Logic Reform!
 

Yes because money solves all problems.

I just found a Pro-Choice Republican women worth millions that is willing to run against Richard Pombo. If Abrahamoff even mentions Pombo I am going to take him out.

Sometimes politics can be really fun.

Logic Reform!
 

It's a small price to pay for an adjustment to the system in which trial lawyers lose a source of revenue and thereby wield less political influence.

It does nothing to improve health care, but really - is that necessary?

Logic Reform!
 

Why wait? The guy wants to sell our national parks. He'll go down sooner or later, and your mystery woman is almost certainly an upgrade.

Logic Reform!
 

I meant taking him out politcally. The primary is not until June. Can't do much until then.

Logic Reform!
 

Sure, you did.


Welcome to the No-Fly list.

Logic Reform!
 

Is trying to take out a Congressmen like Pombo a threat to national security, or a boon to national security. I think the latter.

They are always doing background checks on me. It wouldn't surprize me if they have connected my name with Spanky and are monitoring this stuff. I actually feel kind of sorry for the poor schlep that has to read this stuff.

Logic Reform!
 

We will consider this post your consent to the ongoing surveilance of your telephone lines, where our computers specifically pick up any mention of "Bush", "Dick", "Pombo" or "Serbian".

Logic Reform!
 

You're telling us.

-the Admins

Logic Reform!
 

Aren't you supposed to be in Sin City?

And its not even Christmas.......
 

It just keeps getting better and better...........

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060106/...ess_delay_dc_2

The so called "experts".
 

You find me a post where I plagiarized a Chomskyite and I'll buy you a fancy lunch the next time you're in town.

I didn't say anything about "saddling" (Spanky) or "stealing" (you). I merely pointed out that if you spend money you don't have, and borrow, someone in the future will have to pay it back. This is so obviously true that I have a hard time understanding why it sends Spanky and you off into verbal gymnastics about crap like "absurd presumptions" about China, or whatever. You guys are displaying the signs of cognitive dissonance.

We have a bunch of Republicans in power right now who have decided to cut taxes to benefit their rich supporters, and to increase the size of the government. It will take taxes to pay for this, and if they're not going to tax people now, someone will have to be taxes in the future.

The so called "experts".
 

Your recent post:

Prior post:

I don't see much of a difference between saddling future generations with debt or borrowing from future generations. I am usually good about using prior quotes, and since you like to splice words I will do so in the future.

This is simply not true. I don't know how many different ways I can explain it. If the federal goverment borrows money now in the immediate future we have to pay interest on it and it is a problem.

In the longer term (when future generations are paying taxes) the deficits of forty years ago become tiny. And that tiny debt you don't need to pay back and you don't need to pay interest on it. You just leave it there, and to pay any interest on that tiny debt you just take on more debt. The interest is compouding, but the compounding will never catch up to the rate of growth of the economy. So any interest can always be covered by future bonds.

Your debt always has to remain a certain percentage of GNP, so if the economy is increasing the debts needs to increase. If all we had was the debt from 1960, every year we would issue more bonds to pay off the interest on that debt. But the debt we issued to cover the interest on the debt would probably not be enough to increase the debt so we would need to actually borrow more.

The deficits we incur now will cause problems for the next thirty years, but after that the debt becomes irrelevent. It does not have to be paid back.

Since the United States government has an infinted life span, and it continually grows, you don't ever have to pay off the debt. Is that really such a hard concept to grasp?

The so called "experts".
 

It was an easy concept for Japan to grasp, until the rate opf growth failed to outstrip the interest payments for long enough that it all collapsed.

I'm not sure how old you are, but unless you are significantly older than me, you aren't old enough for the economic crisis in the US in the early 70's led to things like 20% interest rates. What was that all about?

The ordinary schmoe couldn't afford to buy things, so the economy stopped growing. And yet, we still had to pay interest on our debt. How did we do so? By selling more debt. Only, because the US economy wasn't a good bet, we had to sell that debt very cheap.

But you're right. That was an anomaly and it will never happen again.

The so called "experts".
 

Did Japan collapse? I was living in Japan from 93-96 working in the financial industry and it certainly didn't collpase while I was there. How ever Japan did stop growing and that is where things went wrong.

Before Japan hit their recession ( the so called Bubble burst in 89) they did not run high deficits. It was only after they had slow growth that they ran deficits. So the problem wasn't the deficits run up to 89, it was the deficits run during the ninetys when their was no growth.

So they had slow growth but it was not caused by their deficits. They ran deficits in the ninetys (but not very big ones) which might have helped pull them out of the recession but their inability to switch to a service economy and the fact that they bought all the real estate in the world at premium rates and sold it at firesale prices (e.g. ARCO Plaza in LA) that prevented them from pulling out of the recession.

Unless their economy starts to grow their deficits will get worse. But the key to their problem is slow growth. Not any deficits they ran before they hit the recession.


??????. Yes we had a recession, and in the late seventies we had really high interest rates - Jimmy Carter had accomplished a miracle. High inflation and high unemployment at the same time. No one had ever pulled that off before. But we pulled out of it by a tight monetary policy and running huge deficits. That led to growth that eventually made the debts of the seventies seem like chump change. And the growth created by those deficits has made paying back those deficits relavitely easy. If we had not grown even the debt from the seventies would have seemed onerous.

So basically what you have pointed out is what I have been saying all along. Deficits should be managed purely looking at growth. The worst thing you can do to future generations is to not have growth so future generations can not reap the benefits of the multiplier effect. That is what happened to Japan. The MOF and MITI tightly regulated the economy so it could not adjust to a service economy and therefore couldn't grow. The way the economy was run was Tys wet dream. Corporations were not truested at all to bring the best benefit to the public so MOF and MITI tightly regulated every industry with price controls, subsidies, permits etc. The Japanese government made sure everything was fair and did not allow any competitive moves to happen without their making sure such a move was in the publics best interest. The government did everything it could to protect workers jobs. When I lived there there was practically no unemployement. And the result of those policies (the humane industrial policy that so many liberals want to institute here by not letting the evil non compassionate market run amock) was the economy flattened and growth slowed.

That is why the Japanese today are so screwed. If their economy had kept up the growth it had experience in the 80s the Japanese economy today would be three size the time it is now and they would have no deficit problem and plenty of government revenue.

In the recession of 2000 in the US the proper move was to create deficits to pull us out of the recession. It was not the deficits that we were running in 2001-2002 that was screwing future generations but it was the lack of growth that was screwing future generations. Now that we have the growth back, the deficits could crowd out private investors, thereby reducing the rate of growth. So we now need to balance the budget. But the budget deficts in the first term were entirely necessary and definitely benefited future generations.

The Spanky Thesis
 

As an interesting corollary to the Spanky Thesis that Jesus Christ, Debt Is Irrelevant because We'll Simply Grow Out of It, Morons, see the below chart.

http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/Stoft...presidents.gif


Spanky, I understand your point that carrying SOME amount of debt on an ongoing basis is arguably good, because it carries other montetary benefits. Similarly, I agree with the general point that X amount of debt today, standing alone, will decrease in relative size as the economy grows.

We've discussed before the laughable notion that we'll start balancing budgets tomorrow (or in the near future) so that your enthusiastic economic argument will come to pass. In that light, please examine the above graph for me, which demonstrates that debt as a percentage of GDP is in the 60%+ range right now, and is expected to rise to about 70% before the end of Bush's term.

Even acknowledging that SOME debt is just dandy, what's your magical percentage of GDP where the debt just painlessly evaporates in the face of an ever-expanding economy? 60%? 80%? 20%?

If 70% evaporates in less than a generation, then Ty's original comment wouldn't seem to apply. If it takes more than that, please elaborate.

The Spanky Thesis
 

I can't really figure out this graph. At the end of WWII our total debt was less than twenty percent of GNP? That can't be right. I think it was more than a 100% of GNP. So this graph is not showing what percentage of GNP the debt was during different administrations. So this graph is really a snap shot of where all the debt we have today came from? That isn't a correct either because this graph doesn't represent todays debt. So this graph is a representation of where all the debt will have come from at the end of Bush's term. But that doesn't make sense either because the overwhelming majority of the national debt at the end of Bush's term will have been created by Bush II. And this graph shows that at the end of Bush's term most of the national debt will have come from Reagan's term.

Can you explain exactly what this graph represents?

The so called "experts".
 

Catchy slogan. You should make a bumper sticker.

There are two fallacies in that passage, although I only worry about the second. So, riddle me this, RINO:

If what you say is so obviously true, why do so many distinguished economists (including Mr. Greenspan), fret about deficit spending?

And, if you're not arguing that we need not worry about deficits, why are you blabbing on and on?

S_A_M

The Spanky Thesis
 

Correct so far.
That's what it purports to be
The two preceeding sentences seem to be contradictory, but the second one is correct.
Not according to the graph. Perhaps you or the graph are mistaken. Would you like to give some sort of basis for your assertion? The more interesting figure to me, at any rate, is the percentage of the current debt represented by the black bar: the leaders who incurred that debt are long dead. The leaders of today were at best children and likely even unborn when that debt was incurred. Yet we're still paying it off.*

*I am certainly in no way implying that the debt should not have been incurred. When the Nazis start invading France and the Japanese start bombing Pearl Harbor, you pull out the national MasterCard.**

** Note that this reasoning also applies to the bombing of the WTC and Pentagon: all the debt that we've incurred to hunt down the perpetraotrs of those atrocities are okay by me.***

*** The Saddam Hussien regime had nothing to do with these bombings, so the debt incurred to invade Iraq needs to be justified some other way, at least in my book.

The so called "experts".
 

How many times do I have to say this. Deficits are a problem for the year they are incurred and for at least fifteen years afterwards. Deficits are a problem because the debt competes with private enterprize for available financing. Deficits are a problem long term debt isn't.

I am not blabbing. I made the simple statement that when people cry about saddling future generations with burdesome debt when they complain about the deficit, they are full of it. That was all. But people kept trying to tell me I was wrong.

I am simple defending simple truth. The other people are babbling.

The Spanky Thesis
 

This graph is almost certainly wrong. If the current debt is around five trillion that means twenty percent is one trillion. We did not spend a trillion dollars on WWII. I don't think we even came close to spending a trillion dollars on WWII. I think I remember that the debt was 140% of GDP when the war finished. But whatever that number is today, it is not close to a trillion.

And like I said, if the graphs predictions of how much Bush will be spending up to 2009, I am pretty sure Bush IIs combined debt would greatly exceed all the debt that came before him. Either the graph is wrong, or we don't know whay it is trying to say.

The so called "experts".
 

In re your first paragraph, see the one directly below it.

I love the term "rich supporters." It all but advertises "The speaker is utterly irrational." Nothing says "lack of reasoned analysis ahead" like an opening statment about the alleged "class war" the Left loves to blather about.

There is no class war. The GOP is not about feeding the rich and fucking the poor. The GOP is trying, badly, to shrink govt and create a business friendly climate for econ growth. In so doing, the rich will profit, as they always do. The GOP can't stop the rich from doing so. The rich will always get richer because once you're rich, you have capital, and once you have a lot of capital, its easy to make more money with it.

Are the GOP whorishly hooking up contributors? Absolutely. But no more than the Dems do.

The "cure" you seem to advocate - somehow handcuffing the rich and indirectly redistributing their wealth to the poor and middle classes - is impossible in a free capitalist society. When you try it, all you get is a bigger govt class which steals from everyone. Frankly, I'd rather be fleeced by business, which might make me money as a shareholder or employee or entrepreneur, than by a big govt, which will do nothing but feed its inefficient self.

The so called "experts".
 

That may not be the stated intent, but it is the actual effect.

So the GOP does feed the rich. As for fucking the poor, you only have to look at the budget cuts the Senate tried to pass just before Christmas, which were aimed principally at Medicaid, Medicare and student loan programs, and ask who bears the burden of those cuts.

The GOP does not bother to try to argue these do not disproportionally affect the poor. Rather, they try to argue that in the long run, the poor will be better off as a result of economic growth stimulated by less government. Sort of "We're fucking the poor, but only for the short term".

The GOP can't even shrink government - under the bush administration, it's grown. This is the cornerstone of their theory of governance, and they can't even get started doing it. At best, the GOP is incompetent. So tell me again why you vote for them.

The so called "experts".
 

The Dems are incompetenter. Actually, they are only equally incompetent. Both parties are a fucking embarrassment.

I'm done voting. Politicans can go fuck themselves. I say run the damn thing into the ground - that's the only way to get rid of the two-party system.

The so called "experts".
 

No they are not, contrary to what the GOP and a million talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC would have you believe. The Dems do what they say they will do which is to protect those unable to purchase access to those in power. Would a Democratic-controlled Senate try to pass the cuts to Medicare, Medicaid and student loans that the current Senate tried to in December? And somehow, the Democratic presidents stilll have almost always outperformed Republicans in growing the economy and reducing budget deficits (Carter being a notable exception).

The so called "experts".
 

I didn't. I voted for Bush in 2000, but hated the fucker so much in 2004 that I voted for Kerry.

I can't recall a worse choice than standing in the booth, looking at Bush's and Kerry's names on the levers. It was like hearing "You can go home with the skinny girl with volcanic facial acne and body odor or the 250 lb girl in the 'World of Warcraft' t-shirt. But you WILL be fucking one. Select. The line isn't getting any shorter behind you. NOW."

The so called "experts".
 

Oh, those Dems... the picture of altruism. They're the same whores the GOP are, they just sell their souls to different buyers.

The GOP lets big business buy its votes. The Dems let big business and the unions and those who seek wealth redistribution buy their vote. An argument can be made that the GOP is at least more honest about its whorishness, since it doesn't pretend to be helping the poor while also taking handouts from big business, which the Dems do.

But in the end, I agree with Coltrane. The parties are just different colored bags of shit. Same product inside.

BTW, take a look at how much Abramoff money Chucky Rangel took, and take a spin through google to see the myriad reasons offered by Chuck for not returning the money or giving it to charity, as many GOP lawmakers have (embarrassingly) quickly done.

The so called "experts".
 

I didn't say they were any different in where they get their money. I said they were different in what they do with it.

You take one Dem who hasn't returned Indian (not Abramoff, a distinction Dean made over the weekend but which I'll not sign on to) money and compare him to some (but not all) Republicans who got religion all of a sudden and your point is -- what? I might as well point out the money that bush took from Abramoff and hasn't returned, and the point would be as meaningless.

The Spanky Thesis
 

I didn't realize the graph would throw you so badly. Sorry. Balt is right that it is a snapshot of the national debt, and where it came from, as of a certain period in time (today, and projected as of the end of the Bush presidency).

I found it interesting because one of your side points was about the irrelevance of old debt, but let's not let your confusion take us away from my main question. Let's focus on the AGGREGATE DEBT.

Here, let's look at the background data to see if the graph is right. The OMB's official data is presented in a nifty chart here ... let's see ... in 2005 the gross national debt is estimated to be, as a percentage of GDP, .... holy shit! 65.7 percent! And 2010 projections from the OMB? 70 percent!

The graph was right. The horror. The fucking horror.

So. Anyway. Let's go back to my original question to you.

• We've discussed before the laughable notion that we'll start balancing budgets tomorrow (or in the near future) so that your enthusiastic economic argument will come to pass. In that light, please examine the above graph for me, which demonstrates that debt as a percentage of GDP is in the 60%+ range right now, and is expected to rise to about 70% before the end of Bush's term.
  
  Even acknowledging that SOME debt is just dandy, what's your magical percentage of GDP where the debt just painlessly evaporates in the face of an ever-expanding economy? 60%? 80%? 20%?
  
  If 70% evaporates in less than a generation, then Ty's original comment wouldn't seem to apply. If it takes more than that, please elaborate.

Gattigap

The Spanky Thesis
 

I never questioned the accuracy of the aggregate debt (as a percentage of GDP). What I questioned was

1) the percentages seem to imply that the majority of todays national debt comes from the presidents prior to Bush II - which I know is innacurate because most of the recent debt was derived Bush II. In addition, it shows that twenty percent of today debt comes from WWII which I also know is not true. Therefore, proper diagram would show that most of the debt is derived by Bush II, which would reinforce my point that it is not long term debt that is the problem but is recent deficits.

2) In the alternative, (if the percentages are not demonstrating what I stated in #1) then the diagram seems to imply that Bush II has grown the debt to a higher percentage of GDP than all the Presidents since WWII. Which has led to your conlusion that 67% is really high. But as I pointed out that is innacurate because the deficits during WWII (not the debt - meaning not the entire debt but just the deficit for one year) were as high as 140% of GDP. So the debt in the past has been much higher than 67% of GDP or 70% of GDP.

Therefore I reject your assumption that 67% of GDP is some drastic number. Most western developed countries (inclusing Germany and Japan) have much higher debts (higher percentages of GDP). And they have not been fighting wars.

So either way you read this chart it is innacurate (unless you have some theory on how to read it that I have missed).

The last problem with your assumption, is that, as I have said before, the predictions about future deficits are always too low in a recession and too high in an expansion. Remember last year's deficits predictions were too high (and Ty was implying it was intentional manipulation on Bush II's part). However, we were in an expansion (not even that strong of one) and the deficits were much lower than predicted. It turns out that growth right now is really strong, and higher than predicted, so the deficit is going to be a lot lower this year than any one predicted (of course Ty will again blame this on manipulation). If the economy keeps growing at its current rate we will be out of our deficits by 2009.

The miracle about this whole thing is that we just went through a recession and a war and our aggregate debt is only 67% of GDP. And we are still at war and the deficit is starting to drop. That is unprecedented.

• As I said there is nothing catastrophic about a 70% GDP debt. But with the way the economy is growing we won't come close to 70%. Not only does a growing economy bringing in more tax dollars reducing the deficit, but a growing economy makes the pie bigger, making the debt percentage of that pie even smaller.
  
  
  Quote:

  Originally posted by Gattigap Even acknowledging that SOME debt is just dandy, what's your magical percentage of GDP where the debt just painlessly evaporates in the face of an ever-expanding economy? 60%? 80%? 20%?

  The problem with the Clinton expansion was that it took seven years into the expansion before we balanced the budget. We only had a few years of balanced budgets before we hit a recession again. If the economy keeps growing under Bush it may take as long if we don't start cutting spending. But if Bush can get the budget under control sooner then we can start cutting the deficit sooner.
  
  
  
  Quote:

  Originally posted by Gattigap If 70% evaporates in less than a generation, then Ty's original comment wouldn't seem to apply. If it takes more than that, please elaborate.

If you run a balanced budget for twenty years then seventy percent would drop to like fifteen percent (maybe more). So what is the issue?

To give you an idea of the magnitude I think our entire budget debt in 1980 was around one trillion dollars. Last years budget deficit prediction was 400 billion. So one year of deficts in 2004 equals forty percent of GDP for a 1980 budget. It was just take three years of those deficts to get you to 120% of debt. At a deficit of 300 billion per year it would take just four years.

In 2030, if we are in a recession, our deficits will well exceed a trillion dollars. If they are as high as todays deficts they will be from two trillion to three trillion dollars.

The Spanky Thesis
 

From looking at the description of the graph, it looks like a meaningless calculation. To do the calculation properly one would have to look at accumulated debt during each administration, net of interest expense, and then calculate the interest (including interest on interest) going forward.

If you want something simple, this graph pins much of the blame on Reagan/Bush I, in terms of increased percentage of debt relative to GDP.

I suppose it cuts both ways--debt is a problem, but less and less of one post WWII, until Reagan came along.

http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/National-Debt-GDP.gif

Delay
 

So it turns out Delay took money from Abrahamoff, sought to do his bidding (by seeking the shut down of a rival Indian casino), but had insufficient pull with the administration to get it done.

This has to be the best news for the Bush Administration in a while. How often does the scapegoat walk up to the altar with the knife in his mouth?

The Spanky Thesis
 

Sure. Right. And the reason we could afford the Bush tax cuts was because of the massive surplus that was predicted.


My God!! You're right!!!* Bush is a genius!!


*Well, with the exception of at least three times during the Vietnam War, when the deficit 'started to drop' (and in some cases continued to drop) from one year to the next.

But I guess those don't count.


cf. Reagan, who balanced the budget in which year of expansion?

Of course, Reagan had a much greater challenge -- after all, his predecessor had left him with a legacy of deficits approaching something like $40 billion, whereas Clinton's prede..... um, never mind.

Incidentally, I suspect you are comparing apples and oranges here. It took 7 years for Clinton to balance the budget including eliminating borrowing from Social Security. Are you predicting the same thing will happen by 2009? Or just the "on budget" deficit will be reduced to zero?



If pigs had wings they would be pigeons.




I'm not sure what your point is, assuming there is one, but I guess I'm not worried -- after all, by 2045 none of that will matter, right?

The Spanky Thesis
 

Yeeew are seeew on fire. We are so gonna get into a depression.

The Spanky Thesis
 

You may disagree with how they were distributed but they did pull us out of the recessoin.


I left out one salient fact. Tax increases. The amazing thing was that Bush cut taxes, took us through a war and a recession and still the deficit is only 67% of GNP. When Kennedy took over in 1960 defense spending was 75% of the budget. We may have reduced the deficit but it was on the back of the taxpayer.


When Reagain took over in 1980 the economy was shot. Slowgrowth, high unemployment and high inflation. He turned all those three things around. I wish he had cut spending more but we really need that growth.

Just the budget deficit. Just in case you forgot, the Bush administration tried to do something about the Social Security problem, but the Democrats said there really wasn't a problem.




Those would have to be some big wings.





The amount of our growth now will matter in 2045. It will determine to a large degree how much government revenue will will have in 2045. The deficits we incur now will not matter much in 2045. So the important thing is that the economy is growing. In the last year of Bush I presidency the economy was growing, so Clinton inherited a growing economy. In the last year of Clinton's presidency the economy did not grow. So Bush II inherited a contracting economy. He took that contracting economy and turned it into a growing economy. That was what was important.

The Spanky Thesis
 

Translation: There is no level of aggregate debt that is too high, provided we have constant economic growth, a string of balanced budgets, and a multigenerational time horizon. Got it.

The Spanky Thesis
 

I never said that. I just said that 70% is not a big problem. But clearly there is a level that will completely crowd out private investment.

The focus should be on the deficits. And your comment "Provided we have constant economic growth" is the clincher. Any time we have deficits that are so high that they are crowding out economic growth we are screwing future generations. So when the economy is growing you should not run deficits because a growing economy needs fuel for its growth and deficits suck up that same fuel.

Bush II did the right thing by bringing growth back, now we need to see if he can get the budget in balance during the growth phase. If we don't we will be screwing future generations, not by saddling them with debt, but by not growing the economy as much as we could of.

The jury is still out on what will happen, and it really comes down to the Congress. And Congresses recent track record on controlling spending has not been that great. But if the economy continues to grow and the deficits are not brought down then future generations have the right to come back in time and kill us.

The so called "experts".
 

For the umpteenth time, you are not arguing that our government is not sticking future generations with debt. You are arguing that the future generations will be able to afford it.

The so called "experts".
 

And exactly what have future generations ever done for us?

The so called "experts".
 

Fuck that- closer to home- do you deny that you and spanky and your toadies have ruined this board for future newbers? Ty you must realize this board is useless.

The so called "experts".
 

This is why we see you on this Judged board, isn't it?