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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (110910)	5/7/2009 6:30:34 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541572

You don't get to claim this if you also suggest 9-11 is somehow Clintons responsibility? 1 - Yes you do, the two are not contradictory. (In fact they would fit together well, both would be claims about something that happens during a particular president's time in office, being partially dependent on the previous president.) 2 - When have I made such a claim? Saying its Clinton's fault (or Bush's fault) would be simplistic at best, if your using fault in the broadest sense of the term, and completely false in a more narrow sense of "fault". Its Al Qaeda's fault. He was elected president right after a recession had ended And the timing was similar for Bush. Not at all. Bush was elected as a recession was forming up. Clinton was elected after a recession ended. "The decrease in military spending was indirectly a result of Republican decisions." Oh bull again. WE now spend as much as the rst of the world combined. That statement is neither true nor relevant. China in particular spends a lot more on the military than its defense budget, and that's not even counting how drafts, combined with low military pay force the expenses on to citizens, removing it from the budget but not really removing it. But even though its false, its probably not extremely far from being wrong, the real problem with it is that the point is irrelevant. The issue is what happened with the reductions under Clinton. If today we spend one cent, or a quadrillion dollars each year on the military it wouldn't matter to that issue. And again you see it under one president but not another. Its an issue under every president. Which is one of the reasons why such charts are simplistic and not very meaningful. And even though such things happen under every president they where particuarly big under Clinton. Bush had such issues heading in both directions (the housing bubble increasing revenue, while 9/11, Katrina, and the aftermath of two bubbles decreased it). With Clinton almost all the big special factors increased revenue. And yet again you see it under one administration and not the other. Okay, Clinton had some divided government - what's the excuse under Bush when for 6 years he had control like no president before him. In terms of keeping the deficit down, divided government may be beneficial. As for control like no president before him, that's not true. Johnson had more control, FDR a lot more. Obama (while not before Bush) has more control and larger deficits (of course like Bush he faces situations increasing the deficit which he didn't create, but his reactions to them increases the deficit even more. In any case once again I'm not claiming Republicans are fiscally responsible, and I'm esp. not claiming Bush was (like Obama, he was very much the opposite) The only Republicans I've connected to the idea of fiscal responsibility in this conversation was the Gingrich congress.