Weekdays at 12noon on 770 AM: The Truth
 Michael Medved

The Real Lesson of Clintonomics

November 29, 2012 @ 12:09 pm

As Washington wrestles with budgetary crisis, no one seems willing to confront an uncomfortable question: if we're considering going back to tax rates of the Clinton era, why not simultaneously reinstate spending rates of the Clinton era?

When Slick Willy left office, the government collected 21 percent of the GDP in taxes; next year, we're projected to take in 18 percent in taxes, a relatively modest decline. But spending has increased far more sharply: from 18 percent of GDP all the way up to 23 percent. In other words, even if we go back to Clinton's higher tax rates-not just for rich people, but for everybody-we'd still face dangerous deficits if we maintained the same levels of reckless spending.

Nostalgia for the prosperous Clinton era should encourage consideration for the much lower spending that the Republican Congress of those years fought to achieve.

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  • roomtemp wrote...
    So, when are we going to end the unfunded Obama wars?
    December 1, 2012 4:17 pm
    I mean, guaranteeing cheap heroin to Russia and China is important and all. But it's a little pricey.

    Just wondering...

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  • roomtemp wrote...
    Did you see Obama's latest 'proposal'?
    December 1, 2012 5:36 pm
    As delivered by federal reserve minion and treasury secretary Timothy Geitner...

    1.6 trillion in tax increases, 0 defined spending cuts, AND A PERMANENT INCREASE IN THE DEBT CEILING! (Effectively taking the debt limit out of congressional hands.)

    Congress controlling the national purse (or more accurately these days the amount of incurred debt, since the purse is in fact empty) is part of the checks and balances built into our system.

    Yet another blatant unconstitutional power grab by our socialist in chief. Cool huh?

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  • FormerMarineSgt wrote...
    @roomtemp
    December 1, 2012 5:46 pm
    Sorry - the claim of unconstitutional power grab doesn't fly in the reality of the news talking heads that I've been finding who are talking about the debt ceiling request. It's perfectly Constitutional from what I'm hearing. I wouldn't want ANY President to be able to do this freely, but that's different than 'unconstitutional'. And with your comment you clearly don't know how negotiations work. You go in asking for the sun, the moon and the sky, knowing that you are going to give up one or even two of them to get the one that you really wanted. That's what Obama's doing - and he's actually being smart. He's making the Republicans come up with the cuts. He's offered up half of the equation - now the republicans need to offer up the other half. And somewhere in the middle, both sides will win something and lose something. You know damm well that Obama doesn't expect what he offered up to be the final list that becomes the law. So instead of damming Obama, how about damming the Republicans for not coming up with a detailed proposal FIRST so that they could force Obama into a weaker position than he now has.
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  • roomtemp wrote...
    @FormerMarineSgt...
    December 1, 2012 6:47 pm
    SECTION 8.

    The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow money on the credit of the United States;

    It seems rather clear to me that borrowing money is placed squarely in the legislative branch.

    "You go in asking for the sun, the moon and the sky"

    Ok, great... My counter proposal is to eliminate the entire federal budget except national defense. (We're getting real close to a solution now huh? We should be able to wrap this up in just a few decades.)

    "and he's actually being smart"

    Being smart would have been proposing something that required tweaking, not derisive laughter.

    "He's making the Republicans come up with the cuts."

    Political gamesmanship, so he doesn't have to look like the bad guy for cutting entitlements. I'll tax the rich and you cut grandma's medicare = No leadership whatsoever.

    "He's offered up half of the equation"

    I think you seriously underestimate the magnitude of our problem. It's nowhere near half of anything. You're aware that just servicing the interest on our debt is about to become the single biggest expense of government right? And they want to increase the debt limit in perpetuity, while the federal reserve debases our currency further. Zimbabwe much? Argentina a lot?

    "So instead of damming Obama, how about damming the Republicans"

    Oh don't worry. I'm an equal opportunity derisionist. There's plenty for republicans too. I'd like to punch every one who voted for the patriot act and NDAA right in the face. As I recall, none of the tools in congress have even passed a budget since 2009 or so. To say there haven't been any budget proposals from the republican side is a left wing media myth though. Repeating it doesn't make it true.

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  • gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood wrote...
    Oh snap! Another constitutional expert.
    December 1, 2012 8:56 pm
    Hey brainiac, why don't you tell us what the Republicans want instead of practicing for jeopardy. Why don't you leave the reading of the constitution to the professionals. What do Republicans want? I can tell you exactly what Obama wants. You can't tell me what the Republicans want. You can't tell me because they're not saying. Of course there have been Republicans that have said this or that. Paul Ryan's budget plan for example, you know the one he got booed for in all the town hall meetings when he tried to sell it? That one. Who else, oh, AJ's favorite senator Corker, you know, the one that said it's really up to Boehner and said his plan would never pass. That one? Hey I got an idea for the Republicans, how's about they rub their heads together and come up with a cohesive thought. That would be a new one. Good luck on the Civics test.
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  • roomtemp wrote...
    @gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood...
    December 1, 2012 10:11 pm
    "Why don't you leave the reading of the constitution to the professionals."

    The constitution is quite plain spoken, on purpose. I imagine that has something to do with the government of-by-for the people philosophy. The fact that you want 'professionals' to rule you is a more than a little disturbing to me.

    "_and said his plan would never pass."

    Yup, that's probably true. Nothing remotely republican will pass Reid and a democrat controlled senate. It won't even get to a vote, so it doesn't really matter what they want does it? Clearly a republican problem.

    "Good luck on the Civics test."

    Good luck in the soup line.

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  • gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood wrote...
    Right. That's why we don't have constitutional lawyers.
    December 1, 2012 10:32 pm
    Oh and that pesky Supreme Court is just for show right? Because the constitution is so plain spoken there is never room for interpreation. Oh wait, that's not true at all. What are you some kind of moron? I don't know what a soup line is. What is that? Was that a Seinfeld reference? No soup for me? Whatever. It was probably something stupid, like everything else that comes out of your mouth.
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  • roomtemp wrote...
    @gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood...
    December 1, 2012 11:03 pm
    "I don't know what a soup line is."

    Here you go. Our history, and our future.

    http://www.history.com/photos/soup-kitchens-and-bread-lines/photo2#

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  • gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood wrote...
    Uhmmm...I don't know if you're trying to be ironic but
    December 2, 2012 11:07 am
    you do know that one of the reasons we didn't have the soup kitchens and bread lines during this recession was because of those socialist programs like food stamps, unemployment, the stimulus, social security, etc. etc. A little economist John Maynard Keynes set out to explain why depressions happened and what could be done about it. He believed the government should use it's power (taxing and spending) to stabilize the economy. Perhaps coincidentally there was a radio personality Father Charles Coughlin who denounced recipients of government assistance and claimed the New Deal would lead the country toward a Communist dictatorship. Boy some things never change.
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  • roomtemp wrote...
    @gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood...
    December 2, 2012 6:49 pm
    "we didn't have the soup kitchens and bread lines during this recession_"

    Actually, we still have them. There's a couple of them in my town. They get more use during depressions than recessions though. Wait for it.

    "A little economist John Maynard Keynes_"

    I'm more in the Austrian camp myself. I'd hand you over to AJ for a detailed discussion of economic theory as he's considerably more knowledgeable than I in such things. I just know that you can't spend more than you make forever and you can't borrow your way out of debt. Keynes philosophy starts with the assumption that the currency is worth something (actually has the power to 'stimulate'). Ours has lost 97% of it's value in the last hundred years. We're deep in debt and our credit is shot. We can't even afford the interest payments on our 'credit card'. Do you run your house that way? This is where the charts start to get ugly fast.

    History is FULL of tragic examples of the boom-bust cycle. It seems like the height of arrogance to assume those rules don't apply to us. Heck, I don't even have to cite history. I can show you the result of Keynesian economics and socialism in Greece and Spain right now. You want to see what happens when the welfare gets cut?

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPS_7kF2ngc

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90a3mUBr8Dg

    "_claimed the New Deal would lead the country toward a Communist dictatorship. Boy some things never change."

    "Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms." -Aristotle

    Nope, they never change...

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  • gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood wrote...
    I was led to believe you were scary, but
    December 2, 2012 9:25 pm
    your points are largely shallow. Yes people are still struggling, but you are what I like to call, a Doomsday Drone who listens to way too much Ron Paul. Yes, okay. I will give you that the dollar has lost 97% (although I think it’s a point or two less), but that only tells one side of the story. While it is true that one dollar buys less, you get many more dollars for the same amount of time that it used to take you to get the one dollar. In other words, if you are buying a loaf of bread for example, the cost of the bread may have risen by 1000%, but it takes you 30% less time to earn enough dollars to buy it. So you are actually better off. Next time you hear something like that just breathe and ask yourself this, if today you work an hour to fill your tank of gas at $50 and ten years from now you work ½ and hour to fill your tank at $75, are you really worse off? Secondly, you can’t compare my family’s budget to the US budget because my budget is revenue constrained. Even if I put something else on the credit card I have to have enough money to pay the monthly fee or I get cut off. The US Government has no such constraint. It can print money, borrow money, spend money. It can do whatever it wants. Now the problem is of course, inflation. So you could say the US is inflation constrained which would be a more accurate description of the US economy, but that hasn’t really happened. It’s just another doom and gloom prediction from the sky is falling crowd. Inflation has stayed right around target at 2.2%. Lastly, the US is not Greece. You really should get your facts from more than a couple of sources. We have a strong federal government (no thanks to libertarians or conservatives) which the European Union lacks. When the recession began the feds offset the problem with stimulus. Secondly, the banks got bailed out super fast and we have a much more effective central bank. Europe created a common currency without a central bank that matched our Federal Reserve and without a fiscal policy that crossed borders. In a real “federal system” like the US has, the states that are better off (the blue states) help the challenged states (red states). Take a chill pill dude. America is still a very strong country and the dollar will not collapse any time soon.
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  • roomtemp wrote...
    @gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood...
    December 2, 2012 11:16 pm
    Hey, (looks aside) I'm not scary at all. ;-) I'm actually a pretty nice guy and I have no enemies and many friends of all stripes. It might even surprise you to know that I argued in favor of gay marriage based on the equal protection clause in our constitution. (much to the chagrin of my more theocratic conservative friends) Even if we disagree, I'm not your enemy and I don't consider you to be mine.

    "your points are largely shallow."

    This format isn't exactly conducive to any kind of a detailed discussion. Things often drift off into arguments of semantics and name calling here so I prefer to keep things as simple as possible.

    "Doomsday Drone who listens to way too much Ron Paul."

    Guilty as charged I guess. I didn't vote for Romney or Obama. I tend to prefer an honest assessment from someone who is right 99% of the time to the pie in the sky hopium smoking rhetoric and lies. I could link you to any one of a number of Ron Paul speeches in the past 30 years that were dead on in terms of finance, foreign policy, etc. But I suspect you wouldn't be interested anyway so I won't waste your time.

    "So you are actually better off"

    I understand what you're saying but there is a point of diminishing returns with creating money from thin air. It's my opinion that we've reached that point. Do a little research yourself and see what has happened to the purchasing power of the middle class family. It's been getting steadily worse since the 70's. With the federal reserve's QE3 they basically just stated they aren't going to have any more 'QE's' they're going to print money constantly. That was the last bullet in their economic gun. There is no way that the end result is not inflation.

    "The US Government has no such constraint."

    Why would you think that? Of course it has constraints. Things like our ability to produce (GDP) and our credit rating are definite constraints. That's not to say that productivity can't increase but the government budget certainly has constraints and we've been exceeding them for a long time.

    "We have a strong federal government (no thanks to libertarians or conservatives) which the European Union lacks."

    I hate to break it to you but there is no such distinction when it comes to the world of finance. The western global banking cartel is essentially one entity without respect for borders or governments. When Europe fails we will too. As evidenced by the 16.2 trillion dollars we just created to bail out not just our banks but foreign banks and multinational corporations. When you see how leveraged they are, and factor in things like derivatives and rehypothecation, the debt load is truly staggering. There isn't enough wealth on the entire planet to pay it. We're going to see a margin call of epic proportions.

    "America is still a very strong country and the dollar will not collapse any time soon."

    Yeah, we're still a strong country as compared to others. One of the things that keeps it that way is the demand for the dollar as the world's reserve currency for oil trades. That is changing right now. China, Russia, India, Brazil, and many others are setting up agreements so they don't have to trade in dollars anymore because they see it as a manipulated currency with no real value. Guess what happens to the demand for, and value of, the dollar when that happens? (hint:nothing good)

    Thank your preferred deity we still make food here. Demand for that isn't going away.

    "Take a chill pill dude."

    I'm not unchilled. But rather than taking pills I'm learning about growing food and canning things from my depression era Grandma who's seen it all before. ;-)

    Good luck to you and yours...

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  • gaymarriedchristianfromhollywood wrote...
    Have you ever read All I Reall Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?
    December 3, 2012 8:52 am
    There's a story in there about this guy who is kind of jerk. He goes through life saying life doesn't matter, it's all fleeting, nothing is really important and we all need to look out for ourselves period and fruck everybody else...blah, blah, blah. Towards the end of the story he's walking near a pier and this little kid falls in the water. The dude jumps in after him and saves him from drowing and in the process almost dies himself. So the guy who wrote the book said to him, 'hey, what's up with that? why even save him if you don't think life matters and nothing matters and you should only look out for number one? are you full of it or what?' The guy says to him, "Well...I could be wrong." That should be a mantra for all of us. I could be wrong. I understand the fear that people have and I don't think it's very nice or kind to dismiss those fears or to call people names because they disagree with you. I think that for the most part the concerns come from a good place. In the real world I'm actually a mild mannered chick with a pretty easy going life and I feel very blessed and lucky, so I have little to be angry about. It is only on the blogosphere that sometimes I think boy, I'm being a jerk. I don't like Ron Paul for a lot of reasons, but I do love that he is a non-comformist and I do think he has some very valid points on a lot of issues. But I also think he's a bit of a nut (like his age of consent thing, what's that about?). I can totally see why young people like him though. He's a rebel rauser. Where Ron Paul and I part ways are fundamental differences about the role of government in people's lives. Most conservatives and libertarians to a bigger extent tend to believe we don't need to be a country. Each state can just be it's own little country with its own little laws. I'm not ashamed to say I like the government. I think it does a lot more good than harm and for all the talk about communist this, and socialist this, etc. etc. we are THE most capitalist country that has ever been. I've seen lines, long, long lines, but it wasn't for bread or soup. It was to buy a stupid iphone that looks exactly like the last one. I could be wrong, but I don't think we're heading towards socialism anytime soon.
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  • fartforce1 wrote...
    You must enjoy taunting this group of commenters with vocalised political rocks.
    December 2, 2012 6:03 am
    Saves needing to think about writing a real article you researched off of opinion sights, or a book based on more fact than theory... but smile Medved because I changed my mind about buying your book just so I could take a dump on it and put it on you-tube. I wont even illegally down load it. You do realize why the Republicans lost the Election for real don't you? It had nothing to do with Romney, The Debates, The Debacles or Sandy. Its was all the time in how you present your definition of a better reality and while building a picture of of a better world do you invite them into your own world or do you ask them to join theirs? Carl Rove was guiding the bubble of Programming. Pushing his candidates image forward through friendly Media and friendly polling. A person who easily buys the whole as reality would just be like a child with a sucker, letting the flavor last up until the count was taken and the other candidate was proclaimed Popular Victor. . If you didn't buy it then it felt more like a dog and pony show in fractionated media. With little bits of information interpreted oddly toward a favorite candidate dependent on party favor over and over again time after time. Until truth is finally the casualty and your honor is lost. Like bits of sand sipping out of a cracked hourglass. The bias so clear, Clear even if they had opinion form both sides. ..and all the rest, they are the actors.
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  • jaydou wrote...
    The real lesson of getting you as$$ kicked in an election
    December 2, 2012 12:06 pm
    Claim you "won". Find a demographic that did vote for you and claim their votes are somehow more important than the rest of them. Find wedge issues like gay marriage and claim some sort of victory.

    Write books that predict victories that didn't happen. Get the suckers to keep handing you the cash for failures. It is the Republican way.

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  • jaydou wrote...
    Fascinating, just amazing really
    December 2, 2012 1:30 pm
    Karl was doing a piece on the Wall Street Journal site about how Republicans can reach out to Hispanics. Who would have thought that the man just blew hundreds of millions of dollars and only won a single swing state? North Carolina wasn't much of a swing state but it was kind of one.

    Why do Republicans continue to part with their money to pay losers?

    Oh wait, they did win some demographics. Those "important" voters.

    Sweet irony was Mitt's percentage though. Sweet.

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