[quote=cr]Your points are good, but like AN said, if you cut that line at 2006 Bush tax cuts look great. Blame Greenspan for the rest.[/quote]
Isn’t moving the attempting to dispute my point by using a theoretical? You can’t pick and choose your data points after they’ve passed. That’s like saying, “Yeah, we lost the ballgame 13-5, but if we would have scored 9 runs in the 3rd the outcome would have been different.” While that may be true, that is not how things played out.
But I’ll humor AN with his example. Lets say Bush lost in 2004, would Kerry have continued with tax cuts and increased spending? Maybe. But probably not, because Kerry subscribes to a different economic philosophy. He campaigned on balancing the budget (as opposed to Cheney’s “deficits don’t matter”). We probably would have seen a return to the economic policies of the 1990’s (attempt to balance the budget through increased taxes), and we would have seen a vastly different 2004-2008. Would we still have the current crisis? Probably. Would it be unfolding much differently if the US was able to attack it with a budget surplus in its arsenal? Damn right it would be.
The point is, those two time periods, 1992-2000 and 2000-2008, each represent two very different economic philosophies, with two very different outcomes. You can run theoreticals all you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that one economic philosophy has shown certain results, while the other has shown the opposite.
