Austan Goolsbee to leave White House

reply to post by haarvik


great!

a failure will be teaching more people to be failures simply brilliant.

remember the saying " those who cant do teach"

i highly suggest his students drop that class

Originally posted by MaskedDebater
So let me see if I got this straight. Our economy is in the tank and is largely and often unsoundly blamed on Obama.

I'm not sure how 'unsound' that blame is. According to this article, Obama has already spent more than all the Presidents from George Washington to George Bush combined!

snip

Mr. Obama's $3.6 trillion budget blueprint, by his own admission, redefines the role of government in our economy and society. The budget more than doubles the national debt held by the public, adding more to the debt than all previous presidents -- from George Washington to George W. Bush -- combined. It reduces defense spending to a level not sustained since the dangerous days before World War II, while increasing nondefense spending (relative to GDP) to the highest level in U.S. history. And it would raise taxes to historically high levels (again, relative to GDP). And all of this before addressing the impending explosion in Social Security and Medicare costs.

[/quotte]
online.wsj.com...

reply to post by wcitizen


Thank you for that. I have seen that accusation levied by many and despite my best efforts to confirm it I am unable to Sadly your Op Ed source provides no hard data.

On prior occasions I have presented this chart which ALWAYS gets attacked due to source:



SOURCE:
maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com...

I recently came across this where the same talking point was parroted by Palin and determined FALSE:

www.politifact.com...

And here:

The public debt on Jan. 20, 2009, when Obama took office was $6.3 trillion. So "all those other presidents combined" were responsible for $6.3 trillion in debt. Under Obama, it has grown by $3.4 trillion to $9.7 trillion, as of May 27, the most recent figures available.

www.factcheck.org...

Honestly I would love to solve the validity of this claim once and for all. Any data provided is appreciated.

/MD

I believe this article / source accurately refutes once and for all the claim that President Obama has amassed more debt than all former Presidents combined. (Both forms of debt Public/external and Government/Internal) I am wide open for rebuttal.

A few preliminaries. First, there are two common measures for debt. One, called public debt, tallies up the debt held by the public, while gross federal debt is a larger figure that combines publicly held debt plus debt held by the government itself, such as in the Social Security or Medicare trust funds. Both figures are considered legitimate, and since Palin didn’t specify which one she was referring to, we’ll run the numbers for both categories of debt.

Second, we’ll assume that all the debt accumulated under Obama should be attributed to him. In reality, this isn’t a logical allocation, since the first budget he wrote was actually for the 2010 fiscal year, and because he -- like all presidents -- inherited the fiscal legacy of his predecessor.

Still, calculating it this way is much simpler -- and as we’ll see, it won’t matter to the outcome.

We turned to the Treasury Department’s "Debt to the Penny" calculator, where we found that on Obama’s first day in office, Jan. 20, 2009, the public debt stood at $6.307 trillion; gross federal debt stood at $10.627 trillion. For the most recent date available -- May 27, 2011 -- these two debt figures stood at $9.718 trillion and $14.345 trillion, respectively.

That means that under Obama, the public debt rose by $3.411 trillion and the gross federal debt rose by $3.718 trillion. That’s a huge amount of money -- but it’s far less than what was accumulated by Obama’s 43 predecessors.

Because debt is cumulative (minus any intervening surpluses) the debt level for the previous 43 presidents is equal to the amount of debt on the day Obama was inaugurated. So even by the standards we used -- which aren’t especially favorable to Obama -- the debt he accumulated amounts to either 54 percent of his predecessors’ combined debt (using the public debt figure) or 35 percent (using gross federal debt).

Neither of these figures is "more … than all those other presidents combined," ....

Source:
www.politifact.com...

/MD