reply      new comment      top   

*sigh* such a stupid article. Clinton did not produce a meaningful legitimate budget surplus (i.e. he borrowed all the surplus from non discretionary budgets). I'll concede that one can legitimately argue he balanced the budget as other than his raiding of the military pensions, his budget shifting did not leave holes that had to be filled as soon as he left office.

It is not as simple s Democrats good, Republicans bad. OR even the opposite. The reality is we have a congress that EACH YEAR seems to think tossing another trillion or two onto the giant bonfire isn't going to cause problems.

This meme the left has been pushing that incurring debt isn't going to crush us is flawed. yeah, if we were one timing a couple hundred billion a year, we could ignore it. But we are doing 300-400-500 billion a year that also has 300-400-500 billion the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that, etc. These days, we are doing that 3-5 times a year. We are doing all of this while creating/entering into structural budget gaps in medicare, medicaid, and social security.

While the premise on the left that taxation can counter the structural gaps in a number of programs is more or less correct (one can argue about the impact of the fallout, but I bet you can get reasonably close without a major exodus of income producers any faster than is going on already), it still won't stay ahead of the insane spending going on from both sides of the aisle.

We doubled the debt in the last 5 years and we are ACCELERATING spending even without counting the stimulus. We'll double it again in at least 5 years. Will we double it again the 5 years after that? Do you seriously think going from 5% of the budget for servicing debt to 20% in a decade is something that is not going to cause us huge problems?