The Urgency of Growth - E.J. Dionne - WaPo
a very good article by a very good writer. He's getting a good deal of flack from jack-ass conservative schmucks, in case anybody would like to add some rational comments to his article.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-its-about-growth-not-the-deficit/2013/01/27/d71fa160-68ba-11e2-af53-7b2b2a7510a8_story.html
If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster.
The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit.
Let’s call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.
Moreover, the whole point of an economy is to provide everyone with real opportunities for gainful employment and economic advance — the generational “relay” that San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro affectingly described at last year’s Democratic convention. When we talk only about deficits, we take our eyes off the prize.
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during the bush regime when the Republicans blew a surplus and created the massive debt we currently have (I'm not talking about projected financial situtations 10 or 20 years out, but what we have right now.) The explosion of spending for a war on Hussein based on lies, and tax cuts which went mostly tothe wealthiest few percent of the population - was not causing any concern on the part of the GOPers then. But these are the policies that contributed enormously to the current deficit and which lead to the Trickle Down -Deregulation Disaster (aka ) which forced emergency actions to save the economy (first by Bush initiating the TARP - then Obama passing (with 3 GOP votes in the Senate, 0 GOP votes in the HOuse) - the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - which were needed to keep this current REPUBLICAN DYSTOPIA from becoming the Second Great Depression.
All the current debt we have is due to the bush debt funded wars and tax cuts and the spending which is necessary to keep the GOP's Trickle Down - deregulation disaster from becomeing the Second Great Depression. This spending was made necessary by the GOP's reckless spending and tax cuts. As far as concerns for Medicare and other programs these need to be dealt with to preclude problems developiing over the next 10 to 20 years. But putting peoople back to work and getting some growth in the economy needs to be accomplished NOW. This is why the Repugnants are for austerity right now (which doesn't necessarily translate into addressing longer term financial concerns).
Here is an informative analysis showing , for those who don't know,where the current deficit is made up of:
(emphases my own)
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3036
Recession Caused Sharp Deterioration in Budget Outlook
Whoever won the presidency in 2008 was going to face a grim fiscal situation, a fact already well known as the presidential campaign got underway. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) presented a sobering outlook in its 2008 summer update,[1] and during the autumn, the news got relentlessly worse. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that became embroiled in the housing meltdown, failed in early September; two big financial firms — AIG and Lehman Brothers — collapsed soon thereafter; and others teetered. In December 2008, the National Bureau of Economic Research confirmed that the nation was in recession and pegged the starting date as December 2007. By the time CBO issued its new projections on January 7, 2009 — two weeks before Inauguration Day — it had already put the 2009 deficit at well over $1 trillion.[2]
The recession battered the budget, driving down tax revenues and swelling outlays for unemployment insurance, food stamps, and other safety-net programs.[3] Using CBO’s August 2008 projections as a benchmark, we calculate that the changed economic outlook accounts for over $400 billion of the deficit each year in 2009 through 2011 and slightly smaller amounts in subsequent years. Those effects persist; even in 2018, the deterioration in the economy since the summer of 2008 will account for over $250 billion in added deficits, much of it in the form of additional debt-service costs.
Financial Rescues, Stimulus Add to Deficits in Near Term
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In February 2009, the new Obama Administration and Congress enacted a major package — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) — to arrest the economy’s plunge. Mainstream economists overwhelmingly argued that, to combat the recession, the federal government should loosen its purse strings temporarily to spur demand, with a mix of assistance to the unemployed, aid to strapped state and local governments, tax cuts, spending on infrastructure, and other measures. By design, this package added to the deficit. Since then, policymakers have enacted several smaller measures to spur recovery and aid the unemployed. By our reckoning, the combination of ARRA and these other measures account for $1.1 trillion in deficits over the 2009-2019 period (including the associated debt service). Their effects are highly concentrated in 2009 through 2011 and fade thereafter, delivering a boost to the economy during its most vulnerable period.[5]
Bush Tax Cuts, War Costs Do Lasting Harm to Budget Outlook
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[font size="3"]Just two policies dating from the Bush Administration — tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — accounted for over $500 billion of the deficit in 2009 and will account for almost $7 trillion in deficits in 2009 through 2019, including the associated debt-service costs. [/font][6] (The prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 accounts for further substantial increases in deficits and debt, which we are unable to quantify due to data limitations.) These impacts easily dwarf the stimulus and financial rescues. Furthermore, unlike those temporary costs, these inherited policies (especially the tax cuts and the drug benefit) do not fade away as the economy recovers (see Figure 1).
[font size="3" color="blue"]Without the economic downturn and the fiscal policies of the previous Administration, the budget would be roughly in balance over the next decade.[/font] That would have put the nation on a much sounder footing to address the demographic challenges and the cost pressures in health care that darken the long-run fiscal outlook.[7]
Here's another good article on "Adding to the deficit: Bush vs. Obama"
Since President Obama became chief executive, the national debt has risen almost $5 trillion. But how much of that was because of policies passed by Obama, and how much was caused by the financial crisis, the continuation of past policies and other effects? For this analysis, we worked with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to attach a price tag to the legislation passed by Obama and his predecessor. George W. Bush’s major policies increased the debt by more than $5 trillion during his presidency. Obama has increased the debt by less than $1 trillion. Read related article.
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