Honestly, I doubt it. But at least that's what they're "supposed" to stand for. Dems are always for more spending, more give-aways to lazy people, more share the wealth, etc etc.
Then why was Clinton the only one to bring the deficit to nearly zero?
Our debt is largely because of
1) Reagan
2) Bush Sr.
3) Bush Jr.
In terms of what he is actually, personally responsible for (ie not for the commitments the prior ones made) Obama has not made significant spending increases.
That is just ridiculous. Since the end of WWI, the United States has walked all over the rest of the world. This is the fundamental cause of our "terrorist" problem.
We only walked over the Western Hemisphere (to the Phillipines anyway) before World War II. It wasn't until after WWII that we got into this military industrial complex nonsense.
So how about we reduce spending, eh? What a novel idea, that all the democrats and socialists of the country just don't seem to grasp.
Yeah, because wars all over the world and tax cuts really do help reducing the deficit... the only difference between both "sides" is that conservatives like to spend it on the rich and the democrats on the poor.
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=3036I never said anything about tax cuts. I said reduce spending.
As in, let's stop all the silly welfare programs we have that let people sit on their lazy rear ends all day and collect government money for doing so.
Name one.
Most of them require that you make, at the very least, small copays.
Let's stop paying people for being "disabled" because they are overweight (a choice they had).
For crying out loud, getting that money actually requires you or your family to have paid into social security in the first place. Is that money not yours, suddenly?
Let's stop paying for healthcare of illegal immigrants.
Healthcare for non-payers (which is mostly legal Americans who had insurance but went bankrupt when the insurers decided not to pay) is only 5% of a hospital's costs. Compared to Medicare underpayment and excessive insurance overhead, it's merely a tangential issue.
Let's stop letting people live off of financial aid from schools when they have no income, and staying in the school system for decades.
The financial aid program actually makes money (default repayment rates of 1.2! Jesus tapdancing Christ!)
Let's stop handing out money to people who buy "green" energy stuff.
This would save you nothing in comparison to stopping all energy subsidies.
Let's stop medicaid.
Why just Medicaid? Why not Tricare and Medicare as well? And all of national defense? National defense is nothing more than an insurance program anyway, and you are far mroe affected by your neighbor's health than some insurgent in Iraq.
Seriously, we just need to stop some of these things. They're leeches on the government, they help encourage unproductivity, and they are only helping to push us further and further into national debt.
Government spending, as a fraction of GDP, has not significantly increased over the past forty years. What has gone down are tax receipts - particularly corporate and high-income taxes. While low income-earners (those making less than three hundred thousand per year) have been paying a larger share of taxes to compensate.