project. In his opinion it would have been better if the rewards of the project had gone to the worker-builders rather than to the investers who had financed the project.[citation needed]

Keynesians believe that fiscal policy should be directed towards the lower-income segment of the population, because that segment is more likely to spend the money, contributing to demand, than to save it. Keynesians also tend to go further than Keynes himself, and to believe that all savings is excessive savings.

Keynesian economics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Yeah. And that war thing?
TOTALLY not an issue for the last election at all. Everybody is completely behind the president on that.
People were FIRING the "conservatives" because they were too "liberal", and then putting the democrats, typically "liberal", in place instead...
< end sarcasm >


And how many of the republicans who weren't shown the door support Bush in his Iraq policy?
How many of the republicans who were shown the door don't support Bush on Iraq?

And do you have any substantiation for YOUR claim?


Cause that's OBVIOUSLY what will happen if you put the democrats in power instead...

Any corporate business which would have tried to do what our federal government did with Social Security would find their butts in jail with a huge public outcry.

But neither party does anything about the situation, continues on with this GROSS accounting %@#$, and we keep re-electing them.

Perhaps they could start being honest? Eliminate the "Social Security" category from the paycheck tax accounting sheet, and just lump it in with "Federal Taxes"? And then pass new legislation which would be entitled "The REAL Social Security"??
Yeah. Like that'd happen...

Isn't it about time we gave our Congress members another pay-raise?
Or does that just happen automatically these days? At least just for Congress. The working stiff obviously has to fend for himself...

< gets off soap-box >


@#%@#$@!!!

< mutters to self: "I will not agree with that @#%. I will not agree with that @#%." >

I think that's way too presumptuous. Fiscal responsibility is fiscal responsibility; the military was just one means Clinton used to help balance the budget. If the Cold War still existed, he most likely would have found other means to help cut the debt. Other presidencies in the past have experienced an increase in military funding while at the same time decreasing the national debt as a percentage of the GDP, and sometimes at lower levels than Clinton did; specifically during the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

It's not that it's meaningless, it's just that it's meaningless without being superimposed over the GDP. When people link to the national debt clock, it's more significant now because it's large when compared with the GDP. But when Clinton was in office, the GDP was growing faster than the national debt, so placing the dollar value by itself really didn't tell you how we were doing as a country on the debt. Yet now, under the Bush administration, the debt is growing faster than the GDP.

This is why the debt is more accurately read as the percentage of the GDP. Otherwise, just the number alone will tell you as much about the debt as the number of the GDP alone. Which would be nothing in terms of determining whether we are 'doing good' or 'doing bad'.

The quote means nothing. The white house today thinks that Osama bin Laden and his views are disturbing and 'boarder on hysteria'. The White House and all of America also think of him as a threat, perhaps significatly more than the Kremlin saw Reagan. But that doesn't mean the United States is going to collapse because of it. If anything, Bin Laden has galvanized us and made us stronger. Likewise, merely 'standing up' to our enemies and calling them evil does absolutely nothing. Reagan might have looked good standing up there calling the USSR the evil empire and telling Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall', but it did nothing to further the collapse of the USSR.

Bush on many occasions called Iran and North Korea evil, and in the 'axis of evil', and look where it got us: two states poised on standing up to us, and one of them is setting off nuclear bombs and launching rockets in our general direction. It's too naive to think rhetoric alone collapses Empires. One of the most brave and defiant oppositions to an enemy on rhetoric and figurative opposition alone, that is Castro's Cuba, didn't get them anywhere, let alone causing the collapse of the United States.

As I had explained in my previous posts, it is meaningless because of inflation. Using raw dollar numbers, the debt may never go down, but the ultimate value of the debt is still reduced because dollars aren't worth as much as they used to be.

The national debt did not rise under Clinton. Only the number of dollars rose. The actual value of the debt decreased. If you want to know the difference between Clinton's spending habits and Republican spending habits, simply look at the graph I provided.

Or, if you still don't like that, I took the numbers you provided and roughly calculated the percentage increase of the debt each year. Here are the results:

7.2 - 2006
7.4 - 2005
8.9 - 2004
8.9 - 2003
7.3 - 2002
2.3 - 2001

0.3 - 2000
2.4 - 1999
2.1 - 1998
3.6 - 1997
5.0 - 1996
6.0 - 1995
6.4 - 1994
8.5 - 1993
10.9 - 1992

13.4 - 1991
13.2 - 1990
9.8 - 1989
10.7 - 1988

I hope this makes things clear.