Don2 (Don1 Revised)

I'm not sure about ShockOfAtheism's thinking when it comes to national debt.

He quotes a CBS article which also seems misleading.

Let's recall that Bush inherited a budget surplus. So, if you want to analyze this question you'd have to start from there.

Bush next added a tax cut (less revenue) and 2 wars (much more spending).

What happens with the debt, too, do we add interest payments? If so, then that if we continue to increase budget at a constant rate, then the budget would go up higher than constant rate because of the greater interest payment each year. I don't know the answer to this.

So far, Obama has dramatically decreased the cost of Iraq war and he hopes to take back the Bush tax cut on the rich and famous. In the longer term, we'll see spending go down since Obama has decreased spending dramatically in Iraq. If people vote for Democrats/Greens/lefties in Congress, too, instead of Republicans, then you'll see a reversal of the Bush tax cut. This would then increase revenues.

So, between increasing revenues and decreasing spending, Obama's policies make sense and are not the big statist boogeyman that Libertarian/Republican propaganda are painting.

Achwienichtig

Amen to all that.

Of course, you left out any mention of the recession that Obama inherited. Just one more inherited problem working against him. I think he's doing fairly well will slowing the spending down.

RareBird

It has been a success enough. I know people love to criticize and idealize but the American political system simply does not allow for the electorate to achieve its ideals--there is too much in the way after the election in the way of limitations of presidential power and the inviting of other constituencies into this form of "democracy" through what we call "Congress" to think of one POTUS' election as a success or damning failure of enough bad weight to kick him out come what may from the other side. President Obama could not have foreseen loss of the House to the political opposition after just two years in office especially when he seemed to believe that advancing a republican-architected health care bill would buy him some favor from the right. What is now called "ObamaCare" came out of the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation and was Bob Dole's plan in the 90's, adopted in Massachusetts by a republican governor in the name of Mitt Romney.

Pres. Obama very naively believed that once you win an election, that Americans then cooperate and accept the outcomes of elections. I don't think he should be shamed for that because a lot of people don't understand that a media phenomenon has happened since the youth of adults over 30 in which the once sacrosanct center guarded by the three main broadcast networks plus PBS fell away and a reversal of fortune came about where partisan political propaganda became passed off as "news". This creates "compartments" where Americans can exclude the rationale of the other party entirely and listen only to reinforcing spin that tells them what they are inclined to "believe". This is an identity crisis of such immense proportions that it really demands an entire re-thinking of political process. But that has not and probably can not happen and we are stuck with many people making decisions in the wrong theory.

In any event, we do not get to choose who runs, only which of two will make the top executive decisions for the next four years. The republican candidate has said almost nothing about what he'll do except UNDO the progress made by the current and past Democratic presidents. That is a dangerous roll of the dice given the state of America and the world. President Obama has shown himself to be responsible, competent, trustworthy and has repaired the "international community" and America's proportionate place within it which was utterly destroyed by the republican administration in power for the first eight years of the 21st century. President Obama has earned trust. Mitt Romney deserves none--he lied his way into the governorship by lying about his residency, has lied without any hint of conscience about every political adversary on his way to this election. He appears to have no conscience. And it is impossible to be a patriot much less a good POTUS if you lack even the understanding of what a conscience is.

Jimmy Higgins

So was ShockofAtheism's post an actual debate post or a paid advertisement by Mitt Romney? That was about as shy of anything decent in presentation as one probably can get in a formal debate. Mentions jobs, when the peak unemployment level under Obama was over 10%.

Don2 (Don1 Revised)

This is a good point.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/op...ay/24sun4.html

Samhain

I particularly liked this graph:



Notice how the "Change" column is always expressed as a figure that is meant to sound as big as it possibly can rather than having a static method for determining change. Unemployed Americans and Americans in Poverty are expressed as a numerical figure while others are expressed as a percentage. That's Quality Grade A Propaganda right there. Also, I noticed that he didn't source this chart (unless it was his first source, which seems to be a broken link strangely enough).

Thoughtful Thug

I think the Obama administration maybe remembered as the first stage of American Presidency to enact tough austerity measure due to the relative role of its decline in the world.

Of course that being the case, rest on the notion of whether if you do believe that the US is in fact an Empire; and that Empire itself do decline in a natural course like many other that preceded it.

aspronot

SoA is at it again in his latest post with misleading graphs. This time he posts numerous bar and line charts which don't have an origin on the vertical axis. It is a classic tactic to magnify very small changes and make them appear larger. He has lost the debate right there with these propaganda-like attempts at presenting data.

Don2 (Don1 Revised)

SoA grabbing stuff from blogs, tea party websites, the national review. A true conservolibertarian. He may not realize the graphs are misleading, though, as he didn't create them. He's just using them like a political pamphlet, not a rational debate.

His points about 2009 are mostly irrelevant because over most of the budget, it was related to a budget set by Congress in 2008. Obama wasn't President. Some parts seem relevant, though, like Cash for clunkers. But the retail graphs stop in early 2010 and show a huge dip in 2008. Given that we're mostly through 2012 now, what is a rational person supposed to make of this narrow window of time?

Jason Harvestdancer

National Review libertarian? The Tea Party (post 2008) libertarian? Huh?