That seems to be a vast oversimplification of the two presidencies. To be clear, I'm not a Bush fan, and I do like Clinton. Having said that, the economic conditions we have had from Clinton through now seem to be much more closely related to the dot-com and housing bubbles.
Its true. The "greatest economic expansion since blah blah blah" seems to only have been possible because of fictional money.
What I think some of us are saying is that balancing huge deficits by cutting services from the budget is not only totally f*cking wrong, but completely impossible. The US government's projected debt is FIVE TIMES (or more) its annual tax revenue, and its getting worse all the time because the GDP isn't growing as fast as inflation and the debt gets bigger and the amount we get from taxes gets smaller every day.
What got us this much debt wasn't the actual Federal budget anyway, it was stuff that was never budgeted for. For the entirely of the Bush II years the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were paid for by emergency bills half way through the year. A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, none of which was in the budget. Then you had the huge Bush tax cuts which cost us pretty close to a trillion by now, then you had Obama's bailouts which were just as huge as Bush's tax cost (although, possibly, might be breaking even eventually...some say).
Of course there are other things that cost tons of money. The Department of Homeland Security never should have been created in the first place, that's expensive. The Pentagon's budget has increased by something like %50 in the last decade....
This is why its so frustrating to hear people say that we can't afford NPR or the Peace Corps or that we should sell protected land to oil companies and stuff. I don't think people even understand what a trillion dollars is. Sure, $150M for the NEA is a lot of money, but its %0.004 of the Federal budget. Eliminate it, halve it, double it, it doesn't matter. We're SO beyond that its not even funny.
What's frustrating with congress is, to use another personal home economy analogy, its like if your wife ran up $100,000 of debt on your credit cards over the period of a couple of years and then divorced you. You can't just decide to not pay the monthly payments because you don't like her anymore, and you can't just decide what things she bought you will pay for, the money is f*cking SPENT, and the only way to get rid of the debt is to pay the payments. You can make the minimum, but the balance will never go down that way. Never. Ever. You need to make painfully huge payments to decrease the debt.
We have to increase taxes, a lot, for basically everyone. And yes, we can afford it. This is a society that spends $500M going to see a stupid-ass super hero movie and keeps places like Buffalo Wild Wings and the NFL in business. We clearly don't have something better to do with the money.
That's why is so frustrating to see some f*ckhead tea baggers threatening to shut the entire government down until they can pass some token bullshit bill that shaves $300M off the budget without raising taxes. Those kinds of figures are just uselessly low. Just taking even the briefest glance at the budget will show how irrelevant shit like that is.
Somebody else put it this way:
