I managed to find the presidential head debt chart from last time we played Pin the Debt on the Donkey, but you'll find a different rendering of the information here.
Ezra Klein: What causes deficits?
McKeon: Defense cuts unacceptable
McCain Worried About 'Protectionism and Isolationism' in GOP
Debt, Deficits, and Defense: A way forward (pdf)
Spending Worries Put Jobless Benefits at Risk
CBO review of the American Power Act (pdf)
Marco Rubio's positions on the economy
Trumka Willing To 'Accept The Consequences' Of Holding The Line On Ending Wealthy Tax Rates
Legistorm.com: Transparency's sidekick
Video: Church building causes uproar
The Ricketts family is against "wasteful government spending" unless it helps make them rich
Big win over Hoosiers was hard, smelly workout for Bucky Badger
Senator Mitch McConnell - earmarks requested
Bachmann: Transportation projects shouldn't be earmarks
Top RNC aide quits, blasts Michael Steele
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What's your thought on the NY Times deficit plan:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html
Okay, I took your advice and used this little HYT deficit reduction tool and here are my results: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=03g2d9nj
You should notice my results are 49% spending cuts and 51% increased taxes. I like this little tool. It may be a bit simplistic, but it shows that there is sanity through the insanity.
Sorry, actually that is 51% spending cuts and 49% tax increases!
The debt is a result of a two party system and paradigm that has disconnected middle America from the fruit of its labors and siphoned it into a wealthy elite radical fringe (definition starting at $250,000).
The real chart that matters is the GDP middle America "rip off" chart.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gdp_versus_household_income.png
Notice how middle America is being separated from it's own GDP?
When service in a restaurant suffers, more waiters are required. When fire breaks out everywhere, more fire fighters are required. When crime becomes rampant, more police are required. When democratic power is corrupted, more congresspersons are required. The antidote to corruption of power is disbursement of power. Be proactive. Check out plan-b.
Citizen is coach to team democracy. Coach is responsible for success. It’s your call, coach.
http://coach-1640280.newsvine.com/
http://coach-1640280.newsvine.com/_news/2010/06/04/4462088-coach-cm2-constitution http://constitutionm2.newsvine.com/
Presidential Candidate (for one of 9 executive branch presidents) 2016
Notice the disparity of debt between Reagan and H.W. Bush. You know what happened here? We couldn't read his lips!! That's right...H.W. increased taxes thus attempting to unravel "voo-doo economics", which were his words not mine (recall the 1979-80 Republican primary).
What is it that present day Republicans miss about this truism, including H.W.s own son and protege G.W.?
Excellent first segment Rachel and crew. Keep it up.
"The distance between what they say and what they actually do, that is the news."
Can you imagine a conversation where someone calmly and evenly discusses a counterpoint and makes a clear, rational case? I can't imagine anyone from the Republican side doing that under any circumstances.
Rachel, you set a model for conversation involving clarity and rationality. People without clear, rational counterpoints respond with anger and ad hominem attacks. That's when you know you made a better point.
Indeed. Vis a vis the first blogpost about Congress NOT being Junior High School Student government, one does wonder...
I suspect that even average middle schoolers could tell the difference between ADDING to the deficit and SHRINKING it. Why can't the chronological adults we seem to have entrusted with the power of the national purse?
The problem comes when you ask righties to give examples of repub fiscal responsibility. As we have seen in the past few days here, even if they admit that deficits surged under repub presidents, they try to claim that the President has no control over the budget, that congress is to blame, (conveniently ignoring the fact that the president can veto said budget if they disagree with it. They then claim that the congresses that ran up those deficits were dem-controlled. That little canard was also blown up last week when someone helpfully added a column for who controlled congress under each president, and repubs were in charge during much of the big spending sprees.
I guess the next fallback position will be to say that repub deficits came as a result of doing "good" things: fighting wars, giving tax cuts to the rich. On the other hand, dems run up deficits for bad things: social programs that put food on the tables of the unemployed during economic crisis, rebuilding and improving crumbling infrastructure.
EXCELLENT segment. KEEP the Game Show model. And your summation, as usual, spot-on. Thank You!
As much fun as those budget games might be, we should all be honest enough to admit we don't know enough about the programs we think are wasteful and should be cut, and the consequences of cuts or increases in any area. The website is fun, but we should recognize we all carry our own biases and ignorances, (is that a word, like "refudiate"), and those inform our decisions. For example, I don't know too much about farm policy, so maybe I decide we can cut farm subsidies to save some money. I have no idea of the consequences, but it does help me meet my goal of a balanced budget.
Years ago, Wisconsin's Sen. Proxmire used to come out with his Golden Fleece award to spotlight what he thought were wasteful projects. Most of the time, it was some bit of scientific research that on its face sounded pretty goofy. However, at times when it involved research I was familiar with, I was appalled at how badly the whole thing was characterized. The inaccuracy, sometimes even a misleading statememt as to the goal of the research, was breathtaking. After seeing that a few times, I began to suspect that most, if not all of his targets, were being unfairly villified in order to score political points. Fast forward to today, where I think the same thing is going on in the zeal to cut the budget. Repubs have already stated their intent to slash scientific research, most likely following the Proxmire model: I don't understand it, so it should be eliminated.
I predict Republicans will hold middle class tax cuts hostage
till the Dems cave. This Republican mantra of standing up for the
rich won't even register with voters. They get a pass on their
pro-wealthy policies every time. When will voters wake up?
Rachel, your 1st segment comments are well taken. The first step you need to do is to inform the NBC network news performers (Gregory, Williams) of the difference between reporting and 'scribing' and see if THEY could do the former. My guess is that you would be casting pearls to swine.
An added thought about repubs & dems on the deficit would require you to go back in history and look up the 'two santa claus' concept, first proposed by repub operative Jude Wanniski in 1974. It explains the 'apparent' contradiction of the image of fiscal conservatism why the debt under repubs, demonstrated by tonight's chart, are so wildly different. It is no accident or mere coinidence. Here is as good a quick explanation as I have seen from (yeah I know) Wikipedia:
"The theory states that, in democratic elections, if one party appeals to voters by proposing more spending, then a competing party cannot gain broader appeal by proposing less spending. The first "Santa Claus" of the theory title refers to the political party that promises spending. Instead, "Two Santa Claus Theory" recommends that the competing party must assume the role of a second Santa Claus by offering some other appealing options."
The competing party here is the repubs and the 1st implementation of this was David Stockman under Reagan.
You may want to have a brief segment on this - it explains why repubs do what they do vis-à-vis the budget.
1) Please don't do any more game shows.
2) Re the chart: Y'notice how the space between 0 and 50 is a lot smaller than the space between 50 and 100? And how the space between 100 and 150 is between those two in size? I know you were trying to make a point, but graphs like that hurt my brain. Having an evenly spaced chart would have made the same point just fine, and the chart as you have it obviously took more effort than an honest one would.
3) Please don't do any more game shows.
. -- love, jj
First let me say that I am a progressive Democrat, but I have to point out that the Democrats on this chart only had four years to run up the deficit compared with 8 for the Republicans except Bush sr. who is at 55% If we go by years office held dems had 78% increase in two terms. Still better than the Republicans, but not as much as could be implied by this.
Republicans have kept up a policy that decreases tax revenue while increasing defense spending and wars. This is obviously not sound fiscal policy. And what do we get for our money with wars? Only bigger defense contracts and some jobs. Also big money for reconstruction and support. Our military became much more privatized under Bush. But couldn't we get economic stimulus better better without the overhead of such a horrible thing as war? Quite inefficient way to make jobs as wars cost so much in the background.
Regarding all the deficit hawking going around, appears Washington has put creating jobs on the back burner. And if the Wealthy get their Bush Tax cuts this counteracts any savings from all the other cuts in spending which will all increase unemployment, government jobs, earmark jobs, etc. Yes all these cuts will cost jobs. Incuding the idea of cutting unemployment benefits will increase bankruptcies and foreclosures as well as prevent many bills from being paid to small business.
End result is increase in unemployment and the debt, with the wealthiest among us still getting wealthier. I wonder if this is by design.
Actually the Democrats had a 78% increase over 3 terms, not 2. And the Republicans had a 333% increase over 5 terms.
I know it doesn't work out this neatly, but if you look at the 3 terms of Democratic presidents, they increased the debt 26% per term (6.5% a year for 12 years). Over the 5 terms of Republican presidents, they increased the debt 66.6% a term (16.65% a year for 20 years).
That looks like a pretty significant difference to me.
I really appreciated the show last night. Always appreciate the show, but last night was really good. I had made the comment last week that progressives really should do our best to co-opt the word "conservative", and try to make it synonymous to "Democrat". How can the Republican Party call themselves conservatives if, every time they install a President in office, the deficit rises (and rises, and rises)? If the Republicans have the capacity to be fiscally conservative, I'm not seeing it. This whole business about climate change denial all comes because they don't want the business constraints it brings. They might have to (gasp) become conservationists? Whatever it is they are conserving is not the environment, and is not natural resources. They prefer to spew our natural resources around the Gulf of Mexico. I have the time and energy to think about sending a comment to Rachel now, because my talents and energies are being spent around the house these days because I'm amongst the unemployed. Which (in my humble opinion) is a waste of good human resources.
Keep hammering away at the wasteful nature of the Republicans. It's time to convince Americans that the only thing Republicans want to conserve are their own jobs.
I really liked this graphic, so I spent some time splitting the numbers to get a better idea of the dynamics at play. Even without Reagan's spending boom, Republicans spend almost 50% more than Democrats. I said some more stuff here:
http://increaseourtaxes.com/presidents-and-the-deficit/