You have to adjust the spending to the GDP to get a meaningful graph. And there is a slight dip in ~1987 
I need a better magnifying glass, I guess. GDP growth matters only if you really think that America has years of robust GDP growth ahead to broaden the tax base. Frankly, I don't think so. I realize that the CBO loves to pretend so, but it's the era of the new normal in America now.
No opportunity for investment in infrastructure? What the fuck are you smoking?
We have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of general maintenance that has been ignored for decades.
You do realize that American Infrastructure is woefully under repaired. Our bridges are falling apart, bad roads add billions of dollars in gas and auto repair costs. Our power system is barely functional at the best of times and a complete failure given regular natural disasters. Our power plants are ancient. Our internet is laughable, barely better than third world countries when every other western nation is 10 times faster.
Increasing that infrastructure by building more roads and bridges hardly solves your problem of unemployed sociology majors. I mean, it helps the Mexican economy, I suppose, and I read about a Chinese company that won a bid to build a bridge in America and imported Chinese nationals because it couldn't find Americans with dirty enough hands for the job, so Chinese economy, too; but average Americans no longer want to work at anything remotely useful for a living.
I'm being a bit tongue-in-cheek here, and I know that I need to spell this out, because Bay12 rarely has a sense of humor. The more important part here is that those infrastructure improvements have dubious real worth. Your current number of bridges are probably getting you to work on time. If another bridge doesn't decrease commute times, it failed as an investment.
American internet is plenty fast. If you have faster internet, how will it increase your productivity? It'll be fun with faster internet, true, but fun doesn't make the world go round. If you set out to borrow trillions more, you better have gotten serious about these questions. The numbers game is real. You eat the numbers game every time when you toss bits of paper at a cashier and she gives you a week's worth of food.
That... chart. That chart is hilarious.
That chart is a quick image search. never went to the website. You didn't say shit about whether federal spending has ever decreased, though. Do you have a problem with the base data, or just that the base data wasn't goosed and lipsticked enough to your tastes? Maybe it wasn't hilarious enough. The rest can be spun various ways, as you're gleefully doing right now. Spending has never gone down. The rest is pointless trivia. If we enter an age of flat GDP growth, the spending will be the spending, pure and simple. GDP can grow a country out of debt, but America won't do that anymore.
Minor point of order, here. It may be a solid line of work in the worst catastrophe, but it's a pretty terrible line of work in a time of excess (which we're still thoroughly in).
A time of excess when people are complaining about unemployment and underemployment? We're living on the table-scraps of excess now.
No, they literally are terrorists. The create terror for political and financial gain. They cause financial harm to America. The intentionally fabricated the "uncertainty" in the markets and publicly stated they would be willing to crash the economy to harm the president. It is completely insane.
It takes two sides to tango. The Democrats are also terrorists. They're doing the same thing, but more cravenly and opportunistically, because they know that the blame will be stuck on the Republicans.
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 720598 times)