Romney and the deficit

From an advance copy of Romney's acceptance speech (which is otherwise filled with vacuous Romney-esque platitudes):

Every new college graduate thought they’d have a good job by now, a place of their own, and that they could start paying back some of their loans and build for the future.

This is when our nation was supposed to start paying down the national debt and rolling back those massive deficits.

Deficits? He dares to talk about deficits?

When Dubya came to power, everyone was talking about what to do about the Clinton-era surplus. Through war, pork spending (directed mostly at the red states) and tax cuts for the rich, the deficit immediately shot up under Bush. That's when Dick Cheney told the Treasury Secretary: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

Speaking of Reagan: He got into office by talking about fiscal responsibility, yet he quickly ran up a deficit so massive as to overshadow the debts accrued by all previous presidents combined.

George H.W. Bush made that bad situation even worse.

Only Bill Clinton managed to get the government out of the red.

If you've been following the reaction to Paul Ryan's speech, you may have seen this chart, as published by the New Republic. Look at it closely.

The majority of the deficit is caused by two factors: Paying for Dubya's stupid wars -- Iraq is the gift that keeps on taking -- and maintaining Dubya's tax cuts for the rich. If we could simply return the tax rate to where we where while Bill Clinton was in office, we would have a much, much more manageable level of debt.

Y'see that thin light blue area? That puny thing is the stimulus that everyone hates so much. Notice how skinny it is compared to the war bill and the tax cuts for the rich. As noted in the preceding post, most of that light blue area covers tax cuts directed at average Americans. Personally, I think those tax cuts were a mistake (for reasons given in the preceding post), but at least Obama favored the right segment of society.

If we could returns our tax rates to the levels they were at throughout most of the Reagan era -- well, I haven't crunched the numbers, but I strongly suspect that we'd be in surplus, or close to it.

"Return to Reagan." Maybe that's a slogan Democrats should run on.

Thought for the day: How about a Constitutional amendment forbidding this nation's military forces from engaging in extended combat without first raising taxes? (Obviously, we'd have to make exceptions for emergencies and quick raids like the one that got Bin Laden.) If the president could no longer put war on the credit card, the only wars we would ever fight would be those we truly need to fight.