Nice Try, Senator Bayh.
Senator Evan Bayh definitely isn’t short on chutzpah. He penned an editorial in the Wall Street Journal in which he takes a brave stand against the “wasteful spending” of the budget bill before the Senate this week. He’s asking his fellow Democrats to kill the bill and, if they don’t, for the President to veto it.
That’s a fine sentiment and it would be an honorable and principled position if it didn’t come from a man who voted for the trillion dollars worth of pork, payoffs, and bribes called the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act not even three weeks ago.
Senator Bayh’s fine language should taste like ash in his mouth after he backed a bill that was more than twice the size of the omnibus bill he calls “bloated” and says “lacks the slightest hint of austerity from the federal government or the recipients of its largess”.
If Senator Bayh wants to bring down the deficit and put some fiscal sanity in place, he should demand that his fellow Democrats immediate repeal the so-called stimulus bill. Until he does that, he’s just another spend-happy Democratic hypocrite.
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Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, The Economy and Your Money
Fiscal Sanity? After eight years of cheerleading for the most fiscally insane administration in American history, you suddenly care about fiscal sanity? That's really funny, Jimmie. I don't like deficit spending, but there is a time and place for it. And the time is certainly now. George Bush left us the worst economy in eighty years. If there ever was a time for the government to spend a little money, it's now. And it's not like George Bush didn't do even worse. His tax cuts created far more unfunded liabilities than the stimulus package. And then he piled on the additional 'stimulus' of a trillion dollars in borrowed money to kill people in Iraq. Explain to me how Bush's war in Iraq has created jobs here. Let's face it, the Iraq war didn't build a single bridge or school in the US. We would have been better off burning the money in our furnaces to heat our houses. You thought spending money like a drunken sailor was fine, but spending money like a housewife is somehow a big problem? When the Republicans can achieve the kind of fiscal results that Clinton did, they can talk about fiscal sanity. The Republicans think that taking us from a 180 million dollar surplus to a trillion dollar deficit is wise fiscal management. They thought it was just a dandy idea to double our debt. Ever wonder why the majority of Americans think the Republicans are a joke?
Heh…you've read my blog long enough to know better than that. If you're going to lie about what I've been doing here, at least make it a plausible lie. Anything less insults me.
Give me break, Jimmie, you rarely ever criticized Bush for deficit spending. And you hawked the war without any concern for it's price. And you praised Bush's tax cuts. And the Republicans you recently partied with and praised were the same people who praised the war and the tax cuts. You can't duck this stuff now. But I will give you a chance right here and now to duck it. I'm a generous guy.
Here's three things you need to say:
1: Bush's tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible.
2: The spending of money on the Iraq War was fiscally irresponsible.
3: The Republican Congress from 2001-2007 increased spending in an irresponsible way.
You've said number 3, so you'll have no problem saying it again, but I want to hear it anyway. As for numbers 1 and 2, you strongly supported those positions and you need to retract them now if you want to be considered a deficit hawk like me.
You're making things up, whole cloth. I dinged President Bush plenty for his big government ways. I've been heavily critical of him for the bailout plans at the end of his term. My criticisms have been obvious to anyone who has read what I've written instead of what he thought I had written. I did indeed hawk the war because I believed, as I still believe, that it was the right thing to do for many reasons. Wars are expensive and this one is pocket change compared to what the Democrats passed in just one month.
Seriously, you're insulting me yet again. Stop it.
Or at least pay me for enduring your ridiculous abuse.
And by the way, never tell me what I need to say. You haven't earned that.
Oh, and I'd still like to hear about how the Iraq War created jobs here. And you can't use unemployment statistics. Obviously, unemployment goes down when you send people who are already working overseas to kill people. Someone else obviously has to take that job. War is always great for unemployment statistics. FDR proved that. Hell, workers were so scarce during WWII that we let POW's out to work for us. A friend of mine is a grandson of a German POW held in Rochester, NY. So don't try to tell me it didn't happen.
What in the hell are you talking about?
"Wars are expensive and this one is pocket change compared to what the Democrats passed in just one month."
Really? Stimulus bill: $780 million. Iraq War: $1 trillion plus and counting. Your argument is that 760 million is a larger number than $1 trillion. Your math teacher should be shot for allowing you to graduate. Here's a lesson: 1 is less than 2. 2 is less than 3. 3 is less than 4. I don't have time to teach you how to count, but there are tutors available online. Use them before you try to argue numbers with me.
And if you don't want to take credit for Bush's tax cuts, fine. Show me a post where you opposed them. I can bring up plenty where you actually did support them. And I'll note that Arthur Laffer says that Bush's tax cuts didn't make sense because we were on the wrong side of his curve. Want to argue tax policy against me, Arthur Laffer, and Paul Krugman? Bring it on.
And I'm not insulting you, I'm just beating you in debate. If you can't handle that, then don't talk policy. But you insult me. You say that smaller numbers are bigger than larger numbers. You say that all of the math that has ever been developed in this world is wrong. That's insulting. I'll accept your apology when you agree that the number 2 is greater than the number 1. It would also be nice if you could use proper math in the future. Remember, big numbers are bigger than small numbers.
I don't know why I bother correcting you, but here we go again.
The cost of the stimulus bill was over 800 billion dollars. With the service on the debt, the cost is over a trillion. That's far greater than we spent in five years on Iraq. It's easy for you to win these "debates" that you seem to believe we're having when you invent the numbers yourself.
As far as the tax cuts go, though they're not particularly germane to my post, I believe they were far too little. Though they did, in fact, forestall a recession after the 9/11 attacks and led to steady economic growth, they should never have been temporary. You bring your two experts. I'll bring the two-hundred that signed a full page ad in the New York Times saying that the Democratic bribe fest they called the stimulus bill was exactly the wrong thing to do.
And who, besides you, claimed that the war brought a positive economic effect? That's not why we have ever fought a war. It certainly wasn't among the several reasons that both Democrats and Republicans alike agreed on numerous occasions we needed to fight the one in Iraq.
"And by the way, never tell me what I need to say. You haven’t earned that."
Say what you want. Lie when you want. I don't care, I'll just call you on it. You can't even admit that we spent more tan pocket change fighting the Iraq War. And you still can't show me how fighting that war produced a positive financial result. Yes, it's cool that Reagan's friend Saddam Hussein is dead now. But was it worth a trillion dollars and more? Imagine if we had spent that developing other energy resources? We'd be a lot better off. Or maybe we could have just not spent that money. A some point, you have to admit that spending money to kill people is the same as spending money to help people. The only difference is that you think a dead person on the ground is better than a healthy baby.
I get pretty sick and tired of people wring their hands about the cost of the war in Iraq. what would the cost have been if we had not fought that war? Do you not realize that there are some things in life that have more value than money? The new administration has spent more on 31 days than Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 8 years. And on what?? Pet projects that will not create lasting jobs that will contribute to our economy. Propping up failing bad managed businesses that allowing to fail would have been better for our economy in the long run?
Shut the hell up about the cost of Iraq. The value of what we have done there far out weighs any price tag.
Knottie…
It's pointless. fostert is a brain dead Obamabot.
Jimmie…just ignore him. He's not worth the time it takes to read his stuff. When he doesn't even know the difference between the $780 Million he says is in the stimulus bill and the $780 Billion that's _actually_ in the bill, he's either lying, stupid or isn't paying attention. His mind's made up – don't both him with the facts.