$1.29 Trillion Deficit for 2010 Confirmed
(The New America) -- by Thomas R. Eddlem --
The Obama administration has announced that the annual federal deficit remained at a whopping $1.29 trillion during the fiscal year that ended October 1, just a fraction under 2009's record of $1.43 trillion.
The deficit was more than $100 billion higher than Obama had predicted with his first budget proposal for 2010, but lower than more recent forecasts. The President's fiscal 2010 budget proposal, issued early in 2009 and entitled “A New Era of Responsibility,” placed most of the blame for the deficit that existed in 2009 upon the Bush administration. It claimed (partly correctly) that the Bush administration "helped turn a surplus of $236 billion at the end of the Clinton Administration, that was projected to grow still larger over time, into a deficit of more than $1 trillion in 2009.” Of course, Obama's fiscal 2010 budget proposal had already been larded up with “stimulus” spending that spiked the deficit much higher than the nearly $1 trillion Bush-era deficit...
Paul Krugman, ultra-leftist columnist for the New York Times (pardon the redundancy), has been arguing for some time that Obama needs to go big on deficits — and has even made the case that the President didn't really change the course set by the Bush administration:
The whole story is a myth. There never was a big expansion of government spending. In fact, that has been the key problem with economic policy in the Obama years: we never had the kind of fiscal expansion that might have created the millions of jobs we need.... If job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried.How can Keynesian economist Krugman make such an obviously false statement? It is false, of course. Federal spending has increased at about 10 percent per year under Obama.
But Krugman makes his claim by pointing out that while President Obama has dramatically increased federal spending, he didn't increase it at a faster rate than the equally fiscally irresponsible Bush administration.The Bush-era budgets increased at a nearly 10 percent rate as well. Federal spending has more than doubled in the 10 years since George W. Bush first took office, which amounts to a heck of a lot of Keynesian-style economic “stimulus.” Deficits have increased much more quickly under Obama because the economy crashed and revenues remained flat, Krugman has noted, while during most of the Bush era the IRS was able to extract more and more dollars from American taxpayers.
By pointing out that both Bush and Obama have dramatically increased federal spending, Krugman has essentially made the case that both Presidents have engaged in Keynesian economic “stimulus” for the past 10 years. The current economic situation is the direct result of Keynesian economics. In one respect, it is a lot like the last notable experiment in Keynesian economics during the Great Depression. The rate of federal spending under Bush and Obama — doubling over 10 years — roughly tracked the rate of increase in federal spending during the 1930s, the end of the Hoover administration and first two Roosevelt administrations. Of course, during the decade-long Depression-era Keynesian episode, the unemployment level never fell below 15 percent for any significant length of time.
For Krugman, the real reason for the economic crash is not too much, but too little federal spending. He reminds one of the blind follower of Marxist theorist Leon Trotsky who once argued that the proof of Trotsky's far-sightedness was that none of his predictions had yet come true. For extremist Keynesian economists such as Paul Krugman, too much is never enough...MORE...LINK
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No Joke: Bush, Obama and their respective cult-like followers all subscribe to Keynesian economic theory, which is the "progressive" Western version of Marxism, ie Marxism-lite; And some Americans still wonder why the U.S. is going the way of the Soviet Union
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