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You deny that the Reagan boom raised tax revenue much more than the Reagan tax cuts lowered it?

And yet somehow, the deficit and debt increased. Do you deny that since the US adopted "supply-side" trickle-down economics that our national debt has grown?

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

It did this with debt. In fact, the US has pretty much had a continuous debt since at least the Civil War.

The US has only had a surplus once in its history during the Andrew Jackson's administration in the 1830s. The last time the budget was balanced was during the Clinton administration. But that misses the point. A little bit of debt is not only fine it is quite useful. But we've gone well beyond just a little debt and for no practical reason other than ideological infighting and selfishness.

Prior to the Reagan administration debt as a percent of GDP had been falling steadily for decades. Since then the debt has only fallen as a percent of GDP under the Clinton administration and the total debt has skyrocketed to the highest levels since WWII despite no major war or other catastrophe. We have made a choice as a society that we want to have an expensive military and state run medical care for older people (Medicare) but we have been unwilling since 1980 to fully fund these programs nor have we been willing to cut them. Currently we borrow around $600B per year and ironically the US military budget is also around $600B per year. So we basically borrow the entire cost of our military every year and are showing no hint that we plan to pay that money back any time soon. That's idiotic and unnecessary.

People don't heat the Earth just by propagating.

It is one of many reasons... of course the biggest reason we are stuck in a rut is because of a stupid two-party system, which can never change without changing to a ranked voting system... which itself can never change because the two-parties won't allow it.

So we are always stuck with voters having to pick between what they think is the lesser of two evils OR vote AGAINST the party they are most afraid of.... and usually fueled by single issues such as those I listed above.

I'd mod this up, but you're already at 5 ;-). This is what we need, some way to move away from this Kang vs Kodos scenario. "Either way, your planet is doomed". All we really need is for one candidate outside of the Dems and Repubs to get 5% of the popular vote. It's also why I'm voting for Gary Johnson. Not because I think he will win, but because I think he's a better candidate than either Trump or Clinton. Honestly, I had hoped for Trump to run as an Independent since I think he's got the popularity to shake out a third party. Maybe his venom on the microphone will get enough conservatives to jump ship and form another party (though I doubt that... they love their solidarity, even if the head is a crackpot).

Moving slightly offtopic, but I hope folks find it interesting and it continues your thought on gov spending. Here's a graph of the national deficit by president. Note that blue downward curve between Pres. Bush 1 and 2. While it's true that each Bush had their own tour in Iraq, they both spent money like it was going out of style despite being of the "no big government, fiscal responsiblity!" republican camp. Pres. Clinton managed to turn the tide, but is still one of the least liked, highest paid ex-Presidents. Obama, as of 2014, hasn't been doing that well either... Though the latter part of Bush II and Obama are due to the recession.

That's rubbish. The damage caused by corporations opting out of the USA's repressive tax regime and incomprehensible, idiotic rules is negligible compared to the harm and actual, verifiable damage caused by incompetent politicians stuffing their porkbarrels hand over fist. Why should Amazon/Apple/Google pay for smartbombs and drones used to kill children?
 
In the US those who avoid taxes hold the much higher moral ground. Besides, it'll take hundreds of millions of years at this rate for the US to pay that debt down. Makes no sense throwing more on the bonfire of Osama Barrack's ambitions. Unless perhaps you think all the children ought to die, and it's only fair that we all pitch in for the drones.

Ethanol has about 2/3rds the energy per gallon as gasoline. By mandating blends of ethanol with gasoline, the Government is effectively lowering your mileage - resulting in more gallons of the blended material purchased per mile traveled. A stealth tax.

Seeing as the US govt has spent itself into an event horizon of the current magnitude while trying to prosecute 64 simultaneous, one-sided "wars" against brown folk the world over, all you Americans have just got to tighten your belts a little bit. Priorities like fattening the Republicrat fatcats and sponsoring automated killing machines to further the War on Drugs/Terror/Arabs/Commies/Mexicans are there for a reason. Of course the IRS needs your money more than you do! That's why they're above the law. If you don't like it file suit in a secret court.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

I did say it was briefly at zero and very briefly below zero. Yes, you can manipulate the figures in a desperate attempt to make it seem like the GOP is the debt hero, but have a look.

"Now, we have the opposite problem -- an administration who issues oil leases but no permission to actually drill and fights all efforts to build any additional oil refineries"

Nice troll, but the US _exports_ gasoline of which it has a surplus.
There is also no refinery capacity problem.

The global market is willing to spend MONEY to buy US gasoline and diesel. They even pay to refine crude in _US_ refineries for export elsewhere.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mgfexus1&f=m

http://zfacts.com/node/426

"U.S. oil and natural gas production in July was the highest since 1999, according to the Energy Department. That increase has allowed the U.S. to "meet 81 percent of its energy needs last year, the most since 1992." And, the U.S. took on the role of a net exporter of refined products for the first time since World War II.

Countries such as Venezuela and Brazil, petro dynamos in South America, both increased imports of U.S. refined products from last year.

Loder reported that gasoline has become more expensive because of rising world oil prices. The fact that U.S. refiners can turn a bigger profit by sending refined products out of the country should give us pause to think what would happen if we adopted policies to promote greater domestic crude production.

As long as markets for refined oil products overseas continue to grow, it only makes sense for U.S. refiners to tap these profitable opportunities.

"Drill Baby Drill!" won't necessarily lower gas prices as long as customers in China, India and other developing markets are willing to outbid U.S. motorists in the global gasoline price wars."

Incidentally, building pipeline for Canada to export their tar sands oil through US refineries in Foreign Trade Zones isn't going to help US consumers either, because it "un-landlocks" oil which was going to US customers in the first place.

http://247wallst.com/2012/03/07/valero-looks-forward-to-export-opportunities-vlo-trp-tso-mpc-hfc/

"The Keystone XL pipeline, with its projected delivery of 800,000 barrels/day of heavy, sour crude from Canada, figures prominently in Valeroâ(TM)s plans to boost its profits. The higher volume of Canadian crude will widen the differential between Brent and other imported heavy, sour crudes by pushing prices down on imports.

For US drivers, this scenario does not mean that gasoline will be cheaper. It does mean that Valero will be able to capture bigger profits even as US demand for gasoline falls. The only thing that will push down pump prices is for Brent crude to fall significantly with respect to WTI. That is not part of either TransCanadaâ(TM)s or Valeroâ(TM)s plan."

Sorry to derail another anti-Obama attack (I don't like Omney OR Robama!) but the White House does not run the oil industry!

Or more simply, that cutting taxes makes it hard to balance a budget:

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Drivers behind spending under presidents and congresses

Taxation and spending clause

Dems not to blame

Check this out: Government spending by president. This shows that while Obama may have been spending a lot during a recession, something that many economists encourage to balance out the "good years", the real culprits of out of control government spending are Reagan, Bush and Bush.

Reagan can also be somewhat forgiven due to the economic problems in the 80s and encouraging government spending to make up for the loss in business generated GDP, however he was there for 8 years... and that recession did not last 8 years.

Just looking at the fiscal realities, Clinton was by far the best president if it weren't for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act which set the stage for "too big to fail" banks. Still from a spending standpoint he's by far the best.

Obama is overspending driven by rampant bankster cronyism stemming originally from the Bush era and into the Obama years. This started with TARP (Bush) and continued into QEII, III, and further. There's a good argument to be made that much of the current spending is momentum spending from the second Bush term.

Ultimately we have to look beyond the last 3.5 years and really examine longer term track records before we conclude that the Dems overspend or the Repubs drive up debt.

Every single Reagan budget was pronounced DOA by Tip O'Neil (D), Speaker of the House. Every single budget that Congress approved was far larger then what Reagan wanted but had no choice but to sign it.

This is factually incorrect, and honestly it's not even hard to check. Why didn't you?

over Reagan's 8 years, Congress approved smaller budgets than he requested on average, and the deviation from what he requested averaged less than half a percent. He raised the debt by $1,860 billion and Congress reduced his budgets by $16 billion. Otherwise he would have raised the debt by $1,876 billion.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but we all have to work from the same set of facts. If your political stance requires that you believe things that are not true, that doesn't necessarily mean that your politics are wrong. But it's a strong indication.

Take some time. Familiarize yourself with the numbers. Decide what you really believe, not what other people have told you. Then resume posting to Slashdot.

Please don't avoid the issue by playing the Race Card. That is a cheap shot and totally avoids the issue.

Here is the issue. Has your income Doubled in the Last 5 years? Seriously, has it? Have your investments also doubled in value in the last 5 years?

Race card aside, take a look at the rate your Uncle Sam is blowing through money. They DOUBLED spending in the last 5 years. They didn't double income to pay for it. Fair share time. Double everyone's taxes and fees. Now instead of seeing about 1/2 my income vanish to taxes and fees, I would see almost all if it vanish. When it vanishes, what incentive do I have to keep working a producing. Doubling my taxes will not Double Revenue no matter how hard you seize my assets. You can take my assets only once while I am not working. After that I become a ward of the state.

The Al Gore global warming hockey stick is not the temperature rise, but the debt rise.
http://zfacts.com/p/1195.html Add the limit they are trying to add to this graph.

Care to play the class envy card or race card again and avoid the real issue of runaway spending and the upcoming hyperinflation. Playing class envy and the race card won't save us. Putting a cap on spending will, which is what the debt limit is.. a cap.

That is the biggest lie in US political history. Tax cuts do NOT increase revenues.

The fact is that revenues increases are due to the organic growth of the US economy, population growth, and inflation. Once you factor these principle causes out one finds that tax cuts actually decrease revenues.

http://www.factcheck.org/taxes/supply-side_spin.html

http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2010/07/14/197886/tax-cuts-dont-increase-revenues/

However tax cuts are great at increasing the deficit because they are rarely accompanied by spending cuts.

http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

The idea that federal tax revenue cannot go above 20% based on US historical data is off-cited but is really the result of cherry-picking results so that non-US data are not considered. Expand the data set to include historical results from outside the US and you will immediately see that it is utter nonsense.

Yep, for every 100 gallons of ethanol based fuel I use to farm my corn field, they produce 90 gallons of ethanol fuel with the amount of corn I provide for that spent 100 gallons. Although with subsidies, I am living fine. The idea is to make us less fossil fuel dependent.

http://zfacts.com/p/63.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_States

What about this?

About half of the discretionary budget is spent on the military.

http://www.warresisters.org/files/FY2011piechart.pdf

The reason the United States is dying is because we aren't collecting enough taxes to pay for our infrastructure. We started two wars and then dropped taxes. That shit doesn't work.

When our way of life actually was in danger during WII, we immediately raised taxes to pay for the cost of saving our country, and those rates lasted throughout the 50s, which was one of our best economic periods in history. Our national debt dropped, and continued to do so through 1980. Then an actor named Ronald Reagan decided to hand the nation's wealth to the wealthy, and hope they wouldn't blow it all on coke and hookers and stupid investments. He was wrong. Then he passed deregulation that led to the S&L crisis, just like Clinton passed the regulation that would eventually lead to the derivatives crisis that's still boning our economy. Reagan also raised military spending but dropped taxes, and that shit didn't work back then either. Bush I and II continued the same idiot policies, and people complain that Obama hasn't fixed the economy yet. Well, when you've had some fucking frat brats with sledgehammers renting a place for the better part of 30 years, it tends to take more than 20 months to fix.

Anyway, Bush II got kicked out for doing the sensible thing and raising taxes to cover our debt. Clinton raised the top rate again to 39.6%, reduced military spending, and our national debt dropped. McCain even ran in 2000 on protecting Social Security to fulfill our promise to "the greatest generation" with the extra money we had lying around. But that sad sack of shit has sold out along with the rest of the Republican party, pandering to some illiterate backwoods fuckwits called "Evangelical Christians" who believe that Obama is a Nazi Socialist Muslim born in Kenya.

But you need a certain type of idiot to vote against their own interests and ignore common sense and hard data for thirty years running. They're the same idiots who give Jesus $5 hoping for a $10 return. They think the GOP will give them the same deal, and they don't know how fucking right they are.

No. Go look at the numbers. CORN was subsidized. But a gallon of corn ethanol is still more expensive to produce than a gallon of gasoline.

Here's the very first google result for "ethanol subsidies cost gallon": http://zfacts.com/p/63.html
 
So we're paying more at the pump AND the grocery store.
 
This is slashdot, News for Nerds - you're not required to have all the facts, but your knee jerk leap of logic based on assumptions depresses me.

Ummm, I hate to break it to you, but it WASN'T in the 90s that the U.S. debt soared. Since WWII, there are have been precisely two periods where the ratio of U.S debt to GDP rose in a sustained way. The first was under Reagan/Bush, when under Reagan especially, the (democratic) congress consistently approved a budget that was lower than what the president recommended. The second was under Bush Jr./Obama. Regarding the latter, Obama isn't spending at any greater rate than Bush Jr. did, but at least he has the excuse that deficit spending is the only thing that has kept the economy from going into a full blown depression.

The bottom line however, isn't that this is the end of the world, the U.S. just needs to ensure that the deficit spending is being spent on things that will improve the economy in the long-term. However, tax cuts are absolutely the worst way to improve the GDP in the long-term. It would be better to spend the money on replacing aging infrastructure and building new infrastructure, or other things that have a direct and unambiguous effect on the economy.

So, look at debt-as-a-percentage-of-GDP here: (http://zfacts.com/p/1195.html).

Here's the version I made a few years ago from White House OMB data (sorry it's a bit dated, though I have to hand it to GWBush as being the first to get me motivated on politics. All my sources and spreadsheets are in the parent directory... so feel free to download and update it!)

http://hairball.mine.nu/~rwa2/misc/USbudget/hist/US_Historical_budget,_1962_-_2008.html

A more data-based representation: http://cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm

What worries me about a lot of the graphs on that page is that they either use numbers which aren't even adjusted for inflation, or they adjust for inflation but don't compare them to GDP. He gets it right in a few places, but most of the graphs aren't useable. Looking at the un-adjusted debt principals, yes, the numbers will tend to climb.

What I'm much more concerned about is debt as it relates to GDP. After all, if you owe $10 in debt, that's a serious problem if you only make $1 per year, but it's inconsequential if you make $1,000 per year.

So, look at debt-as-a-percentage-of-GDP here: (http://zfacts.com/p/1195.html). You'll see that:

• The debt was once much higher than it is today.
• We were managing to pay it down... through Eisenhour, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter... and then Reagan started a precedent for Republican presidents to blow it sky-high.

I do agree with the webpage about trickle-down not working and that, for a steady economy, we need to get back to the higher taxes on the rich, like the 70%-90% on the highest tax brackets which were helping us pay down the WW-II debt consistently over 35 years until Reagan took office.

I heard that some people still believed the Vietnam war propaganda, I just never heard anyone say it before. I could write pages here about how wrong you are but I have the feeling it is going to have to be simple. So here is a very very very simple explanation of why Vietnam was a fuckup, in the form of a very very very simple timeline.

Ho Chi Minh wrote a letter to US president Truman asking for help in their colonial independance war.

Diplomacy and foreign policy

US drops 6.7 million tons of explosives on Vietnam and its neighbours (its neighbours for god sake? Why?)

US realises that bombs are no match for a civilian population that will never give up, and pulls out.

i move that Reagan was worse then Obama why u ask? cause he had the national debt/GDP start rising http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Way to not understand. That tax model is quite correct and you are just misrepresenting it to try and prove a point.

I suppose you think we can pull our way out of this economic slump and bailouts of giant corporations with puppies and wishes? As per http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/, we currently owe $43,261.80 per citizen! Maybe you can afford to write a check for this, but not most of us lower and middle class. If the corporate-welfare republicans (not all republicans are this type) didn't bankrupt our country, this wouldn't be a problem. I realize that Obama isn't exactly reducing our debt either, but at this point I don't think he has much choice. History has not shown the republicans to be any better. Check out this link http://zfacts.com/p/318.html and see how much good Bush/Reagan's tax policies have done to paying our debts.

First of all, cutting taxes is generally understood to be good for the economy.

Citation needed.

Fighting wars generally isn't, so I don't know why you are bundling those two together.

If you had a drug addiction, and you were always broke, there's a very good reason to think that ending the drug addiction would solve the second problem.

Secondly, the two wars were generally supported by both parties (though in case of Iraq there were more opponents among Democrats but that was mostly posturing for political reasons). I don't think it's clear at all that the US foreign policy would have been any different under Clinton or, god forbid, Gore especially after 9/11.

Let's see: we've spent a few trillion dollars, increased recruitment to Al Qaeda, funneled money to the Taliban through the ISI, lost thousands of soldier's lives, maimed thousands more, killed a few hundred thousand muslims, displaced a few million more, given up habeas corpus, built secret prisons around the world for the purposes of rendition and torture, and we've handed the war in Afghanistan - the "good" one - over to the CIA and Task Force 373 that's busy extrajudicially executing terrorism suspects.

What could Gore, or anyone, have possibly fucked up more than that?

I don't think the recession was caused by Obama nor inherited from Bush. It's simplistic to the point of ridiculous to view something as complex as the economic cycle as determined by which president is in office even though their decisions of course have some impact.

Generally speaking, Democratic administrations have reduced military spending and increased taxes. Have a look at the results for yourself: http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Democrats aren't inherently better or anything, but at least they have demonstrated that cutting military spending and progressive taxes reduce the national debt. If people making more than 160,000 a year are really going to quit working over a 4% increase in Federal tax income, I say good riddance. There are plenty of people who will step up to take their place. They deserve to lose money for being fair weather patriots, who apparently only care about this country when it's dumping cash into their pockets.

"No one blamed bush for Hurricane Katrina. Just for sitting on his ass when it hit ..."

Oh, come on. That's not really a fair assessment of what he did beforehand. He didn't sit on his ass. He flew to scheduled political events in Arizona (including Senator McCain's birthday) and in Rancho Cucamonga, California on the day that the hurricane hit Louisiana (August 29th).

"Sit on his ass", he did not. He was busy shaking hands, cutting cakes, and talking about Medicare. :-)

You are fact-impaired. Start your education, here: US National Debt Graph

bleeding hearts are responsible for the national debt

Actually, you're wrong.

"social services" really ought to be handled by private organizations like they used to.

You might want to do some research on the 1880s, and how effectively social services were handled by private organizations back then. Protip: they weren't handled at all. People died in the streets in massive numbers.

Most of the cries of "ooh big government! big government!" that people love to wave around come from an ignorance of how important government programs are to maintaining social order and a modicum of well-being for poor people. Well, that and a gross misconception of how much of the federal purse is spent on social programs, versus the things that the libertarians actually think are worthwhile. (We could just as easily cut almost all of our defense spending, since it's pretty much worthless).

http://zfacts.com/p/480.html
And on that page, a pdf of annual debt.
http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/OMB-2004-National-Debt-History.pdf

http://zfacts.com/p/480.html
And on that page, a pdf of annual debt.
http://zfacts.com/metaPage/lib/OMB-2004-National-Debt-History.pdf

It can be helpful to look at some actual data once in a while, calming, even. The problem is big, yes, but the historical record shows that the USA was able to reduce it's total national debt as a percentage of GDP, consistently since World War II, with the notable exceptions of the years of Reagan, Bush, and Son of Bush. This was done by growing the economy. It could be done again. One of the best ways to stimulate that kind of massive economic growth would be to use space exploration and alternate energy as a replacement for the military research and development, which drove much of this growth during the Cold War. USA National Debt as Percentage of GDP. If we choose not to do something like this, the debt will be crushing, yes.

How about $600+ billion on something that's lasting about six years?

If the global warming advocates couldn't get the next 10 years right when they made their predictions in 1999, why are we still pretending that they can get the next 100 years right? If 10 years is "just weather", then so is 100!

I can't predict the weather over the next ten days, but I have a pretty good idea of what it'll be like over the next ten months. If you're trotting out this argument, you have no idea what a "chaotic system", and have no business commenting on climate science.

Maybe more science will find an AGW signal

Like this one? Or this one? Or even this one?

Other recommendations contained in the bill include a $77million reduction in NASA's proposed space operations budget

When I read this I decided to see what that is relative to the Iraq war.

I'm using this chart as a reference. It says we've been at it for about 7 years, and it's cost about $670 billion in total.

So, 7 years is about 2500 days. Divide that through and you get about $268,000,000 per day. That works out to 11.16 million per hour.

77 million / 11.16 = 6.89 hours.

7 hours.

The same way Reagan did earlier. If you look at this graph, it kind of shows that despite Republican accusations to the contrary, the Democrats are not the wasteful spendthrifts that Republicans claim they are.

The truth is, both parties spend like drunken frat boys at a strip club. Its just that the Republicans are worse, both in the amount and in the fact they claim its not them, but the other party at fault.

There hasn't been a Republican president since Nixon that didn't spend like hell and cause the national debt to skyrocket. All that Clinton's administration did to lower the national debt was erased by Bush #2. True we are in the middle of a war, but it was a war we were pushed into by Bush and Cheney's lies.

I am certainly no fanatic, but Dubya is the former president's nickname, and he was fine with people using it. How does me using his nickname make me a fanatic in any way? Personally, I would have been overjoyed had some miraculous circumstance put Ron Paul into the White House. That would never have happened, though.

Perhaps the next election will see all the major republican and democratic candidate swallowed up by an earthquake, leaving libertarians in charge. It wouldn't help anything, but at least it would be a change.

This is a Demopublican problem.

No! This is a not a "demopublican" problem. This is a REPUBLICAN problem, through and through. If you look at this graph, you can see that the only presidents since Truman to increase our federal debt as a percentage of GDP since WWII are Reagan and the two Bushes.

Republican presidents are responsible for nearly *all* of our federal debt!

Yeah, it's kind of sad how people keep going on about this, but Obama's spending so far is not really any different from Bush Jr., Bush Sr., and Reagan who in turn each ran up the largest deficits in spending than any president since WWII. As conservatives often point out, Reagan constantly called for a balanced budget amendment, but he himself never actually proposed a budget that was balanced. Small wonder then that between congress and he the deficit ballooned. I'm guessing that it will be very difficult for Obama to increase the deficit in the long term, thanks to recent republican president's propensity for long, expensive, unnecessary wars and their inability to balance a budget. It has nothing to do with political ideology, it's how much U.S. debt the world economy will support.

If I stop think about it, it really pisses me off that conservatives are so easily hood-winked by the rich upper class and Wall Street who call for smaller government and lower taxes whenever a democrat is in power, but what we end up with is tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor, and a huge deficit to boot. Stupid.

... like selling imaginary property.
Except maybe war, but apparently lately even 2 wars at the same time are not helping.

But another dot-com bubble certainly will.

1. Invest into .bean(s), .can(s) and .shotgun(s)
2. Provide a robust and durable access to your domains in the case of a total economic and civilizational meltdown
3. Wait for bubble to burst
4. Profit!

Huge debt we "just got saddled with"? You haven't been paying attention much for oh, say the last 30 years.

Reagan showed that it was possible to stimulate activity by lowering taxes

yeah, that and ramping up the federal deficit. http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

Different spin on the same logic, pass the problems down to the next generation.

And where are we getting the money for this, again?

Given that the Iraq war has cost a bit over six hundred billion dollars so far, and is estimated to top out at over 1.2 trillion dollars, "from stopping the Iraq war" is a good start to answering the question where the money will come from. You know, you could do a lot with four hundred million dollars a day.

Anybody here old enough to remember the candidates talking about what they were going to do with the budget surplus, back in 2000? Or is that just some forgotten ancient history? Surplus... what a concept!

Stop trying to pin fiscal irresponsibility on Democrats. It's total bullshit.

And the war in Iraq has cost the US 1 trillion or so at least. Some estimate 3 trillions. Ah, and 3k military deaths as well (+wounded, +civilian deaths, +breeding future terrorists, etc). Meanwhile OBL is still at large and the Talibans are winning again in Afghanistan.

If your money is created from nothing at the point of a loan and you want to inflate the money supply then you also have to increase the (exponentially growing) debt at the same time.

What? This is not true at all.

The national debt is the federal government balance. Bank-issued FR loans have no direct impact on the national debt -- but they do directly increase the money supply. This will inflate the currency unless there is corresponding growth in the economy.

But I'm not sure what you're trying to say... one cannot "inflate the money supply"... unless you are not using the word "inflate" as the standard term in economics. One inflates a currency by increasing the money supply relative to production. The debt is not growing exponentially... You claim it is a predictable exponential function and has a doubling time, would you like to share the math? This graph suggests otherwise. The national debt cannot be a predictable exponential function, since it is dependent on legislation. Any non-nominal change to budgetary or appropriation legislation changes the rate of growth of the national debt. How can you claim it is predictable, or that it is exponential?

I agree with you that there is a problem with the pyramid scheme economy that we're stuck with, and I think corrective action should have been taken 5-6 years ago. But railing against a fractional reserve is useless in a discussion of the national debt.

Whether or not I disagree with your idealogy, please stop the demagoguery. It's exceedingly annoying to continue to see posts involving economic theory that don't make sense, but hit all the right buttons to incite the even less informed.

Basically it's a tax on the working class.

Agreed. Social Security taxes are very regressive.

In theory the tax hike was designed to build up a big reserve of cash so that Social Security could operate in the 2020s when the baby boomers started to retire.

This is really just an accounting trick so that the long term planning for the Baby Boomers' retirement is separate from the shorter term federal budget. Otherwise this would make governments in power as the Baby Boomers retire look fiscally irresponsible as large deficits are incurred when Social Security pays out.

the same chairman insisted that all this cash should not be put away someplace safe, but should rather be made available as a kind of piggy bank for the government to borrow from.

Do you have a better suggestion for "someplace safe" than government bonds? The Social Security trust fund earns interest on money borrowed by the government just like anyone else who lends money to the government.

By 2000, Clinton (and his VP Gore) had cut the deficit all the way back to a "surplus" which means we were still borrowing some from the SS funds, just not from the outside world anymore.

Actually, there was a budget surplus without any caveats. If you check the data from the CBO, they have one column showing deficits/surpluses including Social Security (and the Postal Service) and another column excluding them. Including Social Security, there were surpluses from 1998 to 2001. Excluding Social Security, there were surpluses in 1999 and 2000.

As for the overall debt, I tend to prefer something like the debt to GDP ratio. Charts like this one show how damaging Reaganomics has been.

I was just using the figures from the pages I linked to. The figures for government spending/debt/GDP only went back to 1978. The job figures went back to 1928, but I chose not to include Hoover, since negative 9% job growth during his administration would have reduced the Republicans' average to nearly nil. Since FDR also bucked the average (to a much lesser degree), I listed the Democrat average both with and without him. In another post I listed more detailed links for anyone who wants to do further research.

And while I'll admit that statistical analysis isn't the most precise means of examining presidential candidates, some correlations stand out: Over the past 75 years, job growth under Democrat presidents has been two and a half times that of Republican presidents. That's a pretty strong correlation. Every Democrat period (FDR/Truman, Kennedy/LBJ, Carter, Clinton) has left office with unemployment lower than when they took office. Every Republican period (Eisenhower, Nixon/Ford, Reagan/HW Bush, W Bush) has left with unemployment higher. That's a good correlation. The deficit has increased dramatically as a percentage of GDP during every Republican administration since Ford, but decreased under every Democrat administrations since Truman. In fact, you can see elbows on the graph between the Carter/Reagan-Bush/Clinton/Bush administrations. That's not a correlation, that's a statistical certainty.

"Lag time" / "long-term effects" wouldn't favor either party, especially since, over the past 75 years, parties have remained in power for anywhere from 4 to 20 years. If we assume a "lag" of 2-3 years, Reaganomics would been directly to blame for (HW) Bush's recession, Truman would have been the cause of the low unemployment during the first half of the Eisenhower administration, and (W) Bush's current woes would be, well, all his own fault.

But I'm not trying to argue specific cases. I'm just pointing out that there's a reasonable statistical correlation between a Democrat president and a good economy. So if you're not an economist, and you don't know all the gory details of macroeconomics, you at least stand a better chance of getting a winner if you pick the left-hand box. On the other hand, if you are an economist, you're apparently a Democrat anyway.

Because I'm lazy. I couldn't find a convenient chart to average that went further back than Wikipedia's. But if you'd like to see more info, I spent some more time digging and found a chart of the national debt back to 1951, a graph of government spending, and a chart of GDP change.

Also, here is a list of the US unemployment rate month-by-month.

The President still has veto power, though, so his legislative control can't be overstated. In fact, I'd argue that most of the best years of the country, fiscally speaking, have been those with opposing parties in the Congress and the Oval Office — in other words, when both parties have to agree on legislation.

Still, the nice thing about averages is that they let you see overall trends even when the individual bits of data are open to interpretation. Regardless of other factors, there's a good correlation between a Democrat in office and stronger job growth, and a great correlation with lower deficits. As this entire discussion is regarding a presidential election, I'm pointing out that the Democrat is statistically the better choice.

As far as congressional elections go, well, I'd suggest looking at the voting records of individual candidates wherever possible. They're not the Official Party Mascot like Presidential candidates generally are, so you can't expect them to toe the party line to the same degree. Choose the candidate that agrees most with your issues, regardless of his or her party.

I did check the numbers. Republicans seem to enjoy spending our money just fine. You're thinking of religious conservatives, who donate significantly to charity but vote for the most corrupt scumbag they can find. Their charity record does not justify the failed policies they support. But I digress. The main point here is that Republicans will label anyone they don't like an "elitist" while throwing our tax dollars at every pork barrel project in sight.

I don't know about the personal characteristics of Democrats and Republicans, whether one is stupid and the other is soulless. But I can say that the Republicans have been a disaster over the past eight years while the Democrats have been the only voice of sanity. Is it wrong to support the party that promotes the best policies?