Republicans are the ones largely responsible for the Public Debt
as we prepare for the Budget Negotiations coming up, it's good to refresh ourselves on how the Debt came into being. This is a pretty good summary, with nice charts, but they don't go into the real cause of the $16 trillion Debt - tax cuts for the highest income brackets started about 1980 and kept up for the next 30 years. That is what explains most of the Public Debt. The highest income people are taxed (just talking income tax now, there was also the big cut in estate taxes a few years ago) at significantly lower tax rates than they did in 1979.
This is why we've been experiencing less than specatular economic growth. The greatest segment of the population - the middle and lower income groups have been bringing home less pay - gradually reducing the amount of money we had to spend. That's why Bush pursued recklessly expansionist monetary policies. They needed to have more credit at cheaper rates to keep a recession from occurring on Bush's watch. He almost made it, save for Phil Gramm's Commodity Futures Modernization Act which legalized trading in exotic financial instruments (that clearly nobody on WS understood) by banks - and made sure such trading was completely free of regulation or even monitoring of the situation. Thus, we got the Trickle Down Deregulation disaster.
http://republicanssucks.org/
Republicans Consistently Increase the Size of Government and Spending
Republicans say they are for LESS government, but Republicans are the ones who consistently increase the size of government and increase spending, and Democrats consistently decreased the size of government.
According to an article at Politicususa.com,
[div class="excerpt" style="background:#DDBBBB;"]the entire GOP TODAY are trying to frame President Obama as a big government liberal but again, the numbers dont lie.
By the end of 2010, the United States STILL has less employees on the books than we did back in 1980 even though the population has grown from 226,545,805 to approximately 330,000,000 in 2010.
TOTAL NONMILITARY EMPLOYEES IN 1980 2,875,000
TOTAL NONMILITARY EMPLOYEES IN 2010 2,840,000
We have 35,000 less nonmilitary employees under President Obama than we had 30 years ago.
Republicans Consistently Increase the Size of Government and Spending
ffr
(22,671 posts)Good analysis and presentation. Thanks you! People should be pounding the Republicons with these facts every chance we get.
Help! Did Bush II add $10.6T to Total Public Debt?
jeff47
(26,549 posts)was Eisenhower.
Kinda demonstrates that Republican concerns about the debt aren't exactly truthful.