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Moded down by imbeciles. Reposted so those who are actually interested in following the thread can see it. We can play this game all day, imbecile mods.

The deficit is the bleeding. The rate of blood loss. The debt is the pool of blood on the ground. The cumulative AMOUNT of blood lost. You fixate on the stream of blood gushing out if you like. I'll look at the pool on the ground. That's what counts. The guy can lose a half a liter or even a liter of blood in a great scary rush and his body can still recover on its own if the rush is stopped at that point. When the loss hits two liters, the guy is in danger of dying unless he gets a prompt transfusion. There is no transfusion for nations. When the debt gets too colossal, about all you can do is hyper-inflate it away. It's still X number of trillion dollars, but if you want you can make that the price of an ice cream cone. But then you've got other problems (Weimar Republic, anyone?).

An aside. Federal budgets are reckoned in these moronic things called Fiscal Years just to confuse people. They run from October 1 to September 30. FY 2013 ENDS on September 30, 2012. It BEGINS on October 1, 2011. It works out that FY X is for practical purposes pretty much calendar year X. It's just offset by minus three months. OK ...

The following are deficits in billions of constant 1983 dollars. What year you pick doesn't matter. What matters is that you compare apples with apples.

Bush:
FY2001 75
FY2002 234
FY2003 302
FY2004 315
FY2005 283
FY2006 285
FY2007 241
FY2008 472
Total contribution to debt 2207 = 276 per year

Obama:
FY2009 879
FY2010 758
FY2011 550
FY2012 535
Total contribution to debt 2722 = 681 per year

The pool of blood belongs more to Obama than Bush, though neither one is a fiscal winner. And it's going to belong a lot more to Obama by the time the next four years passes and the two can be compared on an equivalent eight year basis.

Now, FY2009 (and 2001) don't really belong completely to their Presidents, because the budgets were passed during the term of the previous incumbent. OTOH, though the incoming Presidents could not have vetoed them, have could have changed them within 4-5 months, so they own them to a certain extent. Another monkey wrench is that the last two Bush years were with a Democrat Congress, so that awful last year is to an extent up for grabs.

My personal opinion? Neither guy and neither party is a winner. Bush left Obama an awful mess, but Obama hasn't cleaned it up with appropriate vigor, either. If you ask me about these two clunkers together, they have been a colossal unmitigated disaster for the American people. But you know what? The 200+ year bubble that was the American economy was due to burst anyway. And Congress gets at least half the blame. Some would say the House gets ALL the blame. Not a single dime can be spent that isn't appropriated by the House.

Reference:
http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html [adelphi.edu]

Mouse finger spazzed out, hit wrong button. Here is the real content:

The deficit is the bleeding. The rate of blood loss. The debt is the pool of blood on the ground. The cumulative AMOUNT of blood lost. You fixate on the stream of blood gushing out if you like. I'll look at the pool on the ground. That's what counts. The guy can lose a half a liter or even a liter of blood in a great scary rush and his body can still recover on its own if the rush is stopped at that point. When the loss hits two liters, the guy is in danger of dying unless he gets a prompt transfusion. There is no transfusion for nations. When the debt gets too colossal, about all you can do is hyper-inflate it away. It's still X number of trillion dollars, but if you want you can make that the price of an ice cream cone. But then you've got other problems (Weimar Republic, anyone?).

An aside. Federal budgets are reckoned in these moronic things called Fiscal Years just to confuse people. They run from October 1 to September 30. FY 2013 ENDS on September 30, 2012. It BEGINS on October 1, 2011. It works out that FY X is for practical purposes pretty much calendar year X. It's just offset by minus three months. OK ...

The following are deficits in billions of constant 1983 dollars. What year you pick doesn't matter. What matters is that you compare apples with apples.

Bush:
FY2001 75
FY2002 234
FY2003 302
FY2004 315
FY2005 283
FY2006 285
FY2007 241
FY2008 472
Total contribution to debt 2207 = 276 per year

Obama:
FY2009 879
FY2010 758
FY2011 550
FY2012 535
Total contribution to debt 2722 = 681 per year

The pool of blood belongs more to Obama than Bush, though neither one is a fiscal winner. And it's going to belong a lot more to Obama by the time the next four years passes and the two can be compared on an equivalent eight year basis.

Now, FY2009 (and 2001) don't really belong completely to their Presidents, because the budgets were passed during the term of the previous incumbent. OTOH, though the incoming Presidents could not have vetoed them, have could have changed them within 4-5 months, so they own them to a certain extent. Another monkey wrench is that the last two Bush years were with a Democrat Congress, so that awful last year is to an extent up for grabs.

My personal opinion? Neither guy and neither party is a winner. Bush left Obama an awful mess, but Obama hasn't cleaned it up with appropriate vigor, either. If you ask me about these two clunkers together, they have been a colossal unmitigated disaster for the American people. But you know what? The 200+ year bubble that was the American economy was due to burst anyway. And Congress gets at least half the blame. Some would say the House gets ALL the blame. Not a single dime can be spent that isn't appropriated by the House.

Reference:
http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html

who [Reagan] spend us into the level of debt we are in now

I see you are either suffering from ignorance of the simple statistical data, or have been brainwashed. Neither of these are character flaws; they are simply deficiencies. Not accepting the truth after being made aware of the misconception would be a character flaw.

Cumulative deficit spending in constant dollars:

Reagan, 8 years: 1.600 trillion
GHW Bush, 4 years: 1.462 trillion
Clinton, 8 years: 1.610 trillion
GW Bush, 8 years: 4.351 trillion
Obama, FIRST 3 YEARS ONLY: 4.765 trillion

Gee. Reagan and Clinton were almost exactly the same in terms of accumulated debt. GHW Bush was almost twice as bad considering he only had half as long to work with running up debt as either of the former. And GW Bush and Obama were SPECTACULARLY the worst. Obama has been much worse than GW so far, but both are an unparalleled absolute disaster.

Fact: 9 trillion of the 15 trillion cumulative debt outstanding as of the end of September 2011 and accumulated since the founding of the Republic is down to the GW + Obama period alone.

Note: all the yearly figures run from October through September, so they don't quite correspond to presidential terms, but they are very close.

Now, having corrected the spectacular misconception, here's something to chew on. Presidents can't spend a single dime without the House of Representatives budgeting it. The House has COMPLETE control over the purse strings. All the Presidents do is PROPOSE budgets to the House. Then after the House passes a budget the Senate and President have to concur with it; there is a dance of reconciliation between the House and Senate, and then the President just says "yeah fine, I guess" or "Hell no", after which Congress can still override the veto.

Really? the only balanced budget in recent history happened with a republican congress. I may be alone, but I think we might get an optimal outcome with Obama retaining office but congress shifting to a republican majority in both houses. Going by party in control of the house, Dem presidents with R house happened for the first time in 50 years under clinton. http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html is an interesting collection of data.

For job growth, I didn't quickly find a good source. It's inherently tricky, because policies rarely have effects right away. How much lag time do you assume when trying to decide who is or is not responsible for job growth? You would almost have to go on a per policy change basis, which would require more knowledge of the effect of particular policies than anyone actually has.

The really hilarious thing isn't that you cherry-picked data. It's that you linked back to the un-cherry-picked table:

Obama Deficits
FY 2013*: $901 billion
FY 2012*: $1,327 billion
FY 2011: $1,300 billion
FY 2010: $1,293 billion

Bush Deficits
FY 2009: $1,413 billion
FY 2008: $459 billion
FY 2007: $161 billion

I'm not trying to cherry pick. That's why I linked the whole page.

The key here is who spends the money. It's not the president. Now go back to your data and calculate who was in charge of congress by year. The president means nothing. That's why I chose 2007. 2007 was the last budget passed by a Republican Congress before Pelosi and Reid took over in Jan 2007.

THIS chart is much better as it shows the party in Congress as well as the party that controls the White House. It shows that, at lest over the past 20 years, that Republicans tend to be better stewards of the treasury than Democrats, with some exceptions, of course.

Also, I tend not to look at "projected" deficits of 2012 and 2013.

Of course, Bush inherited an actual surplus and benefited from a much larger housing bubble.

I actually think the surplus was the cause of the increase during the early Bush years. It's hard to say, "We can't afford that. There's no money in the budget." when you are coming off of a surplus. It also doesn't help when congress is evenly split. This is when compromise happens. "We'll fund your pet projects if you fund ours." kinda thing.

You are incorrect. Obama came into office on January 20, 2009. By the first Monday in February, the President must submit his budget request (Congressional Budget Act of 1974). That budget takes effect starting October 1. So FY2009 was already well in effect. The FY2009 Budget was proposed to Congress by George W. Bush on Feb 4, 2008.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt ending Sept 30, 2008 was just over $10T. The debt ending Sept 30, 2009 was just over $11.9T. So the last budget from George W. Bush was almost $1.9T deficit, an increase of over $800B from the previous year. Obama's first budget (FY2010) ending on Sept 30, 2010, gave us an overall debt of just over $13.5T. That means the deficit from his budget was just over $1.65T, which is LESS than the almost $1.9T from Bush. In fact, it was a net reduction in deficit of $233B.

So yes, the GP post was correct that Obama inherited the largest deficit in history, and the deficit has decreased each year since Obama came into office. In fact, someone was nice enough to go through all the data from the Treasury Department website and show a breakdown of the numbers to make it easy to see how the budgets/deficits have changed over time.

Yeah, I've often thought we were best off with a Democrat president and republican congress. Of course, the only times that happened in the previous 60 years has been Clinton and Obama, so it's a little thin as statistical meaning. Overall, plotting deficits by party is tricky, especially when you try to account for election years and items outside the normal budget. The 2009 stimulus was done by obama, most of the budget that year wasn't...

My understanding was that the deficit hawk democrats were a small minority of democrat congressman if they exist at all.

I can't find anything about this company that doesn't come from a press release.

The COO is James M. Demitrius. Looking him up, he's an accountant. Here's his bio. He was at Drexel Burnham Lambert during the Michael Milken era, before the indictments and bankruptcy. During the dot-com era, he was involved in the 1999 IPO of Ixnet, which was acquired by Global Crossing, which went bankrupt in 2002. Then he was COO of Frontier Communications for a year. Then Aluma Systems, a Canadian concrete company, which he arranged to sell off to somebody.

Actual data? The Wikipedia article list the sources, which are from the Federal Budget.
If you can find a link that does as informative a breakdown of the data, pass it along.

Here's another non-gov link - this one on presidential deficits : http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/deficits.html

The Treasury links provide data but no analysis - that's why I prefer external sites.
I wasn't paying attention to the news networks on Clinton's spending - I looked at the numbers.

Federal spending is an important indicator but it doesn't tell the whole story. What matters more is the impact of that spending on the GDP.
By that yardstick, Democrats again fare better than Republicans.

So, overall, Democrat presidents have contributed far less to the total debt than Republicans, especially in recent decades, yet they take the heat for it.
We'll have to see the effect of the Obama administration on those statistics. It would be a real shame if he turns out to be a single-term president and I don't think he can make a turnaround from the impact of the economic meltdown by the end of his current term.

And you need to come up with a different term than Republicrat for George Bush. Not only are you wrong about Dems vs Reps on spending but Dubya was in a class all by himself.
How does "Dubyite" strike you?

Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?

That seems to be the way it's been working so far.

Why is NASA's ~20 billion so hard to pay for when we seem to have little trouble finding enough to spend about 2.5** trillion on entitlements yearly?

Because much of those entitlements are financed through dedicated taxes (FICA) that come directly out of your paycheck. For whatever reason people seem to think those taxes are worth the benefit. I imagine you could fund NASA's budget in the same way if you could convince working Americans to pay an similar NASA tax.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of fully funding NASA, but thirty years of mostly conservative rule have essentially destroyed our finances.

Matt

Your guess seems exactly the wrong way round to me! Scheme *removes* all the barriers that most other languages place in the way of learning and doing. Take a look at some of the testimonials here if you don't believe me: http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/class/hs/testimonials/

I think TFA goes even further in getting things backwards - especially where it implies that Scheme is somehow /necessarily/ all about approaching programming with academic rigour (it isn't) and that it fails to facilitate a more pedagogically suitable exploratory approach (exactly the opposite is true).

Hands down, the best introduction to programming I've encountered is How to Design Programs. The full text is available online, though you can buy a copy from MIT Press if you really want.

Nominally, HtDP uses Scheme, but it's such a tiny subset of the language that it barely needs the name. Instead, the book focuses on the fundamentals of programming. HtDP's philosophy is data-centric. Instead of directly presenting recursion, for example, it presents recursive data structures, from which recursive functions naturally follow.

Last year, I was a TA for a first-year CS course which used this book; the course was phenomenally successful (as always). On the other end of the spectrum, HtDP has been used successfully in high schools and middle schools as well.

I suffered an introductory course in programming in VB while studying physics at university and despised it. Later I was fortunate enough to come across SICP and the SICP videos when I decided I needed to learn programming in earnest but if I'd been stuck with something like C++ or BASIC or Java, I suspect I'd still have found programming a tedious and unrewarding distraction from real maths and science and never really understood its potential. Now I actually like and respect it and there are good resources available for high school level stuff:

http://www.teach-scheme.org/
http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloch/class/hs/testimonia ls/

Apparently Scheme/Lisp appeals even to 'liberal arts' types and though I'm not one of those myself it certainly rapidly transformed my attitude to and understanding of computing and I can see why it might make better and more enthusiastic programmers of students whatever their abilities and preferences.

I don't really have any experience with Scheme yet. I have been going through a tutorial and have been very impressed with the language's simplicity and mathematical nature compared to the languages I know: '(Pascal C C++ Java Python). I have seen references to CLOS-like object systems for Scheme, such as tiny CLOS and GOOPS, though I haven't tried them yet.

I'm not sure how all of this stacks up to SICP since I just found this one this morning. I can't say enough good things about SICP (It is how I really learned to think about software), but neither can a lot of other posters, so I figure I don't have to. This program is directed at a conceptual level and it looks like this course might be a worthwhile comparison.

The link is here

• "Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days": A comprehensive tutorial
• "The Scheme Language": a shorter tutorial
• "Invitation to Scheme": yet another tutorial
• The Scheme Language Standard, "R5RS", is actually surprisingly readable, at about 50 pages. Here's a PDF of R5RS, which is useful to have around if you're actually using the language.
• The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) - a.k.a. the wizard book, a very worthwhile and enlightening book, used as an introductory text at MIT. It's available on the web, but it's not a light or quick read.
• How to Design Programs (HTDP) - a book that teach program design techniques, using Scheme.

Encapsulation is done in objects, otherwise you don't have encapsulation so much as namespaces.

Appartently you are using a strange defintion of "encapsulation" which I have never encountered before. Do we not mean by "encapsulation" the design principle of providing a module (a C++ class, a C file, any group of functions/procedures and data considered as a whole) with a set of interfaces which serve to hide implementation details? You seem to be implying that encapsulation only exists in OOP languages; I vigorously disagree.

"Encapsulation is the process of compartmentalizing the elements of an abstraction that constitute its structure and behavior; encapsulation serves to separate the contractual interface of an abstraction and its implementation." -- Booch

Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/