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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (545122)	1/20/2010 4:26:14 PM
From: TimF	5 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1575697

The majority of that debt was the result of budgets passed by congress's that where controlled by Democrats. Show me proof please. I ignore many of your arguments, because you don't show proof. If your going to ask for proof every time someone says 2+2=4, you usually will get ignored and rightly so. Bogging your opponent down in proving every assertion, every premise, no mater how much it is generally known to be true, can be a good way to keep your opponent from actually developing an argument to the conclusion. If you don't know enough to know that, and your trying to make points about partisan responsibility for deficits and debt, than its hard to take your statements on budgetary facts seriously. But this time I will back up the point, at least in just this one post, not endlessly again, each time you ask for proof regardless of the fact that the truth is already well established. The Democrats controlled congress for most of the 20th century. They've also controlled congress for the past three years. When they didn't control it outright they sometimes had control over at least one house. The record deficits at the end of Bush's term and at the beginning of Obama's are deficits with Democratic congresses. The deficits under Reagan were all under Democratic or mixed congresses (more Democrat than mixed). So in terms of congress all the pre-Reagan debt, most of the Regan debt (not really just the president's responsibility but your presenting it that way and its an easy shorthand) was Democratic. The Bush I debt was partially Democratic and partially mixed. The (much lower) Clinton debt was mostly Democratic (deficits where higher, and projected to go higher still earlier on in his term when he had a Democratic congress, that first Republican congress was the model of fiscal restraint compared to all the other congresses in recent decades), the early Bush II debt is on the Republicans but the largest Bush deficits are on the Democrats, and all the Obama debt is on the Democrats. Only during the first 6 years of Bush II did you have Republicans in power in the House, Senate, and White House. Those where high deficit years, but well below what we have now. Total gross debt 2001 to 2007 went from $5,769.9 billion to $8,451.4 bil, and increase of $2681.5 bil. Total Gross Debt in 2010 is estimated at $14,456.3 bil. So the period of total Republican control accounts for only about 18.5% of the debt, and that's a rapidly dwindling figure. "The majority of spending is on entitlements, and the majority of those where created before Reagan took office." Again, an assertion without proof. Show me. This is even more ridiculous. If you don't already know this points you really aren't qualified to talk about US federal budgets. The entitlement programs are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and SCHIP (and a few other programs such as Foodstamps. Social Security and Foodstamps where New Deal programs. Medicare and Medicaid where created by LBJ with democratic congresses. SCHIP was signed in to law by Clinton, so its associated with the Democrats, but it wasn't a pre-Reagan law. Medicare Part D could just be considered an expansion of Medicare, but to be fair to your side of the argument I'll treat it was a separate program. It was passed in 2003 and went in to effect in 2006 so its both Republican (even though Democrats wanted more money for it, or some other program to server the same purpose, so its not like they would have been fiscally responsibly in this case) and post-Regan. OK how does the spending stack up. Look at en.wikipedia.org "Mandatory Spending" is $2,184 billion. Subtract out disaster relief and interest on the debt to leave the entitlements and you have $2009 bil. The total of all "discretionary" spending is only $1,368 bil. Adding the interest and the disaster relief to that side to make it non-entitlement spending only brings you up to $1543bil.