http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20030714_448.html
OUCH! and I thought my personal books were in bad shape

With this type of wonderful spending... it's no wonder we are in the red....

No wonder the dems wanna raise your taxes... they need more money on this kinda stuff...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,91850,00.html

With all this pork, you'd think sen byrd sponsored it.

Yeah lets cut this out then we only have to come up with 2.9 billon more for one months folly in Bagdad

Recall anyone?

"Bring 'em on."

"Darn good."

Another link.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...-2003Jul14.html

Blame the CIA.

Yes, yes, yes, dear Phil, we know that you offered to do the sex study for free during your Vegas OutSports Convention, but the $1.5 mil that we'd save won't go far enough to address the $450 billion deficit...

gj, your perspective is all wrong. of course this 1.5 mill is a spit in the ocean when you compare it to our current record deficit.

but look at it this way: at our current rate of spending (i say current, because even rummy is starting to say maybe more troops are needed, so the spending rate will increase -- again), this waste of 1.5 mill, which could save lives, could fund our president's iraqi ego trip for 16 minutes and 12 seconds!

i got your back, pf.

It's really not a matter of subtracting one little number from a bigger number, it's just the principle of the matter - this sex thing is a stupid way to spend taxpayer dollars. Republicans are just as bad about this crap as Dems - even the best people are going to be corrupted by the opportunity to spend other people's money with little or no accountability. That's why government should be as small and limited as possible, because it is run by people and people, bless their hearts, suck donkey balls.

For what it's worthk, I suspect most Iraqis would disagree with whoever's assertion that overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a folly. But hey, what do we care? We're free, so f&$% them.

Whenever government spending comes up, you can always find examples that don't seem to make sense, like the sex studies (and BTW, don't judge research by it's title or subject matter - it is typically hard to judge the value of research based on superficial information alone). The concern I have is the structural nature of these deficits.

In any recession, government outlays should increase, and the budget is likely to move into deficit. But any deficit adds to the debt, and reduces the future flexibility of the federal budget, because of the added interest payments that must be made each year. By choosing to go the tax cut route, a dubious way to stimulate the economy anyway, the Bush Administration has permanently (or at least for a long time) reduced the revenue the government can generate. If the Administration had chosen instead temporary fiscal stimuli (like extending unemployment benefits for more of the unemployed or helping bail out the states for a year or two) we would not face future deficits as high.

thersis, that was a very tongue-in-cheek nod to Phil's wild weekend in Vegas with CITT and MSUBobcat. My "real" perspective on this is somewhere between William's and CPTDoom's points of view...

For what it's worth, the name of this thread really got my spirits up. I was hoping for some sort of new opportunity to persecute liberals/communists, but alas, just more Bush-bashing. I guess I'll just have to keep on not buying Dixie Chicks CDs.

You can spend your Dixic Chicks money at Urban Outfitters. (Or just send directly to Rick "man on dog" Santorum)

William1865, I called Iraq a folly and stand by that, Maybe I am just unwilling to agree that the cost in US lives was worth the "Freeing Iraq"..
On to this topic, What is worse is what is left out of this, The coming cost of retiring baby boomers,the deficits many states have( some from un funded federal mandates) and the no job growth recovery. I would be just as mad if it was Gore, or Bush

You know WM, always the voice of REASON. It's always bushies fault. According to the commies, i mean libs... you'd think that Clinton paid off any sort of natl debt all together... when, in fact, he left the country with more debt than when his 8 years started.

The fact remains that during the Ray-Gun era, reducing taxes made the economy strong, but well.. according to them... that never happened.

I am actually surprised the economy is as good as it is. If you look at the rest of the world, we are doing very well. That in and of itself puts a ton of pressure on our economy to turn the world around.

W came into office with a shit hole economy. The internet wizzard didnt help matters with his crazy lawsuits to "count every vote".. well only in the democratic areas where they are too dumb or too old to read the ballot. Then 9/11. then 2 wars that needed to happen.

The point is, you cant really bitch about a deficit... and then say some STUPID study that costs millions... is ok. If the gov't ever got rid of this type of pork, we'd all be better off. The war on terror is not the problem. Tax cuts are not the problem... it's 10,000 of these stupid spending issues that are causing the problem.

Look at Calif, they've never seen a social program they didnt like. They refuse to give up on some of them when times are tough. They must have 10 different taxing authorities in that state, why not one? Then they turn around and want federal money to bail them out? bubkus.

When i'm king of the world, these things will not happen.

And what a wonderful world it will be...

And PF thinks to himself.... what...a .. wonderful......wooooooooorld......yeahhhhhhhh...

Uhhh...remember what happened to that DiCaprio guy after he proclaimed himself King of the World... eek!

Yeah, what a world that would be.
"OK everyone - back in the closet....no wait,
everyone who is rich step forward, OK, heres your tax cut.....carry on."

Raze, only you go back in the closet... the one with double locks... in there, you cant hurt anyone.

Yeah, we got that damn Celine Dion song every half-hour for a year!
eek! wink

but the question is--whose tongue was in whose cheek

eek!

When i'm king, that frenchie goes right back to France.... not canada.

If you're insinuating... eek! ack! ptooie! Boys have cooties! wink

Aw, what fun is that? Is this politics or paintball? Stop making sense! wink

Wild weekend in Vega$?? We want pictures!!!

Um, I don't know where you get that figure, but seeing as we had 4 years (including 2001) of surpluses at the end of Clinton's term, and there was concern we would pay down too much of the debt, I don't think we could have had MORE debt when Clinton left office than when he started. Even if we did (and that would be the residual debt from 12 years of deficit spending, in good times and bad, during Reagan and Bush) we certainly had less debt than was predicted based on the discredited economic policies of our 40th and 41st Presidents.

Actually, in my economic training we learned the tax cuts didn't do jack sh*t - it was the spending that Congress insisted on maintaining that stimulated the economy and caused the boom of the late 80s - that an the draconian monetary policy that Reagan promoted in the early 80s - the kind that produced the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Although W. clearly did enter office at the trough of a business cycle, he certainly has not made matters better. As for 9/11, that was a limited shock that could not have accounted for a 1/3 increase in the unemployment rate over 2 years. The only economic areas that were severely affected were DC, NYC and the airlines. And even some airlines are still making money.

As for "pork" spending - it is always interesting to hear commentators talk about how if we just stopped all this spending we would be fine - except there is no one to pick it up if the government does not do it. There were a lot of weird experiments during the 70s and 80s "war on cancer" - they didn't do anything to help with cancer treatment, because they were based on the idea that cancer was a virus. However, they ended up being a jump-start to the AIDS research when that disease came along.

Edited in an attempt to fix quotes

[ July 15, 2003, 01:14 PM: Message edited by: CPT_Doom ]

ITS ok the White House stated they will cut this in half by 06, because the economy will be stronger then...

They teach wonderful classes at the University of Havana.

Well increased spending that created the massive deficit.... DANG NABBIT, see what happens when you put the dems in control of the house and senate... Good thing Ray-Gun was there to use a little of the pork on some natl security and brought down the USSR while he was at it. Now, just like Ray-Gun, W's gotta build up what bubba destroyed, our natl defense.

With Chimp back in Crawford cutting down weeds in '06 the economy should be better.

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/reuters20030715_645.html

Yahoo! White House acknowledges ballooning deficits

[ July 15, 2003, 10:39 PM: Message edited by: fantomas ]

Actually it was Williams College, and the professor was a Republican - she was even the wife of a stockbroker!

The point she and the textbook were making is that although the tax cuts did eventually stimulate the economy, they only did so because the Congress (and both Reps and Dems were involved) refused to cut spending to the levels requested by Reagan- while he was also increasing defense spending.

It was classic Keynsian economics, and the "supply-side" theory was not the cause of the resulting boom. Under Keynes, during a recession the government should pump $$ into the economy - the government did this in three ways 1) they reduced their own revenue (putting $$ into the hands of consumers) 2) they kept pre-tax cut spending at nearly the same level (ensuring government outlays - and the government is our largest consumer) and 3) they increased spending in other areas (whether the $400 hammers were worth it or not, the need for those hammers created jobs).

"Supply-side" economics taught that by reducing wage taxes workers would work more because they were getting more of each additional dollar in income. The reason that did not affect the economy is that most workers don't set their own hours.

We must also remember that when both Kennedy and Reagan cut taxes to stimulate the economy, the marginal tax rates were much higher (in Kennedy's time the highest rate was about 2 - 2.5 times what our current highest rate is) and the cuts much larger than the ones the Bush Administration wants.