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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... rialPage_h

Thoughts?

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

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zzz



The article talks up SOARING GROWTH but those numbers are typical for the entire postwar period. Do we say Clinton is an economic genius because he saw higher growth?

So...where's the evidence Reagan is causally responsible for any improvement in the economy?

GDP doesn't tell the whole story either. Does the rich getting richer mean life gets better for anyone else? Idk, go ask Marie Antoinette. Most Americans continued to see their lives get worse during the 80s.



Did he inherit a war on two fronts? Or the kind of serious imbalance there is between China and the US?



LOOK OUT GUYS ITS A COLD WAR ZOMBIE
OMFG WTB SILVER BULLETS

Soviet Union collapsed from within. Even arguing that the US directly caused the fall of the Soviets - which it didn't - are we better off - or spending less on the military now - with the Soviets gone?

This is really what this whole article is about. A bunch of unsourced "quotations" and Mark Twain statistics from a propaganda-spewing Reagan zombie. And as we see, it works on people who think they're really clever and on the inside track even though the hard facts and data show clearly it's all a lot of bull.

Reagan didn't end the national depression. The Information Revolution did, and only temporarily. Presidents have very little power over the economy other than not fucking it up (which Reagan definitely did by running up huge debts).

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

yeah what an expensive war. I mean when you compare it to his other spending, the iraq war clearly bankrupted us.

Based on their actions and facts, regardless of the tax and spending issue, still Keynesians under a Federal Reserve system meaning they both have little control over the economy if they are debasing the currency to fund the government (and undeclared wars).

Bailouts and high taxes can of course make it worse.

Gross Private Domestic Investment is skydiving, and unemployment is steadily increasing. Nothing is going to be fixed economically until something fundamentally changes regarding the role of government in the economy.


imo

It has.

The graph is misleading. Not only is there the direct cost, there is also the interest (reflected in the increase in cumulative deficits) and opportunity costs of the war. During a recession.

Is it the one thing that's bankrupting us? No, but it's a major factor in combination with other really bad things.

According to your own graph, if there had been no war, 2007 certainly and probably 2008 would have been in the black.

If there had been no war AND no tax cuts for the rich, the deficit would be marginal at best and our national debt would be going down. The economy would also be better because the money supply would be greater.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Pretty sure we've been in another war too.

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you're right we should have just turned the other cheek after 9/11 and not gone after afganistan.

seriously though, america has been spending twice its income for decades. this was bound to come to a head eventually, everyone in washington is at fault, and bush and obama just happened to be sitting in the hot seat when it happened(bush at the very end of his second term, obama for what looks to be the entirety of his first.)

That's exactly right.

When we finally killed Bin Laden, where and how did it get done?
Why not do that in the first place?



False

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Clearly all those Saudis would have never pulled it off without the barren backwater of Afghanistan.

Dvergar /
Quisling

Considering these people pull off terrorist attacks all over the world, you should probably stop thinking of them as cavemen.

They're smart, determined, and capable.

Nothing in what I typed alluded to them as cavemen, Afghanistan is a shit country. The impetus for the hijackers didn't come from Afghan national pride, it didn't come from a shared offense at US actions against Afghanistan. Afghanistan just happened to be the place where they trained. If it wasn't Afghanistan it could have just as easily been one of a dozen shithole counties. These were largely Saudi's, led by a Saudi. They could have trained anywhere, considering their "training" had to only consist of 'Microsoft flight simulator '99' and 10 minutes on how to slice someone with a box-cutter.

The US is still completely unprepared and wide open for any number of extremely damaging terrorist attacks. If they were smart, determined, and capable we would have already suffered attacks that did substantial, not symbolic, damage.

They do have smart individuals, but they are not often capable (as they have proven time and again with failed attempts).

Dvergar /
Quisling

afganistan is a shit country, but thats where they were so thats where we went.

and aestu, bin laden isn't the only al qaeda member. insert hydra reference here.

you don't get to 14 trillion in debt by making more than you spend.

though the whole pakistan thing is certainly interesting.

Conquer an entire country and meddle in its politics just to catch a few dozen criminals?

Again, why not just do what we did in Pakistan?



That's a copout. You might as well argue that killing people on the battlefield is useless, they can just recruit more, right?



Ok. 14 trillion spent on what?

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

a few dozen? really?

do what we did in pakistan? ok, lets train a seal team for 8 months to hit one target, for each of the hundreds or thousands of targets in the al qaeda organization.

bin laden isn't the only member of al qaeda. By that i mean that killing him, while important, would not have ended the conflict, nor the organization's movement. if killing him would have solved everything, our troops would have already been on the way home.

WHAT we spent 14 trillion on is immaterial. what we're spending money on, whether defense, health care, or just digging a big hole in the ground doesn't matter. we're spending more than we make, and that is unsustainable. the fact that we had ~8 trillion(i forget how much) before bush took office just proves that we've been spending more than we make for longer than the bush/obama years. fairly certain we've been in debt our entire existance, regardless of any years with a surplus.

blaming bush or obama for the debt crisis doesn't solve anything, and that crisis is still very much on going.

Actually, we really shouldn't have gone into Afghanistan after 9/11. What did it accomplish exactly? And Iraq? Did we really think there was anything they could do to us with their alleged WMDs?

[✔] [item]Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker[/item] (Three)
[✔] [item]Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]32837[/item] & [item]32838[/item]
[✔] [item]Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury[/item]
[✔] [item]46017[/item]
[✔] [item]49623[/item] (Two)
[✔] [item]71086[/item]