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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter O'Brien who wrote (211272)	12/19/2001 9:46:48 PM
From: rich4eagle	Respond to of 769670

This is absolute crap, we were at world war fighting for survival against Germany and Japan and the Axis, how can you be so dumb to compare Reagan's peacetime debt to all out global warfare. This is the dumbest comparison of numbers that I can imagine

To: Peter O'Brien who wrote (211272)	12/20/2001 9:38:15 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Reagan's debt was nothing compared to Roosevelt's. Alike in kind, different in scale. I've seen several reports on the rioting and rebellion in Argentena. The cause was agreed by every report and every interviewed expert. Excessive national debt. latimes.com This is Bush Jr.'s vision for America, if he has a vision at all. TP

To: Peter O'Brien who wrote (211272)	12/20/2001 4:23:23 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 769670

"Reagan's debt was nothing compared to Roosevelt's." >>>> Correct. But then there was that matter of the little shooting war called WWII, and the Great Depression.... Both (most economists would agree) reasonable reasons for running deficits. Actually though, I believe that Roosevelt's biggest mistake (certainly the biggest mistake of every politician who has taken the stage after him) was the failure to convert the Ponzi scheme called social security into a retirement plan based program. >>>> As your chart quite clearly shows: tcf.org. the tremendous debt run up during the WWII war years was paid down fairly steadily from 1945 to the early '70s. From 120% of GDP to (what looks like) the mid to upper thirty percent range. At that later state most economists would not find debt service in a growing economy to be a significant problem. >>>>> Now look again at the extremely rapid run of in debt in the early '80s (from the upper thirty percent range, to the seventy percent range of GDP). As you correctly point out... we've been paying on the Depression era debt for over 60 years. Now I ask you, what exactly did we buy with that debt bubble from the Reagan years? A few tanks that are obsolete now? Ships that were mothballed within 10 years? An S&L bailout? Did we receive anything tangible by doubling the entire national debt remaining from 200 years of existence as a nation? We are likely to be paying on that new debt for at least as long as we were paying on the Depression era debt... perhaps longer. And there was no national depression, no world war threatening our very existence, no overriding national emergency that would have justified the debt binge of the '80s.... Just some very bad economic mis-management (which both parties had a major hand in.)