The Economy

[kandrathe]

Afterthought: This just showed up on the Freakonomics blog, seemed apropos. (Always keep taxes in mind, though. That's a big part 'o the chart.)

Ok, first, just let me say that the entire article is a pretty one sided and reeks of "Blame Bush".

One comment I noted was, "Along similar lines, legislation adopted in one year can affect the budget many years into the future." Which is what I said about 6 posts ago. So, I'm willing to give Clinton the credit in not mucking up the course that was already charted, and I'm willing to give Bush the blame for his obvious mistakes and their effect on the economy.

It seems the masters of "lying with statistics" got together and chose a bunch of parameters to skew the raw data to show what they want to show. One key phrase is "We focused the analysis on 2009 through 2012.", which is unfair since the Obama stimulus spending package barely gets going until 2011. What concerns me is that the "Obama Agenda" already registers as significantly contributing to the deficit, when he's only been in office for less than 6 months. It will be interesting to revisit this in 2015 and see where the Obama deficit stands.

I would agree that the Iraq and Afghan wars constitute a large part of the deficit. To be fair, the prescription drug benefit was added at a time when the coffers were full and both the publicans and demagogues were trying to figure out how to spend the boon (rather than pay down the deficit). I would also be fine with repealing that bill, reforming SSI, and Medicare, and scaling back some of our foreign military presence.

Ironically, the "Prescription Drug Benefit Act of 2002" was introduced in the Senate by... Joe Biden.