Obama's Promises are dropping like flies..

[valvano]

Campaign Obama : No Spending Freezes

President Obama : Spending Freezes

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2010/01/26/obama_campaigned_against_spending_freeze.html

Of course, when you ram through the budget busting stimulus and social spending and increase the deficit more than any other president to date, you do kind of back yourself into a corner...:rolleyes:

[saz]

you mean george w. bush, who started two trillion dollar wars and cut taxes for the wealthy during those wars, while borrowing trillions from china, bailed out the banks, which took the country from a budget surplus to budget deficits and exploded the national debt.

[Echewta]

Its been a year.

[valvano]

you mean george w. bush, who started two trillion dollar wars and cut taxes for the wealthy during those wars, while borrowing trillions from china, bailed out the banks, which took the country from a budget surplus to budget deficits and exploded the national debt.

i thought obama was going to offer change from w ? change would have been reducing the budget and reining in spending. instead, obama has done exactly what w did, except to a much higher degree.

so where's the hope and change?

[saz]

well herbert hoover tried to balance the budget and cut spending during the great crash of 1929 and the initial years of the great depression, and that ended in a total disaster for him.

[RobMoney$]

Yeah, but Bush lied too.

[kaiser soze]

which valvano seems to not realize, cannot comprehend, or prefers to be in denial about

yeah, if Obama is doing the same....shouldn't it be WE who are complaining and you celebrating?

Obama is digging himself out of a second term faster than you can say re-election

[RobMoney$]

which valvano seems to not realize, cannot comprehend, or prefers to be in denial about


and has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

[kaiser soze]

and has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

nor does this have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand

jesus christ on a pogo stick, we've reached a paradigm!

[RobMoney$]

nor does this have absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand

Ok, name that tune.

Tell me what Bush, the wars in Iraq & Afghanistahn, China buying up all out debt, or him giving tax incentives to corporate america has to do with the fact that Obama campaigned against spending freezes, and now appears ready to call for one?

...and for the record, I'm not criticizing Obama for this. I've been calling for him to stop the fucking spending since he gave his first trillion to Wall St.
It's just that I've had it up to my ears with the "...but Bush did it to" line that the left uses to excuse everything Obama does wrong.
It wasn't cool when the right did it with Bush (using "...but Clinton banged his intern"), and it's even lamer now that the left is doing it with Obama.

[saz]

obama either changed his tune, or is a hypocrite. big deal, how shocking from a politician.

and it was bush who bailed out the banks and spent trillions on wall street. obama just got a lot of campaign cash from them and made back room deals with the pharmaceutical and private health insurance industries.

this has nothing to do with "bush did it too" and i'll repeat it again: the bush administration was so utterly inept, corrupt, incompetent and went on a spending spree. they gutted the treasury and turned clinton's budget surpluses into budget deficits. it wouldn't have mattered if mccain or obama won last year, as they both would've inherited this incredible mess.

[travesty]

and it was bush who bailed out the banks and spent trillions on wall street.

By no means was I ever a fan of Bush's TARP but if this trend (http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/08/27/tarp-scorecard-paybacks-have-yielded-total-return-of-1016/) continues Bush, Bernanke and (gulp) even Geithner may come out smelling like roses. What happens then? Do we start bailing out everyone in hopes of similar returns?

[RobMoney$]

obama either changed his tune, or is a hypocrite. big deal, how shocking from a politician.

and it was bush who bailed out the banks and spent trillions on wall street. obama just got a lot of campaign cash from them and made back room deals with the pharmaceutical and private health insurance industries.

this has nothing to do with "bush did it too" and i'll repeat it again: the bush administration was so utterly inept, corrupt, incompetent and went on a spending spree. they gutted the treasury and turned clinton's budget surpluses into budget deficits. it wouldn't have mattered if mccain or obama won last year, as they both would've inherited this incredible mess.


I just want to know why the fuck every thread turns into you blaming everything that happens on Bush and the wars?

Obama cuaght bold-face lying once again?...Yeah, but Bush lied to start the wars.
Obamacare is a shit plan?...yeah, but it's no worse than Bush's plan of exit from Iraq.

The sky is falling?...yeah, but Bush's apporval ratings fell more than anyones.


Do you ever want to move foward and discuss the issues that are happening NOW, not what happened during Bush's years?

[DroppinScience]

What happened during the Bush years informs the way things are going right now. Obama does not exist in a vacuum.

[RobMoney$]

http://hisvorpal.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/crying-over-spilled-milk.jpg

[travesty]

Obama does not exist in a vacuum.

But he acts like he does....until someone questions his policies, then it's Bush's fault.

[saz]

By no means was I ever a fan of Bush's TARP but if this trend (http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/08/27/tarp-scorecard-paybacks-have-yielded-total-return-of-1016/) continues Bush, Bernanke and (gulp) even Geithner may come out smelling like roses. What happens then? Do we start bailing out everyone in hopes of similar returns?

i completely agree, bailing out the banks was a necessary evil.

[saz]

I just want to know why the fuck every thread turns into you blaming everything that happens on Bush and the wars?

Obama cuaght bold-face lying once again?...Yeah, but Bush lied to start the wars.
Obamacare is a shit plan?...yeah, but it's no worse than Bush's plan of exit from Iraq.

The sky is falling?...yeah, but Bush's apporval ratings fell more than anyones.


Do you ever want to move foward and discuss the issues that are happening NOW, not what happened during Bush's years?

i'll say it again. either mccain or obama would've inherited this mess: two wars, a massive budget deficit, exploding national debt et al.

if mccain had won last year, i wouldn't expect him to fix everything within his first term, let alone his first year in office. i would at least give him to the end of his term to see if the economy, unemployment and conditions for the middle and working classes were improving. if things were improving by the end of his first term, i'd give him credit.

and yes, obama changed his tune so he's either a liar, a hypocrite, or he changed his mind. yes, i'll agree with you, it doesn't look great. but the reason i objected in the first place in this thread was that valvano implied that obama increased the deficit more than any other president to date, which is total crap. obama and mccain would've inherited budget deficits throughout their first term.

[travesty]

they gutted the treasury and turned clinton's budget surpluses into budget deficits.

Please, Please stop spreading that misinformation saz. There were no "Clinton Surpluses", plain and simple. The numbers don't lie...politicians and the media do.
From the http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

Fiscal End Claimed Public Inter-gov Total
Year Date Surplus Debt Holdings National Debt
FY1997 09/30/1997 $3.789667T $1.623478T $5.413146T
FY1998 09/30/1998 $69.2B $3.733864T $1.792328T $5.526193T
FY1999 09/30/1999 $122.7B $3.636104T $2.020166T $5.656270T
FY2000 09/29/2000 $230.0B $3.405303T $2.268874T $5.674178T
FY2001 09/28/2001 $3.33931T $2.468153T $5.807463T

Yes public debt went down, for which Clinton deserves some Kudos. But at the same time IntraGovernmental Holdings (gov't debt) went up. It's all a shell game. Robbing the Social Security coffers in order to claim a "surplus" is laughable. Yet the Democrats lapped it up and still spew this out to keep Teflon Willy atop the liberal altar. In reality Clinton did nothing more than ride Greenspan's long term Reaganomics into the artificially inflated late 90's boom. Well he did make some worthwhile welfare changes. But he never had a "surplus".

What's frightening is that in 10 years, 1 little decade, we have havemore than doubled the national debt. $5.7T in 2000 to $12.3T as of today and Obama rasiing the ceiling to $14T. That is so incomprehensible that it almost doesn't even matter anymore. It's never going to get paid back so who really cares what ultimate number is right? It truly makes me cry when I think about it.

[saz]

http://www.cbo.gov/budget/data/historical.pdf

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/?&dbname=cp105&sid=cp105AqBYv&refer=&r_n=hr648.105&item=&sel=TOC_627612&

sorry but i don't see the congressional budget office nor the library of congress spreading misinformation. like obama, i wasn't necessarily a fan of clinton's but i'll give credit where credit is due and fiscally speaking, clinton's administration garnered some results. and i don't agree with robbing the social security coffers in order to obtain a surplus. cutting social security is usually favoured by centrists and the right. clinton was hardly a liberal. you cited the welfare reform which i strongly disagreed with. clinton also signed the gramm-leach-bliley or financial services modernization act into law, which repealed glass-steagall and we know how that turned out.

[travesty]

You CAN'T just look at public debt. That's just part of the national debt and part of the source for the national deficit. The other part is GOVERNMENT DEBT. The CBO stats you posted show only PUBLIC Debt.
If in a given year you earn $30,000 and a friend loans you $5,000, and you spend $32,000, is that a surplus? While you can claim "I received $35,000 and only spent $32,000, thus I have a surplus," that's a pretty weak argument when you know that $2,000 of the money you spent was actually borrowed and has to be paid back later. That's pretty much what happened in 2000.
I don't try and dwell on it too much because Clinton did have us on a far, far better track than we are on now. But it just irritates me when people make that claim.

And just because the Library of Congress keeps an opinion letter wrtitten by Democratic Congressman David Obey, doesn't mean that it's filled with the hard facts. He's one of the reasons this lie perpetuates.

[saz]

i agree with you on not just looking at public debt, however you have to admit though that it was a step in the right direction by producing surpluses.

as for obey, he was specifically citing the non-partisan congressional budget office statistics.

[travesty]

Absolutley I admit we were headed in the right direction and, in fact, rather quickly. I can't help but think that had we maintained that course, coupled with Bush tax cuts we likely would be sitting pretty right now.That is of course if Bush could have only contained himself and the military complex after 9/11 and not spent $$ like a mad man. I think the housing bubble would still have burst as it was grossly out of whack but I'm not so sure it would have lead to the calamitous collapse of all financial segments like it did. At least not as severely.