Thank you for your informative response. Helps those of us who lack “intelligence” and are ” insane fools.”

At some point the US dollar will lose its reserve currency status and we will be fully screwed. It ain’t long in coming, either.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=120258&sectionid=3510213

I look right now and see all the various stimulus/job creation bills as nothing more than trickle down without saying trickle down. If you are waiting for any trickle good luck with that. That unemployment rate seems real steady.

So it seems like the current administration is trying to and has managed – so far – to out debt the previous one? Am I correct on that? How do they intend on reducing debt? Is it though some austerity program? Maybe raise taxes? Reduce entitlements?

It’s called sarcasm.

I’ve learned not to waste my time arguing with hardcore partisans. I might as well try to convince the Pope that God doesn’t exist.

But just so I have this straight…When things go bad for a Democrat it’s because of the previous administration, but when things go well it’s due to Democrat genius. Ha.

Did Bush write this year’s budget?

When his “Agricultural Adjustment Act” was taken to the Supreme Court (and found unconstitutional in 1936) his response was “Are we going to take the hands of the federal government completely off any effort to adjust the growing of national crops, and go right straight back to the old principle that every farmer is a lord of his own farm and can do anything he wants, raise anything, any old time, in any quantity, and sell any time he wants?”

Interestingly, the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics reported that in the case of cotton, farm income would have been at least as high and perhaps even higher in the absence of the AAA, and a respected Cornell economist found that the AAA had been responsible for the joblessness of at least two million workers, especially sharecroppers and other farm laborers.

FDR’s massive WPA spending projects provided jobs and economic stimulus, but they were rife with corruption, cronyism, and political favoritism, including intimidation of WPA workers to vote Democrat. A large segment of those projects were targeted at western states where his political backing was previously thin. What your statistics fail to state is that essentially all of the increased GDP you cite reflects govt spending, not an expansion of the US economy, per se, not genuine improvement in the US human condition. (Sound familiar today?)

In fact, the country remained in such dire straits that by the start of WWII he was itching to get involved to crank up the war material production machinery. Thus he orchestrated the Greer incident, in which a German sub was sunk by British torpedo bombers and Greer depth charges, all the while claiming the German sub fired first. Winston Churchill later said the president had made clear at the time that he intended to become increasingly provocative, and that, “everything was to be done to provoke an incident.” Guess things weren’t as good as the numbers suggest, huh?

In sum, Thomas, FDR was a tyrant. His policies brought suffering to Americans far beyond what they would have experienced, using methods that were cruel, and apparently criminal. Any discussion of his saving this country through those policies fails to state the “opportunity costs” that were built into his schemes, that is, failure to advantage alternative means and methods that were prevented from being emplaced by his schemes, and that could/would have promoted better outcomes had they been in effect. Such as it always is when govt takes the peoples’ property and services and spends them the “proper” way, instead of allowing folks to set their own priorities, manage their own affairs, and establish commerce economically.

Perhaps for those who wish not to swallow the Keynesian kool-aid regarding the depression, its causes, and the need to bankrupt our country further in this current economic collapse, a couple of good sources would provide enlightenment and educated rebuttal to the foolishness that all that has to be done to eliminate our deficit, pay down our debt, and thereby promote prosperity is for the govt to create more debt and print more fiat money that citizens will be forced to repay. That whole idea is a fool’s promise.

America’s Great Depression by Murray Rothbard
The Panic of 1819 by Murray Rothbard
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look… by Thomas Woods, Jr.

When George Bush the Unfit took office, America had 132.5 million nonfarm jobs. When he left, the nation had 134.3 million, an increase of 1.8 million. With a population increase of one percent per year over eight years the nation should have had an increase of 11 million to 12 million new jobs without an increase in economic productivity or government prodding. So during his two terms, Unfit actually retarded job growth by as much as 10 million. But population growth caused government spending to rise at the same time the Unfit One retarded the ability of government to gain funds necessary to meet national needs, and Griff can’t blame that on Obama. Those jobs aren’t there and the Americans who would have had those jobs aren’t paying taxes.

Factor in the millions of jobs that were lost in the first year of the Obama administration–all inherited from Unfit’s stupidity–and we see the nation may have as many as 20 million nonexistent jobs. And nonexistent tax receipts.

Then we have outlays for unnecessary wars and extra costs to government through unemployment benefits, welfare payments, possible expense of added crime all contributing to the deficit that Griff wants to blame on Obama, not on the clown who created the problems.

If we factor in the lost revenue the right-wing has squandered with unneeded tax cuts for the aristocracy and the corporations and failure to collect what is due from millionaire tax evaders, we arrive at a figure that might equal the deficit. These are the reasons we have a trillion-dollar-plus deficit that can’t be wished away and will be with us for a long time. But Griff wants to blame all that on a president who inherited the problem, not the ones who created it.

…………………………

Griff is wrong claiming deficit spending began with Carter. LBJ left a surplus to Nixon, who squandered it by paying for his portion of the Vietnam War with the national credit card.

And Almandine doesn’t know squat about FDR and the Great Depression. I have done the research, Almandine hasn’t. FDR inherited a GDP of $56 billion in 1933 and increased it to $125.8 billion by 1940. That’s a15.58 percent annual increase, when four percent is considered robust. Unemployment fell from 24.9 percent in 1933 to 9.9 percent in 1940; before the US got involved in WWII. The economy was continuing apace and that apace was monumentally better. Get a clue and do some research; your ideology is easy to disprove.

Intelligent people, my arse.

You get it.