dear soapbox, tell me what you make of this:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reagan-insider-gop-destroyed-us-economy-2010-08-10

8/10/2010 9:56:30 PM

She's so lovely.

8/10/2010 10:11:13 PM

Proof that the political spectrum has shifted so far to the right that Nixon would be a liberal and Reagan would be a moderate today.

8/10/2010 10:15:15 PM

From the original David Stockman article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01stockman.html

Quote :

"IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase. More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes. "

8/10/2010 10:17:18 PM

8/10/2010 10:21:02 PM

Since when does a $30 billion a year tax cut explain a $1600 billion a year deficit?

Quote :

"Geithner said extending the tax cuts for the top 2 percent of taxpayers would cost $700 billion over a decade and $30 billion for a single year."

8/11/2010 12:34:18 AM

The deficit isn't expected to stay that high; after the stimulus goes away and the economy rebounds the deficit will fall, albeit not to even the high levels it was at under Bush.

Also IIRC part of the increase in the "on-budget" part of the deficit resulted from Obama's decision to put Iraq and Afghanistan in the regular budget instead of a supplemental.

8/11/2010 2:25:35 AM