National Debt Trends

https://2img.net/h/oi27.tinypic.com/120m447.jpg - Link to image / graph

Thats kind Of funny... I cant vouch for the numbers, but it's certainly pretty striking. I forgot how low the deficit was in the last year of Clinton.

Pretty clear to me, but yet people like Card, LTRT and the other right wingers in here will SWEAR that the republicans know better than the democrats.

Bman wrote:Pretty clear to me, but yet people like Card, LTRT and the other right wingers in here will SWEAR that the republicans know better than the democrats.

Gotta love how there's no mention of the war on terror, only that the GOP is in the White House. Oh, I'm sorry we shouldn't be fighting or spending any money on the efforts to stop terrorism.

Nice graph, especially the hand-written notes. We've come to expect that from the left.

When you raise taxes on everyone it should make the debt go down..... that said I'd really like to see the next congress put in a constitutional amendment forcing balanced budgets for every governmental entity, including states.

Its hard to differentiate your sardonic language and the handwritten (obviously biased) notes on the graph. You have a valid point though, we should be spending money to fight terror, and we should be spending money to protect ourselves.

While I cant speak for the entire "left," I have to say that my issue with your stance is that you seem to contend that where we are spending the a vast yet effective amount of money to "fight terror." Even those on the far right have to admit that the connection between Iraq and terror that actually threatens the US is tenuous at best. Two obvious examples are the missing WMD, and now the more recent reports that suggest very strongly that Iraq and Al-Qaeda shared no relations before the war.

If I were able to vote for the war on the floor of the senate, I would have (knowing only what I know now, of course). In the clarity of hindsight, it's clear to me that the war in Iraq is actually providing significant opportunity for the new Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq to kill Americans.

I dont want to hijack this topic, but it's clear to me that the conventional buzzwords of 'tax and spend' liberal vs a mellonesque 'trickle-down' conservative are not necessarily accurate. It would be interesting to see a map of the DJIA (or other market indicator) placed on top of this graph... I think we would probabaly see the opposite... the market performing better in the republican years vs the democrat years... Save for maybe Clinton's second term where the .com bubble was inflating.