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Originally Posted by highthief
Obviously the current admin is not.
The Libertarians can talk about being fiscally responsible all they want but given they have no chance of being in power any time soon, they aren't even candidates.
Clinton was better, but was is theoperative word. The Dems will soon likely taste power again and we will see.
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http://www.factcheck.org/article173.html
Study published by Bush's Treasury Department contradicts Bush's campaign.
April 16, 2004
Modified: April 16, 2004
In speeches and fundraising appeals the Bush campaign keeps making a distorted claim that Clinton 's 1993 tax increase -- supported by Kerry -- was "the biggest in history."
Republicans have been repeating this gross overstatement for more than a decade, but now there's less justification for it than ever. The GOP claim is contradicted by a study published last year by the Office of Tax Analysis of Bush's own Treasury Department....
.....But that bit of political puffery has always been based on a simplistic tally of the number of dollars the Clinton tax bill yielded, without regard for population growth, rising incomes, or inflation.
Now comes a thorough study of every tax bill enacted since 1940, showing that the Clinton tax increase was indeed large, but not the largest.
A tax increase in 1942 boosted federal revenues by 71%, for example, as the US geared up for war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Measured in inflation-adjusted 1992 dollars, Roosevelt's wartime increase amounted to $73 billion a year, while Clinton's increase averaged $35 billion a year (average for the first two years.)
The study said that inflation-adjusted "constant dollars" is probably only the second -best measure of the size of a tax increase. "The single best measure for most purposes is probably the revenue effect as a percentage of GDP." That's Gross Domestic Product, the way we gauge the size of the economy. Clinton's tax increase isn't the biggest by that "best" measure, either. In the period since 1968, the study said, "the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was the biggest increase." That was the tax increase signed by Ronald Reagan, rescinding some of the effects of his huge tax cut passed the year before.
That 1982 tax increase only slightly exceeded Clinton's in inflation-adjusted dollars ($37 billion a year vs.. $32 billion) but it was much bigger in relation to the size of the economy. <b>The '82 increase amounted to 4.6% of GDP (average for the first two years)</b> while Clinton's was 2.7%....
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The popular misconception is that Reagan accomplished some sort of fiscal miracle....and the truth is....he came into office and immediately enacted budget busting tax cuts that he quickly had to do a massive retreat from, in order to rescue the revenue stream, to avoid even bigger new federal deficits, as is documented in the percentage of GDP comparisons of Reagan and Clinton tax increased. GW Bush came into office and immediately enacted tax cuts that set the budget on a reversed course to escalating deficits, and then refused to do anything other than....propose and enact even more tax cuts, increasing annual debt accumulation from $18 billion when he took office, to $550 billion annually, now.
Clinton successfully pushed for moderate tax increases to reverse the $360 billion in debt accumulation for the year ended Sept.30, 1993, and presided over debt reduction that dropped annual treasury debt accumulation to just $18 billion in the year ended Sept. 30, 2000, while at the same time, he was presiding over an unprecedented reduction in the size of federal government employment, even during an economic boom period that critics will give Clinton and his tax increases no credit for influencing, but will relexively cite the economic boom as the primary reason that the debt accumulation receded so dramatically from the years 1981 to 1993.
That doesn't seem like a coherent argument, and it seems overly fair to Mr. Reagan's tenure, at the expense of Mr. Clinton's. Reagan set federal debt accumulation in a runaway course....from just $1000 billion total, when he took office, to $2500 billion when he left. In the inflated dollars of the 1990's, total debt accumulation during the Clinton years was a smaller dollar total than during the Reagan years. Reagan inherited only a $75 billion annual debt increase rate, and Clinton inherited a $360 billion billion annual debt increase rate. Mr. Clinton presided over a period of reduction in the rate of debt accumulation, until it disappeared by the time he left office.
Even, so....some folks are so confident of the Reagan "economic miracle", that they will post about it here as if it was fact, and compared to the Clinton period, the Reagan record was one of out of control spending and an "about face" on tax policy that resulted in a much larger tax increase.
I liken the responses from libertarians, against voting strategically to restore some checks and balances in the federal government, and instead, voting only for libertarian candidates, and electing republicans, by default, with a scenario where your house is on fire, but you have a grudge against the local fire department. You won't call them to put out the fire, because you're involved in a petition drive to reform the fire department, and you won't let anything, even a call to the fire department that you have organized against, stand in the way, even temporarily of your reform efforts....
So....you let your house burn..... $3000 billion in new treasury debt, and more than doubling of the defense budget, in just 7 years, and growth in federal spending that is more than twice the official inflation rate, and nearly double GDP growth, and tax cuts that wrecked the balance that the previous democratic administration had adroitly assembled to balance the federal budget, are the net result, and there seems to be a denial that the damage that has taken place to the federal budget and the accelerated debt accumulation, will destroy the libertarian "plan", or at least make it much more difficult to implement if libertarians had voted fiscally defensively in 2000 and 2004.
I suspect that some libertarians think that the bankruptcy of the federal government will play to their advantage. Last I looked these folks have the same exposure to a catastrophic drop in the exchange rate of the US dollar, as the rest of us have.... so, why the lack of concern? Why the willingness to let republicans continue to run up out of control deficits and military spending?