You have to adjust the spending to the GDP to get a meaningful graph. And there is a slight dip in ~1987 
I need a better magnifying glass, I guess. GDP growth matters only if you really think that America has years of robust GDP growth ahead to broaden the tax base. Frankly, I don't think so. I realize that the CBO loves to pretend so, but it's the era of the new normal in America now.
No opportunity for investment in infrastructure? What the fuck are you smoking?
We have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of general maintenance that has been ignored for decades.
You do realize that American Infrastructure is woefully under repaired. Our bridges are falling apart, bad roads add billions of dollars in gas and auto repair costs. Our power system is barely functional at the best of times and a complete failure given regular natural disasters. Our power plants are ancient. Our internet is laughable, barely better than third world countries when every other western nation is 10 times faster.
Increasing that infrastructure by building more roads and bridges hardly solves your problem of unemployed sociology majors. I mean, it helps the Mexican economy, I suppose, and I read about a Chinese company that won a bid to build a bridge in America and imported Chinese nationals because it couldn't find Americans with dirty enough hands for the job, so Chinese economy, too; but average Americans no longer want to work at anything remotely useful for a living.
I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek here, and I know that I need to spell this out, because Bay12 rarely has a sense of humor. The more important part here is that those infrastructure improvements have dubious real worth. Your current number of bridges are probably getting you to work on time. If another bridge doesn't decrease commute times, it failed as an investment.
American internet is plenty fast. If you have faster internet, how will it increase your productivity? It'll be fun with faster internet, true, but fun doesn't make the world go round. If you set out to borrow trillions more, you better have gotten serious about these questions. The numbers game is real. You eat the numbers game every time when you toss bits of paper at a cashier and she gives you a week's worth of food.
That... chart. That chart is hilarious.
That chart is a quick image search. never went to the website. You didn't say shit about whether federal spending has ever decreased, though. Do you have a problem with the base data, or just that the base data wasn't goosed and lipsticked enough to your tastes? Maybe it wasn't hilarious enough. The rest can be spun various ways, as you're gleefully doing right now. Spending has never gone down. The rest is pointless trivia. If we enter an age of flat GDP growth, the spending will be the spending, pure and simple. GDP can grow a country out of debt, but America won't do that anymore.
Minor point of order, here. It may be a solid line of work in the worst catastrophe, but it's a pretty terrible line of work in a time of excess (which we're still thoroughly in).
A time of excess when people are complaining about unemployment and underemployment? We're living on the table-scraps of excess now.
No, they literally are terrorists. The create terror for political and financial gain. They cause financial harm to America. The intentionally fabricated the "uncertainty" in the markets and publicly stated they would be willing to crash the economy to harm the president. It is completely insane.
It takes two sides to tango. The Democrats are also terrorists. They're doing the same thing, but more cravenly and opportunistically, because they know that the blame will be stuck on the Republicans.
The US has had two major examples of massive government spending cuts, though. The first, obviously, is after WW2, which I don't think needs much explanation. The second, however, was during the early 1920s, after the end of the war. As shown:
It's worth mentioning that this massive cut in spending was also occurring at the same time as sizable tax cuts (Especially the income tax, which was substantially reduced) and a fairly deep recession. Despite this, the economy benefited greatly, revenues didn't decrease, and the deficit shot down. So there are times where government spending was cut, if not recently.
It also takes two for someone to stand up against a terrorist.
Can you cite any specific terroristic things that democrats have done to harm America? Anything other than cower in fear before the threats of the right?
I can point to things the republicans have done. The debt ceiling fiasco. The fiscal cliff fiasco. The fabrication of justification for invading Iraq. Then there is the whole randian movement that explicitly wants to see the federal government completely dismantled.
The Randian movement? Seriously?
Objectivism's "peak" was in the 1960s and was composed of a bunch of impoverished Eastern European anti-communist immigrants living in the same neighbourhood in New York. Yeah, there are Republicans who claim to admire Ayn Rand, but they're basically just giving lip service because "principled" opposition to government spending is becoming fashionable for the first time in ages. Believe me, if the Republicans were Objectivists, they'd be cutting just about every program within reach immediately for every penny it's worth regardless of everything else. They certainly wouldn't be "obstructionist", at least.
Are you seriously suggesting that America's infrastructure can't be improved? Like, look at mainland Europe or Japan's rail systems and tell me they aren't a) beneficial to their economies and b) better than the one in the US.
Utterly irrelevant. (A) Mainland Europe and Japan's populations are far more densely packed, meaning rail is actually somewhat cost efficient, and (B) Cars are far more expensive for consumers to use, especially as a result of exceptionally high gas prices. The bulk of rail would end up just connecting cities in the American interior that would get little traffic, especially when you can just drive your car for shorter trips or take a plane for longer trips.
At least in Canada, the government does subsidize rail transport, and Via Rail is still extortionately expensive, slow, and not terribly high in quality, even though we've at least got the fairly well populated Windsor-Quebec City corridor.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 772200 times)