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To: Scumbria who wrote (128758)	3/2/2001 12:16:21 AM
From: Paul Engel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

SCUMbria - How can people of intelligence and good conscience not be critical of the tremendous corruption and personal immorality of the entire Clinton Clan of Grifters?

To: Scumbria who wrote (128758)	3/2/2001 2:27:48 PM
From: Craig M. Newmark	Respond to of 186894

Scumbria, Re: interest and financial mismanagement Let me try it another way. Under your assumption, 1993 was the last "Reagan/Bush year". Fine. That makes 1981 the last Carter year. Net interest paid by the federal government in 1981 was $68.774 billion. Net interest paid in 1993 was $198.736. So the "excess interest" due to Reagan/Bush is about $130 billion/year. Divide by 365 and this is still about $1/3 billion/day, NOT the $1 billion/day you stated. As for financial mismanagement, most economists today regard how the government finances its spending to have, at most, a second-order effect. Consider: if the government taxes $1 away from the private sector, the private sector loses the use of that dollar and all the future interest on that dollar. If the government sells a bond for $1, the private sector must set aside $1 to repay the principal on the bond. And it loses the future interest on that $1, too, because it also must cover the interest on the bond. Either way, the private sector is out the same $1 plus future interest. There is little, if any, theory or evidence to suggest that if Reagan/Bush had replaced deficit financing with higher taxes, that the economy--then or now--would have performed significantly differently, with the exceptions that tax-financing could well have discouraged entrepreneurship at the margin and could have encouraged more federal spending. How much of the GDP the government spends does have real and important effects. The forty-year argument over deficits merely obscures this more fundamental difference between our political parties. (Take a look at some textbooks and articles from the 1960s--Democrats loved deficits then.) I know you're busy designing chips and all; I'm happy to try to make up for the gap in your economics education. Craig