Obama got softball questions for 7 years. Those minions in the media didn't vet him, didn't question anything about him until his final year...

Posted by dahsdebater on 4/10/2017 9:30:00 PM (view original):
Do you not see the irony of this post given your previous post less than half an hour earlier? You do realize that the recession Obama inherited was worse than the one Reagan inherited, right?

Exactly a point I am trying to make........ The Obama lovers want to use Bush W as their scapegoat....
The Reagan Republicans can then use Carter as theirs. I call it FAIR Play.
And it is debatable that the recession Obama inherited was worse than the one Reagan got.

The 1980 recession lasted 2 quarters with a total GDP drop of 2.2%. The 1981 recession - which was entirely the result of the Fed raising the Prime Rate too quickly - lasted 5 quarters with a GDP drop of 2.7% starting from a complete GDP recovery from the first recession (the drops were not compounding). The Great Recession lasted 6 quarters and led to a GDP drop of over 5%. There is absolutely no ambiguity whatsoever as to which was most severe.

Anything is debatable if you want to debate it badly enough. But you're going to look incredibly stupid.

Another Chart I ran across shows another side of the debt issue, based on GDP.

	Debt Increase/Trillion	End of Term GDP	Percentage
Reagan	1.873	5.413	34%
GHW Bush	1.484	6.492	29%
Clinton	1.268	10.472	12%
GW Bush	4.899	15.549	34%
Obama	8.296	18.164	46%

Clearly shows when factoring in the GDP of the country when each President left office what the percentage of debt was spent against the GDP. Obama was again the clear LOSER. This time by percentage, not just dollars.

i never like to bash bush.....i think he he is a good guy and well meaning and he brought dignity to the office.....he is not a scapegoat....just because i think his policies were wrong does not mean i do not respect him.

Posted by dahsdebater on 4/11/2017 3:52:00 PM (view original):
You really do want to look incredibly stupid, eh? In both of these charts you're ignoring term length. That's a massive normalization factor. GHW's numbers effectively need to be doubled since he accumulated that debt in half the time of the rest of the guys on your list. So by your simple metric, Bush 1 is the "clear LOSER."

No, now you look stupid. His GDP would also have to be doubled along with his spending which would put it back to the same number. Could it have changed had he served 2 terms, yes, but that doesn't mean it would have doubled.

If you want to compare 2 terms of Bush Sr. using the metrics you imply, you would get a debt spending of 2.968, an increase in GDP to 7.577 and that would equate to a percentage of 39. Still not as high as Obama. Sorry!

I feel like I'm having a battle of wits with an unarmed man... You can't just extrapolate some data and compare it to some historical data and pretend it's legitimate... You have to treat it as debt/GDP per year. In reality that actually does show that Obama accumulated more debt than GWB, but not for the reasons you have posited. In reality it's because of the strong economic growth at the end of Obama's 2nd term - his "final GDP" is out of line with his average term GDP, so economic growth was not as strong as final GDP would indicate. Here are the real numbers (in trillions):

	Reagan	GHW Bush	Clinton	GW Bush	Obama
Average Annual GDP	4.16	6.09	8.45	12.69	16.47
Average Annual Debt	0.23	0.37	0.16	0.61	1.04
Debt/GDP	5.63%	6.09%	1.88%	4.83%	6.30%

So even using your numbers Obama is still the LOSER. Who's the unarmed man here anyway? LOL!

I'm a Republican. I voted against Obama twice. I'm not arguing for or against any specific president or party, I'm arguing against stupidity. As a highly educated Republican it's getting harder and harder to convince the other people I work with that the Republican party represents a defensible alternative. Realistically they no longer represent any of the fiscal conservatism I believe in. This has been a problem since Reagan got the party so deeply into bed with the military complex. So much of the Republican rhetoric at this point is based on distraction and misdirection. There is virtually no chance of abortion becoming illegal in this country any time in the foreseeable future, but it's still such an important voting issue that it's hard to see Republicans holding a house of Congress or the White House without it. That's absurd.

dahsdebater, I appreciate your saying it, and if it makes you feel any better, while the Democrats have not quite been as out there as the Republicans in recent years, they have their own problems which amount, as Thomas Frank's great book "Listen, Liberal" makes clear, to having abandoned their electorate and their raison d'etre, so as to be in league with Wall Street. And they have managed to get in bed with the military-industrial complex as well.

Makes you yearn for Eisenhower and Kennedy, doesn't it? Even Nixon and Johnson start to look like great statesmen at this point.

But as to the debt/GDP growth ratio, while I support your position and your data makes sense, I think there is a missing element that makes almost all questions of public debt only partially rational: public investment.

In other words, some public debt is just money spent: paying salaries, expanding agencies that may or may not serve legit public purposes, but money spent on that purpose; some public debt is corruption and waste, though in the US this is actually pretty minor compared even to some democratic countries - I live in Italy, trust me on this; some is war and the secondary expenses of war - on this the real debate should be whether the particular war was necessary, legitimate and wise, and carried out as well as it could be given the circumstances - unneeded wars are sheer waste and worse, necessary wars for national defense or saving civilization is money well spent, and might, though might not, have some positive results in terms of a more productive society later on, through better international conditions economically and politically, better designed institutions, innovative technologies - the Civil War, but especially World War II fit this description pretty well. Other wars, not so much; finally, some public debt is investment pure and simple - building infrastructure, developing technologies, research and development, education and re-skilling the workforce. Anything that will make the economy more productive and wealthier in the future is not really just debt.

We always hear that government should be run as businesses are. Fine (not really but let's take this dare...) let's do that. When a company spends on R&D, or develops new products and borrows or raises capital to do so, it is not treated as pure expense, but as investment, and when a business buys or builds something it is treated as an asset. But school buildings, dams, electric grids, sewer systems, highways, hospitals. etc. are not allowed to be treated as assets in public accounting, just as expenditures. Same with military procurement.

So the raw numbers, and even therefore the yearly proportions of public debt are not as meaningful as they first appear. We should treat all government spending and procurement, and assets, and public investment (the railroads, the Erie Canal, the national roads before those, the TVA which provided electricity to the whole South, how productive would America be today without that? the land grant colleges, etc.) as not debt per se but investment, and so as an asset or as a productive expenditure just as private businesses do.

that was really interesting...what a better way of analyzing and understanding expenditures.....also businesses do consider revenues to be vital to a healthy going concern.