Greenspan: Bush Budget Bankrupting America
Greenspan: Bush Budget Bankrupting America
The Washington Post today reports that the economic worries of Americans just are not registering with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. While many people spend their days worried about gas prices, rising inflation and a falling stock market, lawmakers are busy interfering with the court system and trying to increase the deficit by privatizing Social Security. Increasingly, Congress and the President are just out of touch with the economic worries of Americans. Now it seems they are out of touch with the economic worries of the Federal Reserve Chairman.
Alan Greenspan testified today before the Senate Budget Committee and had this to say:
Indeed, under existing tax rates and reasonable assumptions about other spending, these projections make clear that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years. But most important, deficits as a percentage of GDP in these simulations rise without limit. Unless that trend is reversed, at some point these deficits would cause the economy to stagnate or worse.
So the Federal Reserve Chairman is basically saying to President Bush and his allies in Congress, “keep this up and you’ll bankrupt the country.” Future generations will be stuck with the bill.
- Theo LeCompte
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog Roll
“Keep this up and you’ll bankrupt the country.”
Gee, we’ve been telling him that for years. John Kerry was right!
April 21st, 2005 at 6:29 pmGreenspan should have retired back in 2000. But on the other hand, could you imagine the damage an asskisser like Condi would do in that position? i don’t want to think about it.
April 21st, 2005 at 6:34 pmThis won’t register with our President, he still thinks some of daddy’s friends can come and BAIL OUT THE WHOLE FRIGGIN’ COUNTRY! and get him off the hook once again.
April 21st, 2005 at 7:05 pmwhere was alan when we needed him…? he supported the unsustainable tax cuts and we heard hardly a peep outta him the entire time the deficit was being run up to record levels… now, fresh from meeting with his fellow wizards at the G7/IMF/World Bank conflab, he’s all worried… fuck you, alan, and the horse you rode in on…
April 21st, 2005 at 7:19 pmwhere was alan when we needed him…? now, fresh from meeting with his fellow wizards at the G7/IMF/World Bank conflab, he’s suddenly all worried… screw you, alan, and the horse you rode in on…
April 21st, 2005 at 7:21 pmI am just as concerned about the question that evoked this response. In essence Greenspan was asked about the necessity of reducing or eliminating entitlement programs…the class warfare rachets up another notch
April 21st, 2005 at 7:25 pmEXACTLY !
Even though the massive federal deficits accrued from the Bushies tax cuts, Greenspan’s solution is to CUT Social Security and Medicare. Alan’s new nickname:
WRONGWAY GREENSPAN
April 21st, 2005 at 8:23 pmThis has been going on for over four years and this country voted him in for another four years. I think we deserve what we get for being so stupid.
April 21st, 2005 at 8:26 pmThis is all part of the master plan. It’s called ‘Starving the Beast’.
April 21st, 2005 at 8:35 pmDon’t you guy worry your heads off over Greenspanes remarke, he will ease your worries next week with nice rosey forcast. The republican liberal press will tout what a wise man he is.
April 21st, 2005 at 9:03 pmHere’s the current US Gov stats on the public (that is, Government) debt: $7,781,395,486,207.30.
It’s that 30 cents that really worries me. <joke />
$4,578,249,401,863.92 of that is held by “the public”, meaning not money the Government borrowed from itself at our expense.
The “public” includes overseas investors, including foreign governments with T-bonds & massive US currency reserves.
If these folks ever start dumping dollars for Euros . . . . well, let’s not even think about it.
Remember, if you’re old enough, the old Cold War days of MAD: mutually assured destruction. If the USSR were to strike us with nuclear weapons, and we were to retaliate, etc.
Our current pundits claim it’s the same deal. Sure, China or Japan or several Middle East nation seem to be in the driver’s seat: anyone of which could collapse the dollar’s value in record time. But not without, we’re told, seriously hurting their own economies or the global economy.
But guess what? Japan and the EU, to start, becoming less dependent on us; we’re becoming more dependent on them, China, India, etc.
So the day’s going to come when they’re no longer willing to finance our Defense Spending binges. In preparation for that day, we’re cutting all the public health and social betterment programs.
Make sense to you? If not, obviously you’re not one of the people getting very very rich from some highly questionable Major Weapon Systems acquisitions. [More on that another day, perhaps].
Our current problems are due to poor tax policy and worse spending decisions. Greenspan’s just providing cover for both.
April 21st, 2005 at 10:40 pmFrom the git-go, it has been W’s secret agenda to utterly backrupt this country…in order to justify wiping the Fed slate clean of all “social programs”. I saw this 5 years ago, and I see it now. Running our economy into the ground has been W’s secret plan all along.
April 22nd, 2005 at 7:31 amSocial Security and Medicare have long term debt, so any plan to fix those should focus on eliminating that long term debt. The Ryan-Sununu S.S. bill does just that. Taking on some smaller short term debt to solve that problem that way is fine. An analagous situation is if you borrowed money now to pay the closing costs of refinancing your house at a lower rate. You’d have some short term debt to pay off, but in the long term, you’ll pay much less for your mortgage.
That being said, it annoys me to see Bush/Congress not cutting spending more to reduce the deficit.
April 22nd, 2005 at 9:24 amFuture generations may not have to worry about paying back America’s enormous debt – because they way we are going, in the future there may not BE an America.
April 22nd, 2005 at 10:38 amUh, is this the same Greenspan guy who testified that tax cuts for the rich were great and that the resulting deficits were manageable because the tax cuts would magically spur new capital investments which would create an avalanche of new jobs which would then increase new tax revenue which would then take care of the deficits, and Tinkerbell would spread fairy dust all over the land and everybody will have smiles on their faces forever. Is that the same guy?
April 22nd, 2005 at 11:38 amI’m waiting for China to cut its currency loose from ours. See how the hicks like it when the price of their favorite Chinese goods at Wal Mart double.
First Greenspan pushes tax cuts. Now he says the policy he pushed is unsustainable. Bush said Kerry’s proposals would cost $2 trillion, and how was he going to pay for it. Bush added $2.2 trillion in new debt. Bush derided Kerry’s proposed $0.50/gallon gas tax (proposed ten years ago). Now gas is up a dollar and it’s all going to the mideast. It’s getting real hard for this blue stater to not look down on the red staters as a bunch of ignorant hicks.
April 22nd, 2005 at 12:01 pmGreenspan: Turns out we were all wrong.
Hillary Clinton: For the record, we were not all wrong.
Bush’s economic plan — and we’ve been saying this and the hicks haven’t been listening — is short term gain for long term pain. He pumped pure sugar into the economy to make things look all rosy through election day, now we’re seeing a bad case of diabetes. Of course if you increase your debt you’ll be living the good life for a few years. Now, it’s hard to even think about what that will cost us. Those soldiers in Iraq, when they get home they will be stuck paying for all their equipment, with interest, because we couldn’t raise the money to pay for it now. Bush’s supporters need to get out a history book and look up “Fighting foreign wars with borrowed money” and see how that worked out in the past.
April 22nd, 2005 at 12:06 pmIt’s all good
As long as somewhere down the line congress passes the Bush/Cheney tax. I envision a 98% tax on assets and earnings of these two people personally as well as their heirs. There should be some accountability for the actions of those who perpetrated this.
April 22nd, 2005 at 12:20 pmThe war on poverty is over. The poor lost.
April 22nd, 2005 at 5:25 pmThere’s little doubt that running up massive deficits is a deliberate tactic to create public support for killing social programs (the “starve the beast” theory mentioned in other posts). That’s a big problem, but not as big as the one that Bush and his fellow starvation artists appear to be overlooking.
The whole point behind the starve the beast theory is that once the social programs are dead, we’ll be able to turn the economy and the government around. Given the record levels of consumer debt and the record levels of foreign trade deficits, that might well not be possible. When you have record trade debt, record consumer debt, record government debt, falling real wages, and inflation in key areas (fuel, health care, housing), what do you get? It isn’t a healthy country–just ask the third world countries how much fun it is to slave under the World Bank and IMF masters.
April 23rd, 2005 at 6:00 pmThe intrest payment on the federal debt for 2005 was 368 billon dollars. Could have paid for the hurricane damage with cash. These greedy jack asses will never grow us out of debt.
September 22nd, 2005 at 7:30 pmGreate site. Thank you :)
November 14th, 2005 at 7:00 pmDragonball
Dragonball
December 22nd, 2005 at 3:52 pmfree song lyrics
free song lyrics
December 25th, 2005 at 2:08 amcheap webhosting
cheap webhosting
December 25th, 2005 at 2:24 amjohn spencer
john spencer
December 27th, 2005 at 8:41 amxbox 360 games
xbox 360 games
December 28th, 2005 at 5:34 amsports tickets
sports tickets
December 30th, 2005 at 4:59 pmjewelry
Jewelry
January 1st, 2006 at 9:05 amsamsung ringtones
free samsung ringtones
January 1st, 2006 at 1:22 pmjewellery
jewellery
January 1st, 2006 at 4:48 pmFree Texas Hold Um…
Explosive misspelling: Free Texas Hold Um…
January 7th, 2006 at 6:20 pmFree Ringtone Download…
Free Ringtone Download…
January 18th, 2006 at 8:16 amHi! And at whom what animal of a house?
January 19th, 2006 at 1:42 pmnostrils Saxonizations Alcestis affirmations:archangels?neurological orchestras.overhearing
September 6th, 2006 at 6:34 amWe need to vote, and we need to get active. One cool thing I found is congress.org
You can put in you zip code and sign up for email that will tell you how your representatives vote on each issue, and then it has their contact information so you can contact them on issues.
Since they already have the database in place, I’ve been pitching the suggestion to them, to also create web pages or blogs for candidates in a particular zip code so you can see who’s running against your representatives if you don’t like who that person has been voting.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:12 am