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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RMF who wrote (43263)	5/18/2010 12:54:29 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

The situation was as serious to our country as WAR would have been It was a recession. Perhaps a recession is as bad as a minor war (less directly traceable deaths, but if its a bad recession it does likely cause people to die earlier in some cases in ways that are hard to show concretely), but still "as serious as WAR" (esp. with the caps) seems like hyperbole. so I can't really judge what he has done until I see if we can get OUT of this mess first. I don't see how any level of seriousness would keep us from judging what was done. It might effect the judgment we come to, but that's a different point. yet I haven't heard ANYBODY (Republican or Democrat) SAYING where they'd like to make HARD CUTS in spending, have YOU? If you change that to I haven't any high level politicians, than I'd agree. You'll notice the BIG upswings in debt to GDP came from those guys... Not really. The BIG upswing came under FDR. Of course WWII was a rather big, and valid, excuse, but you seem to want to ignore explanations and just look at the numbers (or lines in a graph). And the big upswings largely came with Democratic controlled congresses. The WWII/FDR upswing, the highpoint and also steepest point on the graph under Bush, and at least part of the increase under Reagan (all of that increase was with at least partial Democratic control of congress). The real trend has been to scale back some of the WWII debt (partially with growth reducing the debt to GDP by increasing the GDP, partially by actually paying it back at certain points of time, and partially be inflating it away, which set us up for higher interest rates later, but looks good in the stats, at least at first, when it happens), then increases in the ratio ever since (with a dip down when the Republican's first took over congress, but that didn't last long as they gave up on the idea of fiscal discipline after a few years) Thanks for the link. I only had data to about 1900, but some of the data there goes back to 1800.