Budget talks: This is getting nasty

The current debt ceiling/credit downgrade crisis is being brought to you by the Tea Party.

The Tea Party, working hard since January 2011 to ensure President Obama is a one-term president, no matter the cost. (Tea Party is a registered trademark of the HBC Corporation--Haters and Birthers Coalition).

 

A division of Koch Brothers Enterprises.

 

Baron, this is such a bullshit talking point. And you know it. There is a big difference between a "budget surplus" and the "national debt." Tell me, when George Bush was sworn in, did the United States have a national debt or not? Let's compare apples to apples here...a budget (remember those...it has been about 830 days since the Democrats in Congress have presented one) is different from our debt. Dems like to say this because it makes people think Bush inherited an actual surplus. In fact, on Jan. 4, 2001, our national debt was $5,719,452,925,490.54. When Obama was sworn in it was $10,627,961,295,930.67. That means $4,908,508,370,440.13 was added to the national debt under Bush. It is now at $14,564,970,167,709.38. This means that $3,937,008,871,778.71 has been added during the Obama Administration. Bush was a big spender and no favorite of the people who are now in the Tea Party. But Obama is leaving Bush in the dust.

In sum, all the "Bush inhereted a budget surplus" talk is a bunch of crap. Apples to oranges. Means nothing.

 

Ahhh, but Republic presidents are the only ones who care about the national deficit.

Tell us all about it, teabaggers.

 

Did you make that graphic with crayons? Notice no citation...I doubt you would plaigerize something so I assume it is your creation? What are your sources? How did you arrive at your conclusions? I want to know your research methodology.

And teabaggers again? How fucking old are you?

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_by_U.S._presidential_terms

 

You know, if you just right click on it and click "view image" and you can see the source link instead of going nuts.

It's from MSNBC.

 

That could him go more nuts.

 

You don't expect the teabaggers to actually use logic, do you?

 

I'm 52 years old, bagger boy.

 

The Bush Administration kept the Iraq & Afghanistan wars off the budget for years. Obama put them on the budget when he took office.

This is an incontrovertible fact, and it has a lot to do with the rise in the national debt since 2009. In my opinion it was the right thing to do, no matter the political cost.

If you're going to talk about the rise in the debt, you owe it to yourself to be intellectually honest about where that debt comes from. It isn't all from the stimulus package, nor is it all from the ACA. A good portion of it comes from two wars that were started years ago and never budgeted for.

 

The U.S. has about $4 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, according to this Brown University report. And we all know, the vast majority of that was spent on Iraq, a country that didn't attack us:

http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/defense-homeland-security/169293-study-iraq-afghan-wars-cost-nearly-4-trillion?page=2#comments

Clinton had a surplus of around $236 billion in '99 and $127 billion in '00. For fairness sakes, since there was the dot.com bubble, we'll stick with the lower number. Had Bush continued with Clinton's policies for his eight years in office, that would have been roughly another trillion.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=aGqLx61MRY6w

So, let's say that 75 percent of the war costs are from Iraq, since we had considerably more troops there, so there's $3 trillion. Bush continues the Clinton policies, there's another trillion, which I think is reasonable, because except for a brief recession, the economy was doing pretty well until '08, except for the middle and lower classes, who were getting easy credit to pay for stuff.

So Bush could have wiped out more than 2/3 of the national debt, just by not starting one war, and continuing the successful policies of the previous president for $4 trillion right there.