Forum Post: The Bush administration
Posted 12 years ago on Jan. 3, 2012, 10:59 a.m. EST by sato
(148)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
This is what Republicans never acknowledge.
Taking office in 2001 with a balanced federal budget and a surplus, Bush quickly pushed through sweeping tax cuts that were not offset by spending cuts. The tax cuts have cost about $1.8 trillion, according to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks never were budgeted and have cost taxpayers about $1.4 trillion so far. Obama ordered the last troops out of Iraq in December, but the Afghanistan conflict will extend into 2014.
Bush signed legislation in 2003 enacting a prescription drug benefit as part of Medicare, the government health care plan for seniors — a huge entitlement program projected to cost as much as $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
The Troubled Asset Relief Program, the bank bailout program widely loathed by many conservatives, was another Bush-era program. Congress authorized nearly $700 billion for the program at the recommendation of Bush's treasury secretary, former Goldman Sachs executive Henry Paulson, in response to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent financial crisis in the fall of 2008. As a presidential candidate, Obama supported the TARP bailout, as did his GOP rival, Sen. John McCain. To be sure, today's GOP candidates occasionally acknowledge that not all was perfect pre-Obama.
http://news.yahoo.com/george-w-bush-barely-mentioned-gop-campaign-071501934.html
And then Obama gets all the blame! Hell, St. George couldn't have solved the mess the Bush Administration created, given just 4 years! Nobody could have. Most of this Obama blame (not all, but most) is just yet more of what the Republicans do best, sew havock.
It is simply easier to destroy a nation than it is to build one. The Republicans get in power, tear everything apart to make themselves a pile of money, and then blame the Democrats for not putting things back together well enough again, and people buy that!!
Things were actually pretty good under Clinton . . . no wars, no federal debt (wages could have been better) but compared to today it was great! What did those assholes do . . . spend three years putting Monika's dress on the nightly news . . . and then these assholes would have us believe that everything's Obama's fault! Wake up folks, you're being sold a barrel of hog slop!!!
The budget never had a surplus. It was a projected surplus that never came to fruition.
and after bush we got a huge deficit and even worse projected deficit
The Bush administration fell down the memory hole as soon as a Democrat was elected.
Meanwhile republican and libe(R)tarian propaganda mills have been working overtime, to convince you, more of the same kind of policies, enacted by that administration,, will save us from the "other" side.
Their level of success is far too high.
Couple of points...
Graham/Bailey was signed into law by a Democrat (Clinton) - this repealing of the Glass Steigel Act is blamed for the economic crash which led to TARP.
While the January 2000 baseline projected a 2006 budget surplus of $325 billion, the final 2006 numbers showed a $247 billion deficit—a net drop of $572 billion. This drop occurred because spending was $514 bil lion above projected levels, and revenues were $58 billion below (even after $188 billion in tax cuts). In other words, 90 percent of the swing from surplus to deficit resulted from higher-than-projected spending, and only 10 percent resulted from lower-than-projected revenues.
Non-drug-related health care costs have been reduced for elderly patients who gained better prescription drug coverage under Medicare Part D, according to a new study.
Researchers found non-drug health care costs have decreased by nearly 4%, or an average of about $306 per quarter, among elderly Medicare beneficiaries who had limited drug coverage prior to implementation of Medicare Part D in January 2006 and now receive more generous prescription drug benefits through the government program.
Most of those health care cost savings were thanks to reduced inpatient and skilled nursing facility care spending, but reductions in costs were also seen in doctor visits.
The study is published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
"In concert with previous studies, these findings suggest that increased medication use and adherence achieved through expanded drug coverage for seniors have been associated with decreased spending for non-drug medical care," write researcher J. Michael McWilliams, MD, PhD, of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and colleagues.
butter32 is correct. The surplus was speculation. We were basically running on credit that we never paid back. Truth is, both sides have much to be guilty for and your partisan defense will keep us in this problem. When we the people unite and call Repubs and Dems BS, we might get some where.
So, now the Republicans are trying to balance spending with spending cuts and the democrats won't have any of that.
If you look all the way back at the development of the US national debt and our pattern of budget deficits, we do have a problem. Our current system of taxation is not taking in the amount of money it would need to if we were going to begin running balances and surpluses and thus begin to slowly pay down the national debt. That is a systemic problem, and it does need to be addressed. There is an optimal debt-to-GDP ratio that comes out to roughly 85%, and we are currently running about ten percentage points above that.
Here's the catch, though: if we deleverage too fast, especially by attacking social support spending, then all that happens is the economy contracts hard. We'll have less debt than we did before we cut spending, but the contraction will cause GDP to fall faster than debt and as a result of that we'll be in an even worse situation than when we started out. There is a path to getting a handle on both the public and the private sectors that should avoid the worst of that contraction, and if you wish I'll link you to an essay I wrote on the subject.
No need for the link. The government needs to "downsize" without a doubt. We also need to stop importing cheap chinese made products.
If you look at the GDP since the signing of NAFTA (I think it was in 1997) the GDP has continued to decline.
We need to put a "equilization tax" on all imports so that the price of an imported product will equal the price of a domestically made product.
The "equilization tax" then needs to be used to help companies who want to build manufacturing plants to produce goods made here in the United States.
We also need to impose a "export/import tax" on US companies who reside here in the United States,and use companies outside the United States to manufacturer goods to be imported here in the United States.
Revenues from these taxes can be used to "build our infrastructure" and put people to work who are collecting welfare - to be supervised and trained by businesses here in the United States.
We need to start being concerned about what's going on in this country instead of "buying chinese made products" that build their economy.
Absolutely; what you're talking about is a return to tariffs on a given set of goods, and punitive taxation of corporations that deliberately choose to outsource their manufacturing operations to other countries. I completely agree with you; if we can bring those jobs back from overseas and require that the people who fill them receive adequate compensation, then that's an important step in the right direction.
The fact that you're open to infrastructure-based stimulus plans (assuming they're actually administered properly and the greatest possible bang is squeezed out of every tax dollar we put in) is in fact really good news. Whether we like it or not, we're going to need a joint effort by both the public and private sectors to fix things, and as much as we need to streamline the government we don't want to render it impotent in the process.
You make sense.
[Removed]