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I mentioned George W. Bush a single time. I fully recognize the "Bush did it too" or "Bush was worse" is a poor political argument. I also made my original arguments to be as factually based as possible and tried to avoid the usual partisan talking points, since this is ultimately about economics, not politics, and we have things like numbers and math to form lines of logical arguments with. Statements like "he's spent more than any person in the history of the world" are just pure misguiding hyperbole at best, and completely false at worst. In the 1940s, the federal deficit was 22% of GDP. In 2009, the federal deficit was 10% of GDP, and it hasn't been in double digits since. At least amend your statement to, "Obama has run bigger deficits as a percentage of GDP than any president not fighting Nazis," which would at least be accurate. In any event -- all I'm saying is that I'm very much a "deficit hawk" in any condition where the Federal Reserve has to keep interest rates above. Cut the deficit, offset the spending by lowering borrowing costs, so the private sector can borrow more cheaply for the purposes of growth. Hooray! The problem is when you have such a bad recession that borrowing costs are effectively zero, for the government and anyone else, and you still have high unemployment and no inflation. You cannot go bankrupt if you print your own currency. You can always print more money, which is why Japan has no problems borrowing money at low interest rates even with a 250% debt to GDP ratio[0]. Yes, I know, "OMG Weimer and Zimbabwe HYPERINFLATION!" This is why the US government doesn't just print money, it issues bonds that the Federal Reserve buys by printing money, giving the Federal Reserve the ability to constrain said money supply if the economy recovers. And by the way, if we have inflation, that is a good thing, as it means enough people have enough jobs and income that they are spending enough money. If you can give me a scenario where we have inflation without full employment, I'd love to hear it. the same people have been ranting about hyperinflation for years. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles presented their famous "Simpson-Bowles" budget in 2011, and prefaced it by saying the US needed to take these budget steps or else they would face issues with rising interest rates or inflation in about two years[1]. 2011 was two years ago. Hmm. If Social Security needs to be a little means tested and the age raised, so be it. If Medicare needs to be means tested, age raised, or what have you... then so be it. Let me get this straight. Because some entities in our private sector did some really dumb (or malicious) things, and the resulting speculation bust led to massive unemployment, the solution is... cutting core government programs that had nothing to do with it? And you want to do it by turning Social Security into a welfare program (bet it'll still be politically popular after that!) and by raising the age of Medicare, which means all the poor people that will actually need it will probably be dead, because even fewer of them will live to 67 or whatever age you want to raise it to. And we need this to prevent "financial collapse," even though countries with much more debt relative to us have not come anywhere near collapsing. Yeah, we have a lot of useless bureaucrats in government. But I'd love to see how much of our federal budget they actually take up, because it's probably not as much as you think. I don't like my taxpayer money going to useless bureaucrats either, but it's a complete exaggeration that this is the reason why the US is on the "road to ruin." In general, public sector employment is the lowest it's been in decades[3]. Apparently the man who has "spent more than any person in the history of the world" has not spent enough money to keep all those public sector employees employed. If for no other reason, we have NO RIGHT to burden future generations with exorbitant debt. Sadly, perhaps one of the biggest fallacies that usually comes up with the discussion. As I gave in my example, because of Medicare, I don't have to pay for my parents to have health insurance. If the government needs to tax me now or later because of that, I don't consider that a "burden." I consider that something that has freed me to take greater capitalist risks in starting my own company, that should hopefully provide even greater gains for the country's economy. And if we're spending too much on Medicare because we're spending too much on medicine in general, then we should solve that problem, not cut Medicare. For a much more eloquent description of this concept, I refer you to Paul Krugman[3]. And that's all the time we have for today, ladies and gentlemen. After I post this, I'll be editing my /etc/hosts file, as it's now 3pm, and I really need to get some work done. Sadly, arguing economics on Hacker News doesn't grow our economy nearly as much as coding. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb.... [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2011/03/08/bowles-simpson-fisc... [2] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/american-austeri... [3] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/on-the-non-burde... |