DISQUS

Beyondwords · 1 year ago

Your feed still isn't working in my Bloglines. Maybe I should delete it and resubscribe. It's worth it to me to do an extra click and load your site, though. :)

Drew Tatusko · 1 year ago

Aww shucks... It should be ok now. Mine updated automatically without any modifications to anything else.

Steve · 1 year ago

Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but since I came back... you make the statement "Just like Reagan, Bush II has taken a balanced budget and screwed it up."

I suppose everyone is entitled to a little bit of re-writing history, but to argue that Reagan started with a government that had a balanced budget is, well, a fantastic stretch.

For the four years preceding Reagan (better known as the "Carter Years" there was a deficit run each and every year. (http://www.cbo.gov/budget/data/historical.shtml... did not inherit a Balanced budget. Not even close. I always thought it an interesting bit of history that prior to 1999, the last "balanced budget was in 1969, and that was only after "using" the Social Security surplus to balance the books.

Just thought you might want to know.

In addition, Reagan started with double digit inflation (12.5% for 1980, ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt), double digit interest rates (the federal reserve, or PRIME was at 13.35 in 1980, http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/data...), and unemployment was at a more "reasonable" 7.1% level. (http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputSer...)

Drew Tatusko · 1 year ago

Thanks for the fact check!