Where WILL the Liberals get the money for their non-essential and often pathetic feel-good welfare schemes?
Not to worry, Liberals have destroyed a country that 2 world wars failed to damage. And THAT is the ONLY thing they have accomplished.
Quote:
NYT: Deficits may alter U.S. politics, power
Projections suggest little room for new domestic initiatives for a decade
NEWS ANALYSIS
By David E. Sanger
The New York Times
updated 9:29 p.m. PT, Mon., Feb. 1, 2010
In a federal budget filled with mind-boggling statistics, two numbers stand out as particularly stunning, for the way they may change American politics and American power.
The first is the projected deficit in the coming year, nearly 11 percent of the country’s entire economic output. That is not unprecedented: During the Civil War, World War I and World War II, the United States ran soaring deficits, but usually with the expectation that they would come back down once peace was restored and war spending abated.
But the second number, buried deeper in the budget’s projections, is the one that really commands attention: By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.
For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors. Beyond that lies the possibility that the United States could begin to suffer the same disease that has afflicted Japan over the past decade. As debt grew more rapidly than income, that country’s influence around the world eroded.
Or, as Mr. Obama’s chief economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, used to ask before he entered government a year ago, “How long can the world’s biggest borrower remain the world’s biggest power?”
Pointed questions
The Chinese leadership, which is lending much of the money to finance the American government’s spending, and which asked pointed questions about Mr. Obama’s budget when members visited Washington last summer, says it thinks the long-term answer to Mr. Summers’s question is self-evident. The Europeans will also tell you that this is a big worry about the next decade.
Mr. Obama himself hinted at his own concern when he announced in early December that he planned to send 30,000 American troops to Afghanistan, but insisted that the United States could not afford to stay for long.
“Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power,” he told cadets at West Point. “It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry.”
And then he explained why even a “war of necessity,” as he called Afghanistan last summer, could not last for long.
“That’s why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended,” he said then, “because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”
Mr. Obama’s budget deserves credit for its candor. It does not sugarcoat, at least excessively, the potential magnitude of the problem. President George W. Bush kept claiming, until near the end of his presidency, that he would leave office with a balanced budget. He never got close; in fact, the deficits soared in his last years.
Mr. Obama has published the 10-year numbers in part, it seems, to make the point that the political gridlock of the past few years, in which most Republicans refuse to talk about tax increases and Democrats refuse to talk about cutting entitlement programs, is unsustainable. His prescription is that the problem has to be made worse, with intense deficit spending to lower the unemployment rate, before the deficits can come down.
Mr. Summers, in an interview on Monday afternoon, said, “The budget recognizes the imperatives of job creation and growth in the short run, and takes significant measures to increase confidence in the medium term.”
He was referring to the freeze on domestic, non-national-security-related spending, the troubled effort to cut health care costs, and the decision to let expire Bush-era tax cuts for corporations and families earning more than $250,000.
Video: Obama budget banks on red ink
But Mr. Summers said that “through the budget and fiscal commission, the president has sought to provide maximum room for making further adjustments as necessary before any kind of crisis arrives.”
Turning that thought into political action, however, has proved harder and harder for the Washington establishment. Republicans stayed largely silent about the debt during the Bush years. Democrats have described it as a necessary evil during the economic crisis that defined Mr. Obama’s first year. Interest in a long-term solution seems limited. Or, as Isabel V. Sawhill of the Brookings Institution put it Monday on MSNBC, “The problem here is not honesty, but political will.”
One source of that absence of will is that the political warnings are contradicted by the market signals. The Treasury has borrowed money to finance the government’s deficits at remarkably low rates, the strongest indicator that the markets believe they will be paid back on time and in full.
The absence of political will is also facilitated by the fact that, as Prof. James K. Galbraith of the University of Texas puts it, “Forecasts 10 years out have no credibility.”
He is right. In the early years of the Clinton administration, government projections indicated huge deficits — over the “sustainable” level of 3 percent — by 2000. But by then, Mr. Clinton was running a modest surplus of about $200 billion, a point Mr. Obama made Monday as he tried anew to remind the country that the moment was squandered when “the previous administration and previous Congresses created an expensive new drug program, passed massive tax cuts for the wealthy, and funded two wars without paying for any of it.”
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But with this budget, Mr. Obama now owns this deficit. And as Mr. Galbraith pointed out, it is possible that the gloomy projections for 2020 are equally flawed.
Simply projecting that health care costs will rise unabated is dangerous business.
“Much may depend on whether we put in place the financial reforms that can rebuild a functional financial system,” Mr. Galbraith said, to finance growth in the private sector — the kind of growth that ultimately saved Mr. Clinton from his own deficit projections.
His greatest hope, Mr. Galbraith said, was Stein’s law, named for Herbert Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.
Stein’s law has been recited in many different versions. But all have a common theme: If a trend cannot continue, it will stop.
This story, "Huge Deficits May Alter U.S. Politics and Global Power," originally appeared in The New York Times.
Where WILL the Liberals get the money for their non-essential and often pathetic feel-good welfare schemes?
Not to worry, Liberals have destroyed a country that 2 world wars failed to damage. And THAT is the ONLY thing they have accomplished.
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Two comments.
1) The title of the thread is "Obama Bankrupts America," yet the comments made in the opening post are all about "The Liberals." Why do people feel it is necessary to blame Obama for things happening in Congress?
2) I believe the destruction, if linked to bankrupting America, started oh...perhaps with NAFTA and has been compounded by decisions made over the past 8 years.
__________________ DobeMom
"Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes."
--Lewis Grizzard
Not to worry, Liberals have destroyed a country that 2 world wars failed to damage. And THAT is the ONLY thing they have accomplished.
You must have forgotten the great depression, which I believe was laid upon Mr. Hoover's feet. That darn Liberal Roosevelt managed to fix that eventually.
__________________ If all you have to sell is fear, you're out of business.
Everything and everyone are interconnected. If I destroy my enemy, I have destroyed myself..... Dalai Lama.
You must have forgotten the great depression, which I believe was laid upon Mr. Hoover's feet. That darn Liberal Roosevelt managed to fix that eventually.
I believe that it was WWII that ended the Great Depression. Had that not occurred, Roosevelt's socialist policies would kept the Great Depression going strong for another 30 years.
I believe that it was WWII that ended the Great Depression. Had that not occurred, Roosevelt's socialist policies would kept the Great Depression going strong for another 30 years.
Zoltan
Wow...Obama appears to be in good company!
__________________ DobeMom
"Life is like a dogsled team. If you ain't the lead dog, the scenery never changes."
--Lewis Grizzard
Te jössz magyar Meant completely with respect for your heritage and service to the US btw.
Zoltan is certain that you mean no disrespect with your little "quote".
But one should be cautious with other cultures, languages and nuances. A literal translation in one language can be meaningless in another language, or it can mean more than you think. (Connotation, old sport)
For example...the phrase: "Yo Mama" would simply mean "Your Mother" to a Somalia Pirate. However if that Somalia Pirate used that phrase in the wrong neighborhood, in the U.S., he could very well get his arse kicked.
Zoltan learned this the hard way.
While interrogating an Iraqi prisoner during Desert Storm (Yes Zoltan spent a little time in the Gulf, and Sterling will back me up on this) I was playing "good cop bad cop" with my Farsi translator as the good cop. I thought that our prisoner was not being very cooperative and so, in a Oscar winning performance, I flew into a rage and in my limited Farsi...called him an "as*s whole" to his face. Whereupon he burst out laughing....my translator burst out laughing, and the two "intelligence experts" left the room shaking their heads. Later my translator explained that the term I used, even in perfect Farsi, meant as much as calling someone a "belly button". Since then I have been very careful using phrases in unfamiliar languages.
Of course, "Te jössz magyar" could be the title of a new Hungarian Punk Rock Hit record. Zoltan has been away from the old country cultural scene for a long time now and has missed a lot.
I'm guessin' D means for "crazy"(or some such) to replace Hungarian.
As in,, You will go Hungarian trying to cipher out that graph??
__________________
Locally owned and operated, Dale(graduate of the Ron "Tater Salad" White, School of Debate)
I'd rather be fishin'
Sarah in 2012
"No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world poops on everybody. Pretending it ain't poop makes you an idiot, not an optimist."--?
"The reason for the 2nd Amendment was to insure we have the means keep the 2nd Amendment."--Goose
Obama Bankrupts America
Meant completely with respect for your heritage and service to the US btw.
