A great piece of propaganda
 

When I say propaganda I don't mean it in a negative way. I think it represents the feelings of a lot of people in the country regardless of political belief in an effective way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZs8k4pJcyk&sns=em

I agree...very well crafted.

I'm strugglin' here. . . especially the graph of the surplus v deficit.
How exactly does a graph from 1980 to present (that shows the only surplus years as having been under Clinton) support this argument?

I want to believe.

Early 80's... Recovery from Carter.
Early 90's... First Gulf War?
97,98,99.... Smoke and mirrors. The Illusions of .COM and the waste of Y2k.
00... the market reacts to the 600 billion spent on Y2K and the billions lost on .COM... you can't spend this much green, and produces nothing and not have the market take another dive.
01.. The Begining of another war...

Notice that the magnatude of the 2009 deficit is more than 3 times the max deficit of the past 20 years.

We've run a deficit since 1960, with the exception of the latter years of the Clinton presidency, when a Republican congress kept him under control...and as mentioned earlier, the rate at which the deficit exploded under Obama is one of the key messages of the piece..,

Nope...recovery from the Vietnam era and serious inflation...President Carter inherited double digit inflation from President Ford...I recall some serious inflation under Ford, but no cost of living adjustment was made to military pay because we were going to Whip Inflation Now...didn't happen...it worsened during the Carter years, but to say his four year term was the cause of the deficit in the 80s would be somewhat incorrect...

Sir I yield to you on that one. It was my impression that Reagan had to spend more to rebuild the military... On a tangent, do you remember some payrole issues in 77 & 78? I was on the young side in those days, and I just assumed that sometimes you didn't get paid in October when you were in the Army...

If my three years had been with Reagan rather than Carter, I may have stayed in and navigated down your path. Such is life.

I recall a hiccup or two back then...I think it had to do with a change in the computerized payroll system, but I seem to recall we were paid a day or three late...I do recall that TDY vouchers took a long time to clear...

President Reagan had to rebuild the military after the Carter years...but President Carter had to increase military pay considerably in order to preserve an all volunteer force...we had pay raises of 11%, on year it was over 14%...President Reagan spent more on hardware...but that was deficit spending and it did push the Soviet Union over the brink...

Chris--

With respect, it remains to be seen if Reagan "had to spend more to rebuild the military." While I believe that re-armament during his administration was a prudent course of action, the type of archival evidence needed to prove this point will remain unavailable during our lifetimes.

Also, the Republican Party has gotten a lot of mileage from the interpretation that there was a clear break between the Carter and Reagan administrations in matters of national security policy and military affairs. My own research has lead me to the surprising, but provisional, conclusion that this interpretation may not be sustainable.

A powerful concept in the historiography of the American army is the concept of a professional "renaissance" taking place after an interval of civilian "neglect". This concept was advanced during the Gilded Age and the Progressive era. It was articulated by proponents of military reforms that were not feasible given the configuration of domestic politics and the absence of a credible external threat.

Unfortunately, rather than changing their approach and getting what they could, these reformers scorched the earth by arguing that civilians, not soldiers, were solely responsible for America's martial backwardness.*

In the intervening decades, this argument has gained political currency, especially with the GOP, yesteryear's Jackson Democrats, and those inaccurately labeled "neo-conservatives."

But does it bear up to historical scrutiny? In President Carter's case, maybe not. The man's many miscues have greatly obscured the positive role he played in setting the stage for the "renaissance" of the 1980s. For example, he appointed GEN David C. Jones as CJCS. During his tenure in the Joint Chiefs, GEN Jones played a pivotal role in the ongoing debates over defense reorganization and unification.

Perhaps more significantly, it was Carter, and not Reagan, who began the public debate over the utility of war as an instrument of policy in the post-Vietnam era. Many individuals and groups in American political and strategic culture did not care for Carter's preferences and have pilloried him for those preferences ever since. Nevertheless, he did advance the discourse. In this light, Carter behaved very much like a typical navalist, as all naval officers--if not all naval historians--should. That is to say he sought the informed consent of the American public for his defense policies. (Arguably, he has proved prophetic in his conceptualization of the navy's force structure in a world in which the Cold War has receded to tertiary importance.)

By way of contrast, President Reagan was disinterested (not uninterested, disinterested) in having this type of dialog with the American people. He left the discussion of matters of defense policy and national military strategy to Caspar Weinberger while issues revolving around naval affairs fell to John Lehman as well as civilian navalists and to the navy itself.

The consequences of this choice are many. One is civilians' contemporaneous understanding of the American armed services. We often celebrate the many upsides of Reagan's presidential leadership, not the least the reassertion of America's naval pre-eminence, the codification of escalation dominance across the spectrum of warfare (that is the intentions and capability to win wars), and the restoration of a sense of national self confidence.

However, an unintended consequence of his approach was that over the course of Reagan's presidency, the public's intellectual understanding of the American armed services did not correspond to its appreciation for the armed services. This paradox undermined the public's grasp that the armed forces, especially the navy, had accomplished a feat rare for contemporary military organizations--modernizing for tomorrow's battlefield while simultaneously increasing the readiness to fight today.

__________________________________________________ _________
* See, for example, Frederic Louis Huidekoper, The Military Unpreparedness of the United States: A History of American Land Forces from Colonial Times Until June 1, 1915. It is truly amazing what one can find by looking at every book on every shelf on certain floors of a library.;)

Tax cuts is an insanely vague and misdirected phrase in any political discourse. Increased tax revenues come from increasing the number of tax payers. Every effort that increases tax payers has increased tax revenues. When have attempts to increase tax rates increased the number of tax payers and/or increased tax revenues?

Further insanity prevails with both parties removing large parts of the population from the tax paying rolls. Everyone must have some skin in the game.

Go over your post agin and then focus on # 1.
 

Go over your post agin and then focus on # 1. Anything odd about the whole thing.

Did revenue increase after the tax cuts? How much did spending go up as the increased revenues came in. How much of that increase went to the Military and how much to other programs.

As a side note - what was the interest rate on a 30 year mortgage in 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982 and 1983?

Here are the charts -

http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/d...icit_brief.php

And here is about how the United States Government conducts business -

US Govt Econ 101

It's a slow day in the little West Texas town. The sun is beating down, and the streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich tourist from back East is driving through town. He stops at the motel and lays a $100 bill on the desk, saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks upstairs, the owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the cattle rancher.

The cattle rancher takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel, the Farmer's Co-Op.

The guy at the Farmer's Co-Op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, picks up the $100 bill, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, pockets the money, and leaves town.

No one produced anything...no one earned anything...however, the whole town is now out of debt and looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

Damn!! This required a warning or placing in the humor section. Now I'm blowing my nose to clean out the ice tea I was drinking. I'll spare you the description of my laptop screen and keyboard. :eek: