William Jefferson Clinton, regardless of all the controversies that surround him, he is the person, who amazes me every time I read, listen or watch him. In my opinion, he is the possessor of some of the most advanced intellectual capacities, ever known to mankind. He has lots of empathy, is a great leader and a wonderful system builder. Under his presidency, United States enjoyed the largest peacetime economic expansion, in it’s history. Doesn’t matter what Fox news, Rush Limbaugh, and other Republican and conservative propaganda machines are trumpeting, the fact is that he converted a monthly deficit of 48,498 billions of dollars of monthly deficit in Feb. 1993 into 31,862 billions of monthly surplus in Jan. 2001, while Ronald Reagan converted 17,194 billions of monthly surplus in Apr. 1981 into a 27,871 billions of monthly deficit in Feb. 1989. George W. Bush converted a monthly surplus of 76,379 billions in Jan. 2001 into a deficit of 63,475 billions in Jan. 2009. Surprised? That is not what you hear at Fox news! This is the reason why they always do blah blah, but never give you real hard core numbers and hard cold facts, like the ones you are getting here. Now take the tax revenues and federal government expenses as percentage of GDP ( Gross Domestic Products). When Bill Clinton was president the average federal government expenses were 10.00% of GDP while tax revenue was 10.01& of GDP. A picture much closer to what you want to achieve as the head of household or business. During Reagan’s presidency the expenses were 22.4% of GDP, while revenue was 18.2% of GDP. Is this the type of budget balancing you really want? With bush senior the expenses were 21.0% of GDP while revenue was 17.6% of GDP. With Bush junior the expenses were 19.9% of GDP and revenue was 17.6% of GDP.
Did you get the true picture presented by hard cold facts and numbers? Among the last four presidents, three Republicans increased deficits and debts, while on democrat reduced debts and deficits. As far as Obama is concerned, when he took office, U.S. was in the middle of biggest recession since great depression. Budget and trade deficits were high, unemployment growing by leaps and bounds, world’s largest banks and other financial institutions were under water, real estate market had worst crash and U.S. manufacturing was in serious decline. Be fair, and tell me, do you really think that he had to do all that spending in stimulating and reviving economy, if conditions were not that grave?
We need to revise some lessons in economics before we take this discussion any further. Conservative and liberal economists have different takes on causes and fixes of economic depressions and recessions. They range from most conservatives saying that depressions and recessions are essential parts of unavoidable economic cycles. Problem solved. If they are really essential parts of an unavoidable economic cycle then I guess you cannot blame anyone for anything, including Obama. After all, unavoidable is unavoidable. But in real world, as opposed to the theoretical world presented by conservative economists, the problem is not that simple. We all know for fact that different economies perform different at any given point in time. In addition to this, any given economy performs different at different points in time. This is the reason, due to which the proponents of an unavoidable cycle have never been able to show, in definitive terms, how long this cycle is, how many phases it has and how long each phase is. To mask up this failure, they came up with the argument that the length and severity of this cycle is, different in different cases and different points in time. Ironically, this argument presented by the proponents of economic cycle goes against their own theory.
Just think, if something is so strong and natural that it is unavoidable, then, how does it has so much variability in it’s length and severity and number of components, and their length and severity. This great variation in the length and severity of this cycle, and it’s number of component, itself depicts that it cannot be unavoidable and as a matter of fact, it is not a natural constant. But, it is a composition of many and different variable factors, which are erroneously or mischievously combined together and named as one, while they are obviously not one entity. These essentially, contributing factors are highly variable, hence, definitively manageable, if managed properly. This argument also goes against the deregulation. If the proposed components are so variable and effective then they must require management, so that their variability is always kept in positive direction. Without regulation, any highly variable factor has an innate tendency to go into any direction, positive or negative. We all know, without any doubt, from our household and business experiences that variables require serious management in order to be kept in favor and to stop them from going into an unfavorable, destructive and damaging direction. In case of a business, to manage these variable factors, the business owners and managers are required to kept the quality of goods and services high and affordable, keep the variety and choice for customers broad, to do promotions and marketing, hire qualified personnel and train them properly and provide competitive deals that may knock out the competition. No conservative has never been able to answer this question. Why the variables in national, state and / or county or city economy should be exempted from this rule? Even if they give an answer, it would be extremely vague like that is what we believe in and that is how it has always been in our history.
My answer to this notion is, if someone’s beliefs are wrong, other people are not supposed to follow him. As far as, ‘it has always been like this’ argument is concerned, it is simply not right. For example, please, let me know, because I don’t know, when in our history it was okay to deceive and trick customers, do fraud, put profit before general and national interest, don’t care about country and nation, ditch the economy, get golden parachutes and run away?
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Read our articles Global Recession: Causes, Consequences, Fixes, Part 9 And Global Recession: Causes, Consequences, Fixes, Part 11
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