It's the average Joe's debt. We're paying for foreign and 'drug' wars and privatized prisons so that profiteers, who have tons of tax loopholes, can make billions. But it's cool since there are plenty of jobs at fast food joints. 'Muricun!
Because the people profiting from the loopholes give enormous amounts of money to candidates. It is even worse after the citizens united SC decision.
What's this about over 16 trillion inept??? I didn't know we had over 16 trillion people to begin with. Where did they come from? Who is going to feed all these people? Why are they inept? signed, Spoiler
If you get into politics, you get rich because you learn the loopholes. The uber-rich are the cronies/puppet masters for the politicians. They help make the politicians rich which in turn makes the loopholes a personal/financial issue for the very people who can propose and enact the chances which close the loopholes. Would you tax yourself at a higher rate for the greater good of the people? Some might, but unfortunately, money money money equates status and power in our country. Higher taxes = less money.
At the end of the Clinton administration, it was projected that we'd have our debt paid off in 6 years. Bush took our surplus and gave everybody tax refunds. Then he passed two tax cuts that weren't paid for and started two wars that weren't paid for. Then there was the grand recession that hit right before the election which will limit revenue until we're fully recovered. While spending has gone up under Obama, it's gone up at its slowest rate in 60 years. Spending has increased at a rate of 1.6% per year under obama. Compare that to Bush II (10.2%), Clinton (4%), Bush I (5.8%), and Reagan (8.6%). AND when adjusted for inflation, spending has actually GONE DOWN under Obama at a rate of -0.1%. The only president to do that since Eisenhower. Source Here's a chart showing what effect the wars, tax cuts, and recovery efforts have had on our deficit. If you go back and look at our debt over time adjusted for inflation, you see that it's fairly level from WWII to the early 1980s. Then Reagan slashed taxes and the debt began to skyrocket. Clinton came in, raised taxes and the debt finally began to level off. W. Bush passed more tax cuts and the debt started going up again. So obviously Obama is to blame.
It won't matter that we're $20 trillion in debt 5 years down the line when eggs are costing us $10.00 a dozen. Not trying to say it doesn't matter, but it's all relative to purchasing power. $20 trillion isn't that large a figure if, when spread throughout the economy, isn't buying all that much. But that doesn't imply that I agree with the policy either. In my opinion, the inflationary economic policies allow the state to implicitly tax the people to pay for things like bank bailouts, wars, prohibition, and empire.
The thing I've never liked about this argument is that it ignores the fact that the level of the "mandatory" spending can be changed. Just as Congress likes to ignore "mandatory" cuts that past Congresses have required (like the sequestration that many in Congress are now trying to get around only one year after instituting it), they are well within their rights to re-work these spending obligations. Of course, there would have to be enough of them to agree and actually pass a bill. Good luck with that.
What has the rate of growth in spending been under Obama if you use FY 2008 as the baseline? The problem with your argument is that you're going off the spending from 2009, which included all the "temporary" measures to deal with the financial crisis. Invoking a permanent state of crisis as a justification for continuing to spend at crisis levels ad infinitum is hardly consistent with the fiscal restraint you're trying to attribute to Obama.
lol, epic pwnage. i would actually vote for obama if i voted in the coming election, but outside of Iraq war spending, Cannonball's version of history is certainly highly convenient to the democratic presidents. clinton gets all the credit for the tech bubble years, which were part of the underlying decades-long credit bubble, and all the fake money that created (numbers which i'm guessing were used for the "6 years to pay off the debt" projections) and then bush gets the blame for the mess when it pops a few months into his presidency. of course, bush chose short-termism and cut taxes and the fed chose to cut rates so that no pain would be inflicted, except to the national debt, from the ensuing recession. and then when the housing bubble - which was a nice combination of the 25-30 year long credit bubble, financial deregulation (including the repeal of Glass-Steagall under clinton), and low interest rates from the tech bubble popping - popped a few months before W left office, we implemented measures to keep the economy from collapsing. measures which dramatically increased the debt and measures whose fiscal impact/blame apparently only belongs to bush. measures which obama (or pretty much anyone who was president) had no problem continuing because like most politicians he wasn't going to take short term economic pain, which would be his own political pain, when he could just shove it onto the national debt. pointing out that there are factors which have contributed 1+ trillion annually to the deficit only points out that obama has ignored those factors in setting spending over 1 trillion above income because politically long term debt pain is a lot easier than short term economic pain and has been what pretty much everyone has been choosing over the last 30 years. at some point, some president will probably have to (involuntarily) take the shorter term economic pain and then we'll probably pretend it was all his fault, vote him out, and make sure everyone in the future keeps doing the same things that caused the previous problem.
