Kos has this administration dead to rights in this post, and there simply is no defense or refutation possible. None.
No Defense
by John Cole| 39 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity
No Defense
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Krista
Holy crap, that really puts it in perspective, doesn’t it? He’s spending like an idiot!
Think Progress had an interesting comment, about how the costs to reconstruct after Katrina could be paid by simply rolling back the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
It seems like the country’s pocketbook is being emptied along with those of 99% of the country’s population.
But that 1%…they’re doing peachy, thank you very much.
Barry N. Johnson
No surprise that Bush didn’t fare too well in this recap. It was interesting to note that Clinton (who, along with Bush 43 was the only president in the list never to submit a budget cut) is a little overrated for his fiscal restraint. His saving grace was presiding over an unsustainable tech bubble that kept coffers so full that even Washington’s biggest spenders couldn’t deplete them fast enough.
I was also surprised by Nixon’s numbers in these charts. Whatever else he might have been, I don’t think anyone has ever accused him of being an economic conservative.
Lines
Don’t you know, 9/11 changed EVERYTHING!
We’re turning the corner on fiscal responsibility.
We’re fighting the money there so we don’t have to fight it over here.
Walker
I unfortunately do not have a link for this, but an economist who works with the Census bureau told me last week that there is 3 times as much money in the real estate bubble than there ever was in the tech bubble. How is it going to be any different if and when (as many major economists are saying) this bursts?
docG
NEVER? I read the chart as scoring Clinton 9 budget cuts of 30.
Techie
I think that it’s rich to see the Democrats suddenly concerned about spending again.
I’ll remember that when the next Democrat President brings up Nationalizing the health care system…
rachelrachel
This is Kos:
Kos is too young to remember, but Lyndon Johnson (unlike Bush) actually ran a surplus in 1969.
TallDave
While I agree with the overall point, I’m a tad suspicious. I’d like to see discretionary broken out. I remember the admin was claiming they’d held discretionary spending increases below a few percent, so I’m guessing it’s mostly the Medicare expansion and/or hurricane relief.
Now, I personally opposed expanding Medicare, because I think it’s a socialist sop, and so did AEI. And I think Bush hasn’t done nearly enough to cut the budget. But it’s a little disingenuous for Kos to put that up there when we all know he’d oppose any cuts just as vehemently as he criticzes Bush for overspending.
Like I’ve said before, nothing would make me happier than a serious non-military spending cut proposal from the Left. But if they did that, by definition they wouldn’t be the Left anymore, would they?
So, I call BS. Let Kos join the PorkBusters initiative if he’s serious. Doesn’t seem like he’s on board so far.
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Defense Guy
Walker
The real estate ‘bubble’ is not creating jobs, so the comparisons are not really apt.
I agree that Bush and the current Congress are spending like drunken sailors, and as was pointed out here yesterday, that is an insult to inebriated seaman.
TallDave
Walker,
You might take a look at Japan. Real estate prices declined by around 67% in the 1990s iirc.
over it
This is from Political Wire(?)(will have to check to see if that is indeed the name of the site I link-hopped to):
Bush Beats LBJ in Federal Spending
Nick Gillespie reviews a new study by the American Enterprise Institute that calculates President Bush “has boosted total inflation-adjusted discretionary spending in his first term by 35.1 percent. To put that in context, chew on this: LBJ — the Texas legend who created the Great Society and, for all intents and purposes, the Vietnam War — only boosted discretionary spending 33.4 percent. What’s more, the gap between Bush and LBJ will only grow…. since the final outlays for fiscal year 2005 (the last budget signed in Bush’s first term) aren’t in yet.”
The great irony is that the conservative political movement was spawned in response to Lyndon Johnson’s domestic policies. Now, it’s leader, George W. Bush, may cause it’s undoing. It’s no wonder so many conservatives are turning on the president.
Barry N. Johnson
Oops. My bad. Learn to follow the lines!
Lines
Defense Guy: “The real estate ‘bubble’ is not creating jobs”
I’ll make sure to tell that to all the framers, contractors, gardeners and city workers that are required to build all that new real estate. I’m sure they’ll just poof away in a fit of logic.
over it
.
This was linked to in that sentence/blurb on Political Wire(? again, not quite sure on name of site)
over it
er…misquoted the above. Should be ‘NO wonder’ not ‘A wonder’. ;)
You get the point though…
Carry on.
Walker
Personal savings are critically low; many people have justified spending a sizable portion of their income by borrowing on real estate based on inflated prices as collateral. This keeps money in circulation, creating jobs. What’s the difference from money earned on stocks? Real estate itself is not as liquid, but loans leveraged on it are and its effects are very real.
And they went into a recession and had lots of problems with their financial infastructure. Sure, they survived, just like we survived the tech bubble, but there was a period of readjustment. The point I am making is that people claimed Clinton wasn’t really fiscally responsible because he had this bubble to back him up; we got in trouble when the bubble burst. Arguably true.
But Bush is also backed by a bubble, one that is the reason we didn’t hurt so much from the collapse of the tech bubble. And he is spending more than this bubble warrants. I fear that things will be worse when this bubble bursts.
Doug
Bush has been blowing up the federal deficit since about Day #1. IMHO, the Republican fiscal conservatives have been a little slow to outrage.
Krista
Techie, I think when it comes to government spending, there are two things that need to be looked at: how much is being spent, and on WHAT it is being spent. The second factor is actually more important than the first. Not only is this president spending like a drunken Paris Hilton, but he isn’t spending it on things that would benefit your average American who is just trying to make ends meet. A lot of it is pork. IMHO, implementing a national health-care system would probably go over a lot better than many of the wasteful spending initiatives that have occurred. A lot of people are probably thinking, “What the hell has he spent this money ON! I’m worse off than ever!”
Defense Guy
Man I hope not, that would really be tragic for them.
Some figures for you.
Information Sector
Construction Sector
There is a lot of useful information on those pages and that site itself. You are correct that Construction jobs are at an all time high in 2005, but the rise has been far more gradual and has been going on since the 1990’s.
DougJ
Sorry, people but 9/11 changed everything. Don’t you get it?
Trent
This always annoyed me: What do conservatives think Clinton should have done in face of the o-so-terrible-tech-bubble? Discourage people from pursuing it? Regulate it? Are you serious?
C’mon! Let the free market rule! Stand by your beliefs conservatives!
This is such a dickish criticism of Clinton. He did what he should have. He supported market forces and a lot of people got rich. A lot of companies came into existence. Some people lost a lot of money at the end of it, but i think it was clearly a new gain for the economy.
And there was nothing he could have or should have done to control the bubble aspect of it. It’s the American way. We’ve had bubbles before and we’ll have them again.
Steve
Let’s be clear here. Of course the Left would object if cuts were made to social services. But the point is that the Left does not consider the tax cuts to be sacrosanct.
The Left loses elections, however. So the costs of hurricane relief will be paid by the poor in terms of lost social programs, not by the rich in terms of sacrificed tax cuts. That doesn’t mean the Left is required to stand up and cheer because at least we’re not doing it through deficit spending.
Defense Guy
Trent
You are missing the point over why that is pointed out. It is pointed out always in a comparison between Bush and Clinton, because under Clinton we were in a tech boom and by the end of the term, it had burst and we were in a recession. Thats it, at least when I use it, thats what I am trying to get accross.
As to Krista’s question about where it’s all going, here is a general idea of where it comes from and where it goes from last FY.
Here
Trent
People on the right usually refer to the tech bubble in a manner to devalue the value of the economic boom in the Clinton years, as if it were all a mirage. That’s what i’m referring to. Not sure if you were expressing that sentiment. This has just been a long standing pet-peeve of mine.
Defense Guy
Trent
Anyone using the tech bubble as a way to denigrate Clinton is being dishonest, and probably doesn’t like Clinton for other reasons. It was, in some ways, artificial, but I am not sure how it can be laid on him. The point I am making is simple, Bush inherited a recession, and so comparing him to Clinton has some serious limitations associated with the attempt.
I knew there was a serious problem when companies were able to get funding to run million dollar ads having never even turned one dime in profits.
One other thing. Despite some people’s attempts to use it in a mocking way, the truth is that 9/11 really did change everything. It shook public confidence to the bone, and we have only recently come back to pre event levels. What happens when we get hit again?
jg
It was COMPLETELY artificial. People were buying stocks from companies that didn’t yet have a product.
I blame Gore. He helped make the internet available to commerce and the public. Fuckin’ jerk!
Krista
Defense Guy – thanks. I’m very curious, though, as to what needs to be spent, versus what actually is spent. Especially in that “discretionary non-defense” category. I couldn’t find any lovely graphs like that for Canada’s budget, but if you’re at all interested, for comparison purposes (especially where we’ve got a balanced budget and universal healthcare), you can find a bunch of stuff at http://www.statscan.ca. It’s kind of dry, though.
Andrew J. Lazarus
Defense Guy, even if the construction industry isn’t creating jobs as fast as the tech bubble, you still haven’t dealt with the other (and more serious) effect. The Fed and the bubble allowed consumers to turn their homes into ATMs. The result was the only period in history where manufacturing was in a downright depression while consumer spending wasn’t even in a recession. Leaving aside what will happen if the value of the underlying real estate drops, what will happen if highly-leveraged consumers (balloon mortgages, interest-only mortgages, ARMs) are unable to make payments in a time of higher inflation (driven in part by Bush’s deficits) will not be pretty.
Mark
That set of pie charts from the House site is misleading. It gives you the impression that both pies are the same size. In fact, we’re spending $340 billion more than we take in in revenues (pre-Katrina). By not including the deficit, it makes it look like a smaller percentage of monies go to things like interest on the debt. The “Revenue” pie represents $2.1 Trillon in revenue from taxes, and the “Spending” pie represents $2.4 Trillion in outlays. To make it equal, there should be a big ‘ol slice of pie on the “revenue” side that says “Money borrowed from foriegn sources.”
opportunist
That’s when I plan on buying a house
Defense Guy
Mark
Good point, but I only included it because it came with the other pie, which I knew existed and wanted to show Krista.
Andrew
Agreed re: the insanity of the current real estate market. Several houses have gone up for sale on my street and have closed at prices that I consider mind-boggingly stupid. My house was purchased before the insanity really kicked into high gear.
Interest only mortgages should be illegal and we ought to be teaching our kids proper accounting and finance along with the crap they get now in school. Of course, since we can’t get government to behave responsibly with our money, I can understand why some individuals may feel inclined to follow their model.
Krista
Thanks for the link. Interesting reads on that site, I’ll be checking it out.
Krista
Defense Guy:
I could not agree more. I wish I had learned budgeting, and how to balance a chequebook, and how to live within ones’ means, and how to invest. My mom’s spending makes George W. look like a miser, so I had no example there from which to draw. I’m slowly, slowly getting out of debt, but it pisses me off that I got there in the first place. Stuff like that should be mandatory in school.
MM
Defense Guy:
IMO, it’s not that the loans should be illegal, but the lenders ought to be required to explain what an interest only loan means. I knew what I was getting into, and I knew it was a calculated risk, but I also knew that after 5 years, the payments go up.
Nobody involved in the process explained it to me, though. So I can imagine all kinds of fiscally ignorant people thinking that that $800 mortgage payment will stay that way forever.
If lenders were required to include the post interest only payment estimates in their GFEs, then it might help people make an informed decision.
I agree that we should teach basic finance in schools. In my school district, the only kids who took a class on that were the kids in remedial math. The class was called “everyday math”, and was supposed to teach them how to balance a checkbook, read a map or a bank statement, etc.
Lines
They can fit those courses in right next to Intelligent Design and How to Properly Pray to our Glorious Leader
crg
That might be a reasonable response if we were talking about deficits and there weren’t spending/revenue figures available. If the numbers linked to are accurate, the Clinton administration didn’t preside over a massive increase in spending. It’s not that “washington’s biggest spenders couldn’t deplete them fast enough”, it’s that the rate of spending increase was held down.
SeesThroughIt
That’s exactly it. Meanwhile, Bush is so set on defending tax cuts for the richest of the rich that he’s cutting funding for military quality of life programs, including health care. Why does George Bush hate our troops so much? Is it because he hates America or just hates freedom in general?
Republcans like to denigrate Democrats as being “tax and spend.” Well, with Bush, it seems like the alternative is “don’t tax and spend.” Personally, I’d rather actually have the money we’re spending than run the country into a mountain of debt by spending a shitload of money we don’t actually have. But hey, I guess that’s some crazy non-right-wing-speak there.
DougJ
Clinton created the tech bubble to distract people from his extramarital affairs. Don’t you people read Newsmax?
Jon H
Defense Guy writes: “The point I am making is simple, Bush inherited a recession, and so comparing him to Clinton has some serious limitations associated with the attempt.”
Bush may have inherited a recession, but he then adopted policies which weren’t particularly effective in a recession. Frex, tax cuts for wealthy people whose spending wasn’t constrained to begin with, rather than focusing on lower tax brackets where people would be more likely to spend it.
jobiuspublius
Worst-POTUS-Ever is all about tax cuts and cost plus no-bid contracts for his cronies, i.e. his base, the haves and have mores. When will people finally wakeup?