Talk about cash money, money
The Washington Times (America’s shittiest newspaper®) shows it’s the go-to place for fine analysis of all budget and deficit-related matters. Especially when William F. Shughart II, the F.A.P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Mississippi [!!!] is writing.
In February, the $175.6 billion deficit was a single-month record, 46 percent higher than the previous single month high (in February 2007), and nearly $14 billion more than the deficit for all of fiscal 2007, which ended last Sept. 30.
We’ve seen a lot of nonsense written about the deficit, but this is the first time we remember someone going on about the monthly deficit. Because once you start doing that, hilarity ensues. Such as us commenting that the government’s finances are in great shape because it ran a surplus of $159 billion in April. Why — that pretty much cancels out February’s deficit! Hooray!
the total deficit for fiscal 2008 (ending this Sept. 30) is expected to top $410 billion – with another $407 billion in red ink forecast for fiscal 2009, both within striking distance of 2004’s record annual deficit of $412.7 billion.
What is the world coming to when even economics professors fail to adjust for inflation or the size of the economy? $410 billion is a lot of money, but at 2.9% of GDP it’s pretty good compared to what St. Reagan managed (6% in 1983). Indeed, 2.9% would have been awesome compared to the typical Reagan year. Adjusted for inflation, 1983’s $207 billion deficit and 1992’s $290 billion deficit trump all others with 2008 dollars value of $454 billion and $452 billion, respectively. (Inflation figures here.)
Such irresponsibility is a relatively recent phenomenon. Total federal debt in 1940 – that is, all the government’s accumulated deficits from the time of the Founding until just before World War II – was just $50.7 billion.
Yes, those were the days: when federal debt amounted to 110.3 percent of GDP. Today’s 65.5 percent is, in comparison, not bad at all. Shughart does get bonus points for creativity:
For the last five years, Congress and the White House have been on a spending binge that would embarrass a sailor on shore leave.
Oh, that’s good.
wow, what an original analogy! He must be a professor.
Hotty Toddy, Gosh almighty
Who the hell are we?
Hey!
Flim Flam, Bim Bam
Ole Miss, By Damn!
At least sailors spend their own money.
FAP FAP FAP
POCKITA POCKITA POCKITA
You know, you could have pointed out that Shughart was also a senior fellow at the Independent Institute (huh?) of Oakland as well. I’m a fire-breathing liberal because of my education at Ole Miss- it has some redemptive qualities to it.
Plus, Faulkner worked in the post office.
I’m just sayin’.
Wait, is the Federal gummit spending all that money on hookers and booze? Or do sailers on shore leave spend their money on Halliburton? I’m confused.
Man, you’re out of touch. Hookers and booze are provided by Halliburton. They corner that market now.
Attention Sadly No! magic editors & whatnot.
THIS is priority news:
This is so awesome I don’t know what to say. This is such a gift from the blog gods that I do not know what we did to become so fortunate.
He’s also a member of the Free United People’s Order of Bikini Inspection.
He also serves on the Policy Advisors Board for the Heartland Institute. You know, these folks.
Second link is pdf, by the way.
Gee, golly, Mr. Techdude. It seems to me that if one of their prestigious members were to prove that Barack Obama isn’t a natural-born resident of the US, maybe ONE of those groups would, ya know, mention it on site.
Also, if it was such a horrible joke of a bad forgery, why did it take you weeks to discover it?
He goes many steps beyond Kerning. So far my favorite is the RGB Value Heat Maps of the totally fake, forged Certificate Of Live Birth.
If Barack Obama has a real birth certificate, he should immediately turn over the only surviving original copy to some right wing blogger who works under a pseudonym and has been threatened by dead rabbits, so that we can establish that Obama is a real person.
I have been saying for quite some time that B.(ilal) Hussein Obama has been invented by the AP and does not, in fact, exist.
Oh! And on the actual Atlas Juggs site, TechDude has flashing animated GIF’s showing the Kerning differences!!! It’s awesome.
If they’re so bent on insisting that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, couldn’t they, um… like, ask and official of the state government or something? Or are they part of the Global Democratic Conspiracy?
Climate Scientists don’t know what they’re doing.
Obama’s birth certificate is a “horrible, crude fraud”.
But will they step up and challenge the theory of “Obama Warming”?
mikey
I bet McCain’s birth certificate would prove interesting if anyone were to figure out quipu.
Oh, for the love of shit.
They’re really comparing a computer-printed document from 2007 to one that was typed out on a typewriter in the 1960s? Seriously?
And why do all the dude’s scans look like they were made with a Fischer-Price toy?
Come now, tigrismus, everyone knows that wherever a white baby is born is America. They don’t need anything like a birth certificate, that’s for the coloreds. We can trust that John McCain is definitely, without a doubt, not a Latin American communist sleeper agent.
Wasn’t it the Isreal Insider that published Maliki Obama’s (Barack’s half-brother) quote that Barack was indeed brought up a Muslim? Even though Maliki had no way of knowing that, not having even met his half-brother until they were both in their 20s?
I’m beginning to think that Isreal Insider is an offshoot of The Onion.
Wait a minute, did “techdude” (nice handle, btw) conclude that the birth certificate was a forgery based on a scanned copy?!
Wow. Just wow.
…or decipher the characters on oracle bones.
Why has John McCain not produced the original clay tablets from the original Akkadian bureaucrats charged with recording his birth? Were his parents skipping out on taxes due to the heirs of Sargon?
McCain’s mom? It would be irresponsible not to et cetera.
Such irresponsibility is a relatively recent phenomenon. Total federal debt in 1940 – that is, all the government’s accumulated deficits from the time of the Founding until just before World War II – was just $50.7 billion.
Yes, and you could buy a lot with a nickel in those days, too.
And if you laid out all the accumulated deficits end to end, they would extend 1/100,000,000 of the way to Alpha Centauri. Or something.
Is this him? here
Member Since: July 18, 2008
Sex: Male
Age: 45
Last Login: July 18
Location: Newark, DE
Ethnicity: Puerto Rican
Zodiac: Capricorn
But but but this suggests he could be a latino, you know not a white guy.
The fact is, your savior Obama Osama has been exposed as a total fraud and pshoney. Heartlanders already knew this, but when will the coastal eleites realize this, before he sells them out to terroists? Tiy are fools for following him. The proof is here from an expert that his birth certificate was forged. You believe in stupid things like global warming, so of course you will defend this fraud, so you deserve the shafting you get for your liberal oligopoly leaders who are only using you to destroy America.
Um, could any of those wingnuts spend 5 minutes, as I did, finding out the definition of a natural born citizen? I know this interferes with their mad forensic kerning skilz, but- shock- it doesn’t matter if Obama was born in the US or not.
Who is a natural-born citizen? Who, in other words, is a citizen at birth, such that that person can be a President someday?
As usual, the Constitution provides the framework for the law, but it is the law that fills in the gaps.
Currently, Title 8 of the U.S. Code fills in those gaps. Section 1401 defines the following as people who are “citizens of the United States at birth:”
· Any one born outside the United States, if one parent is an alien and as long as the other parent is a citizen of the U.S. who lived in the U.S. for at least five years (with military and diplomatic service included in this time)
usconstitutions.net
According to this guy who has a blog who met a dude who is a Certified Expert, if you look at photos of Obama’s ears closely enough you will see that he faked the Apollo moon landings.
I know, Ronin, it’s crazy. Besides being just plain wrong, they’re also terribly wrongheaded to push “you can’t be president if you weren’t born in the US!” rhetoric while supporting Panamanian-born McCain.
There’s just no reasoning with the insane.
Wait, does that have anything to do with “The Corner” over at NRO?
I think it’d be irresponsible not to speculate.
This is such a gift from the blog gods that I do not know what we did to become so fortunate.
Obviously the dead mutilated rabbit was insufficient; we must sacrifice a few mutilated dead goats as well.
So far my favorite is the RGB Value Heat Maps of the totally fake, forged Certificate Of Live Birth.
Does Pamela Geller know the Predator has taken over her web site?
That was my question about the whole birth certificate thing: What in the Sam Hill are these nitwits hoping to prove? That Obama wasn’t actually born at all? That he’s really a body-snatcher from Planet Zordornamutdkrlp? They should demand he strip naked in public to demonstrate once and for all that he actually has a navel and to prove his lack of torso gills, but then that would only prove he’s had those surgically altered just to trick real Americans.
before he sells them out to terroists?
I read this as “before he sells them out to tourists.”
And exactly how is it you came to know so much about that planet, eh?
we must sacrifice a few mutilated dead goats as well
You rang?
Hell, the Washington Times isn’t even Washington D.C.’s shittiest newspaper any longer. Compared to the Post at least it has the virtue of a uniform quality and quantity of shittiness. If you make the mistake of reading it, there’s a little auto-correct function that goes off in your head and ends up making some sense of what you’ve read. The Post, on the other hand, varies dramatically in terms of quality and quantity of shittiness, meaning that reading it is a lost cause unless you’re familiar with the particular author and the particular coverage of the Post on the issue you’re reading. And make no mistake about it: from high Broderism to war cheerleading, there are many issues on which the Post is at least as shitty as is the Times, not to mention that the quality of the Post’s shittiness–desperate and futile over-the-top sucking up to the sadistic cool-kids in the hopes that they’ll really, really, like you some day–is far worse and more pernicious than the quality of shittiness of the Times–bugfuck insanity.
For some reason, I’m reminded of a certain Chris Muir cartoon…
Sometimes I get nervous around here.
Well, gosh, I thought all of the economic signs were pointing to not only a recession but a goddamn depression, but who am I to argue with a representative of Fap Barn?
The GDP numbers are fudged. Reagan had a GNP. But the creative accountants in DC didn’t like adding up what we actually produced, so we changed to GDP as a measure. GDP is basically all spending, adjusted for “inflation”. But the price deflator used to calculate GDP is a joke. If you adjusted inflation calculated the same way it was in 1990, there has been exactly one quarter of positive economic growth in the Bush administration (2Q04, conveniently in time for the 2004 election). Any percentages you calculate using official GDP numbers are likewise a joke.
It is true that the Reagan debt was huge. We’re about to remember how huge it was, since it was financed with 30-year treasuries about, oh, 30 years ago. But lets not downplay Dubya’s achievments. His debts were even bigger. And Dubya, in his infinite wisdom, decided to finance his debt from 2001-2004 with 10-year notes. They come due, oh, about exactly the same time as Reagan’s debt.
And when they come due, they come due in current dollars. It works out to be something like 750 billion dollars (in current dollars) a year that the US is going to have to borrow to pay back the holders of those old treasuries, and that’s before the US gets into having to borrow to fund the new huge deficits we’re incurring (in current dollars).
Depending on how big you think the deficit is going to be in 2011, we’ll have to be borrowing between 1.2 and 2.0 TRILLION dollars a year for every year from 2011-2012. The biggest load of borrowing the US has ever done was about 420 billion. If you think the Chinese & Japanese are going to line up to buy that debt, I think you will be surprised. And there isn’t going to be near enough money in the social security trust fund to rob to cover it, which has been SOP whenever foreigners won’t buy our debt.
Oh, and that 1.2 – 2.0 trillion estimate doesn’t include what will happen if the US has to bail out Fannie & Freddie (leveraged 62x) or the FDIC (leveraged about the same amount).
Of course, the deficit estimate of 400 billion for 2008 is yet another joke. I don’t think it will hit 1 trillion, but I suspect we may make a run at it (though the government will figure a way to fudge that number as well).
Dang, that was supposed to be “borrowing between 1.2 and 2.0 TRILLION dollars a year for every year from 2011-2014”
Aha! Mystery solved!
You guys are wondering why this seems to have legs, when it’s so patently ridiculous? combat18 explains it for you:
Just look at that laundry list! Clearly unprecedented levels of bullshit are required to defend America from taxes and “the Muslim call to prayer”.