Republican Presidents Can't Manage Our Money

[Brassmask]

Let the blaming of "anyone else but the GOP president" begin.

[Xavier_Onassis]

If the Democrats are 'tax and spend', the Republicans are 'borrow and squander'.

[Plane]

Could this be drawn to include FDR and Hoover?

[Xavier_Onassis]

Could this be drawn to include FDR and Hoover?


Sure, but what would the point be?

Hoover belongs to a different time, which well never return, when one could buy stocks for 5% down. FDR had to pay for a war.

The farther away one gets from the present, the less the path can indicate the possibilities of the future.

Republicans promise fiscal responsibility, but have not delivered it. They cut taxes a lot, but do not cut spending, and make up the difference by borrowing, most recently from China and Japan.

[BT]

I find it odd that the national debt went down during the Kennedy through Ford years. There was a lot of spending going on with Viet Nam, The Great Society and  NASA.

[Michael Tee]

I wonder if the explanation can't be found in the sophistication of the weaponry - - say that Viet Nam was being fought with the equivalent of WWII weaponry, with some technical improvements, but the later wars were with highly advanced space-age weapons.  Look at the casualty rates, for example: in Nam, 200 deaths a week were relatively common casualty counts, if those same counts had appeared in Ireq, Bush and Cheney probably woulda bin lynched.  Maybe they found a way of fighting wars with minimal casualties but at a hugely increased cost, including the cost of lifetime care for all of the casualties who in an earlier generation of warriors would have just died of their wounds but were saved by advances in battlefield medicine. 

You also have to wonder at the cost of Star Wars, which supposedly through the genius of Ronald Reagan, bankrupted the U.S.S.R. but miraculously spared the U.S.A. even though both sides had to spend their brains out on the technology and deployment.

I hope that if the figures in the graph are analyzed more, military spending will be seen as the culprit, in which case, conservatives, who don't give a shit about human life and pain, but sure as hell love what's in their wallets, will finally find a reason to halt the deadly spread of militarism where it's easiest to stop it - - at the appropriations level.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I find it odd that the national debt went down during the Kennedy through Ford years. There was a lot of spending going on with Viet Nam, The Great Society and  NASA.


They had higher taxes then. The Republicans did not control Congress through most of this period. A divided government generally results in compromises where benefits are paid for out of a deficit, because one party refuses to raise taxes to pay for them.

[Amianthus]

I find it odd that the national debt went down during the Kennedy through Ford years. There was a lot of spending going on with Viet Nam, The Great Society and  NASA.

Because the graph is showing it as it relates to GNP. The debt didn't go down those years, the GNP rose faster than the debt. Same with the Clinton years.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Because the graph is showing it as it relates to GNP. The debt didn't go down those years, the GNP rose faster than the debt. Same with the Clinton years.
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Quite true.

But still, it shows that the Democratic presidents were more fiscally responsible than the GOP presidents.
No prizes should be bestowed on either side, however.

It is probably impossible to run the country without a large national debt. It seems to be impossible to run any economy without some inflation. It could be that a balanced budget is not feasible, either, but it is still a goal to strife for, like not executing innocent people for crimes they did not commit, which would be far easier to do.