Who Cuts Deficits Again?

[davidswanson]

Send This to Any Newspaper That Uses Cartoons from the Albuquerque Journal

To the Editor:



You ran a cartoon depicting former president Ronald Reagan reducing the federal deficit and President Obama increasing it. The latter might prove true, but is a prediction. The former is simply not true. The national debt, taken as a percentage of gross domestic product, had been declining steadily and rapidly since the end of World War II when Reagan took office and signed budgets with bigger deficits than anyone had previously seen, massively increasing our debt. George H.W. Bush took the practice further, setting new records for deficit spending and debt. During Clinton's presidency the deficit shrank for five years and became a surplus for the last three, reducing our debt. The most dramatic swing in U.S. history came when George W. Bush took office and immediately shifted us from surplus budgets to deficit budgets that dramatically broke his father's record.

Now, I don't think a budget surplus is the best measure of a presidency, and I was not a fan of Bill Clinton, but it is interesting that the Republican presidents, and the Congresses they served with, have loaded our children down with almost insurmountable debt, while the media so consistently tells us the opposite story. One reason for this, I think, is the reluctance of those in power and those who write about them to acknowledge that these Republican presidents have dramatically increased spending in an area we're not supposed to question: the military. Thousands of Americans were in the streets on Wednesday protesting government spending on schools, jobs, healthcare, and bank regulation (as well as the insane Wall Street "bailout") oblivious to the fact that over half of every dollar of income tax goes to wars, military, and debt for wars and military. (That's 51% by the calculation of the War Resisters League. Feel free to do your own math; you will certainly end up at right around half of every dollar.) Has your paper ever told anyone that? In fact, Robert Gates has proposed the largest military budget yet (yes, with a Democratic president this time) and that story has been widely misreported as a budget reduction and depicted as such by the same cartoonist.



I know tax season is supposed to be a time for incoherent rage, but come on.

Honestly,
David Swanson

[BeFree]

1. Truth!!

For some it's hard to take. They just can't handle it.

Thanks to Reagan and the republicans we're in deep shit.

[Statistical]

2. Did you look at the graph

Deficit is not national debt.

Deficit is the annual difference between revenue & spending.

In the Reagan slide it shows Reagan cut revenue to force a cut in spending (which didn't work).

Note the defecit = "shaded part of graph" grew each year.

The cartoon properly showed a rising deficit due to reduced revenue under Reagan.

[bertman]

5. I see what you mean, Statistical. But the intent is to show the deficit going down

under Reagan and up under Obama. A not-so-subtle message in cartoon form.

[davidswanson]

6. you both have a point

the cartoon may in fact show a growing deficit, but it shows spending decreasing -- which it did not. Had the cartoon shown taxes decreasing and spending rising, then the growing deficit would have been plain to see. As it is, the cartoon just looks like a rough and sloppy attempt to show three things going down.

[Time for change]

7. I don't get it

It looks to me like that cartoon clearly shows a declining deficit under Reagan, as you originally said.

[abq e streeter]

3. A little local angle on this; the Albq Urinal..er.. Journal is a blatantly republican

propaganda outlet thinly disguised as a news organization ( hmm, makes me think of a certain cable "news network"...and MANY other "newspapers" and networks for that matter). Also, the cartoon is, from the looks of it, by John Trever, a rightwing idiot( which is why the Urinal publishes him in the first place). I actually have to confess to owning a Trever original , signed with a greeting to me (as a "fellow long suffering Cubs fan"), given to me by a friend who's also a cartoonist who worked with him and mentioned her friend ( me) who was a hardcore Cub fan, which Trever apparently is too........P.S. just noticed the bottom cartoon, and it is indeed a Trever...Your call to DUers to contact their local papers that ran this cartoon is a fine idea, but here in Albuquerque, asking the Journal to stop giving voice to rightwing lies is akin to asking them to give up their reason to exist.

[redqueen]

4. Nice.

I see so many outright lies in the M$M I can't even watch anymore.