l****z
发帖数: 29846 | 1 Obama on Pace to Borrow $6.2T in One Term—More Than All Presidents from
Washington Through Clinton Combined
By Terence P. Jeffrey
January 13, 2012
(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama has been increasing the national debt
during his presidency by an average of $4.24 billion per day ($4,240,506,
004.34) putting him on a pace to increase the national debt by $6.2 trillion
($6,195,379,272,340.74) by the end of his term on Jan. 20, 2013, according
to the debt figures published by the U.S. Treasury.
That $6.2 trillion is more debt than was accumulated by all U.S. presidents
from George Washington through Bill Clinton combined.
In fact, the U.S. national debt did not eclipse the $6.195 trillion level—
the amount Obama is on pace to increase it in one term—until August 19,
2002, during President George W. Bush’s second year of office.
The national debt was $10.6 trillion
($10,626,877,048,913.08) on Jan. 20, 2009, the day Obama was inaugurated. As
of the close of business on Jan. 11, 2012, it was $15.2 trillion ($15,236,
307,075,631.58.) In Obama’s first 1,087 days in office, the debt increased
$4.6 trillion ($4,609,430,026,718.50)—or an increase of $4.24 billion ($4,
240,506,004.34) per day.
At that daily rate, the debt would increase a total of $6.2 trillion ($6,195
,379,272,340.74) over the entire 1,461 days of Obama’s four year term. | S*********n
发帖数: 4050 | 2 Can the T-bags stop him?
Remember all the spending has to be approved by congress. | y****t
发帖数: 10233 | 3 nobody can stop dictators, especially when there are some many useful idiots
like you defending him.
【在 S*********n 的大作中提到】
: Can the T-bags stop him?
: Remember all the spending has to be approved by congress.
| S*********n
发帖数: 4050 | 4 Economic Legacy
Reagan Policies Gave Green Light to Red Ink
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 9, 2004; Page A11
The line is not likely to make this week's eulogies to Ronald Reagan, but
when Vice President Cheney allegedly declared, "Reagan proved deficits don't
matter," he summed up an enduring argument from the former president's
economic legacy.
In late 2002, Cheney had summoned the Bush administration's economic team to
his office to discuss another round of tax cuts to stimulate the economy.
Then-Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill pleaded that the government --
already running a $158 billion deficit -- was careering toward a fiscal
crisis. But by O'Neill's account of the meeting, Cheney silenced him by
invoking his take on Reagan's legacy.
_____Live Online_____
• Wednesday, 11 ET: Columnist Steven Pearlstein will talk about
Congress's failure to live up to Reagan's legacy on taxes.
__ RONALD REAGAN __
__ A Long Good Bye Ends __
• Gallery: Reagan is laid to rest during sunset services near his
library in Simi Valley, Calif.
Eulogy Transcripts
• Reagan's Children
__ A Final Farewell __
• Video: Dignitaries and world leaders eulogized Ronald Reagan at the
National Cathedral.
• Photo Gallery: A Final Salute
Eulogy Videos
• President Bush
• Former British PM Thatcher
• Former Canadian PM Mulroney
• Former President George Bush
__ A President Lies in State __
• Video: Procession
Onlookers watch as a horse-drawn caisson carries the 40th president to
Capitol Hill for the last time.
• Video Excerpts: Capitol Ceremony
• Panorama: Lying in State
• Others Who Have Lain in State
__ More From The Post __
• The Other Reagan Legacy: Outspoken Son Ron (Post, June 25, 2004)
• Reagan Hailed as Leader for 'the Ages' (Post, June 12, 2004)
• Words of Praise From Father and Son (Post, June 12, 2004)
• More Stories
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It wasn't that Reagan's policies proved that government borrowing had no
impact on the economy. But his administration's record -- particularly with
some years of hindsight -- did give reason to question traditional thinking
and provided a new context for future arguments about deficit spending.
"The lesson we should have learned [from those years] is that deficits have
little or no short-term economic impacts," said William A. Niskanen, a
member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.
As important, they appeared to have no impact politically, said Stephen
Moore, a conservative economist at the Club for Growth who worked in Reagan'
s budget office.
"Voters and politicians became anesthetized to big deficits," Moore recalled
. "Reagan was running these big deficits, and liberals argued it was going
to be Armageddon. We were going to ruin the economy. Interest rates were
going to go through the roof. And none of these things happened."
The fiscal shift in the Reagan years was staggering. In January 1981, when
Reagan declared the federal budget to be "out of control," the deficit had
reached almost $74 billion, the federal debt $930 billion. Within two years,
the deficit was $208 billion. The debt by 1988 totaled $2.6 trillion. In
those eight years, the United States moved from being the world's largest
international creditor to the largest debtor nation.
To some economists, the impact was clear. Interest rates rose in the late
1980s and early 1990s, the economy slowed, then slipped into recession, and
productivity barely advanced. Americans feared their nation had slipped into
the shadows of Japan and Germany.
Reagan's "economic policy . . . was a disaster," University of California at
Berkeley economic historian J. Bradford DeLong wrote this past weekend on
his Web site. "The tax cuts made America a more unequal place, and the
deficits slowed economic growth in the 1980s significantly."
But after the boom years of the 1990s, and the steady economic slides of
those international rivals, some economists are reevaluating that version of
history. The argument against deficits is more about self-righteous
moralism than economics, they say.
The Reagan "experience changed the debate dramatically," said Kevin A.
Hassett, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute. "Back then, it
seems that everybody believed Reagan must be some kind of kook and the
people who agreed with these views were flimflam artists. Not so anymore."
Indeed, since the Reagan years, the argument over the deficit has been
turned on its head. In the 1980s, prominent liberal economists dismissed the
significance of government red ink to head off the slashing of social
welfare spending. Now, many liberal economists have become the fiercest
deficit hawks to head off still more tax cuts.
But the shifts go beyond politics. For nearly a century, economic orthodoxy
has held that federal borrowing harms the economy by driving up interest
rates, diminishing investment and productivity, and placing an unfair burden
on future generations, who will finance the spending and tax cuts of the
present.
Traditional economists argue that as the government enters private capital
markets to finance its deficits, it competes with private borrowers. A
deficit equal to 1 percent of the size of the economy -- about $110 billion
today -- would slap as much as a full percentage point on the interest rates
consumers pay to finance a new home or new car. By that measure, today's
deficit would account for nearly 4 percentage points of a 6 percent mortgage
.
But the new argument holds that interest rates are set on a vastly larger
global marketplace. With rising global prosperity, even a federal deficit as
large as the United States' would present little competition for would-be
investors. A soon-to-be-published paper by American Enterprise Institute
economist Eric M. Engen and Columbia University economist R. Glenn Hubbard,
the first chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that
the record budget deficit of 2004 should raise interest rates by 0.12
percent.
"The world's capital markets are lot more sophisticated and flexible than
they were then," said N. Gregory Mankiw, the current chairman of Bush's
economic council. "That probably means that other things being equal,
changes in domestic fiscal situations have less impact."
Indeed, this school of thought is becoming something of a consensus, Engen
said. Deficits equal to 1 percent of the size of the economy should raise
interest rates by 0.3 percent, he said. That is the low end of the 0.3 to 0.
6 percent range postulated by Brookings Institution economists William G.
Gale and Peter R. Orszag when they argued deficits are economically
significant.
Benjamin M. Friedman, a Harvard University economist who lamented Reagan's
fiscal policies in his 1988 book "Day of Reckoning," said the expansion of
foreign credit has tempered the feared hikes in long-term interest rates
that he thought would cripple the economy. But, he said, "that doesn't let
deficits off the hook."
"It's important to realize that interest rates are set on world capital
markets; therefore, a large deficit need not impact capital formation," he
said, referring to economic investments in new plants and equipment that
drive growth. "But that's identical to saying we will continue to do capital
formation, but we'll do it by forever borrowing abroad."
And that spells trouble, said Niskanen of Reagan's Council of Economic
Advisers. Debt does have to be repaid, and foreign investors -- primarily
the central banks of Japan, Britain and China -- own $1.7 billion of federal
debt. That, he said, has made the country "terribly dependent" and "
terribly vulnerable."
That is a bipartisan fear. "The key point is, even if it were sustainable,
it's not desirable," said Orszag, a prominent Democratic economist. "We
still will owe the money to foreigners. We're still mortgaging our future
national income. Just because you can take out a larger mortgage to buy a
bigger house doesn't mean you should." |
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