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

To: RMF who wrote (49386)	2/23/2012 11:04:18 AM
From: TimF	3 Recommendations Respond to of 71588

An area of spending that isn't the largest, and that has declined as a portion of all spending on a trend that goes back generations, and that is currently set to be reasonably contained while larger area of spending explode upwards, can't be reasonably said to be driving the deficits. Then he TRIPLED it in 8 years. Again a meaningless point. Going from $1 to $3 is tripping as well. "Trippled" tells us nothing useful. The deficits were large, which can be shown by more relevant stats, they were a problem, but not because debt tripled. Also the situation now is around twice as bad. If only we merely had deficits as large as Reagan's as a percent of GDP... Instead we have not just a little bit worse, but massively worse. Beyond that Regan's spending on modernizing the military, helped post Reagan presidents have lower defense budgets. Obama's spending OTOH works to drive future spending up, not down. but how much of those deficits are because of "increased" government spending Under Obama and Bush, spending increase more that the deficit. By that measure over 100% of the deficits are due to increased government spending. That isn't really the best measure to use when your comparing two different sources. Its better to compare the impact of each, not just to dismiss one because its larger than the deficit in question. But reduced revenue is clearly a smaller factor. Really its two factors, each of which is smaller than the spending increase. Reductions due to the recession, and reductions from tax cuts. If we had kept a lid on spending, we wouldn't have a deficit problem.