President Obama's fiscal 2011 budget will generate nearly $10 trillion in cumulative budget deficits over the next 10 years, $1.2 trillion more than the administration projected, and raise the federal debt to 90 percent of the nation's economic output by 2020, the Congressional Budget Office reported Thursday.

In its 2011 budget, which the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released Feb. 1, the administration projected a 10-year deficit total of $8.53 trillion. After looking it over, CBO said in its final analysis, released Thursday, that the president's budget would generate a combined $9.75 trillion in deficits over the next decade.

...

The federal public debt, which was $6.3 trillion ($56,000 per household) when Mr. Obama entered office amid an economic crisis, totals $8.2 trillion ($72,000 per household) today, and it's headed toward $20.3 trillion (more than $170,000 per household) in 2020, according to CBO's deficit estimates.

That figure would equal 90 percent of the estimated gross domestic product in 2020, up from 40 percent at the end of fiscal 2008. By comparison, America's debt-to-GDP ratio peaked at 109 percent at the end of World War II, while the ratio for economically troubled Greece hit 115 percent last year.

The assumption there is that the system operates logically, which it doesn't.

this might come as a shock to you all, but I would be in favor of government funding of modernization of the public infrastructure. They would need to build it with a set scope so there isn't 50 years of project creep.

Why do you feel it necessary to match the stupidity of the tea partiers with your own, equivalent level of stupidity?

I've heard otherwise intelligent people say they would support gay marriage but where do you draw the line, when will someone ask to marry their family dog?

http://books.google.com/books?id=_Al4ol ... 1&lpg=PA31

Lewis Black wrote:
So why do Bush and his Christian buddies believe marriage is between a man and a woman? Because it says so in the Bible - the Old Testament, to be exact.
...
But they also seem to have forgotten that the New Testament is the Christian Bible and the Old Testament is the Jewish bible. Please allow me to speak on behalf of my people: "Keep your fucking Christian Right noses out of our reading material!"
Now, to be fair, there's a good reason why the Old Testament states that man must marry woman. It's because, at that time, the Jewish people weren't civilized, and the Bible was, in large part, written for that very reason - to civilize people.
..
So they came up with this really scary God and a list of rules, and they told everybody that God was there to enforce those rules.
They needed to do this because as the Jews were wandering around willy-nilly in the desert, one of them no doubt led a camel up to a rabbi and said, "I met her at an oasis and it's been wonderful... We're in love and, well, Rabbi, we want to be married."
And the rabbi said, "Perhaps you didn't notice, but she's a fucking camel." Then he went back to the other rabbis and informed them, "Son of a bitch, we have to come up with another rule! Today a guy came back with a camel and yesterday one of them showed up with a snapping turtle. God knows what's going to happen tomorrow. We've got to get these people on track." Hence, the man-woman marriage rule in the Bible.

THE once proud, solid first-quarter GDP performance has taken a beating over the past few months. The advance estimate had America's economy following up on a hearty 5.6% growth fourth quarter with a still-robust 3.2% in the first three months of 2010. In May, this was nudged downward to 3.0% by the statisticians at the Bureau of Economic Analysis. And today we learn that in fact the American economy only expanded by 2.7% in the first quarter. Half a percentage point of GDP in a $14 trillion economy is nothing to sneeze at.

Former Clinton administration economist Laura Tyson, now a member of the current President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, opened the event with a talk that laid out the gloomy numbers. It will take 11 million new jobs to get back to where we were before the Great Recession, and absorb new workers coming into the labor force. If we create 200,000 jobs a month, it will take 12 years; at 350,000 jobs a month, four years. In May, the private sector generated 41,000 new jobs. Don’t do the math; it’s too depressing.

Would still be wrong! Sorry, F-minus for you.

A few weeks ago, the International Monetary Fund published a paper looking at the impact of government spending on economic growth. Economist John Taylor explains:


Getting the multiplier wrong has big consequences for understanding the effects of fiscal stimulus on the economy. The government uses the multiplier to estimate the widely cited projections of unemployment, job creation, and economic output. In the time leading up to the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein used spending multipliers greater than 1 to promote the economic effects of the stimulus. In the months following the implementation of this package, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has used estimates of a spending multiplier between 1.0 and 2.5 — relying on macroeconomic models that ignore the possibility that the growth of the economy may be affecting the level of government spending, and not the reverse. By extrapolating from these multipliers, CBO and CEA have made important projections about the effects of fiscal stimulus on the economy. These projections have been largely wrong.

For example, in their January 2009 report, Romer and Bernstein used multipliers of between 1.0 and 1.55 to determine the effect that the proposed stimulus spending (then $775 billion) would have on GDP and, by extension, on job creation. They assumed that each 1 percent increase in real GDP would create an additional 1 million jobs. Based on that assumption and their estimated spending multiplier, they estimated that the fiscal stimulus would create 3.5 million jobs by the end of 2010. While we cannot be certain how many jobs would have been lost or created without a stimulus package, we do know that since January 2009 3.8 million jobs have been lost.

The IMF paper notes: "Using the same method our estimate is closer to ½ million additional jobs."

On what planet?

This says nothing that addresses your attempt to point at the 41k worth of jobs last month as the only impact of the stimulus.

This one!

You were trying to say that the statement "Stimulus = good" was not a "Universally accepted fact". But saying:

Stimulus = good != universally accepted fact

Doesn't accomplish that goal.

I'm not sure which makes you a bigger loser... the fact that you're seriously trying to argue and nitpick psuedo-code or the fact that you don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Let's replace the phrase "Universally Accepted Fact" to the word "True", since that's what a programming language understands. Open up your VB editor in Office, paste it in, and run it:



Run that snippet. Stimulus = "Good" evalutes to false first. Then False <> True is evaluated, which is in fact a True statement.

So, if you set Stimulus = "Not Good", my statement:
Stimulus = "Good" <> True evaluates to... TRUE.

If you change Stimulus = "Good", my statement evalues to FALSE.


Maybe you should go take a programming class instead of working on growing your hair out.

Fag.