Calling Out the Conservative Lies on Stimulus
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/02/05-1

I plowed through almost half of the piece, but I had to stop when he was ventilating about how Smyrna, TN would benefit from the slowdown in the auto business. Isn’t Smyrna, TN the place that the Saturn car is built? This is the same car line that GM announced today that they would be be selling or shutting down.

Before that, he was going on about as how Tom Friedman and some guy from the University of Chicago were so absolutely prescient about how the world really worked, being flat and all that. (Almost everything that came out of Friedman’s mind has been wrong, or at least, twisted into some contorted allegory of reality. His [Friedman's] advocacy of globalization has blown up in his face, just as the opponents said it would: The benefits of globalization rained down on Wall Street, while the costs fell on places like Blue Ridge, GA, and thousands of other towns that lost jobs and manufacturing facilities.)

And how Dubai was going to be a center of the financial world. It’s actually shrinking faster than a grape in the desert sun. There are thousands of cars left at the airport in Dubai as the former owners flee the city lest they be put in a debtors prison.

The awful fact is that the entire financial system is broken.

“The Atlantic,” “The New Republic,” “Time,” “Newsweek,” “US News and World Report,” “Reader’s Digest” are all magazines that have all run their course. Too much ideology, too little truth.

Color all of them gone.

When Clinton was president, the rate of government borrowing increased by one third of a percent per year. Compare this to Ronald Reagan, who annually increased the rate of borrowing by an average of 17 percent each year. The Clinton Administration borrowed 18 billion dollars in its last year. The Bush Administration STARTED by borrowing almost 140 billion in its first year, and was up to borrowing 500 billion by 2003, and it continued to borrow at this rate until the end of his presidency.

Going back to 1961, only two presidents have handed Congress a balanced budget. One was bill Clinton. The last one before Clinton was Lyndon Johnson. And he did that during the Vietnam War.

If one looks back at every presidency since the end of World War II, the record shows that Republicans for every dollar of debt created by Democratic presidencies, Republicans have created two dollars and fifty two cents in government debt. The neo-conservatives have the worse rate. Reagan came into office with a national debt less than a trillion dollars. By the time he left office, he had increased it to 2.6 trillion. His sucessor, did a little better, but this was simply because he continued to increase borrowing by about 13 percent per year. But he did not cut taxes, so the rate of the increase of debt was slower that Reagan. Clinton reduced virtually eliminated government borrowing, so the debt levels stayed flat during his presidency and he started on paying down the debt.

His sucessor and last president, simply copied Reagans economic ideas, and the results were the same. The debt doubled.

Historically republicans have done much worse with “borrow and spend” economic ideas, than democrats have done with “tax and spend” ones.

“$787 billion economic recovery package becomes law with the simple stroke of Obama’s pen.”

DOW 7,587.25
-263.16 -3.35%

You see, next year there’s going to be a huge rebound as our drunken band of congressional free spenders unloads 2T from our children’s future. And when that runs out and the economy once again sputters due to the even larger sized government, another 3T they will spend from our grandchildren’s livelihoods. And yes, once again, boom, the year after that in a dismal attempt to get the entire drunken band of narcistic liberals re-elected. Spend, spend, spend, nope no worries for us!!

Of course, the trick is going to be to save enough in your retirement fund to last you, and your descendants, until 2050. After the impending great Obama depression ends. I’m almost ready.., are you??

The economy will not recover without fundamental changes in banking and trade policy. A large stimulus package, though necessary, will only give the economy a temporary lift but then unemployment will rise again and continue at unacceptable levels indefinitely without successively larger stimulus packages and huge federal budget deficits. The economy is a depression, not a recession.

If you don’t read any other article, read this one.