[quote=SK in CV][quote=earlyretirement]Excellent. Thanks for sharing.[/quote]
No, it’s really not so excellent. It is almost worthless. Much of it is based on a wholly bogus premise:
Just take a look at their [the CBO] 2002 projection, after passage of the Bush tax cuts:
The CBO predicted the FY2012 surplus would be $641 billion, the national debt would total $3.5 trillion, the debt held by the public would total $1.273 trillion, and GDP would total $17.2 trillion. They missed by that much.
The actual FY12 results were:
The true deficit was $1.37 trillion (amount national debt increased – not the phony deficit number reported by the mainstream media).
The national debt was $16.1 trillion.
The debt held by the public was $11.3 trillion.
GDP was $15.8 trillion.
Based on these results, I won’t be asking the CBO for help with my Super Bowl bet. Making ten year predictions is beyond worthless, but public policy in Washington DC is based on these useless CBO projections.
Why was that projection off? Well it’s true that projections 10 years out are problematic to begin with. They are based on laws and regulations remaining unchanged. That doesn’t happen. At least 4 different things happened between the 2002 CBO projection for 2012, and 2012.
1. Tax cuts passed in 2002 were scheduled to go into effect in 2006. Subsequent legislation moved those cuts up by 3 years, to 2003, cutting revenues by trillions of dollars.
2. War in Afghanistan ultimately added trillions to expenditures.
3. War in Iraq ultimately added trillions to expenditures.
4. Credit crisis/Mortgage crisis both reduced revenues by trillions of dollars and remediation increased expenditures by trillions of dollars.
When an entire an argument is based on a faulty premise, then the argument itself is of no value. This one fits that description perfectly.[/quote]
SK,
The author mentions all of these things in the article, and has blasted both Bush and Obama (and Congress, et al.) for their involvement in, and handling of, these issues.
From the article:
As the national debt soared from $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office to $16.4 trillion today, I heard shrieking liberal talking heads on MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal media blame the debt on the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. If the Bush tax cuts were so horrific, why did Obama and his minions just make 98% of these tax cuts permanent? Liberals held protest marches across the country against Bush’s wars and burned him in effigy. Obama’s defense budgets have been larger than Bush’s and he doubled down on our miserable failure in Afghanistan. You don’t hear a peep from the liberals about the warmongering Barack Obama who has kill lists and unleashes predator drones, killing women and children across the globe. Liberals pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the citizens, but continue to support a President that uses executive orders to imprison citizens indefinitely without charges, has expanded surveillance on citizens, has kept Guantanamo open, signs the continuation of the Patriot Act, and proposes overturning the Second Amendment by executive order. Liberals shriek about the evils of an unregulated Wall Street, while remaining silent as Obama hasn’t prosecuted a single banker for the greatest financial fraud in world history. You don’t hear a peep about Jon Corzine, who stole $1.2 billion from the accounts of farmers and ranchers. Liberals talk about regulation and then stand idly by while Wall Street lobbyists wrote the Dodd Frank law and insurance and drug company lobbyists wrote the Obamacare law. Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds and is only matched by Neo-Con hypocrisy.
The Neo-Con controlled Republican Party is a pathetic joke. They have the guts to declare themselves the party of fiscal responsibility, after Bush’s eight year reign of error. He and his fiscally responsible party were handed a budget in surplus and managed to add $4.9 trillion to the national debt by waging undeclared wars, encouraging Wall Street to create the biggest fraudulent financial bubble in history, creating a new $16 trillion unfunded entitlement (Medicare Part D), cutting taxes without paying for them, and creating a massive new government agency (DHS) to take away our liberties and freedom. Federal government spending grew from $1.9 trillion to $3.0 trillion under Bush and the Republicans. Does that sound fiscally responsible?
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The author is one of the tiny handful of people who’ve addressed some of the biggest losers in this whole Wall Street debacle: senior citizens and savers who are daily paying for Wall Street’s fraud in the form of 0-1% interest rates on savings accounts, Treasuries, etc. all in a world where real costs of essential goods and services are rising at a very rapid clip.
