posted August 29, 2010 05:00 PM            

sigh~

The orange cast to his skin is different this time of year, possibly due to direct sunlight. i know I will burn for this.

what bonehead Boehner has planned for us should he ascend the speaker throne.

"The Fiscal Impact of the Boehner Plan"

1. Fully Extend the Bush Tax Cuts.
=
Increase deficits and debt by $3.8 trillion over ten years.

2. Have the president veto the Employee Free Choice Act, a carbon tax or cap and trade, and "any other tax increases on families and small businesses" if passed during a lame-duck session of Congress.
=

Unable to assess impact of hypotheticals, but the provision impairs ability to address deficits and debt, including the potential loss of $624 billion in revenue over ten years from a carbon regime.

3. Call on Congress to repeal the provision in healthcare reform mandating that small businesses file IRS 1099 forms on purchases of over $600.
=
Increase the deficits and debt by $17 billion over ten years per Congressional Budget Office estimate. The provision was included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to close the business tax gap.

4. Reduce non-defense discretionary spending to 2008 levels.
=

In 2008, non-defense discretionary spending was approximately $494 billion. Under the President's proposed 2011 budget, non-security discretionary spending is $530 billion. In his State of the Union Address, the President announced a three year freeze on non-security discretionary spending, and levels drop to $490 billion in 2012 and $480 billion in 2013. Boehner's remarks did not address a plan beyond that point. This proposal would therefore save $36 billion next year and nothing thereafter.

5. Resignations of the President's economic team, starting with Secretary of the Treasury Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers.
=

The position of NEC Director is not Senate confirmed, so it is fair to estimate that it would take the Administration two weeks to fill that position. Estimating for the taxes paid on his $172,000 annual salary, two weeks without an NEC Director would save the Federal government between $5000 and $6000.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner makes an annual salary of $191,300. Because he is Senate confirmed, it is safe to estimate that it will take two months for his confirmation. Therefore, two months without a Treasury Secretary would likely save the Federal government between $25,000 and 26,000. Therefore, these resignations amount to a fiscal impact of $30,000 - $32,000 of deficit reduction over the next two months.

Total Fiscal Impact of the Boehner Plan: Increase Deficits and Debt by roughly $3.781 trillion over ten years.

this comes from a not altogether bipartisan report, it is matching everything else i am finding, so it's likely that everyone is using the same data, and it is incestuous.

I will vigilante er vigilantly keep looking in the weeks and months to come.

Study Looks at Tax Cut Lapse for Rich
By JACKIE CALMES
Published: August 10, 2010

NYT

WASHINGTON — As debate heats up over President Obama’s proposal to let the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy but to extend them for everyone else, a nonpartisan Congressional analysis circulated on Capitol Hill on Tuesday provides a look at the impact the plan would have on high-income taxpayers.

Given the progressive nature of the federal income tax system, in which tax rates increase with income, even the richest households would continue to pay the four lower rates on up to the first $250,000 of their income, under the approach being pushed by Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress.

The president has vowed to extend the tax cuts for individuals with less than $200,000 in annual taxable income and couples with less than $250,000 — about 98 percent of American households. About 315,000 households report adjusted gross income of $1 million or more.

Taxpayers with income of more than $1 million for 2011 would still receive on average a tax cut of about $6,300 compared with what they would have paid under rates in effect until 2001, according to the analysis, which was prepared by the Joint Committee on Taxation at the request of the Democratic majority on the House Ways and Means Committee.

That compares, however, with the roughly $100,000 average tax cut that households with more than $1 million in income would receive under current rates.

Filers with taxable income of $500,000 to $1 million would still get on average a tax cut of $6,700 compared with pre-2001 rates, according to the data from the tax analysts. But that compares with roughly $17,500 if the top Bush tax rates were maintained.

If the president gets his way, in 2011 the top two income tax rates — now 33 percent and 35 percent — would revert to the levels before the Bush administration, 36 percent and 39.6 percent, respectively. But the four lower rates would remain 10 percent, 15 percent, 25 percent and 28 percent. For some taxpayers earning up to $250,000, the top marginal rate would remain 33 percent.

The tax-cut debate is shaping up as one of the hottest of the year and will play out in the weeks before voters go to the polls to determine which party controls Congress. Democrats want to extend the tax cuts for all but the wealthy, while Republicans are fighting to maintain them for everyone.

Most of the tax cuts that were a signature domestic initiative of George W. Bush’s presidency carried an expiration date of Dec. 31, 2010, to limit the potential revenue losses; supporters assumed that they would be extended when the time came.

Extending them for the next 10 years would add about $3.8 trillion to a growing national debt that is already the largest since World War II. About $700 billion of that reflects the projected costs of tax cuts for those in the top 2 percent of income-earners.

With the economy still weak, the issue of the tax cuts has led to an economic debate between those who would end all or some of them to reduce the projected debt and those who say raising taxes on the wealthy could threaten the economic recovery.

For both parties, the dispute has become a defining one as they hone campaign arguments heading toward November.

Speaking of Republicans at a fund-raiser in a wealthy community near Dallas on Monday, Mr. Obama told Democratic donors, “What you see is a governing philosophy on their part that basically comes down to ‘We’re going to extend tax cuts for the wealthiest among us’ — folks who don’t need those tax cuts and weren’t even asking for them, which would cost $700 billion.”

For their part, Republicans do not emphasize the impact of extending the tax cuts for wealthy individuals. Rather, they say Mr. Obama is about to spring a big tax increase on many small-business owners who file their taxes as individuals. Analyses from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization, show that less than 3 percent of filers with small-business income pay at the top two income tax rates, and many of those are doctors and lawyers in partnerships.[/quote]

I am seeing quite allot of aggressive advertising about these so called tax hikes. People are not hearing the facts.
What they are hearing is that the Obama admin is going against campaign promises [again] and raising taxes on the poor and the middle class. False

I am hearing that this hurts the small business owner. False

I am hearing that reverting back to a higher tax rate on the wealthy hurts job growth. False

Why is the dialog always about stuff that is not true? Because taxes are the most consistent and bipartisan issue that everyone hates.

Why is Git mo still open?
why is BP still calling the shots?

posted August 30, 2010 12:41 AM            

i don't envy any politicians in our times, especially those who try to stay honest. an ox president in the year of the tiger...tuff job for sure.

posted September 07, 2010 10:30 AM            

I listened to the Obama Labor day speech in the car, and just read the text of the speech. I am adding some quotes to this thread as it directly relates to the Man who wishes to be `Speaker`

quote:

---

Obama:

When we passed a bill earlier this summer to help states save jobs -- the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers and nurses and police officers and firefighters that were about to be laid off, they said no. And the Republican who thinks he’s going to take over as Speaker. I’m just saying that’s his opinion he’s entitled to his opinion. But when he was asked about this, he dismissed those jobs as “government jobs” that weren’t worth saving. That’s what he said, I’m quoting -- “government jobs.”

Now, think about this. These are the people who teach our children. These are the people who keep our streets safe. These are the people who put their lives on the line, who rush into a burning building. Government jobs? I don’t know about you, but I think those jobs are worth saving.

---

Obama vowed that he would fight efforts to privatize Social Security. "To those who may still run for office planning to privatize Social Security," he said, "let me be clear: It will not happen on my watch. Not while I'm president of the United States of America.

Obama described the U.S. economy as a car that had been driven into a ditch by Republicans during the administration of George W. Bush. The president said working people had struggled to pull the car out of the ditch, only to have the Republicans ask for the keys back. "I don't want to give them the keys back," Obama said. "They don't know how to drive."

posted September 08, 2010 09:47 AM            

So two months before an election, and 19 months after the mother of all spending programs, President Obama said yesterday he's rolling out one more plan to stimulate the economy. We'll discuss the details when they're released, but the effort itself is a tacit admission that his earlier proposals have flopped. As the autumn economic debate gets underway, it's important to understand how and why we got here.

The recession preceded Mr. Obama's Inaugural by 13 months, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, and so did the President's fiscal policy ideas. George W. Bush got there first. In February 2008, he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed on a $168 billion combination of federal spending and temporary tax rebates that were supposed to maintain growth through the housing market decline that election year.

Larry Summers, who would later become Mr. Obama's chief economic adviser, made the case for such a stimulus to boost domestic "demand" in late 2007. Any stimulus, he told the Brookings Institution, should be "timely, targeted and temporary." Peter Orszag, then at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) before joining the Obama White House, made the same case.

The official GDP statistics did show a growth blip in the second quarter of 2008 to 0.6%, but third quarter GDP fell by 4%, and we all know what happened after the financial meltdown. Stimulus I failed.

Enter Stimulus II, the $814 billion plan that was also supposed to make up for lost private demand. It too was a combination of one-time tax rebates and spending, mostly on social programs like Medicaid rather than on "shovel-ready projects."***except, we were told this money would be spent on "shovel ready projects to put people to work. They lied*** Mr. Summers promised this would have a 1.5 "multiplier" effect on GDP growth, and White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein famously predicted the spending would keep the jobless rate below 8%.

All during this time, the Federal Reserve was also feeding the economy with unprecedented monetary stimulus, cutting its benchmark interest rate to near zero and expanding its balance sheet by more than $2 trillion by purchasing mortgage-backed securities and other assets.

During this time, too, Congress passed other industry-specific stimulus bills—cash-for-clunkers, the $8,000 home-buyer's tax credit, mortgage payment relief, and jobless pay up to 99 weeks. Yet all of this has merely stolen auto and home purchases from the future, with sales falling once the tax benefits expired. The housing market in particular may be softening again, despite historically low interest rates.

The recovery seems to have begun in summer 2009, with GDP growth hitting 5% in the fourth quarter on the backs of an inventory rebound and expansion overseas. But U.S. growth has since decelerated, to a mere 1.6% in the second quarter, and the jobless rate is 9.6% after three consecutive months of job losses. The economy is growing, but far too slowly to restore broad-based prosperity.

In sum, never before has government spent so much and intervened so directly in credit allocation to spur growth, yet the results have been mediocre at best. In return for adding nearly $3 trillion in federal debt in two years, we still have 14.9 million unemployed. What happened?

The explanations from the White House and liberal economists boil down to three: The stimulus was too small, Republicans blocked better policies, and this recession is different because it began in a financial meltdown. Only the third point has some merit, and for a different reason than the White House claims.

On a too-small stimulus, this isn't what Democrats or most Keynesian economists told us at the time. Even Paul Krugman, who now denies intellectual paternity for this economy, wrote on November 14, 2008 that "My own back-of-the-envelope calculations say that the package should be huge, on the order of $600 billion." The White House raised him by 33% two months later, but now we're told that wasn't enough.

Given that the stimulus program was so poorly structured and so overtly politicized, how do we know that, say, $500 billion more would have made a difference even on Keynesian terms? The money for government spending has to come from somewhere, which means from the private economy. Our guess is that by ensuring even higher debt and implying higher taxes, a bigger spending stimulus would have done even more harm.

Stimulus godfather Mark Zandi and CBO have produced studies claiming that the stimulus saved millions of jobs and thus prevented an even deeper recession. But these are essentially plug-and-play economic models that multiply the amount of dollars spent by the assumed impact on jobs based on previous studies, and, voila, the jobless rate would have been higher without such spending. In the real world, the economy lost 2.51 million jobs.

The claim that recessions rooted in financial panic pose special problems has more truth to it. Credit excesses built up over many years have to be wound down, and that takes time, while banks have to work down their bad assets. However, one good aspect of this recovery is that business balance sheets have shaped up nicely, thanks to productivity gains, and banks have been making healthy profits. The problem is that banks still aren't lending and businesses aren't hiring or investing enough.

Which brings us to another major cause of the Obama malaise. When it took office in 2009, many of us advised the Administration to focus on nurturing the recovery first and postponing social-policy priorities that would only add more economic uncertainty. All the more so given this recession's unusual financial roots.

Instead, Democrats embarked on the most sweeping expansion of government since the 1960s, imposing national health care, rewriting financial laws from top to bottom, attempting to re-regulate the telecom industry, and imposing vast new costs on energy, among many other proposals. Not to stop there, in January it plans to impose a huge new tax increase on "the wealthy," which in practice means on the most profitable small businesses.

Central to Mr. Obama's political strategy for passing these priorities has been trashing business and bankers as greedy profiteers. His Administration has denounced or held up as political or legal targets the Chrysler bond holders, Wall Street bonuses, Goldman Sachs, health-insurer profits, carbon energy investors, and anyone else who has dared to oppose any of its plans to "transform" U.S. society.

Only yesterday at a Labor Day event in Milwaukee, Mr. Obama was at it again, declaring that "anyone who thinks we can move this economy forward with a few doing well at the top, hoping it'll trickle down to working folks running faster and faster just to keep up—they just haven't studied our history. We didn't become the most prosperous country in the world by rewarding greed and recklessness."

Whatever else one can say about such rhetoric, it is not the way to restore business confidence or turn a fragile recovery into a durable expansion. It has only spread fear and even greater uncertainty.

As for blaming the Republicans, with only 40 and then 41 Senators they couldn't stop so much as a swinging door. The GOP couldn't even block the recent $10 billion teachers union bailout. The only major Obama priorities that haven't passed—cap and tax and union card check—were blocked by a handful of Democrats who finally said "no mas." No Administration since LBJ's in 1965 has passed so much of its agenda in one Congress—which is precisely the problem.

To put it another way, the real roots of Mr. Obama's economic problems are intellectual and political. The Administration rejected marginal-rate tax cuts that worked in the 1960s and 1980s because they would have helped the rich, in favor of a Keynesian spending binge that has stimulated little except government. More broadly, Democrats purposely used the recession as a political opening to redistribute income, reverse the free-market reforms of the Reagan era, and put government at the commanding heights of economic decision-making.

posted September 08, 2010 07:14 PM            

The fact is that O'Bomber has never produced a single quarter or month of unemployment numbers as good as the worst of the Bush 8 years. Neither has O'Bomber come close to the levels of GDP growth produced during the Bush years.

In fact, O'Bomber has wasted more than a Trillion dollars on a phony stimulus/Porkulus...which was supposed to go to shovel ready infrastructure projects...and instead handed the money off to his political supporters...in city, county and state government and to his Socialist pals...the union bosses...and we have nothing to show for it at all except for the debt which we will have to pay off at some point.

More bizarre is the fact the OMB warned that doing nothing was better for the economy in the long run than spending $787 Billion on a stimulus.

So, we got no short term benefit from the stimulus and we still have the long term effects the OMB warned about as well...and, the OMB was wrong about the short term benefits of O'Bomber's Porkulus Bill.

Almost everyone has awakened to the fact O'Bomber and his Marxist Socialist pals in the White House are far worse than the gang who couldn't shoot straight.

Of course, there will always be that 10%...O'Bomber Kool-Aid drinkers who never get the word and/or can't manage to figure it all out for themselves.

CBO: Obama stimulus harmful over long haul
By Stephen Dinan
5:11 p.m., Wednesday, February 4, 2009

President Obama's economic recovery package will actually hurt the economy more in the long run than if he were to do nothing, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

CBO, the official scorekeepers for legislation, said the House and Senate bills will help in the short term but result in so much government debt that within a few years they would crowd out private investment, actually leading to a lower Gross Domestic Product over the next 10 years than if the government had done nothing.

CBO estimates that by 2019 the Senate legislation would reduce GDP by 0.1 percent to 0.3 percent on net. [The House bill] would have similar long-run effects, CBO said in a letter to Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, who was tapped by Mr. Obama on Tuesday to be Commerce Secretary.

The House last week passed a bill totaling about $820 billion while the Senate is working on a proposal reaching about $900 billion in spending increases and tax cuts.

But Republicans and some moderate Democrats have balked at the size of the bill and at some of the spending items included in it, arguing they won't produce immediate jobs, which is the stated goal of the bill.

The budget office had previously estimated service the debt due to the new spending could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of the bill -- forcing the crowd-out.

CBOs basic assumption is that, in the long run, each dollar of additional debt crowds out about a third of a dollars worth of private domestic capital, CBO said in its letter.

CBO said there is no crowding out in the short term, so the plan would succeed in boosting growth in 2009 and 2010.

The agency projected the Senate bill would produce between 1.4 percent and 4.1 percent higher growth in 2009 than if there was no action. For 2010, the plan would boost growth by 1.2 percent to 3.6 percent.

CBO did project the bill would create jobs, though by 2011 the effects would be minuscule.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/04/cbo-obama-stimulus-harmful-over-long -haul/

So, any way you slice it we've lost almost 3 million jobs since O'Bomber's Porkulus Bill was passed. We did not create any net new jobs in 2009 and 2010...and the OMB said the effects of the so called stimulus bill to create jobs in 2011 would be minuscule. Guess what?

posted September 08, 2010 07:55 PM            

well of course not, dodo, because obama had to FOLLOW the bush 8 years! bush came in on the tail of clinton and a SURPLUS. look what he had to do to UNDO that and create the mess obama walked into!

but the bush tactics were costing jobs and shrinking the middle class while kissing the arses of the rich back in the THIRD year of his FIRST term...we haven't even come that far with this one yet.

the bush years oversaw the major shift to outsourcing jobs - which is WHERE those jobs are to this day...and not likely to come back since americans DEMAND a living wage for the most part. i could retire to india and live like a queen tomorrow. plenty of people are headed that way...but my work is hard to outsource or computerize.

again, a lot of people don't want "jobs" they want to make their own...

posted September 08, 2010 11:55 PM            

A refresher course on the recent and not so recent past. I am using multiple links as our resident rewriter of history loves to debate [ignore] the facts by discrediting the messenger. It will be interesting to see which AM thinker blog post will fit all of them.

NDN: Boehner’s Economic Plan Would Worsen The Deficit By Roughly $4.2 Trillion Over The Next Ten Years

NEWSWEEK: “Recent GOP Proposals Would Produce Fewer Jobs And Far Larger Deficits Than The Plans Obama Has Already Passed Or Currently Wants To Pass”

TIME mag Michael Crowley: At The Heart Of Boehner’s Speech Was “A Gaping Chasm”

ATLANTIC: John Boehner Mocked His Deficit Reduction Plan Before He Proposed It

Economist Paul Krugman had this interesting post:

September 4, 2010, 11:44 am The Perils Of Government By Poll, 30s Edition
------------------------------------------------
Poll lovers everywhere might like this

In light of the way we actually got out of the Great Depression, it’s instructive — and depressing — to look at polling from that era. Two results from Gallup, in March 1938:

Do you think government spending should be increased to help get business out of its present slump?
Gallup Poll, Mar, 1938

37% Yes

63% No

In your opinion which will do more to get us out of the depression: increase government spending, or reduce taxes on business?
Gallup Poll (AIPO), Mar, 1938

15% Increase government spending

63% Reduce taxes on business

21% No opinion

another economist Until the economy is restructured so more Americans share in its gains, the economy won’t make many gains. We’ll be forever trying to scale a wall that can’t be, because the vast majority of Americans lack the purchasing power to move upward

On Sunday, a top Republican leader–Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX)–admitted the Republican economic plan for the future is more of the same failed Bush-Republican policies that got us into this mess. On Meet the Press, he explained:

David Gregory: “…I think what a lot of people want to know is if Republicans do get back into power, what are they going to do?…”

Congressman Pete Sessions: “…We need to go back to the exact same agenda…”

The same agenda that resulted in 8 million jobs lost?

posted September 09, 2010 12:32 AM            

quote:

---

“…We need to go back to the exact same agenda…”

---

let's give the keys back, absolutely!

posted September 09, 2010 09:03 AM            

The only arrow in their quiver is..."Bush did it".

But, all the way back to the days of yore, adults have despised weak kneed weenies who refuse to take responsibility for the messes they caused.

O'Bomber managed to turn a sharp downturn in the economy...a recession...into a virtual depression with his failed economic policy.

It's not as though O'Bombernomics hasn't been tried before...in America and elsewhere. So, there's no possible excuse which O'Bomber can make...except to plead stupidity....his own.

Roosevelt tried it in the 1930's. Gigantic expansion of government, deficit spending, attempts to take over the private sectors, gigantic tax increases to fund his Socialist agenda...and it failed utterly. By 1939 his treasury secretary Blumenthal had to admit.....

Get Over It: New Deal Didn't Do the Job
Published on January 21, 2009 by William Beach and Ken McIntyre

"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work."

Sound like Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, or perhaps another exasperated Republican stalwart, lamenting President Barack Obama's inclination this week to try to spend our way out of the recession?

Listen again:

"I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises."

Sound more like a liberal Democrat -- say, Harlem's Rep. Charlie Rangel -- pushing Obama to "create" jobs?

How about this:

"I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. ... And an enormous debt to boot!"

Surely this must be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denouncing the Bush administration's economic policies.

Wrong. Wrong. And wrong again.

The words came from none other than Henry Morgenthau Jr. -- pal, lunch companion and loyal secretary of the Treasury to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Morgenthau made this "startling confession," as historian Burton W. Folsom Jr. calls it, during the seventh year of the New Deal he helped FDR create to combat the rampant unemployment of the Great Depression.

It was May 9, 1939, and Morgenthau was appearing before powerful Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

"In these words, Morgenthau summarized a decade of disaster, especially during the years Roosevelt was in power. Indeed average unemployment for the whole year in 1939 would be higher than that in 1931, the year before Roosevelt captured the presidency from Herbert Hoover," Folsom writes in his new book,"New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America."

Indeed, Morgenthau confessed what so many keepers of FDR's flame won't admit: The New Deal failed. Massive spending on public works programs didn't erase historic unemployment. It didn't produce a recovery.

And neither will a "new" New Deal.....
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2009/01/get-over-it-new-deal-didnt-do-the-job

And...why the so called New Deal failed..and the Marxist Socialist roots of Roosevelt's "New Deal"

Some unconventional reflections
on the Great Depression and the New Deal
By F. William Engdahl
http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/History/New_Deal/new_deal.html

A good definition of "Insanity" is....

Doing the same thing over and over...and expecting a different result...this time!

Failing to observe the ancient wisdom..."when you find yourself in a hole...stop digging and put your shovel down"....leftists are intellectually incapable of throwing the 5th rate 19th Century thinker, Karl Marx, under the bus.

Americans have seen this play before. O'Bombernomics is a replay of the Roosevelt disaster...the "New Deal" and we're not going to set through it again.

November 2nd looms on Socialist Progressive demoscat calendars.

posted September 09, 2010 09:58 AM            

When he was running for President in 2008, Barack Obama frequently used the phrase "the last eight years." Now that he's president and it's two years later, he often uses the phrase "the last decade." The standard Democrat story is that our current troubles are simply the result of some bad trend set into motion the very second George W. Bush stole the 2000 election -- that we've had a full decade of horror and decline.

Our JournoList friends can prove with Queeg-like geometric logic that current deficits, for example, are mostly Bush's fault and that Obama, or any other Democrat, is virtually blameless. Here is one their favorite charts.

Source: Ezra Klein, The Washington Post.

Allow me to refudiate. This will take some doing, so I will break up my refudiation into three articles, a sort of before, during, and after: the good old days, two years that changed the world, and the end of Western civilization as we know it.

The good old days were those when fiscal year budgets were written and passed by a majority-Republican House and Senate and signed by Republican President George W. Bush. Those four years culminated in 2007, which I'm afraid will forever look like heaven on earth in retrospect.

By 2009, the world would look completely different. In a future article, I will address 2009 and what happened between 2007 and 2009, not the least of which was a complete reversal of party control of both Houses of Congress and the presidency.

After 2009, the deluge. Western civilization would be over, though its inhabitants would not quite be aware of it yet. That also will be addressed in a future article.

For now, I return to 2007. While George W. Bush was president for eight years, there were only four years in which both Houses of Congress were also Republican: 2003 through 2006. Congress writes budgets one year ahead, so those Congresses wrote the budgets for fiscal years 2004 through 2007. (You might think the Republicans also had Congress in 2001 and 2002. They didn't. Jumpin' Jim Jeffords made sure of that.)

(Unless otherwise stated, I use fiscal years, running October through September, from here out. That's the way the federal government does its books.)

Take a look at what those darned Republicans did when they wrote budgets.

Sources: OMB (see Table 1.2) and CBO. (WOT is War on Terror.) The fifty-year averages are for the fifty years prior to 2007, or 1957 through 2006.

Why are those averages meaningful? Because they had been holding for the past half-century. For the fifty years prior to 2007, revenues averaged 18.0% of GDP, and outlays averaged 20.1%. Moreover, the revenue extremes were 16.1% and 20.6% of GDP, and the outlay extremes were 17.0% and 23.5%. We had had half a century of fairly stable budgets (believe it or not) as fractions of GDP.

(For the statistically inclined, the linear regression estimates of revenue and outlays for 2007, based on the previous fifty years, are 18.4% and 21.1% of GDP. The actual values were 18.5% and 19.6%.)

Spending. Did Republicans spend like crazy? No. Every year was at or below the fifty-year average. Also, there was no upward trend at all. In fact, spending went down that last year.

Tax Cuts. Did the Bush tax cuts, which became effective in 2001 and 2003, decimate revenues? No. In fact, revenues grew every fiscal year that a Republican Congress wrote budgets. The trend was, in fact, positive and led to above-average revenue levels in 2006 and 2007.

Deficits. Deficits declined in each of those four years. By 2007, the deficit was 1.2% of GDP, a below-average number. In fact, were it not for the War on Terror (costing $171B that year), 2007 would have been in surplus!

Debt. What about the debt (OMB, Table 7.1)? It barely budged, and it actually edged downward a bit. The federal debt held by the public was 36.8% of GDP in 2004 and 36.2% in 2007. The previous fifty-year average was 37.0%. The debt was below that for all four years of 2004-07. As with most other measures of budgeting, the levels were to the good side of average and trending in a better direction while Republicans wrote budgets.

The FY2007 budget was about as white-bread average as it gets, and even a tad to the good side. Not only were the numbers themselves close to average, but the trends were fairly level and, if anything, showed positive signs: rising revenues, falling spending, falling deficits, and falling debt.

So much for the federal budget. What about the economy itself?

Unemployment. Over the months corresponding to those fiscal years, 2004-07, the unemployment rate averaged 5.0% and hit a low of 4.4% in March of 2007. Even though FY2007 corresponded to a budget written by Republicans, the new Democrat-controlled Congress increased the minimum wage in May 2007. By that September, unemployment crept up to 4.7% and would go above 5.0% by the end of calendar 2007. We have not seen anything that low since, "despite" two more minimum-wage increases.

Jobs. At the end of FY2007 (September), the economy was producing 137,667,000 jobs. Four years before (September 2003), there were only 129,925,000. That is, over 7.7 million jobs were added in those four all-GOP years. We now stand at 130,311,000 jobs -- a loss of 7.4 million jobs since Republicans lost Congress.

Gross Domestic Product. Real GDP grew at an annual rate of 2.7% over those four fiscal years. In FY2007, it grew 2.3%. While these are not superlative numbers, they match the standard conservative estimate of 2.5% growth for a nominal year. Over those four years, the rate was between 2.2% and 3.1% for any one year, indicating both strength and stability. Economic growth was what one would call "sustainable."

The Stock Market. The last day of FY2003, the S&P 500 would close at 996. Four years later, it would close at 1527. It reached its all-time high in October 2007: 1576. That is more than a 50% gain in those four years. Since then, it has lost over 30%, standing barely above its close in FY2003.

Putting It Together. If we send ourselves back to the end of 2007, forgetting what we know about what came after, it had all the features of an ideal year: responsible budgeting, manageable debt, and good, solid economic growth. All budget and economic numbers were about average or to the good side of average, and generally trending in positive directions.

The Bush tax cuts did not hurt revenue. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars had relatively minor impact on the budgets. All the things normally blamed on Bush were simply not in play.

And no matter how much you want to blame Bush for what happened after 2007, you cannot moan about "the last eight years" or "the last decade." Up through 2007, or through seven of Bush's eight years, things were just fine.

That is to say that if you were the pilot of Flight USA and looking at your cockpit dials in 2007, you would have said "all systems nominal." And all this after Captain Bush fought off the hijackers shortly after takeoff and the craft's altitude plunged dangerously until righted, again by Captain Bush.

But Captain Bush did not just engage autopilot and put his feet up. All along, he had doubts about some systems not adequately monitored by his cockpit gauges. He had asked his mechanics to look into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the regulation of sophisticated mortgage-backed investments. But the Democrats in his machine shop told him Fannie and Freddie were just fine and he was a stupid pilot for even asking the question.

And that's about where 2007 ended, except for one more thing. The entire crew of Flight USA, except for Captain Bush, was switched out about then. For the remainder of the flight, Captain Bush would try to pilot his craft through hostile weather with an incompetent and hostile crew -- the same crew who told him not to worry about Fannie and Freddie. The passengers would soon revolt as well and replace Captain Bush with the least experienced airline employee on board, one with no actual pilot experience --a flight attendant with very good passenger rapport.

posted September 09, 2010 12:01 PM            

but no one seems to think bringing the jobs back HOME would make any difference, and unless they are forced to those who are farming work out for pennies on the dollar are not going to give up that privilege, are they?

posted September 09, 2010 12:27 PM            

Bernie: I have good news and bad news (about the american jobs outsourced) for the Bangladesh worker

The good news? The hourly wage in Bangladesh has doubled.

posted September 09, 2010 12:45 PM            

there is also the syndrome exhibited by NETFLIX who instead of hiring a lot of people languishing on unemployment, spent tons on automation so they could meet the growing demand for their services. now you don't even have to wait for the film to come by mail, it can be delivered straight to your screen...and thousands of netflix former employees are needing unemployment. this is not due to shrinking business but drastic overhead reductions.

and it affects even those whose jobs are not outsourceable or suitable for automation, since less people are working and those who are have a hard time paying a real person to do a real job for real money...but it's not because the money isn't there, it's because of the way it is being distributed.

posted September 10, 2010 01:36 PM            

Dear friend:

America is at an historic crossroads. Despite the mounting challenges facing our nation, Democrats in control of Congress are turning a deaf ear to the voices of the American people. Bent on runaway spending, failed “stimulus” policies, and ever-increasing federal regulation, it’s clear that Washington’s priorities do not reflect those of the American public.

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House Republican Leader

posted September 10, 2010 02:20 PM            

lest we forget, the 30s was when environmental unpredictability teamed with human greed (which caused the continual farming of land that needed regular respite) to create a massive upswing in the numbers of unemployed and underfed americans.

without govt spending, how were those people to survive on land that could not produce?

i don't think it was FDR's policies that caused the dustbowl and i don't think a more business-friendly tax system would have created more wheat to feed the masses. it is absolutely HUBRIS to think that economic success OR failure rest in one factor such as economic policy.

if you look around the world you will find recession AND prosperity being experienced by BOTH capitalist and socialist peoples fairly equally. remember china? meanwhile russia may not be "communist" anymore but it is still russia, authoritarian and often brutally so. as it was under the czars, the bolsheviks and stalin... http://www.ccccok.org/museum/dustbowl.html

The Dust Bowl taught farmers new farming methods and techniques. The 1930's fostered a whole new era of soil conservation. Perhaps the most valuable lesson learned form the Dust Bowl - take care of the land. The Dust Bowl's future is controlled almost exclusively by the weather. The prolonged drought combined with the meteorological phenomena of the 1930's was rare and never before tortured the Great Plains as it did. Droughts and winds still cause many problems, but most are averted and minimized with proper soil conservation. When times turn dry again, will the wind blow and history repeat itself? Only time will tell.

in fact, it is boehner who is suggesting we GO BACK to doing the same thing that got us here. innovation and understanding of where we went wrong, just as with the dust bowl, is necessary. the fact that things have got worse before they get better, well i predicted that and i am no politico/economic genius!

posted September 10, 2010 08:00 PM            

Or maybe the green one is more your style?

Just want to add that the talking head experts said we would not feel anywhere close to comfortable for over 2 years. Not a recovery but an easing throughout.
Plenty of those same experts said that the programs and stimulus monies were not enough. [I tend to agree] That we needed a bigger flow of cash. Well the good news is most of the money lent has been paid back. In fact the bankers made the repayment a top priority in order to continue paying out bonuses.
Quite a few said that it would not be for 4 maybe 5 years before a sense of normalcy might be attained. Depending on other factors, like getting health reform passed. Medical costs were and are the single largest cause. Not even the wars trump the rising health care costs.

Re: The dust bowl I watched a PBS special on that with remarkable footage. I had not viewed the live pics of the US Capitol building in a black cloud of dust that blew all the way from the prairie.

posted September 12, 2010 02:14 PM            

It wasn't the dust storms of the 1930s which put businesses out of business and people out of work.

That was the direct result of the disasterous Socialist Progressive policies of Franklin Roosevelt and his merry little band of Socialist Progressives with whom Roosevelt attacked the business community...the very business community which creates jobs in America.

The Marxist Socialist Progressive O'Bomber seems hell bent on recreating the 7 year extended depression of the Roosevelt years.

So far, O'Bomber has gotten away with it...due to his Socialist comrades in Congress marching America off the economic cliff.

Never fear America; November 2nd is just around the corner and Americans are fed up with O'Bomber, his Socialist agenda and his congressional comrades.

So far, O'Bomber and his Socialist comrades have been running against Bush.

That didn't and won't work.

So now, they've decided to run against Boehner. That's not going to work either.

Pee-Lousy, Reid and O'Bomber have totally destroyed their credibility on every issue. Their Socialist Progressive agenda make Americans want to throw up.

Americans know the Socialist Progressive demoscats have been in control of Congress since the elections of 2006 and voters are not happy campers.

posted September 12, 2010 04:18 PM            

no, the economy was tanking and was going to get worse before it got better no matter who got in.

i see now boehner is saying he would consider the end of the top 2% tax cuts as long as those extensions of tax cuts to the lower and middle classes are continued...very much as obama has been saying...and no doubt like the other oppositionists will claim credit for such a plan going through even though that has been the administration's intention all along.