Quote:
Originally Posted by spence
If you were to smooth the curve you'd see the pie on the right is a continuation of the Bush trajectory while the pie on the left is an abnormality.
The trajectories are not the same. Nor are trajectories in and of themselves meaningful. Wars, for example, create a much steeper upward rise in spending than in peacetime.
What is your criterion for abnormality?
The nearly constant upward slope of the curve might be more meaningful than the periodic fluctuations in degree.
Besides, a perfectly smooth slope with an unchanging degree of rise would be an abnormality requiring a harmonious condition of rising stupidity (stupidity being gvt. spending beyond sustainable limits). That our politicians, as a class, might well be fiscally stupid is no surprise.
But there were actually periods in our history when the slope trended downward for sustained durations. Actually, those were times before progressive politics became the norm--times of Constitutional ascendency. Our post-constitutional era has loosed a centralized political class upon us whose appetite for spending seems limitless. And the constant upward rise of the slope might have a meaning beyond that of mere party differences. It might be an indication of the divide between progressivism and constitutionalism.
And, yes, what you call the Bush trajectory is due in a great degree to his progressivism.
I think most everyone agrees the debt and healthcare costs are an issue, it's just that there are differing options on how to address it.
The constitutional option would be to keep the Federal Gvt. out of the issue. It is this type of usurpation and thievery of our individual, local, and State rights that has created and continually expands an insatiable central gvt. which has forced us as a nation into insoluble debt.
Here's the rub, a president Romney would still have the same debt, same deficit and the same Republicans out to protect their spending interests.
-spence
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That is more of an assumption than a rub. Romney, presumably, would have been more business friendly. He might have erased many of Obama's executive orders and their regulations, and that would have eased business burdens, and his policies might well have encouraged the spending of business money that is now being withheld due to uncertainty and fear of more of the coming regulations. Who knows what he could have done to Obamacare. But he might have brought a brighter more optimistic outlook, ala Reagan and Kennedy, to the American psyche and to the business climate, than the struggling gloom and discord that pervades us now.
But even that would just be a temporary bump until another election and the further encroachment of communitarian, progressive governance.