‘Those Days Are Gone’

March 5, 2007

Digby caught an item on 60 Minutes last night about David Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, that deserves a little more attention. From CBS:

[Walker]calls it a fiscal wake up tour, and he is telling civic groups, university forums and newspaper editorial boards that the U.S. has spent, promised, and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it doesn’t act now. As Walker sees it, the survival of the republic is at stake.

“What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous,” he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer.

You have heard this before, from Ross Perot 15 years ago. You might have even thought the problem had been solved, when President Clinton announced, “Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit … will be simply zero.”

“Well, those days are gone. We’ve gone from surpluses to huge deficits and our long range situation is much worse,” Walker says.

That’s actually as far as Walker would go. The nation’s finances were in great shape, but “those days are gone.”

That’s true, of course, but it might be helpful — in the interests of accountability and progress — for Walker (and 60 Minutes) to talk about why those days are gone.

Digby wrote:

I am getting so tired of Republicans screwing things up so that the Democrats have to come in and clean up their messes. Tonight, I watched what could have been a vintage 1992 60 Minutes story about how the deficit is going to bankrupt the country unless somebody does something right now — which immediately translates into a story that insists we must radically scale back all spending and entitlement programs (except the military, of course) because it would be immoral to pass these bills on to our grandchildren.

And yet, in this vintage deficit fear mongering story, there is virtually no discussion of why we are in this situation…. [W]here were [Walker] and 60 Minutes during the past six years when the Republicans blew a record surplus and dug us into a hole so deep he now says the republic is in danger?

Just to be clear, this isn’t just about finger-pointing and assigning blame. Well, that is part of it. After a rough decade in the 1980s, the nation’s finances were finally on the right track. Thanks to economic policies that Republicans fought tooth and nail, the deficit was gone, the surplus was huge, and we were on our way to paying off a massive national debt. Bright skies, open roads, no traffic — we were on our way to a bright future.

And then Bush took office and took us on a detour. Every single claim about his fiscal policies turned out to be wrong, and the consequences have been drastic.

But holding Bush and his allies responsible is only a part of the equation, because he and his ideological cohorts still believe they have credibility to fix the crises they created. They drove the nation into a ditch. Dems pull up with a tow-truck, and Bush says, “Don’t listen to them; I’m driving and I know what to do.”

If Walker and 60 Minutes would take a moment to mention any of this, it’d be helpful for the policy debate.

I think the fact that CBS even reported this shows just how liberal and biased to the left the MSM is…..

Damn, I can’t even say that without laughing….

It really doesn’t even matter to the koolaid drinkers. They will bury their heads and pass the buck.

This is so depressing. I’m going to go think up some more metaphors about how f’ed up they are…..

  • To paraphrase Grover Norquist (yes, that idiot), “George Bush shrank the competence of government so small that he could drown this nation in a bathtub full of red ink.”

    I really wish we could bill every person in this nation that voted for W for the cost of his fiscal mismanagement. Or better yet, maybe we could bill the Republican party the cost of the deficits they ran up.

  • I’m going to go think up some more metaphors about how f’ed up they are…

    Homer

    Perhaps some sort of comparison b/w the ReFuklican state of “mind” and the situation of a wounded soldier in Building 18?

    Of course the ReThugs will never come up with a solution that makes sense: Tax the living hell out of their rich friends. Nope, better whack another chunk off the SCHIPs program. Because ReThuglicans love children. Until they emerge from the womb.
    [Insert Mark Foley joke here. Or not.]

  • I am sorry to have missed that story but drop-in company unable to stop talking about trivia, or go home at any decent time, foiled my plans. It must have been impressive because several of my students kept talking about the story this morning and afternoon in class. I tried to reassure them that this has actually happened before and we should have a tax increase to compensate for our fiscal losses. How much teenagers comprehend is always surprising to me; they are an underestimated group. It was fuel for a good discussion anyway, but I was handicapped by my not having watched the program.

    I guess its time to get TIVO.

  • It never should have happened to begin with, but much of the blame rests with the gullibility of the portion of the electorate that voted for Bush. They bought his transparant lies about endless economic growth and became blinded by the tax cuts he campaigned primarily on. They should have known better. They decided to be irresponsible rather than responsible when they chose tax cuts over the debt reduction that would have had a much more beneficial impact on our economy.

  • “Or better yet, maybe we could bill the Republican party the cost of the deficits they ran up.”

    That one is easy: raise taxes significantly on capital gains, second homes, and wages in excess of $200,000 / yr.

  • You guys remember history a little different than I do. There has not been an accounting surplus in the federal budget since I can remember. I am fifty five. Mr Clinton announced a budget surplus but neglected to come clean about social security. When he achived these results, there was a Republican majority in the house and senate. Both parties are in total denial about the actual budget accountability. If you used the accounting methods conceived by these hacks in both parties you would be in jail. The one thing you should take into account is inflation runs about four percent. every ten years your money loses fourty percent of it’s purchacing power. Until recently the interest on borrwed money was so low it would not keep up with inflation. Your govenment is not worried. (Either party) They believe that they borrow it now and pay it back with less valuable assets.Listening to the above rant makes me wonder if any body can do simple math any more.

  • Walker’s a really good public servant–a completely non-partisan guy who just tries to do his job and do right by the taxpayers.

    In other words, exactly the sort of person the Bush administration and their allies on the right is determined to drive out of public life. With them gone, “government sucks” becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

  • Come on now.

    Our finances were NOT in great shape before Bush made them so much worse.

    We still had problems with Social Security and Medicare. In addition, virtually any presciption drug plan was going to cost a fortune over the long term. We were going to have a huge AMT problem that would be expensive to fix.

    I am not saying tha Bush made things a lot worse. I am just saying that we need to be careful and not catch the Reagan disease of looking back in time through rose colored glasses

  • Listening to the above rant makes me wonder if any body can do simple math any more. -E.C. Sedgwick

    Not to detract from the validity of your post, but I find it a bit ironic to question peoples’ math skills after claiming a compounding devaluation of 4% would equal an overall devaluation of 40% in a decade.

    It’s actually 33.5%, a difference of 6.5%.

  • Math was never my strong subject. I don’t owe any money and I am retired at fifty five. I am closed enough.

  • After reading this it’s enough to make you wish for Nixon to come back. He wasn’t anyone I’d trust, but he was a professional politician. He did do some things that helped get the economy on track for growth.

    Then along came Reagan who was conviced that his rich buddies were overtaxed and the Laffable curve (yes I meant to write it that way) would result in huge revenue growth. The only thing was that we weren’t in the overtaxed range of the curve, we were in the lower half so the tax cuts reduced revenues. Don’t forget George H W Bush correctly called it voodoo economics

    Bill Clinton convinced Congress to raise taxes on Reagan’s buddies by a small amount and held the line on spending while trying to do more with what was available. After 6 or 7 years we weren’t spending more than we took in. Sure Bill included the Social Security surplus in the picture, but so has the shrub (thanks Molly).

    Along came shrub and he pomised bread and circuses telling us that more tax cuts would once again work because of the Laffable curve said so. Again we all knew that we were on the lower portion of the curve and that tax cuts would reduce revenues. But Hey, we were at peace. The Soviets were no more, the Chinese wanted to be like us, oil was cheap because cars were becoming more efficient (in 2000) so we were told we deserved more of our money. But shrub, like most Republicans, looked only at the current quarter. All that debt that Reagan ran up wasn’t his problem so just ignore it. After all one of dad’s buddies would come along and bail him out.

    So to recap. Pre Reagan out national debt was about $1 trillion, after Reagan it was about $4 trillion, GHW Bush it was about $5.6 trillion, after Clinton it was about $5.6 trillion, now under the shrub it is almost $9 trillion.

    The Republicans owe the US of A about $8 trillion. Pay up!

    OK, that’s enough rant for now.

  • E.C. Sedgwick, first things first: inflation has not been running at 4%. It’s been a very long time since inflation even ran at 4% on a year-to-year basis. i’m not going to take the time to look it up now, but inflation has been running south of 3% for a good 15 years or so, maybe a touch longer.

    second things second: clinton did achieve a general fund surplus in either his last or his last two budgets, and the projections were for more of the same and this information was not a closely held secret (so i have no idea what you mean about “coming clean”).

    third things third: long-interest rates have been above inflation, so i have no idea what you are talking about (maybe you mean that passbook savings interest has been below inflation?).

    fourth things fourth: your comments on government accounting are equally poorly informed. indeed, the big critique of government accounting is that we mix capital and operational expenses together instead of amortizing the cap expenses over time.

    neil: we do not have a social security problem in the slightest. as for the rest of your rant, what the clinton fiscal policy gave us was the running room to address the other problems you mentioned (although, of course, the solution to the health-care cost problem is some form of universal health care).

  • Watch that “tax second homes” thing. I have a second home. It’s a small place in the woods. My two houses together don’t add up to the size of the average home in my area. I don’t need it taxed like it’s some palace on the cape.

  • A reminder that David Stockman, Saint Ronnie’s first budget director in the 80s, publicly stated that the deficit was being deliberately run up in order to justify cuts to popular social programs later on.

    That’s your party of fiscal responsibility, folks.

  • ok, i cracked: i took a look at inflation from 1993 (when clinton took office) through 2006: 39%, compounded, over those 16 years.

  • Being jaded by watching the fiscal performance of all the Repub Presidents we’ve had in the last forty years, I’ve just come to conclusion that they use this power of the purse to rob the public. What we’ve watched over the last six years has been the most blatant robbing of the middle class to give to the rich as we have every witnessed. Many of these so called “self made men” such as Cheney have done nothing but feed on the public teat their whole career both directly by spending tax dollars or in-directly by being in charge of the company receiving so many “no-bid” contracts.

    Now, so much wealth is concentrated in the hands of so few that even the old chestnut “what’s good for GM is good for America” has to be re-warped into tirades against the estate tax by the Walton family. It’s obvious to all of us that what GM (and the rest of the country) needs is universal single payer health care if it wants to maintain it’s place in the world. Being told that these “programs” are impossible due to the outright greed exhibited by those who oppose it is not acceptable. A failure to solve these very solvable problems (since every other industrialized nation in the world has been able to do so with varying degrees of success) can very well doom the future of our children and our country to the ash heap of history.

  • The curious thing of it all is that when these thieves are finally out of power, the “presidential pardons” that protect them from prosecution will likely be invalidated by the courts as multiple events of intentionally obstructing justice. We could save the Republic the cost of several thousand prison cells by keeping Gitmo available….

    • Comments are closed.