You’re citing data that supports the opposite of your stated position, and I’m the one clinging?
Reading comprehension is really not your strong suit, is it? I’m a Keynesian. What you’re looking at in that data is Keynesian economics at work. Government spending consistently turns around a recession. Increasing taxes drives a stronger economy. Increasing social programs, too. Austerity makes a foundering economy crash. It’s been proven in reality time and again, yet fiscal conservatives keep trying to do it Friedman’s way and keep running things into the ground.
As usual in a stupid Internet argument, I’m confused about what we disagree on and am now not sure we disagree at all.
First, although I’m not necessarily a Keynesian, I am at least enough of one that I agree you should spend in a recession. Therefore, I think that what Obama did (spend in a recession) is good. I therefore approve of what I see in the graph - that the debt, and the deficit, ballooned under Obama. We might debate how much of this is due to “Obama” and how much is due to a budget written before he came into office.
What I was disputing was what was claimed as Maddow’s original contention (no idea if she actually claimed this, so this is even less interesting as an argument) that the debt (or maybe deficits) always goes up under Republicans and down under Democrats.
This is manifestly not true - instead what we see is that the deficit goes up in recessions and goes down in recoveries, which is not shocking given all of the budgetary mechanisms to help people ride out recessions. The pattern is the same in Republican and Democrat years - starting with Bush Sr., proceeding into the rare moment in the last 50 years when the economy was doing great during the Clinton years, then ballooning under Bush as a result of recession, climbing back up during the recovery, then tanking again with the Great Recession, and climbing back up during Obama’s administration because of the recovery again.
This has almost nothing to do with whether a Democrat or a Republican is in office. This is the extent of what I was complaining about originally. Any other differences you might have with me appear to be the result of mutual confusion.
Remember that deficit is calculated from spending and revenue (mostly taxes). While in many cases, Democrats spent more (though not more than Bush 2 and his oil/poppy wars), they also increased revenue through higher taxes and stronger economies. Net result was decreasing annual deficits (or increasing surpluses, a la Clinton). Thus, Maddow’s assertion is correct.
When you try to separate what the economy is doing from who is running the country, you’re blindfolding yourself. We have over 100 years of data, nationally and globally, that show the very simple relationship that austerity stagnates and eventually crashes the economy (tariffs, back to the OP topic momentarily, do their part to cause recessions, too). Increasing taxes on corporations & the wealthy (who are black holes of active commerce, sequestering a high % of their income in savings instead of spending), along with increased spending (the largest employer in the United States, directly and indirectly, is the United States Government, by orders of magnitude). The Executive Branch effectively sets the budget and how it is spent (though it has to be approved by congress). The economy dances to the beat set by the POTUS.
Now, if you’re asserting that the cart follows the horse, at least as elections go, then I’m listening. I’d be interested in a hypothesis that people vote generally R when they are doing well (“I want to keep more of this excellent money I’m making, and they promise to lower my taxes!”) and D when they need to be bailed out of a recession (“This moron crashed the economy and I lost my job, save me Bill Clinton!”), But saying that the strength of the economy, unemployment, and deficits have nothing to do with who’s in office is a non-starter.
It is foolish for us to draw any conclusions about R vs D based on these positions; there is simply too much policy variability to imagine we can observe correlates from this small sample size (I would die before I published a correlation based on an n of 2 or 3). In addition the main effects here are not from budget policy, they’re from the behavior of the economy. I simply don’t believe that the economy dances to the beat set by the POTUS - the economy is a global, historical entity. It’s just not that easy to control its motions through budgetary mechanisms.
In this graph we see basically four (maybe three) types of Presidencies: We’ve got Nixon, Ford and Carter who had more or less low deficits. We have Reagan and Bush, who presided over the broad recovery from the 1970s economy but ended in the S&L scandal. We have Bush Jr. and Obama, who both inherited a recession and presided over a recovery. And we have Clinton, who presided over the strongest economy of the past 50 years. If we want, we might stick Clinton in the same category as Bush Jr. and Obama, since he basically presided over the recovery from Bush Sr.'s recession.
We might try to attribute these movements to policy choices, but Presidents don’t really have that much power to alter the way budgets work. The simplest visualization of that is probably this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-n0i_cM1Wen4/UjI66lRYb5I/AAAAAAAAO5M/dKcsfjFGwpU/s1600/Unemp+vs+Spending.jpg - here we can see that the main determinant of spending, and thus the size of the deficit, is the behavior of the economy. That is, through many, many long decades of (Keynesian) policy, the American budget has many mechanisms in place to increase spending in response to recession, exactly the sort of anti-austerity measures you describe.
Recessions, now that we are back in the good old capitalist boom-and-bust cycle, happen on an 8 to ten year cycle, lining up pretty well with the length of a 2-term administration. This might produce apparent correlates with new budgets, but I think the effect is largely illusory.
No. You don’t get to introduce evidence into the conversation (from a conservative think-tank, much less) then discount it when I point out it doesn’t support your argument. This started when you called Maddow’s analysis “horseshit” and “partisan.” Her analysis was from over a century of data. You’re the one who cherry-picked the smaller data set.
Keynesian economic policy has never lasted more than 8 years in a row in the US before getting flopped dramatically over to Chicago-school for 8 to 12. What you call the “capitalist boom-and-bust cycle” isn’t inherent or structural. It’s the direct result (traceably) to constantly flip-flopping economic strategy. Over the same period, there are a number of independent examples of social democratic countries who have enacted long-term Keynesian strategies and have experienced sustainable, uninterrupted prosperity and had neutral to surplus government bottom-lines, right through global recessions and bubbles. We have the results of the controlled experiment readily available. It’s not random and it’s not inevitable. Economic policy shapes economic results. Bury your head in the sand if you’d like, but don’t expect me to join you.
Okay, here’s the last century. I plotted mean deficits out of GDP which seems the most fair comparator across time. I also gave them off the first year to allow for your point about previous-Administration budgets. As you can see, the two extreme points are Dems, Obama in the Great Recession, and Roosevelt, the original Keynesian, doing exactly what I said: running deficits in order to climb out of a recession. It doesn’t look that much like there’s a clear D vs R break here, does it?
EDIT: Just in case you want to contend the important quantity is the change in the deficit, here’s the mean change in deficit for each president:
At this point I really don’t trust any data you present. For one thing, if its data for a century, there should be 100 data points. Second, the trend matters. What was the deficit when they started? What was it when they ended their term? Finally, just deleting the first year budget handicaps the data in favor of Republicans. The graph you cited shows a trend where every Rebuplican handed over their worst debt year to a Democrat in their first year, who then decreased it.
You’re welcome to examine the data yourself, it is easy to find. There is one data point for each president since Hoover. The second graph shows average rate of change, which takes care of the trend argument. In any case I think the point is sufficient - any general trend certainly can’t be said to hold across the century. If anything the effect we’re seeing now is probably just greater variability due to the increasing instability of the economy.
I don’t think that China will call in its debts as such.
However, I wouldn’t be surprised if the debt would be used as leverage in order to get Taiwan back.
That is literally the single most deceitful way to present what you are saying, since the argument is the deficit decreases compared to the term before them. By removing all labels and just showing random deficits you remove the context of the question as a way to move the goalposts.
I didn’t remove all labels. The points are colored by party; they are ordered on the Y-axis by start of presidential term. I left is as an exercise for the reader to deduce which president is which. I could probably have been clearer in my labeling and it looks like I got an axis label wrong on the second one; that’s what you get for a ten-minute effort. Still, I did indicate in the text what I was plotting. To clarify, the first plot shows the mean of deficits across the presidential term. By this plot you can see that FDR and Obama had the worst average deficits of any president since Hoover; the rest is a mixed bag. The second plot shows mean of change in deficit from the previous year across the presidential term. By this plot you can see that Obama and Clinton both on average reduced deficits, while Bush on average raised them, but there’s no clear pattern across the rest of the century.
As for being “literally the single most deceitful way to present what you are saying”, I could surely do worse, don’t you think? How about this: if you’re so sure I’m deceitful (I am not, I’m just enjoying making some quick graphs), instead of practicing hyperbole and fashionable slams like “move the goalposts”, why don’t YOU make a figure proving your point?
