Quote:
Originally Posted by Tempest
Oh please... for more than a decade the republicans controlled the coffers and spent like crazy.. the dems in congress are ineffective morons and the repubs still win in the senate most of the time... And that has nothing to do with the question... You going to answer or just try and divert attention... Be thankfull I didn't break out the debt chart which shows all republicans since Reagan sinking the USA deeper and deeper into the hole.
|
For starters your question is flawed from the start, the European Union is not a country but a economic community of twenty-seven member states. So those as a whole dont apply seeing how all of them are independent and have there own governing political systems.
And your correct about the Democratically run upper and lower houses being complete failures. No argument from me there. Its to bad House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's earmark reforms lated less than 100 days before some 9000 of them started to appear. Its also one of the contributing factors as to why Bush budget is out of control. He spoke of this in his last State of the Union Address.
There is no republican utopia, it simply dosent exsist and never will. Just as there will never be any perfect political party. I guess your somehow trying to justify Republican/Capitalism being a failure?
Thank god you didnt pull out your debt chart. Now about the Regan Debt and Deficit. The unforeseen factors by the Reagan administration economists or, for that matter, by economists anywhere would know the following.
First was a legacy of the inflation that was rampant as the administration came in, namely the high level of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare payments. Because of the cost of living adjustments (COLAs), the payments jumped sharply in 1979, 1980, and 1981. They were $400 billion higher in those three years than they would have been using the average COLA from 1973-1980.
Second was the drop in tax revenues due to the severe recession that resulted from the anti-inflationary stance of the Fed. When Paul Volcker took over as Chairman of the Fed in 1979, his primary challenge was to break the wage-price inflationary spiral that had been building for several years. The recession that ensued from the tight money policy of the Fed was implicitly endorsed by most of the Reagan economists.
Third was the problem of interest on the national debt. When the debt was growing most rapidly from 1981 to 1983, interest rates were still very high. As a result, the government's bill for interest began to rise very rapidly. As the government borrowed to counteract the recession of the early 1980s, it had to pay the high interest rates that were a holdover from the inflation era.
In summary, even in the absence of tax cuts or any military buildup, we would still have had exploding deficits because of inflation-swollen entitlements, inflation boosted interest rates, and post-inflation effect on tax revenues.
Thanks for letting me educate you.