The Republican Record

Discussing all things political in NW Arkansas and beyond.
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Re: The Republican Record

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Everyone does better when a Democrat is in the White House.

The United States of Inequality
In Democrat-world, pre-tax income increased 2.64 percent annually for the poor and lower-middle-class and 2.12 percent annually for the upper-middle-class and rich. There was no Great Divergence. Instead, the Great Compression—the egalitarian income trend that prevailed through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—continued to the present, albeit with incomes converging less rapidly than before. In Republican-world, meanwhile, pre-tax income increased 0.43 percent annually for the poor and lower-middle-class and 1.90 percent for the upper-middle-class and rich. Not only did the Great Divergence occur; it was more greatly divergent. Also of note: In Democrat-world pre-tax income increased faster than in the real world not just for the 20th percentile but also for the 40th, 60th, and 80th. We were all richer and more equal! But in Republican-world, pre-tax income increased slower than in the real world not just for the 20th percentile but also for the 40th, 60th, and 80th. We were all poorer and less equal!
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Re: The Republican Record

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Re: The Republican Record

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10 Epic Failures of the Bush Tax Cuts

In a rare moment of candor last week, the third-ranking Republican in the House admitted the failure of the Bush tax cuts. "You know, I think it's fair to say, if the current tax rates were enough to create jobs and generate economic growth we'd have a growing economy," Mike Pence acknowledged, adding, "It's not working now." Given that the Bush years produced the worst economic growth in the past 50 years, Pence is sadly correct. But sadder still is the dismal performance of the Bush economy across almost every indicator that counts. From moribund job creation and sinking household incomes to skyrocketing deficits and record income inequality, Republican economic stewardship over the past decade has been a disaster.

Here, then, are the 10 Epic Failures of the Bush Tax Cuts:

Dismal Economic Growth
A Decade of Budget Deficits
Red Ink as Far as the Eye Can See
Disastrous Job Creation
Declining Incomes
Increasing Poverty
A Massive Windfall for the Wealthy
Record Income Inequality
A Sagging Stock Market
Jeopardizing Future Economic Growth

Perrspectives
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Re: The Republican Record

Post by Doug »

Darrel wrote: A Decade of Budget Deficits
Red Ink as Far as the Eye Can See
Disastrous Job Creation
Declining Incomes
Increasing Poverty
A Massive Windfall for the Wealthy
Record Income Inequality
A Sagging Stock Market
Jeopardizing Future Economic Growth
DOUG
The tax cuts didn't work. But so what? Obama caved in anyway. I hate to say I told you so...
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Re: The Republican Record

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Re: The Republican Record

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Image

"Sometimes I think Obama's the
most effective guy on their team.

Did Reagan ever borrow a billion dollars
from China to give to the super-rich?"

See here.
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
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Re: The Republican Record

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Re: The Republican Record

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BRIDGE To NOWHERE still with us... should be self-explanatory

"• 2. 'Bridge to Nowhere': Defeated, 181-246, a Democratic bid to strip HR 662 (above) of funds for building the Gravina Island Bridge linking tiny Ketchikan, Alaska, with an airport on sparsely populated Gravina Island. This is the "bridge to nowhere" lampooned in recent years as an example of wasteful congressional earmarks. While notoriety has cost the Gravina Island project much of its anticipated federal funding since 2005, HR 662 contains $183 million in fiscal 2011 spending for it and the Knik Arm Crossing Bridge, another disputed project in Alaska. A yes vote was to defund the "bridge to nowhere."

Houston Chronicle, Mar 5, 1011

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Re: The Republican Record

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Re: The Republican Record

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ANOTHER SPIN OF THE WHEEL or The Big Debt Lie

by Gene Lyons.

(Note this article appeared in Ark Demo-Gaz and Salon. I'm reproducing from Salon)

After three decades of failed experiments, you'd think we might finally give up on supply-side economics


There's nothing remotely conservative about believing in magic. Yet when it comes to fiscal questions, Republicans are as superstitious as gamblers around a roulette wheel. Regardless of how much they've lost, they're confident their system will prevail if they double down one more time.

How you can tell they're about to do something momentously dumb is when they're unanimous, i.e., operating on sheer ideology. Show me a unified GOP, and I'll show you a budgetary disaster about to happen. That's what makes the pending showdown over raising the national debt limit so worrying.

But hold that thought.

The betting system the GOP's been playing for the past 30 years is called supply-side economics. "The theory goes like this," explains David Cay Johnston. "Lower tax rates will encourage more investment, which in turn will mean more jobs and greater prosperity -- so much so that tax revenues will go up, despite lower rates."

To anybody with a passing interest in the material world, it's clear that this has never happened. Over the same period, the national debt has risen to more than $14 trillion -- almost 90 percent of it under Republican presidents.

Meanwhile, ordinary citizens have failed to prosper as President Reagan's seductive "morning in America" rhetoric promised. Since 1980, Johnston shows, "the average income of the vast majority -- the bottom 90 percent of Americans -- has increased a meager $303, or 1 percent." Meanwhile, the income of the upper 1 percent of taxpayers more than doubled, and that of the top tenth of 1 percent increased more than 400 percent.

Social mobility in the United States lags behind many European countries. The richest 300,000 American taxpayers currently enjoy incomes roughly equal to that of the bottom 150 million combined.

Anyway, here's what I mean about the dangers of GOP herd behavior: Given current conservative hysteria about "runaway spending," it's worth remembering that the United States last balanced the federal budget in FY2001 under Bill Clinton.
...
Also in consequence, every Republican leader now posing as a hard-line fiscal conservative -- Speaker John Boehner, Rep. Eric Cantor, Rep. Paul Ryan, and Sen. McConnell -- voted to increase the national debt limit at least seven times under President Bush. All of them, every time.

Ironically, of the present players, only Barack Obama made what he now calls a protest vote against raising the debt limit in 2006.

Read the rest here , at Salon

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Re: The Republican Record

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What’s Driving Projected Debt?
May 20, 2011 at 12:11 pm

"As we’ve noted, my colleagues Kathy Ruffing and Jim Horney have updated CBPP’s analysis showing that the economic downturn, President Bush’s tax cuts, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit over the next ten years. So, what about the public debt, which is basically the sum of annual budget deficits, minus annual surpluses, over the nation’s entire history?

The complementary chart, below, shows that the Bush-era tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — including their associated interest costs — account for almost half of the projected public debt in 2019 (measured as a share of the economy) if we continue current policies.

Image

Altogether, the economic downturn, the measures enacted to combat it (including the 2009 Recovery Act), and the financial rescue legislation play a smaller role in the projected debt increase over the next decade. Public debt due to all other factors fell from over 30 percent of GDP in 2001 to 20 percent of GDP in 2019.

We focus here on debt held by the public, which reflects funds that the federal government borrows in credit markets to finance deficits and other cash needs. That’s the proper measure on which to focus because it’s what really affects the economy. We compare it to GDP because stabilizing the debt-to-GDP ratio is a key test of fiscal sustainability.

As Kathy and Jim note, simply letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule (or paying for any portions that policymakers decide to extend) would stabilize the debt-to-GDP ratio for the next decade. While we’d have to do much more to keep the debt stable over the longer run, that would be a huge accomplishment."

http://www.offthechartsblog.org/what%E2 ... cted-debt/
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Re: The Republican Record

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See here.

States that cut the most funding lost the most jobs:

...steep spending cuts are hampering economic recovery in some states, while other states that resisted cuts or increased spending are now seeing declining unemployment rates, faster private-sector job creation, and stronger economic growth.

Relative to national economic trends, states that increased spending enjoyed on average:

0.2 percentage point decrease in the unemployment rate
1.4 percent increase in private employment
0.5 percent real economic growth since the start of the recession

In contrast, states that cut spending saw on average

1 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate
2.1 percent loss of private employment
2.9 percent real economic contraction relative to the national economic trend

Steep state spending cuts have gone hand-in-hand with rising unemployment rates, falling private-sector payroll employment, and lower growth in state’s gross domestic product, or GDP — the sum of all goods and services produced by labor and equipment in each state, less imports.
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Re: The Republican Record

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There's more to the Republican Record than taxes and income. Consider a new finding by

James Gilligan, a psychiatrist and professor at New York University.
His new book, “Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others",
lays out the fact that when Republicans are elected POTUS homicide and suicide rates go up.

Quick summary:

"His inquiry explores why rates of homicide and suicide tend to increase together, and why those rates fluctuate so enormously over brief periods of time.

Gilligan tracked rates of suicide and homicide over a century, from 1900 to 2007 and was intrigued by the peaks and valleys he saw. Over that period, he writes, “I saw three large, sudden, and prolonged increases and decreases in these measures of lethal violence, which reached a peak and were then followed by equally dramatic decreases.”

He scratched his head over that until he realized that “all three of the epidemics of lethal violence corresponded with the presidential election cycle.”

Now, the next part of this item will get Republicans’ noses out of joint and will no doubt start Democrats thumping their chests. What Gilligan found was that suicides and homicides started climbing to epidemic levels following the election of a Republican president. If that isn’t annoying enough to the Grand Old Party, he also discovered that the rates remained around epidemic levels throughout the time Republicans occupied the White House. “The increase began during their first year or years in office, and peaked in their last year or years,” Gilligan writes.

And what happened when a Democratic president toodled up to the White House gate in a moving van? Those epidemic levels of violence, according to Gilligan, began to reverse direction in the first year or two of a Democratic administration and the rates reached their lowest point in the last year or years of the Democratic term.

Entire Washington Post review is
here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/pol ... _blog.html

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Re: The Republican Record

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From another thread but it needs to be archived here too:

***
Image

"President Reagan came into power in 1981 after convincing Americans that our debt was out of control — at that time, compared to our gross national product (GNP), it was at a 50 year low. Republicans and Democrats alike voted for Reagan’s budget that lowered tax rates substantially with the bulk of the benefits going to America’s most wealthy (trickledown economics). By the end of Reagan’s 8 years, the deficit had tripled. The deficit grew by another 55% under George H.W. Bush after he saw the light of fiscal responsibility and broke his no new taxes pledge. The budget was balanced during the Clinton Administration and the debt was actually on a trajectory to decline. But the federal budget doubled under President George W. Bush after two tax cuts, again mostly to the wealthy, at the same time we were engaged in two wars.

America had its largest employment growth under President Clinton’s administration and its poorest employment growth under the second President Bush. Trickledown (supply side) economics simply does not work and most reputable economists will admit as much. It fails especially in times of globalization because tax cuts for the wealthy are often invested, not in America, but in countries where growth rates are higher because of slave labor and a lower standard of living."

Image

Middle Class Held Hostage
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Re: The Republican Record

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Re: The Republican Record

Post by L.Wood »

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Re: The Republican Record

Post by Savonarola »

L.Wood wrote:.

Image

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Not quite.
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Re: The Republican Record

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Savonarola wrote:Not quite.
As per above:

"We quickly discovered the source of the discrepancy: Whoever put the chart together used the date for Jan. 20, 2010 -- which is exactly one year to the day after Obama was sworn in -- rather than his actual inauguration date. We know this because Treasury says the debt for Jan. 20, 2010, was $12.327 trillion, which is the exact number cited on the supporting document that Pelosi’s office gave us."

Yep, this one is making the rounds in the leftie circles, especially facebook. I've been knocking it down for months.

Note, these numbers are for raw dollars, not adjusted for inflation.
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Re: The Republican Record

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One More Must-See Chart On Government Spending Under Obama And Reagan

"Obama recovery has been much more impressive than the Reagan recovery since A) The conditions Obama inherited were wildly worse and B) Federal government spending under Obama didn't grow as fast as it did under Reagan.
But we were just looking at Federal Government spending.
Here's a look at annual government spending growth at all levels: federal, state, and local.

Image

In Reagan's first four years in office, government spending grew by at least 7.5 percent, and in the first two years, government spending grew by over10 percent year-over-year. Obama hasn't had one year of government spending growth over 7.5 percent, and the growth in government spending in 2011 that appears as the second smallest in this chart, is actually the third smallest since WWII.
Although GDP has been mediocre under Obama, he's achieved a rebound in growth with much less stimulus than Reagan did, and, it should be noted, that despite predictions from many economists, there's been no double dip, unlike with Reagan."

LINK
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Re: The Republican Record

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The $10 trillion hangover ... Paying the price for eight years of Bush

Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes

SOURCE: Harper's (1-1-09)

"In the eight years since George W. Bush took office, nearly every component of the U.S. economy has deteriorated. The nation’s budget deficits, trade deficits, and debt have reached record levels. Unemployment and inflation are up, and household savings are down. Nearly 4 million manufacturing jobs have disappeared and, not coincidentally, 5 million more Americans have no health insurance. Consumer debt has almost doubled, and nearly one fifth of American homeowners are likely to owe more in mortgage debt than their homes are actually worth. Meanwhile, as we have reported previously, the final price for the war in Iraq is expected to reach at least $3 trillion.

As bad as things are, though, this is just the beginning. The Bush Administration not only has depressed the economy and racked up unprecedented debt; it also has made expensive new commitments to the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, to disability compensation and education benefits for veterans, to replenishing the military equipment consumed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and simply to paying interest on the debt itself.

The president is not solely to blame for American profligacy, of course. Congress approved inequitable tax cuts and spending binges, and the Federal Reserve and other regulators, along with the mortgage industry and millions of consumers, share responsibility for the housing collapse. Nonetheless, the outgoing administration has made a series of unwise economic choices that together will add up to a burdensome legacy.

Using conservative assumptions, we calculate that the bill for Bush-era excess—the total new debt combined with the total new accrued obligations— amounts to $10.35 trillion. This legacy will have long-term consequences for America’s prosperity, but it also will weigh heavily and immediately on the Obama Administration, which will need to spend money fast to get the economy moving again.

When George W. Bush took office, he inherited a budget surplus of $128 billion and a bright fiscal future. The Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan government agency responsible for estimating future expenditures and revenues, projected a cumulative budget surplus of about $5.6 trillion between 2002 and 2011, if the country stayed on track—which of course it did not. What happened instead was that the administration successfully pushed for not only two rounds of massive, inequitable tax cuts but also a 59 percent surge in government spending."

[Linda J. Bilmes, a lecturer in public finance at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, is a former assistant secretary for administration, management, and budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce. Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor of Economics at Columbia University and winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. Bilmes and Stiglitz are co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.]

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