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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JBTFD who wrote (14142)	3/31/2012 3:27:43 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 85487

OK, here's my response to any points in the edit that where not covered by my response to the inital post. Obama did inherit a very bad situation. So did Reagan. Inflation was a serious problem leading in to his time in office and there where other problems as well. And the early 80s had a double dip recession that (at least combing both dips) was about as bad as the recent recession. In fact that was a major reason for Reagan's highest deficit (in nominal dollars or as a percentage of GDP). In 1983 the 2nd dip had just barely ended, unemployment was higher than it is now (10.8% peak, while the low point at the end of the year equals the current 8.3% see research.stlouisfed.org ). We didn't have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they account for a small portion of current spending, and in the early 80s there was still the cold war, and there was more need to rebuild our military (and that rebuilding helped future presidents contain spending, while the extra spending now, is more likely to help drive future spending up, by creating a larger baseline for the budget battles). Edit - It is true, that any president in Obama's situation would have fairly large deficits. But they could reasonably have been lower, instead Obama acted to increase them. Sometimes defenders of Obama will say "well Bush spent a lot and had large deficits", but Obama's spending totals and deficits where larger, and to the extent the president before you had large deficits its more important rather than less, to get a handle on things.