The Republican Nomination For President: The Race For The Race For The White House

I'm with you! This crop of candidates for president of the US are destroying this country with their lies and unethical behavior; there's no more "class" left in our head of state. Their messages don't align with what they do when they take office. It's all a sham.

Why does this chart matter? Because it makes clear, in that wonderful "worth 1,000 words" way, two realities that are fundamental to sane discussion of public finance, but that most of the public doesn't realize and that the Republican leadership is actively working to obscure. They are:

- The very large, but temporary and self-limiting, expenditures for TARP and other measures proposed by both the Bush and Obama administrations to avoid a second Great Depression, plus Obama stimulus spending. And;

- The very large, but permanent and worsening, budgetary impact of the "Bush tax cuts" -- which when first proposed back in the pre-9/11 era, were supposed to end in 2010 and were in response to what back then seemed to be the "problem" of a burgeoning surplus in federal accounts! Since "extending" those cuts just sounds like business as usual, I think it is hard for most people to envision the profound and growing effect they have. The chart above helps toward that end -- and doesn't even go into how heavily those cuts are skewed to the "haves" of society. Last year Austan Goolsbee had a marvelous chart of his own on that point.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/the-chart-that-should-accompany-all-discussions-of-the-debt-ceiling/242484/

And here's one more for good measure, from the same CBPP source:

[see chart at above link]

Our country, although not perfect, has remained the superpower of this world with only five percent of the world population.

The one thing that chart misses is that Obama extended the Bush tax cuts,

UPDATE: Many people have written to ask how the impact of the "Bush-era tax cuts," enacted under George W. Bush and extended under Barack Obama (with the help, as you will recall, of huge pressure from Senate Republicans), is divided between the two presidents. I don't know and have written the creators of the chart to ask. (They have responded to say: it indicates the legacy effects of the changes made by each Administration. For instance, neither Bush nor Obama is credited with the entire cost of Pentagon spending or entitlements, but only the changes his Administration made, up or down. By this logic the long-run effect of tax cuts initiated by Bush is assigned to him, as any long-run effect of savings he initiated would be too.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/07/the-chart-that-should-accompany-all-discussions-of-the-debt-ceiling/242484/

There's a huge difference that you will never see. Your analogy misses the whole point.

I am starting a different thread on why to not automatically vote Obama.

And it doesn't match up with the sentiment in another very liberal forum in which I post. The "very liberal" element there says they are going to sit the election out rather than vote for Obama. Their anger toward him, which I attribute to unrealistic expectations, is enormous...and I honestly do not see them voting for him no matter what. They would much rather throw out the baby with the bath water.