Obama Spending vs FDR?

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
1

"In the first eight fiscal years of FDR’s presidency, before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, federal spending as a percentage of GDP never exceeded 12 percent (despite the Depression). During those years, it averaged only 9.85 percent. Under Obama, annual spending as a percentage of GDP will average almost two-and-a-half times that much.

“In fiscal 1942, when the U.S. started dramatically ramping up expenditures to fight World War II, federal spending equaled 24.3 percent of GDP. In 2010, the first full fiscal year of the Obama era, spending will reach 25.4 percent of GDP.”

From: http://cnsnews.com/commentary/article/61454

2

Fucking unbelievable - and that was wealth we actually had; not borrowed, as in now.

3

I didn’t include the borrowing part in my excerpts… here is some of that:

"Under current estimates, Obama will not beat FDR’s overall record for borrowing, although he will nearly double FDR’s pre-World War II rate of borrowing. From 1934-41, FDR ran annual deficits that averaged 3.56 percent of GDP. Obama, according to OMB, will run average annual deficits of 7.05 percent GDP. When you include the war years of 1942-45, FDR ran average annual deficits of 9.76 percent of GDP. Even without a world war, Obama’s overall prospective borrowing is at least competitive with FDR’s.

"And Obama and FDR share one historic debt-accumulating distinction. By OMB’s calculation, they are the only two presidents since 1930 to run up annual deficits that reached double figures as a percentage of GDP. Obama will run up a deficit this year of 10.6 percent of GDP. The last time the deficit hit double digits as a percentage of GDP was 1945 – when Germany and Japan surrendered.

“The U.S. won the Cold War without ever running a double-digit deficit. President Reagan’s highest deficit was 6 percent of GDP in 1983 – and he bankrupted the Soviet Union not the United States.”

4

Look at the difference in what it was being spent on too.

5

Well, we can compare completing for example Hoover Dam with, say, weatherizing 9000 homes at over $57K each.

And I’m sure that for each instance we could find of FDR crediting Hoover with something or honoring him in some way, an instance can be found of Obama blaming Bush for something.

6

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
I didn’t include the borrowing part in my excerpts… here is some of that:

"Under current estimates, Obama will not beat FDR’s overall record for borrowing, although he will nearly double FDR’s pre-World War II rate of borrowing. From 1934-41, FDR ran annual deficits that averaged 3.56 percent of GDP. Obama, according to OMB, will run average annual deficits of 7.05 percent GDP. When you include the war years of 1942-45, FDR ran average annual deficits of 9.76 percent of GDP. Even without a world war, Obama’s overall prospective borrowing is at least competitive with FDR’s.

"And Obama and FDR share one historic debt-accumulating distinction. By OMB’s calculation, they are the only two presidents since 1930 to run up annual deficits that reached double figures as a percentage of GDP. Obama will run up a deficit this year of 10.6 percent of GDP. The last time the deficit hit double digits as a percentage of GDP was 1945 – when Germany and Japan surrendered.

“The U.S. won the Cold War without ever running a double-digit deficit. President Reagan’s highest deficit was 6 percent of GDP in 1983 – and he bankrupted the Soviet Union not the United States.”[/quote]

Reagan hardly bankrupted the Soviet Union and even a rudimentary examination of the historiography reveals that the USSR was on the verge of collapse well before Reagan took office. In fact, many historians argue that Reagan’s increased military spending may have delayed the fall of Communism in Russia.

Even the 1975 NIE that led to the formation of the infamous Team B said that the best policy toward the USSR was to simply ignore them since their economy had fallen so far that they would have collapsed within 10-15 years without any provocation whatsoever from the US. So this Reagan-as-commie-slayer-extraordinaire myth may very well be just that: a myth.

7

You really do have a pattern of historical revisionism, don’t you?

Cite me a single source prior to the Reagan presidency that shows an analyis of the Soviet Union being then considered on its way to economic and political collapse or even potentially so.

Oh wait, you don’t need facts to come to conclusions – just predisgested assertions from whereever you get them.

Problem is, you’re going to get asked to provide at least some slight trace of substantiation.

So how about it?

8

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
You really do have a pattern of historical revisionism, don’t you?

Cite me a single source prior to the Reagan presidency that shows an analyis of the Soviet Union being then considered on its way to economic and political collapse or even potentially so.

Oh wait, you don’t need facts to come to conclusions – just predisgested assertions from whereever you get them.

Problem is, you’re going to get asked to provide at least some slight trace of substantiation.

So how about it?[/quote]

If you read the 1975 NIE, or an assessment of it performed by anyone not associated with Team B, the conclusion is exactly what I’ve already stated. Virtually everyone in the intelligence community (no members of Team B were a part of the NSA, CIA, or FBI) agreed with the report and the findings of Team B, which contradicted the contents of the report, were roundly criticized as inaccurate both then and after the fall of the USSR.

You want me to cite my sources? My source IS the 1975 National Intelligence Estimate. Do you want me to cite a source for my source too? Sorry, I don’t personally know anyone who compiled the report. You’re asking me for facts about a subject that will forever be debatable, but the release of declassified documents by the Soviets bears my assertions out. Their nuclear missile stockpile had been pathetic, obsolete and much smaller than first assumed by the military industrial complex for years. Virtually every historian who is an expert in this area agrees that the NIE was accurate and that Team B’s competitive analysis was inaccurate.

But Team B (created by CIA Director George HW Bush after Director William Colby was fired by President Ford for expressing deep skepticism about the ability of a group of people outside of the intelligence community to come to a more accurate conclusion concerning the state of the Soviets than the intelligence experts could), which included several prominent members of Reagan’s administration, was borne from the “Halloween Massacre” that eventually led to the neo-con movement of the late 70’s/early 80’s.

The members of Team B that were a part of Reagan’s administration, including Donald Rumsfeld, then urged Reagan to ramp up military spending, despite the '75 NIE’s (as well as every other NIE between 1975 and Reagan’s inauguration) conclusion that to increase spending on weapons systems and nuke stockpiles was unnecessary and perhaps might even prolong the tenure of the Communists in the USSR.

This isn’t revisionist history; this is what really happened and it’s all available for you to read yourself, word for word, if you can find the 1975 NIE somewhere. However, if the USSR fell due to a massive arms buildup/race that eventually bankrupted the Soviets (an assertion that most historians with access to declassified documents relating to Russia’s military disagree with), then the credit should go to Jimmy Carter rather than Reagan because the arms buildup actually began during the last two years of HIS administration, not during Reagan’s. Reagan simply followed in Carter’s footsteps.

9

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
…Cite me a single source prior to the Reagan presidency that shows an analyis of the Soviet Union being then considered on its way to economic and political collapse or even potentially so…
[/quote]
In 1969, Andrei Amalrik (a Soviet Dissenter) wrote “Will the Soviet Union survice until 1984?”

From wikipedia:
"…The book predicts the country’s eventual breakup under the weight of social and ethnic antagonisms and a disastrous war with China…

…Amalrik said in his book:
I must emphasize that my essay is based not on scholarly research but only on observation. From an academic point of view, it may appear to be only empty chatter. But for Western students of the Soviet Union, at any rate, this discussion should have the same interest that a fish would have for an ichthyologist if it suddenly began to talk.[8]…

…Predictions of the Soviet Union’s impending demise were discounted by many, if not most, Western academic specialists,[10] and had little impact on mainstream Sovietology.[11] “Amalrik’s essay was welcomed as a piece of brilliant literature in the West” but “[v]irtually no one tended to take it at face value as a piece of political prediction.”[6]"

To be clear:

  1. this was NOT a scholarly work,
  2. he was wrong about the causes of the collapse, and
  3. the ‘experts’ dismissed the work.
10

CORRECTION:

I incorrectly stated earlier that Rumsfeld was a member of Team B. He was an ardent proponent of the committee (as was Paul Wolfowitz, who WAS a member), helped form it and before then had raised alarm about the USSR’s nuclear weapons programs, which of course turned out to be inaccurate claims.

11

[quote]artw wrote:

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
You really do have a pattern of historical revisionism, don’t you?

Cite me a single source prior to the Reagan presidency that shows an analyis of the Soviet Union being then considered on its way to economic and political collapse or even potentially so.[/quote]

If you read the 1975 NIE, or an assessment of it performed by anyone not associated with Team B, the conclusion is exactly what I’ve already stated. Virtually everyone in the intelligence community (no members of Team B were a part of the NSA, CIA, or FBI) agreed with the report and the findings of Team B, which contradicted the contents of the report, were roundly criticized as inaccurate both then and after the fall of the USSR.

You want me to cite my sources? My source IS the 1975 National Intelligence Estimate. [/quote]

So, when asked to provide a single piece of evidence for expected impending economic collapse, you cite something that is no such thing, but instead is evidence for completely different things that weren’t the topic of discussion and aren’t what was asked for.

There was no such estimation, at least at any high level (perhaps something could have been found on a UFO site or something) at that time of the Soviet Union being on the road to economic collapse. Quite the contrary.

I say this because I was around at the time and was familiar that this – impending economic failure of the USSR – simply was not the analysis of the day whatsoever.

And as for some predicting war with China or ethnic strife, yes there were such predictions but they were wrong: they were not the cause, and were not mainstream opinion by any means.

If we’d waited on that, there would have been no success.

To claim that Reagan’s starving them of income and causing them to increase military spending beyond what they could afford, to a percentage of their GDP that was simply incredible – which out of their peculiarities he was able to predict correctly that they would do – was not causative of their economic collapse is not a matter of reason or logic, but of wanting to deny.

12

I don’t remember the details at the moment, but we had a nuclear scare with the then USSR as late as the early 80’s. They were far from a paper tiger on the brink of collapse even then. Their economy didn’t have the apparatus that ours had, but Reagan’s incessant economic pressure definitely greased the skids of their “downfall”.

4 more years of Carter and then Mondale and or Dukakis and the Soviet Union would likely still be around. The very thing that liberals constantly blasted Reagan for was what scared the hell outta Chernenko and then Gorbachev. People were never quite sure what he’d be willing to do next to win that chess game. In the end they blinked and he didn’t.

The irony is that Gorbachev’s perestroika, designed to bring stability was the crack in the door that led to the breakdown of the Kremlin’s stranglehold on the other republics. Reagan’s many meetings with ol Mikhail surely were a major influence there as well.

An economic arm bar and “helping” him to loosen the central grip and the stage was set for exactly what we saw. It unraveled before the world’s eyes.

13

[quote]katzenjammer wrote:
Fucking unbelievable - and that was wealth we actually had; not borrowed, as in now. [/quote]

Agreed.

Objective statistics like these really help put things in perspective.

14

[quote]artw wrote:

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
You really do have a pattern of historical revisionism, don’t you?

Cite me a single source prior to the Reagan presidency that shows an analyis of the Soviet Union being then considered on its way to economic and political collapse or even potentially so.

Oh wait, you don’t need facts to come to conclusions – just predisgested assertions from whereever you get them.

Problem is, you’re going to get asked to provide at least some slight trace of substantiation.

So how about it?[/quote]

If you read the 1975 NIE, or an assessment of it performed by anyone not associated with Team B, the conclusion is exactly what I’ve already stated. Virtually everyone in the intelligence community (no members of Team B were a part of the NSA, CIA, or FBI) agreed with the report and the findings of Team B, which contradicted the contents of the report, were roundly criticized as inaccurate both then and after the fall of the USSR.

[/quote]

Yes. That about sums it up.

The Russian economy peaked in year (roughly) 1968. The oil spikes in 1974 and 1979 kept them going for a while along with the surge in gold prices, but by 1980 (RR’s first year) the end could be seen.