Conservatives Caused Huge Deficits, Blame Obama
By Dave Johnson
CFA
Headline at Drudge Report: Obama policies projected to add $9.7 trillion to debt by 2020... points to this story, National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says,
President Obama took office as President of a country with a $1.4 trillion deficit - thanks to the failure of conservative policies. Their tax cuts, wars, military buildups, corruption and incompetence drove the borrowing WAY up, and then their deregulation, corruption and incompetence destroyed the economy, driving the borrowing up into the stratosphere.
(More here.)
CFA
Headline at Drudge Report: Obama policies projected to add $9.7 trillion to debt by 2020... points to this story, National debt to be higher than White House forecast, CBO says,
President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday. Proposed tax cuts for the middle class account for nearly a third of that shortfall.So here is the deal. This Drudge headline, saying Obama's spending "adds to the deficit" is a trick. Here is how it works. Suppose you take over a company that is losing $100 million a year, and your jobs is to turn it around. So perhaps the second year the company only loses $70 million, $30 million the third year, and breaks even in year four. You saved the company. But in those years the company "lost" another $100 million. Should you be fired?
President Obama took office as President of a country with a $1.4 trillion deficit - thanks to the failure of conservative policies. Their tax cuts, wars, military buildups, corruption and incompetence drove the borrowing WAY up, and then their deregulation, corruption and incompetence destroyed the economy, driving the borrowing up into the stratosphere.
(More here.)
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3 Comments:
This statement is a bald-faced lie -
"President Obama took office as President of a country with a $1.4 trillion deficit - thanks to the failure of conservative policies" According to the most rudimentary internet search on the topic, Obama took office with a $482 billion dollar deficit. Obama himself has ramped up the deficit to the $1.4 trillion in his 2011 budget. And Dave Johnson - with a straight face I am sure - has the effrontery to suggest conservative policies drove the debt way up WITHOUT ACKNOWLEDGING the fact that Obama, Pelosi, Reid and Biden wrote the last two budgets that Bush signed in to law.
I cannot believe, for the life of me, that again Vox Verax - the ostensible 'voice of truth' - would re-publish such an outright lie that this piece represents.
Here is what I don't get, though. Biden was in the Senate since 1970 and Obama since 2004 and these two clowns act as if they had no idea how bad things were. They must have complete incompetents as Senators because even Mort Zuckerman has called the Obama Administration a complete and total failure. If they had no idea how bad it was then they will have no idea how bad things are going to get under socialist policies.
Oh, and I forgot this non-sequitir arguement - "Suppose you take over a company that is losing $100 million a year, and your jobs is to turn it around. So perhaps the second year the company only loses $70 million, $30 million the third year, and breaks even in year four. You saved the company. But in those years the company "lost" another $100 million. Should you be fired"
This question is so far from germaine to the arguement it's laughable. I am reminded of the episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is working for "Leland and Associates" and has to provide a report to Mr Leland. Mr Leland reads the report and tells Kramer that it is as if he has no business skills whatsoever. Mr Johnson apparently has no concept of either running a company or how an economy works.
First, it's always a dangerous game to compare an executive of a government with an executive of a company. Other than the fact both are the figurehead of their respective enterprise, the similarity ends there.
You cannot compare Obama to the head of a corporation charged with turning the corporation around. A corporate executive would not heap massive costs on the company in an effort to turn it around. Costs would be slashed, efficiencies found, inefficiencies would be jettisoned, money would be invested or saved not thrown at whimsical programs that only heap more costs on the business. Finally, prices couldn't arbitrarily be raised to get more revenues because competition and floating price theory would prevent the business from raising prices too high. If all of these efforts failed, the business would go to bankruptcy and liquidate.
None of these could be applied to a government entity because governments don't operate with costs in mind because government - unlike business - has a never ending pool of investors to draw from in the form of tax payers which prevents governments from ever worrying about costs since their costs can always be covered by increased taxes.
To answer the question, though, you absolutely should be fired if you are not turning around the company and instead heaping massive debt on the company and throwing bad money after bad projects and policies and not containing costs. Obama is foisting crushing debt on his 'company' at a time when it is already hemoraging money and the investor pool is dwindling. Obama is not making the tough choices that a corporate executive would make such as slashing costs - labor, debt, expenses. No, Obama is ramping up labor, debt and expenses which is exactly the wrong recipe for the wrong problem at the wrong time.
God help the man who succeeds Obama in the Oval Office.
My apologies - I transposed the debt and deficit in my first post. Yes, obama inherited a $1.4 trillion dollar debt - and then doubled it in one year. Both debts are reprehensible and our charge to our government should be - stop the spending. I did so in 2005 when I met with Josh Bolton as a member of the UofM Policy Forum. We met with Bolton and I admonished him for the Bush Admin reckless spending and run up on debt. And so I do with Obama's debt as we all should do I.
The debts Obama is incurring will never be paid back beccause Obama is printing money and has so many competing policies - health care, bailouts, cap and trade, stimulus spending, businesses are loathe to hire because they have no idea what the government is going to do next. Last week, the CEO of Sears said they are not going to expand in this economy because they have no idea what the government is going to do - are they going to bail out a competitor, regulate a product out of existence when it comes to the environment? Until this government expresses a lull in its activism in the economy, Sears is going to stand pat. As are other businesses.
This administration is hell bent on propping up a false economy by not allowing the economy to contract and find its natural bottom. Stimulus spending in the old Keynesian model was supposed to stimulate the economy to increase government revenues, but government revenues are way down.
Nothing - and I mean absolutely nothing - this administration is doing is working. What is required now is cutting spending, cutting regulation and cutting taxes - all of which JFK suggested at his famous speech at the New York Eceonomic Club in 1962 and then implemented in 1963 - because JFK knew that production is the key to growing an economy. We have trounced production and ramped spending and so you cannot grow out of this economic calamity and so Obama keeps borrowing because there is no production in the economy as a basis to grow from.
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