Just to keep the record balanced, since you keep posting the same list of accomplishments, I'll repeat the list of failures:
Compare Clinton’s 3.4 percent growth rate to the spending orgy that has dominated Washington since Bush moved into town. With Republicans in charge of both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, spending growth has averaged 10.4 percent per year. And the GOP’s reckless record goes well beyond runaway defense costs.
Since Republicans started running Congress, spending in
- The Department of Education has exploded by 101 percent;
- the Justice Department has shot up 131 percent;
- the Commerce Department, 82 percent;
- the Department of Health and Human Services, 81 percent;
- the State Department, 80 percent;
- the Department of Transportation, 65 percent; and
- the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 59 percent.
Incredibly, the four bureaucracies once targeted for elimination by the GOP Congress—Commerce, Energy, Education, and Housing and Urban Development—have enjoyed spending increases of an average of 85 percent.
This year's deficit is down to just 2% of GDP, well below the recent averages of about 2.7%, but let's look at what the RP has done to the national debt:
Facts and Figures that are worth remembering:
From: zFacts.com:
"In 1981 the gross national debt, as a percent of the nation's annual income, reached its lowest point since 1931, 32.5%. It could have been paid off then easier than at any time in the previous 50 years. But inflation was high and Reagan mistook inflating dollars for a real growth in debt. On February 5, 1981, two weeks after taking office, in his "Address to the Nation on the Economy" Reagan said: "By 1960 our national debt stood at $284 billion. ... Today the debt is $934 billion. ... We can leave our children with an unrepayable massive debt and a shattered economy." But, the 1960 debt he said was "smaller" was 56.1% (instead of 32.5%) of our national income. As seen below Bush II has imitated Reagan and turned the debt upward once again. The White House, in OMB's 2006 Budget, predicted a 47 year high in 2006."
"The national debt peaked at 120% of GDP in 1946 due to the war effort, but Roosevelt, Truman, Ike, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon and Carter all did their part to bring the national debt back to pre-war levels. By the beginning of 1981, the national debt had fallen to 32.5% of GDP. Then, Reagan took office and the national debt took off. It rose non-stop for 12 years to 66.3% at the end of Bush's term, erasing 25 years of progress in paying down the national debt."
Perhaps the RNC and Congressional powers need to look at why the "unbeatable majority" that we had just four years ago is dwindling away, and why some of our reps are running for their lives. Could it be:
- Failure to do anything about illegal immegration,
- Failure to do anything about eminent domain abuse,
- Passage of an unconstituional restriction on campaign speech,
- Failure to do anything about the impending bankruptcy of SS,
- Failure to get the federal gov out of Education (instead we have NCLB),
- Failure to rein in pork barrel spending (instead we 15,268 projects in 2006),
- Failure to implement a rational energy policy that promotes conservation, alternative fuels, new production, and new refineries,
- Failure to reduce government as campaigned on for years,
- A Medicare Drug bill that is a loser for everyone concerned, except for the insurance and drug industries, If we lose the House and/or Senate, we have no one to blame but ourselves. Our only claim to success is several presumably conservative judges, a WOT that is working, but many Americans don't understand that it has perhaps another hundred years to run, and fear of what will happen if the Dems take over. Fear of the other guys is a hard platform to run on, especially when our base wanted something done about the list above.