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

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (670109)	8/29/2012 9:56:38 PM
From: TopCat	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1579680

"Christies would have a hard time coming across as a sophisticated intellectual...." Coming from you...that's funny.

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (670109)	8/29/2012 11:30:39 PM
From: puborectalis	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1579680

Republicans howl that President Obama has exploded the size of federal government spending in his short tenure as President, and it is true that he has increased it. But President Bush actually increased federal spending by more than 2X as much as Obama has. So it is unfair to lay the explosion in spending at the feet of President Obama: Both presidents are responsible. The increase in government spending, meanwhile, is actually NOT the only factor that has caused the deficit. The other factor--equally if not more important--is the fall-off in government revenue (tax receipts). This second and larger factor can be blamed on two things: First, the Bush tax cuts, which reduced revenue, and, second, the weak economy, which reduced the incomes and capital gains upon which most federal taxes are based. In the chart below, you can see what happened to both federal receipts (red line) and spending (blue line) over the past decade. President Bush cut taxes in 2001 and 2003. These tax cuts hit federal revenue, while federal spending growth continued apace. This combination ballooned the deficit in the early years of the Bush presidency. By the middle years of the Bush presidency, however, on the strength of the housing boom and strong economic growth (much of which now looks like a debt-fueled mirage), federal revenues began to grow rapidly. By 2007, in fact, the gap had almost closed. But then the bottom fell out. The housing bubble burst, the financial crisis hit, and the economy plunged into recession. And then President Bush handed President Obama the worst recession in more than 70 years and left Obama to clean up the mess. This recession clobbered federal revenues (tax receipts--red line), which have only just regained their 2007 bubble highs. President Obama's stimulus, meanwhile, helped add about $600 billion to federal spending (blue line). The combination of these two factors ballooned the deficit from $400 billion when President Bush left office to ~$1.3 trillion now. Read more: businessinsider.com