In a recent poll, Americans were asked whether they thought the deficit had decreased or increased since Obama took office in 2009. 54% of Americans thought in increased and a mere 19% thought it decreased. Even a plurality of Democrats (32%) thought it increased with 21% thinking it stayed the same and 30% thinking it dropped. Perhaps this accounts for the majority disapproving of how Obama handled the deficit.
However, the deficit has indeed dropped not risen — and dropped substantially. In 2009, it stood at $1.4 trillion and 9.8% of GDP. In 2013, in 2009 dollars, it had shrunk to $680 billion or 4.1% of GDP. This year it is projected to be lower still. At $486 billion, it’s the lowest it’s been since 2008.
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How about health insurance? Health insurance premiums have tended to rise every year. In the period 2004 to 2009, they rose 34%, i.e., 6% per year. In the period 2009 to 2014 that fell to 26%. In 2013, the increase was only 3% for families and 2% for individuals. This is a significant improvement. Nonetheless polling from back in May by Gallup shows Americans disapprove of the ACA by a 51% to 43% margin. So even though it shows signs of reining in costs and has clearly widened coverage, a majority disapproves of it. This month, Gallup found that 27% of Americans thought the ACA had hurt them and 16% thought it helped them. They also found Americans expected the ACA to make things worse over the long term by a 46% to 36% margin. (This margin has remained stable going back at least to June 2013.)
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This suggests that Democrats are — as usual — doing a terrible job of running on the issues. If majorities of Americans think that the ACA has worsened healthcare and Obama has worsened the budget, someone at the Democratic National Committee is not doing his or her job.
The key player in conveying factual information to citizens is the media. We should not ask or expect Democrats to undo the enormous damage caused by Fox News and its sycophants.
You correctly spotlight two more examples (of MANY) showing that the American public is woefully ignorant of simple facts about the world around them. I suggest that we do NOT want a culture where we rely on political parties to communicate such facts — our descent into that rathole is what has created the current mess that you describe.
I suggest that, instead, we do whatever is needed to restore some sense of objectivity, neutrality, and accuracy to our media. Here are some steps I suggest we consider:
1. Reimpose the federal “Fairness Doctrine”.
2. Reimpose strict limits on the number of outlets a single individual or entity may own in a single media market
3. Find ways to make it MUCH easier to hold publishers and broadcasters accountable for patently false information they disseminate.
I can’t help but observe that, after all the jingoistic chest-thumping is over, the several BBC networks offer FAR better information than any of the US networks.
While I am a vigorous advocate of our First Amendment freedoms, I argue that we must not allow our immensely powerful mass media to be used to propagate flagrantly incorrect “news” among us.
Our entire democratic system is premised on a well-informed and well-educated electorate. The GOP in general and Fox News in particular have been working to subvert that premise for decades.
Is that they’re wrong twice on the deficit. Wrong that it hasn’t been reduced and wrong that reducing it was the right thing to do. I’ve been saying for at least five years that it’s criminally obscene, given the actions of the Republican Party during the Bush II debacle, for any Republican to be accorded any credibility on the federal budget deficit whatsoever. The fact that they created a $1.4 trillion deficit with their shameful tax cuts and then actually controlled the conversation when they pivoted to lecturing on the dangers of deficits in January 2009 is one of the saddest developments in modern politics.
That Obama went along with this garbage economics, appointing the Simpson-Bowles commission in his very first year in office and making deficit reduction a priority throughout his presidency, is one of the great failings of this administration. Some of us predicted that he could balance the budget (using only spending cuts, of course) and still would not get any political credit for it. Two reasons. First, the narrative is that Obama and the Democrats are wild spenders. Facts don’t matter at all. Second, nobody’s going to want to give you credit for an economic policy that actually delays the recovery.I think what’s going on here is that most Americans don’t understand economics in the least but they sure understand that things are not going great for them.
My wife, a former Republican, was called by the Baker campaign last night. The person asked “Do you think the state is going in the right direction?” She replied, “That’s a stupid question, what are you referring to exactly?” The guy could not say. It’s clear that they just want to set up the “It’s so bad” image. I pointed out to my Republican friends that Romney promised to get unemployment down to 6% in four years and Obama did it in two and they replied, “Yeah, but those jobs suck and it would be better under Romney”.
To quote Bill Clinton: “The problem with ideology is, if you’ve got an ideology, you’ve already got your mind made up. You know all the answers and that makes evidence irrelevant and arguments a waste of time. You tend to govern by assertion and attacks.”
Are right that those jobs suck. They’re wildly wrong that it would be better under Romney.
… What step is she on? Sounds like she’s well past step #5 (Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our deficit.) My uncle finally admitted he was powerless over economics… but (perhaps paradoxically) still struggles to believe that an economist greater than himself could restore him to sanity… I think his sixth month chad is coming up soon.
It’s a tough recovery to make… but keep supporting her in it!
My wife accompanied me to the first volunteer’s meeting at Framingham State for Elizabeth Warren. (long story that I may share sometime) After hearing Elizabeth that night, my wife put a Warren bumper sticker on her car and changed her voter registration to Democrat that week.
I suppose.
…don’t know the difference between the national debt and the deficit. The national debt has gone up – with the deficit being down, it’s going up more slowly, but it has been going up nonetheless.
I feel like one dropping should also cause a drop in the other, but I admit I am not an expert on the subject.
The deficit is the year on difference between spending and revenue. The national debt is the absolute value of all outstanding (cumulative) deficits and/or other debts. The national debt always grows when we have deficits and shrinks when we have surpluses. It gets more complicated as the economy expands or reduces, as the ratio of debt to the economy is an important measure, too.
The “deficit”, as reported by the feds and media, is the *on budget* difference between spending and revenue.
Remember that the GOP, keepers of economic sanity, decided to go along with George W. Bush’s misleading strategy of funding the Iraq invasion with “Emergency” appropriations. The cost of his Iraq invasion did NOT, therefore, appear in the reported deficit for those years. There are similar, though less egregious, differences based on accounting for interest in federal “trust funds” (like for social security).
The REAL budget deficit is the difference between the federal “net worth” at the beginning and end of the fiscal year.
That number is different from both the published federal deficit and the difference between the published national debt at the stop and start of the fiscal year.
The ACTUAL record of Mr. Bush and the GOP from 2000 to 2008 is even more dismal than already widely known.
Each year’s budget has spending and revenues. To the extent that spending is greater than revenues, that is the deficit. If revenues are greater than spending, that is a surplus.
If there is a deficit of any kind, then the revenue must be made up from another source: principally by borrowing. That is debt. Debt carries over from year to year, but deficits are for one year only. Each year’s budget has at least some debt repayment and some borrowing, so the overall debt figure is somewhat dynamic. But as long as the budgets are in deficit, then the overall debt will increase. As the size of the deficits have been significantly reduced over the last few years, the rate of increase of the debt has slowed, but the number is still increasing.
Increasing, that is, in terms of actual dollars owed. But to the extent that the size of the debt is an economic (rather than political) issue at all, the important factor is not the number of dollars owed, but rather the size of the debt relative to the size of the economy. That is for the same reason that a $100,000 mortgage is crippling for someone with $20,000 of annual income, but light for someone with $100,000 of annual income. By that measure, I think the debt has been relatively stable for the last few years.
what it would be mean to have little or no debt. it would actually muck up the financial markets because we need US bonds as a baseline.
One of the things I find challenging is the influence of the federal government on the economy and not in a positive way. In the early 2000’s it seemed at the time that that the economy needed a good recession. Instead we popped out of it because of tax cuts and low interest rates and we ignited a housing bubble. Clearly that was Bush/Congress/Greenspan jacking up the economy for political purposes.
On the Obama front, the 2008 recession was a debt recession and this takes a while to get out of. Instead they treated it like an inventory recession which has more of a V recovery (and where stimulus is useful). Lots of people talked about it at the time. I think many actions during 2009-11 were not correct and were more politically driven (example: borrowing at the federal level and transferring to state and local coffers) and just postponed recovery (another example was all the home loan program malarkey). Sometimes you have to take the economic medicine to get up a new base for growth.
So is it any wonder people don’t know what’s what? Incumbents tell them half truths to get reelected, candidates tell outright lies trying to get their jobs, and the media sucks conveying economic news. They never ever reported on the housing bubble until it was clear that it burst.
It was always pretty clear that the “stimulus” was never going to really succeed as advertised, because the primary economic problem was too much debt, everywhere. The whole thing had too much in the way of tax cuts, too much in the way of spending on Democratic pet projects that were decidedly not “shovel ready.”
That said, the transfers to state and local governments probably worked like an aspirin, lessening the pain but really doing little to provoke a recovery. States and municipalities would have been forced to cut far more than they did, with loads of teachers, police, fire and other essential services lost, without this aid.
The funny thing is that the politicians are most proud of all of the foreclosure “reform” that they enacted, all of which simply imposed delay on the inevitable. These stupid policies made and continue to make the recovery slower and far less robust than it would otherwise be. Even more stupid when you realize that with the enactment of a 10 word statute, the federal government could have solved the debt crisis AND the problems caused by lots of foreclosures in one easy step. (They could have made it possible for you to do with your mortgage bank what GM was able to do with its mortgage banks– “You have lent me more than my property is worth; here is money in the sum of what the property is worth, now eff off”)
Policians are, in the main, blowhard morons who haven’t the vaguest idea what they are blathering about.
in general terms of comparing the federal budget to a household budget, but I’ll do it for the sake of illustration. Imagine that your household brings in $4,000 a month after taxes, so $48,000 a year. Imagine that all your expenditures for the year total $51,500. You have to borrow the $3,500 to pay for the rest of it somehow. Most people in recent years have put it on a credit card.
The $3,500 is your deficit for the year. Your debt is all the money you’ve borrowed from any source and haven’t paid back yet, plus the accumulated interest. If, next year, you only spend $2,000 more than you bring in, your deficit is lower than this year’s but your debt still grows. You put more on the credit card.
In Washington the Republicans, during the Bush years, ran up the deficit to absurd levels by cutting taxes while increasing spending at the same time. Since Obama came in they’ve said they suddenly want to balance the budget, but they won’t agree to any tax increases at all to do it. They only want to cut spending. But they won’t cut any of the areas that might be cut without harming everyday people (weapons systems the Pentagon doesn’t even want, subsidies to Big Oil and Big Agra, no longer overpaying for Medicare Part D prescription drugs). They want to cut just about everything else.
They’ve succeeded to the point that the federal government is at its smallest share of the economy since Eisenhower’s presidency. We really don’t have a spending problem as much as we have an inadequate revenue problem.
…is the idea that the government needs to live within its means “just like your family does”. Most families do not spend only what they take in. They have mortgages, credit cards, car payments, student loans, etc.
Your pet peeve demonstrates even more strongly how misleading the metaphor is.
A family that has a structural deficit, so that it takes on more debt every year, will collapse. A huge factor in that collapse is skyrocketing debt service. The only way for that family to solve its problem is to climb out of its debt, and that is TWICE as hard as it seems. The family must cut spending enough to both meet its expenses and also pay off its existing debt.
NONE of that is true for a government with the ability to print money. More “debt” only means an increase in the money supply. During a a “normal” recession, that often translates to INCREASED tax revenue, because the increased money supply allows consumers to spend more. That increased spending grows the economy and raises tax revenue.
The premise that balancing the federal budget is needed to grow the economy is a right-wing LIE. The assertion that the federal government must “live within its means” is the lie within that lie.
What you say is true, but only to a point. At some point, the ability to print money does not solve the problem of sovereign debt, if that sovereign debt exceeds a certain threshold. At that point, very bad things indeed happen.
We are not at that point, nor do we appear close to that point. But what you say is not universally true.
Agreed, enthusiastically.
The real elephant in the room is a looming liquidity crisis caused by the current concentration of wealth. Deficit spending while the very wealthy are NOT putting the wealth they hoard back into circulation in the form of consumer debt (and similar instruments) risks unleashing a host of catastrophic consequences.
I think that, however, is best left to its own diary.
those particular circumstances did not work to the benefit, say, of the long-term stability of the Western Roman Empire.
the time to debate that point isn’t when millions upon millions of Americans are unemployed or underemployed for such a length of time that it is likely they will always be so if there is no government intervention.
Kickstarting the economy for individual families — not the 1% — with 5-10 years of extra spending on infrastructure, schools, etc. would spur the kind of economic growth that would allow us to get back to the point where we don’t have to run deficits greater than the rate of inflation year in and year out.
let alone the US economy.
So gut feel is what the majority of Americans work with when they’re voting.
As johntoo1 notes, the debt has increased. The budget deficit has dropped, and yes that is a positive trend.
Can we blame the media? Partly. But I think kbusch’s first instinct is correct, it’s the party’s fault too. And not just for lack of communication, but because of the amount of time and energy spent on getting spending down. President Obama is as responsible for that as anyone else, maybe more so.
It’s all an attempt to buy Republican goodwill, and I respect it for that (really), but so far it’s not working. Republicans meanwhile have shot down their own hardliners over truly serious deficit-cutting measures. So we get a whittle-down, wither away approach.
Always money for war though. Always always always money for war.
that our deficit has dropped, not when the cuts have been to social services, even as military spending has only seen the tiniest of trims and corporate tax giveaways and loopholes are as bad as ever.
There are still a lot of people who are underemployed or unemployed from the Great Recession and at this point, without government intervention, the vast majority of them will always remain so.
This will come back to bite us in the next recession, which could very well be worse than the Great Recession since so many families aren’t as financially strong today than they were 6 or 7 years ago.
If we don’t ever make those 5-10 years of concerted effort to rebuild our infrastructure in this country and make other huge investments that will spur tons of job growth short and long-term, then we’re going to continue to fall behind in the global economy and it won’t be long before even the Chris Matthews of the world stop talking about “American Exceptionalism” and chanting about how “we’re #1.”
It is not true that military spending wasn’t cut– that was the whole point of the sequester. Dems and the administration bet that Republicans would not allow that portion of spending to be cut, which was the basis of the sequester deal. The Republicans called their bluff.
I said that the cuts were tiny.
Relative to our military needs and the sheer size of military spending in relation to other discretionary spending, the cuts were tiny.
We’re still spending more on the military than we were during the freaking cold war, even adjusted for inflation.
If we cut our military budget in half, we’d still be spending more on the military than the next ten next largest military spenders across the world.
it’s actually like social services:
1. Pay for troops
2. Support for troops.
3. Services for families
4. Healthcare
5. Stuff the bases buy that goes into the local economies.
6. Retirement
7. Support for wounded
8. This list could get much longer.
Maybe some could be cut out of the above (read something about this on the subject of PX’s) but no one thinks anyone should suffer any more than they already do.
The military has tried to reduce costs by reducing maintenance but that has proved more costly than cost effective.
Weapons systems of course are costly, but the fixed costs are so high that it’s not like “buy 50% less planes and it will reduce costs 50%.”
We could be putting people at more risk without the best weapons and it’s important to have them well maintained.
The answer is of course dramatic reduction in mission but I don’t see that happening. My point is that it’s not the bloated low hanging fruit evryone assumes.
Sure it is. It’s not the kind of spending that can be turned on and off wholesale, but it’s damn easy to reduce spending substantially.
There are over 60,000 US troops deployed in Europe. That doesn’t include military or civilian contractors or dependents. They all require both fixed infrastructure, military and domestic, as well as an ongoing supply chain.
There are roughly 1.4 million active duty. That means more than 4% are stationed in Europe.
I’m not arguing that you could save 2% of the military budget by cutting it in half — it might be more, it might be less. I do know that if you start eliminating bases and bringing those troops stateside (instead of simply doing base consolidation with the same number of total troops) you can get some substantial savings.
I also know that there are some substantial future savings to be had if the Congress would quit propping up weapons programs the USMil doesn’t want.
I also also know that there are some substantial future savings for every aircraft carrier we don’t build. There are 20 aircraft carriers in the world. 10 are American. We’re building another 3. The price tag of an aircraft carrier is about $13B — but like all boats, the operating costs are enormous.
I also also also know that if we reduce our enlistment numbers, we cut down on (1) (2) (3) (4) and (5) right away, and (6) later.
The military is roughly 2.5% of our GDP. So let’s bring it down to 2.0% and take the peace dividend.
as well as practical questions.
The less troops we have in other countries the less they listen to us. Some may think that’s okay, but it’s a policy question.
Some of these are practical questions. We need foreign bases to project overseas.
Some of these require further discussion. I’m not an expert but we (your average poster here) are all novices in this area. I do know the reason we have 10 aircraft carrier is because they rotate. After a long tour It takes more than a year to refit and the crew needs to be in port. So 10 means 5 or 6 are on duty.
You can see that here http://www.gonavy.jp/CVLocation.html
Reducing enlistment numbers means that existing service people have to deploy more. Long deployments have had serious affects on them and their families.
I’m sure the money could stand some cuts. So could the rest of the budget. “Cut defense” and “cut fraud and abuse” are two sides of the same coin- political rhetoric.
We had a whole lot of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for a decade, and I see precious little evidence that they listened to us.
While I agree with you that foreign policy questions are tightly intermingled with our decisions about troop deployments, I fear you have the cart before the horse — we seem to dial up the “boots on the ground” after giving foolish answers to those foreign policy questions.
Perhaps if our government was less influenced by those who benefit from enormous military expenditures, our posture towards those foreign policy questions might shift towards answers that actually ARE in our long-term national interest.
The thing I find the most interesting is that for the last 70 years (post WW2) our policies haven’t changed much with a change in government, even when the party (or person) won and had promised change.
These are hard questions. I could say “China’s not going to war with their largest trading partner” then a few years down the road they are muscling their neighbors just because they can. Then it’s too late, as we’ve seen in the Ukraine.
I’m also worried about our European allies going all League of Nations on us and letting people like Putin have their way with no pushback.
the new Gerald Ford class of US carriers doesn’t work and core aspects of its technology are akin to vaporware.
The costs are skyrocketing — and we don’t even know if there will ever be a final product that works without ripping out the new technology and going back to the Nimitz Class tech.
We’ve already spent $13 billion on the first one (Nimitz Class ships cost half that to build) and the thing still doesn’t work. It’s a Big Dig sized problem that should be a national freaking scandal — and may even cost more than the entire Big Dig when all is said and done, just for *one ship.*
The comparison I like is between REBUILDING our MBTA and building a new carrier.
A fundamental bottleneck that strangles our MBTA is its two-track tunnel design. New York learned from us and built a four-track system. This is key for several reasons:
1. In normal operations, two tracks on each side allow express trains to run on the inside while local trains run on the outside. This moves more people farther faster.
2. When a disabled train blocks one track, the second track allows operation to continue until the disabled train can be cleared.
3. Routine maintenance is possible. The ability to close a segment of track for routine maintenance while operation continues on the second track allows round-the-clock maintenance AND round-the-clock operation.
The entire New England region would benefit from a rebuild of the downtown MBTA system into a four-track system. Other projects are still required:
– North-South connection
– Put the B, C, and E Green Line routes underground
– Extend the Red Line to Arlington center
– Extend the Green Line to at least Winchester — Wilmington would be better
Perhaps expressing choices like this in terms of the outcomes, rather than the dollars, might make it easier for voters to demand the right choice.
In my opinion, the world, the nation, the region, and my family benefits FAR more from a new MBTA than from one or two new aircraft carriers.
I think geographically the Green Line extension you suggest makes more sense for the Orange Line, and I think Anderson/Woburn makes the most sense as a terminus. Orange could be the slower local route and the Lowell Line Commuter Rail the express route. Plus I’ve always found the Green Line an uncomfortable ride. I have long thought that all “subway” lines should extend to 128.
The approach you suggest might be more workable if the currently-planned Green Line terminus at College Ave in Medford (on the Tufts campus) were made a transfer stop for the Lowell Line (like Porter Square).
The difficulty with an Orange Line connection to Anderson/Woburn is that it is very difficult to get to anywhere on the Cambridge/Somerville side of the Charles.
One study that would be interesting (does ANYBODY in the state ever actually look at data like this?) is what portion of the commuter traffic that chokes I93 between Boston and 128 is headed for downtown, versus destinations in Winchester, Medford, Cambridge, and Somerville.
In any case, ANY of these improvements are, in my view, more valuable than a new aircraft carrier.
would be a mass transit connection to Kendall Square via a spot like Woburn (or better yet further north). It’s truly a “can’t get there from here” situation when you’re talking about coming down 93 (at least in a reasonable amount of time).
It could’ve had it in the 70s and said no. The reason is the townsfolk (and my ma’s parents and brother are from there) didn’t want the “problematic element” that comes through the subway. The old B and M went through Arlington and Lexington centers and easily could’ve been extended from the old Davis terminal which became the Red Line station. We did get the minuteman trail out of it, and there may be a more diverse and urbanized Arlington population that might want that now. A great town these days, sadly I’m priced out of it. As are most folks who would need a subway.
…the “problematic element” from the likes of Cambridge? Even beyond that it seems the Red Line doesn’t go through areas that are that bad, including the decent part of Dorchester.
The era of Death Wish, Warrors, Fort Apache and Bronx is Burning and subways being associated with graffiti and black on white violence. I am certain that had a role to play, and likely still does in some quarters.
against cutting military spending, but I think it’s worth noting that military service is one of the few ways for blue-collar people to make a middle-class life for themselves. I have a lot of friends in the Guard or Reserves who are employed by the military. They have health benefits, a good retirement, and a middle-class paycheck.
I often wonder how many servicemen and women could be trained for non-military missions like natural disasters. Haiti. Forest fires. Hurricanes. We are using a few troops in Liberia now. How many other ways could we put military people to work? Other, admittedly smaller, countries with compulsory military service, offer non-defense jobs.
Service people into non military careers, leveraging the skills they learned.
What if we instead built subways and bridges with the money? Then, to use your language, the very same “blue-collar people” could “make a middle-class life for themselves” without leaving their families behind, facing substantial risk of life or limb while away, and too often bringing back PTSD?
For that matter, those same “blue-collar people” could easily become nurses or technicians as we expand health care, could become solar panel installers as we expand renewable energy generation deployment, could become teachers or social workers or other civil servants as we reinvest the money in government service at home rather than abroad.
We could just spend the money to invent cold fusion
but my bet is that, for the investment necessary to maybe invent cold fusion, we could just install massive amounts of existing technology to generate electricity without emissions. You know, solar, wind, that sort of thing.
There is a world of difference between a boondoggle like cold fusion and the things enumerated in the comment you reply to.
Why so cynical? Surely you don’t think continuing to waste money on cold-war military “preparedness” is wise.
There is less need for, say, artillery pieces designed to slow the Soviet advance through the Fulda Gap nowadays, nor is there such a need for supersonic fighter to counter squadrons of MiGs. But naval, low altitude air (like the stupidly-retired A-10) and special forces should get their gear.
I am also aware that the likelihood of any of these things happening in a pluralistic republic asymptotically approaches zero, and lingering over such wishlist stuff is therefore a departure from reality.
thinking the same way.
A military is for waging war.
I agree that the world offers a myriad of problem spots where we might be able to assist. In my view, those non-military missions require a non-military organization in order to succeed.
Of all the services our government could buy in exchange for health benefits, a good retirement, and a middle-class paycheck, it seems to me that effectively waging war is among the least valuable.
It is also among the most-fraught with moral issues. History has not smiled on mercenary armies or the nations who employ them. Even your comment reflects the assumption that the cannon-fodder (because that is, after all, the primary role of those “boots on the ground”) will be “blue-collar people”. I continue to believe that our nation would be more careful about its military adventures if the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful are among the first to be killed, rather than the last.
I agree that the government can and should do much more to offer ways for blue-collar people to make a middle-class life for themselves. I think waging war is a horrific pretext for that.
And it worked quite well. My great uncle Tony’s lifelong love of the outdoors was spurred by working on lake and forest improvements in Western MA.
If you think the bulk of military spending is on pensions and veteran benefits, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Insofar as there are troops to pay… well, of course. A reduction in the military means a reduction in troops.
Furthermore, if military spending was cut, much of that money would be spent elsewhere. Putting that money into infrastructure, schools and the social safety net all has a positive multiplier effect and would grow jobs. Military spending actually has a net negative multiplier effect.
So it’s not like the money in our economy would go ‘poof,’ it would just be moved around — and moved into areas that are more beneficial for our economy and growing jobs.
yet our whole Congressional delegation was lobbying a few years back insisting that GE in Lynn be the primary contractor for a backup engine to the F-35 which the Pentagon said it didn’t need or want.
Try telling all the union employees at shipyards and defense manufacturers that their jobs are going away. Defense cutbacks contributed to the early 90’s recession here.
So of course infrastructure spending would be great, but trying shutting a base in the south and transferring that money to a northen mass transit project? Unlikely.
I’m hardly a defense spending proponent but I stick by my original point that with serious policy discussion/change, it’s not the piggy bank many think it is.
Ukraine? If Putin wants it he can have it.
Shite vs Sunni? Kill each other- I don’t care
Afghanistan run by the Taliban? Where is that again?
China wants all these remote islands in the middle of nowhere currently owned by Japan, the Philippines, et al? So what?
Humanitarian crisis somewhere that needs troops. Let someone else do it.
Geopolitical theory says that the danger point is when power is at an equilibrium. As long as we are big and effective we call the shots. The smaller (and less able to project, an important point) we become, we lose our say in the world.
… and that means running on the Democratic record and on Democratic values. Across the country we see Democrats shunning Obama (check Paul Krugman’s piece defending Obama in Rolling Stone: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/in-defense-of-obama-20141008?page=3.) And of course, as others have noted, the media is not our friend, and that includes Charlie Baker’s BFF, John Keller.
with his whole balance the budget spiel ?
If he had run as Krugman (deficits don’t matter, etc) I bet he would have had a harder path.
It was Dick Cheney who said “deficits don’t matter.” Krugman never said anything of the sort. He said Washington should pay down past debts in relatively good times and engage in deficit spending in a recessed or depressed economy when interest rates on T-bills are historically low.
Krugman did not agree with your take above, he thought a stronger stimulus would have fixed this recession faster and better, but he was calling out the housing bubble back in 2004 and 2005.
If Obama ’08 (and I don’t think Obama really understands economics all that well) had run on a big stimulus, he might well have had a harder path politically. That proves nothing except kbusch’s original point: that American voters generally don’t understand economics and think balanced budget = good, full stop.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/deficits-and-the-printing-press-somewhat-wonkish/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0
“Right now, deficits don’t matter” is very different from an unqualified “deficits don’t matter.”
I will try to spend more time researching all my comments.
Note no one answered how Obama won when as part of his platform he said he would balance the budget. Too busy clarifying Krugman I guess.
Politicians are what they are. And thank goodness that one was broken, because that would have been exceedingly dumb. Which is not to say that a bigger deficit would have fixed everything, as some here seem to think, but just that cutting it then would have done far more harm than good.
Deficits are like the filibuster– the parties’ positions change depending on whether they are in power. Dems yelped about the deficit to oppose the “Bush tax cut.” It is almost always BS.
You’re the one who brought Krugman into it.
Candidate Obama did not, to my recollection, promise in 2008 specifically to “balance the budget.” He did want to cut the deficit in half by 2013 and that happened. And it fell even more, to about two-thirds below its FY 2009 number, in the just-closed FY 2014. As a percentage of GDP the decrease was even greater.
But the question’s disingenuous in the extreme. Obama won in 2008 for a million different reasons. There were two choices and voters went with Obama. With voters who don’t follow macroeconomics closely, even being bad economics at the time, it’s not like promising to reduce the deficit or to balance the budget would be so obviously politically disqualifying that millions of people are going to say “I’m voting for the other guy.” Especially when the other option, McCain, said he wanted to balance the budget within 8 years.
Move towards balancing the budget vs. balancing the budget. Of course he one for a million reasons. Every president does, which why “win by running as a Democrat” is not an accurate statement.
I’m just saying moving toward balancing the budget would be bad economics in 2008-2009 but that doesn’t mean anyone is going to decide not to vote for the guy because of it. Like you said, these are not issues the average voter really gets and we don’t get an economist-level debate on them. We get the usual political soundbite stuff and not a huge difference between the candidates on the goal of deficit reduction.
Noise Machine is dedicated to misinterpreting Paul Krugman. The whole deficit thing was part of the noise.
is a centrist.
“You know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter. We won the mid-term elections, this is our due.”
Dick Cheney to Paul O’Neill , January 9, 2004
I don’t think anyone talks about the deficits now. They got too big to get your arms around,
When you’re running for re-election things are great.
Most people don’t understand the difference between the country’s deficit and debt — so many may say they think the deficit has increased and really mean the debt, which would be correct.
Though they probably wouldn’t understand the economic nuances for why that’s not a bad thing — and, in fact, we should have run higher deficits for a few years to get out of the Great Recession quicker and stronger.
I thought we were going to have a vote women (Gov, AG, Mdsx DA) block. It appears that the other women have abandoned Martha Coakley because she’s a lead weight which will drag all three of them down! On election night, I’m still gonna be saying…should have gone Grossman.
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Damn fingers.
Obama started at a low- just like he was blamed for the unemployment rate on 2009,10, and 11. He can’t get credit for the deficit reduction.
Call Paulson or Bernanke
it does highlight poor press and negative news reporting