Rants, Recipes and Ramblings

Political Math does a MMA-type take down on Paul Krugman

One of my favorite bloggers rips apart Paul Krugman’s nonsense defending the Obama budget busters

http://politicalmath.wordpress.com/2009/08/25/willful-omissions-from-paul-krugman/

Key graphs…

“…If you look at the 1945 budget with the single question �How are we going to reduce our debt?� you can identify the major problem. It�s the defense budget, which is almost 90% of the budget. Interestingly, reducing the defense budget is exactly what we did in order to reduce the debt, cutting it over 80% in 3 years (it helped that we won the war).

As a contrast, President Obama�s solution to reducing overall spending is� well, I don�t think he really has a plan. His projected budget in 2016 has reduced the defense budget as a percentage of the overall budget from 20% to 14%, but military spending isn�t what is killing us. The president has no plans to reduce mandatory spending whatsoever. In fact, his only change to entitlement spending is to increase it…

…(By the way� if you would like to blame the debt load on the Iraq war, you should know that those costs have raised our debt by 5% of the GDP. Comparing this to WWII, which raised our debt by 70% of the GDP, is a pretty weak argument.)”

Political Math could also has discussed how the US Industrial base was intact and functioning compared to the most of the rest of the World.  We could make things and sell them to ourselves (pent up demand from the Depression and WWII) as well as the rest of the rebuilding world.

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