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Where Did Our Debt Come From?

pbrauer

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A. Democrats?
B. Moderate Republicans?
C. Right Wing Republicans?

Hint:
Green => Reductions in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt (as measured by the debt to GDP ratio)
Red => Increases in the burden of Gr. Fed. Debt <<
SpinneyGraf.png


Where Did Our Debt Come From? - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic
 
________________________________________________

Obama
2009-10
....... +25.12% .......+18.8%
________________________________________________

Obama
2009-12*
....... +42.26% .......+10.6%
*Current projected
________________________________________________


Where Did Our Debt Come From?

A. Democrats?
B. Moderate Republicans?
C. Right Wing Republicans?
D. Obama

Sorry, you lose the partisan game. Obama is on course to do in 4 years what took the Repubs 20.
 
is there a *note global economic collapse* asterisk you have?

weird how people forget that, as if 'guilt' over debt applied unconditionally...
and as if it made the 'other side' more representative or less guilty
 
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Blame is more important than solutions to the majority of people, thats the real scary part

Just ask the President. How many times has he blamed Dubbya, instead of manning up and taking on the challenge himself? Not sure any of us can actually count that high...
 
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________________________________________________

Obama
2009-10
....... +25.12% .......+18.8%
________________________________________________

Obama
2009-12*
....... +42.26% .......+10.6%
*Current projected
________________________________________________


Where Did Our Debt Come From?

A. Democrats?
B. Moderate Republicans?
C. Right Wing Republicans?
D. Obama

Sorry, you lose the partisan game. Obama is on course to do in 4 years what took the Repubs 20.

Sorry, you are also incorrect. The correct answer is, at this time, C & D.
 
I was hoping that this would be a discussion of what the money was spent on, rather than blaming a political party.

Fail.
 
Blame is more important than solutions to the majority of people, thats the real scary part

Just ask the President. How many times has he blamed Dubbya, instead of manning up and taking on the challenge himself? Not sure any of us can actually count that high...

Thank you for a shining example of what I'm talking about.
 
I was hoping that this would be a discussion of what the money was spent on, rather than blaming a political party.

Fail.

How DARE people talk about things other than I think they should talk about!

:D
 
I find this blame game completely counter-productive to finding solutions for what absolutely needs to be done in the fairly immediate future to rescue your country from financial crisis.

A good analogy is a ship that is taking on water while in the middle of the open ocean. Some people on the ship will start bailing out water immediately and try to repair the source of the leak; others will pretend that the water is not a big deal and keep going forward with the journey; others will prepare to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble and thus avoid the problem altogether; others still will stand on deck while the water is rising to their knees, continuing to accuse each other of improper maintenance of the ship.

If any animal in the wild engaged in these kinds of behaviours, it would die in fairly short order. If you deny that the crisis is happening or that change is coming, you risk abrupt trauma and dying out. If you can't adapt to the change while it's in progress, you die out; and in relation to that, you can mitigate the severity of the change with some intelligent planning to make sure that it doesn't kill you in the process. If you bicker with your peers instead of making plans to mitigate the impact, you risk wasting valuable time and dying out.

It's simple survival logistics. Humans are animals and our civilizations are macro representations of the health of collective individuals. If you are not careful, the hubris that you are invulnerable will cause your fall.
 
Just ask the President. How many times has he blamed Dubbya, instead of manning up and taking on the challenge himself? Not sure any of us can actually count that high...

Well said Whovian. We all know damn well that on the day Obama took office there was no debt, there was no deficit, there was no economic collapse, there were no bailouts in place, there was no employment crisis getting worse by the day, and Obama inherited the best economic climate since FDR took over from Hoover. Its great to have you here reminding people of reality.
 
I was hoping that this would be a discussion of what the money was spent on, rather than blaming a political party.

myself as well.

in which case, the answer is: mostly entitlements. domestic spending and defense spending are big too, but nowhere near the honkers that those are.

irregardless, the one thing that is critical to understand about deficits is that they are the result of overspending, not undertaxing. Bush II and Obama are particularly guilty of this, though Bush II at least seemed to grasp better what he was doing, and did less of it (don't know if that makes him more or less ethically responsible).

SO, if (as Orion has pointed out) we are to survive, the problem now is to Observe the correct problem (massive spending), Orient from there onto plausible attack venues (how do we massively reduce spending without doing so in such a way as to destroy the economy even more), Decide which venues offer the best paths; and Act on them.


UNFORTUNATELY, the first step is admitting that you have a spending problem. and i see at least one entire political party (and half of another) unwilling to do that yet.
 
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I went and did some research on the subject. It appears that our debt came from spending more money than we had coming in from taxes.

I'll be forwarding the results to the treasury department.
 
I went and did some research on the subject. It appears that our debt came from spending more money than we had coming in from taxes.

I'll be forwarding the results to the treasury department.

:shock:




all this time!!!




:tearing of hair, wrending of clothes: if only we had known!




:lol: well done, sir.
 
:shock:




all this time!!!




:tearing of hair, wrending of clothes: if only we had known!




:lol: well done, sir.

Just doing what I can, sir.

For America.

*salutes*
 
Some people who like being elected realized that if you don't have taxes but provide services anyway, you please both the people who want low taxes and the people who want more services. Which is to say, the American people.
 
Blame is more important than solutions to the majority of people, thats the real scary part

It's why Obama plays the blame game so often; he has no solutions.
 
Why do so many people believe that the economy magically turns on a dime every fourth January?

Quick quiz for the OP: Do you believe that the current deficit is 100% Obama's fault, or do you think there are other factors at play? If you think there are other factors at play, then wouldn't any intellectually honest person have to be incredibly leery about drawing conclusions regarding a president's "success" based on one macroeconomic factor?
 
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Some people who like being elected realized that if you don't have taxes but provide services anyway, you please both the people who want low taxes and the people who want more services. Which is to say, the American people.
That's incredibly obvious but most people are in denial, and the debt is probably the most important issue of all.
 
to answer the question:

SS
Medicare
Defense
 
Our money is going exactly where mpg is saying its going. Specifically, into social security and defense both things that need to be controlled. Anyways if I were a betting man and I'm not, I would say our debt will trend similarly as it did after FDR:

US_Federal_Debt_as_Percent_of_GDP_by_President.jpg
 
I agree with Ronnie, deficits don't matter. Recessions do matter. Our country has been in a recession for most of my adult life: !977-1979 was "Carter's recession". 1982-1985 was "Reagan's voodoo economics recession". 1989-1992 was the "Operation Desert Storm recession", where everyone stopped buying big ticket items due to the uncertainty of the war. The stock market dropped like a rock (though soon recovered). 1998-2000 was a recession caused by the dot.com implosion. 2002-2005 was the Bush recession caused by 2 new wars. Last but not least is the current depression caused by the housing bubble burst in 2008-? and the reality that our own financial system was off the deep end.

Why is our system so ****ed up? Why do we really have global recessions? I'll tell you why. It's to keep the workers under the thumb of the wealthy. Much better to have us begging to do menial tasks than having everyone getting a 10% annual raise throughout their working careers. It's the American anti-dream. I don't want to continuously cut back to make our country meet it's ends. Print more money. Right Ron (RIP)?
 
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