Replies to post #102191 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[tinner]

Though it has been a failed policy for 30 years..............what do you really expect a sorry ass REPUBLICAN to say..................give me more failed policies please! Talk about SOS.

[fuagf]

Thanks for the best 'starve the beast' theory one we have seen. A couple of blasts from the past.

One .. And bear in mind, also, that taxes have lagged behind spending partly thanks to a deliberate political strategy, that of “starve the beast”: conservatives have deliberately deprived the government of revenue in an attempt to force the spending cuts they now insist are necessary.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=50184227&txt2find=beast

Two .. The conservative answer, which evolved in the late 1970s, would be dubbed “starving the beast” during the Reagan years. The idea — propounded by many members of the conservative intelligentsia, from Alan Greenspan to Irving Kristol —
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=46921813&txt2find=beast

Three .. Hmmm ... on the idea of cutting big government by 'Starving The Beast' i'm guessing, George Bartlett's, position has changed ..

Starve the beast was a theory that seemed plausible when it was first formulated. But more than 30 years later it must be pronounced a total failure. There is not one iota of empirical evidence that it works the way it was supposed to, and there is growing evidence that its impact has been perverse--raising spending and making deficits worse. In short, STB is a completely bankrupt notion that belongs in the museum of discredited ideas, along with things like alchemy.

Bruce Bartlett is a former Treasury Department economist and the author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action and The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward. He writes a weekly column for Forbes.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=50949977&txt2find=beast

[StephanieVanbryce]

The Bush Deficit Bamboozle

OK, even by contemporary standards, this is rich: the official Republican stance is now apparently that Bush left behind a budget that was in pretty good shape. Mitch McConnell:

The last year of the Bush administration, the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.

[ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_07/024787.php ]

They really do think that we’re idiots.

So, that 3.2 percent number comes from here (pdf). Where’s the bamboozle? Let me count the ways. [ http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/108xx/doc10871/historicaltables.pdf ]

First, they’re hoping that you won’t know that standard budget data is presented for fiscal years, which start on October 1 of the previous calendar year. So this isn’t the “last year of the Bush administration” — they’ve conveniently lopped off everything that happened post-Lehman — TARP and all.

Second, they’re hoping you won’t look at what was happening quarter by quarter. Here’s net federal borrowing as a percentage of GDP, quarter by quarter, since 2007:


http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=87&ViewSeries=NO&Java=no&Request3Place=N&3Place=N&FromView=YES&Freq=Qtr&FirstYear=2007&LastYear=2010&3Place=N&Update=Update&JavaBox=no#Mid

Can we agree that the deficit in the first quarter of 2009 — Obama didn’t even take office until Jan. 20, the ARRA wasn’t even passed until Feb. 17, and essentially no stimulus funds had been spent — had nothing to do with Obama’s polices, and was entirely a Bush legacy? Yet the deficit had already surged to almost 9 percent of GDP. Even in 2009 II, Obama’s policies had barely begun to take effect, and the deficit was already over 10 percent of GDP.

What this chart really tells us is what you should have known already: the deficit is overwhelmingly the result of the economic slump, not Obama policies. But the usual suspects want to fool you.

I’d like to think that the raw dishonesty of this latest Bush defense would be obvious to everyone. But after the past decade, I’ve stopped believing such things. They think we’re idiots — and they may be right.

I think they KNOW their base is DUMB ..
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/19/the-bush-deficit-bamboozle/