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

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (45322)	8/27/2010 7:26:54 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

I mean the President immediately preceding Bush did not. And the president immediately preceding Bush was not president at the same time, under the same conditions, with congress acting in the same way. Sure a different president would have changed the results, but probably only marginally. The president may not have initiated Iraq, but Iraq is only a small part of the spending increase. Clinton, or Gore, or anyone else in place of Bush would not have had the continuation of the "peace dividend", and in fact giving Afghanistan (which probably would have happened anyway) they would have to have increased military spending a bit, if perhaps not quite as much as it increased when Bush was president. They wouldn't have had the tech stock boom that Clinton had, instead they would have had two recessions like Bush had. They wouldn't have had a congress hyper-concerned about spending and deficits like Clinton had, instead they would have had the Bush era free-spending congress. The increases in existing entitlement spending would have happened on schedule. Some sort of drug program, likely costing even more than Part D has (since the Dems where pushing for a more "generous" program) would have passed, and the non-military non-entitlement spending would not have been likely to have increased at a much slower rate given the politics of the time. You still get large deficits before the recession, and then huge deficits after.