Still Not Sure How I Will Vote
- Thread starter oldtime
- Start date
i did a little research on your b.s.
here is reality...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterfe...-biggest-government-spender-in-world-history/
But for fiscal year 2009, President Bush in February, 2008 proposed a budget with just a 3% spending increase over the prior year. Fiscal year 2009 ran from October 1, 2008 until September 30, 2009. President Obamaâs term began on January 20, 2009.
Recall, however, that in 2008 Congress was controlled by Democrat majorities, with Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, and the restless Senator Obama already running for President, just four years removed from his glorious career as a state Senator in the Illinois legislature. As Hans Bader reported on May 26 for the Washington Examiner, the budget approved and implemented by Pelosi, Obama and the rest of the Congressional Democrat majorities provided for a 17.9 percent increase in spending for fiscal 2009!
Actually, President Obama and the Democrats were even more deeply involved in the fiscal 2009 spending explosion than that. As Bader also reports, âThe Democrat Congress [in 2008], confident Obama was going to win in 2008, passed only three of fiscal 2009âs 12 appropriations bills (Defense, Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security). The Democrat Congress passed the rest of them [in 2009], and [President] Obama signed them.â So Obama played a very direct role in the runaway fiscal 2009 spending explosion.
Note as well that President Reagan didnât just go along with the wild spending binge of the previous Democratic Congress for fiscal year 1981 when he came into office on January 20 of that year. Almost no one remembers now the much vilified at the time 1981 Reagan budget cuts, his first major legislative initiative. Then Democrat Rep. Phil Gramm joined with Ohio Republican Del Latta to push through the Democratic House $31 billion in Reagan proposed budget cuts to the fiscal year 1981 budget, which totaled $681 billion, resulting in a cut of nearly 5% in that budget. Obama could have done the exact same thing when he entered office in January, 2009, even more so with the Congress totally controlled by his own party at the time.
Reagan then ramped up the spending cuts from there. In nominal terms, non-defense discretionary spending actually declined by 7.1% from 1981 to 1982. But roaring inflation at the time actually masks the true magnitude of the Reagan spending cut achievement. In constant dollars, non-defense discretionary spending declined by 14.4% from 1981 to 1982, and by 16.8% from 1981 to 1983. Moreover, in constant dollars, this non-defense discretionary spending never returned to its 1981 level for the rest of Reaganâs two terms! By 1988, this spending was still down 14.4% from its 1981 level in constant dollars.
I understand the sentiment but just like liberal do gooders you can't suspend the laws of economics and unintended consequences.
So I'm quite skeptical.
Ok... how about one of the most succesful hedge fund guys ever... talking about structural change...
Paul Tudor Jones knows something about econ... he wrote
http://dealbreaker.com/2010/10/ten-...jones-had-an-acute-case-of-plantar-fasciitis/
...
Any serious attempt to address the structural imbalance is met with a chorus of boos from financial industry pundits who rail against âprotectionism.â In discussions involving the Ryan Bill, these pundits have few qualms with lobbing into the mix, like grenades, those most dangerous of words: âTrade War.â They often invoke the specter of Smoot-Hawley, the infamous US tariff act that triggered a trade war in which American exports and imports were slashed by half, leading a number of economists to argue that its passage contributed significantly to the Great Depression. But what they fail to see, or neglect to acknowledge, is that in modern times there never has been free trade with China; the US has already been in a trade war for nearly two decades; and it is the only time in this nationâs history it surrendered without ever firing a shot.
The United States lost six million jobs, indebted itself to China by $1.4 trillion, and received in return a host of consumer goods, many of which now reside in landfills across the country.
âTrade Warâ is a very dangerous phrase. Clearly, China and the US are commercial competitors and not enemies. There is no reason for âcombatâ in any sense of the term. The Chinese have set the RMB/USD peg artificially low
because they believed it was necessary in order to shift from an agrarian to an industrial-based economy. The United States also protected its nascent industrial sector when it did the same thing in the 19th century. Developing a significant export-oriented manufacturing base was part of an ambitious plan to relocate hundreds of millions of rural Chinese to cities where they could obtain manufacturing jobs and pursue a better life. It worked. Chinaâs coasts now burst with export-dependent factories and cities. But now and going forward, Chinaâs export strategy is completely unsustainable. In the intermediate term, much less the long term, it is becoming clear that the main buyer of Chinaâs exportsâthe United Statesâcan no longer foot the bill. A much better policy would be finding the right balance between domestic demand and exports through a stronger currency. Brazil did this brilliantly between 2005 and 2007. Their currency appreciated 34% against the dollar yet the economy grew 2% more than the prior
three years and above what was thought previously to be the speed limit. The incoming Chinese administration of 2012 will be forced to contend with a population that has been relocated and retrained for jobs that may one day
disappear, much as they did in the United States, all because China engaged in a futile attempt to avoid an inevitable re-equilibration of exchange rates. After all, one way or the other, the real US and Chinese exchange rate will find equilibriumâ either through nominal movement or through relative inflation rates.
Just as the Chinese elite have become dangerously wed to an unsustainable export-driven manufacturing model, the US elite have become indifferent to mercantilist assaults on the global trade framework. In mid-September, when the Bank of Japan intervened to suppress the value of the yen against the dollar, there was no response from Americaâs political, financial and media leaders. While these interventions might have been understandable six years ago, when Japanâs economy was relatively less well off than that of the United States, they are far from necessary today: Japan has an unemployment rate that is half that of the United States and it still runs a trade surplus. Nonetheless, Japan intervened to protect its export industry, and the United States, incomprehensibly, responded with not even a whimper, let alone a bang.