Originally posted by: charrison
Originally posted by: Vic
Originally posted by: CycloWizard
Originally posted by: Vic
The President does the economic planning and frames the budget, while Congress studies and votes upon the proposals.
Just because techs is a hack doesn't mean you both need to be too.
However, his argument of deficit spending is correct in that this was probably the single most important factor playing into the current situation, albeit amidst countless other factors.
How does what I said make me a hack? I pointed out how ridiculous it is to even say that the president is responsible for the economy when his job has nothing to do with the economy. The job of the president is to enforce laws. The job of the legislature, whether or not they choose to actually do it, is to propose and pass laws, including budgets. The biggest problem with the political situation in this country today is that everyone, even you apparently, seems to forget that and everything gets blamed on the president. Why don't we just do away with the legislature altogether if we want it to be a one man show? Or, why don't we hold accountable those who actually are responsible for these things rather than trying to force the president to be a king?
The President, as chief executive, proposes the budget.
I corrected your misleading statement. Straw men like I want a king were completely unnecessary.
And more to the point, both the executive and the legislative were controlled by the same party for the first 6 years of Bush's admin, with the first budget approved by the new Dem-majority (barely) congress not coming into effect until this October.
The biggest problem with the political situation in this country today IMO is that people are always trying to spin the facts to suit their own purposes.
But speaking of spin, you are usually pretty level headed in your view of the political climate, but you appear to be falling into that spin trap as of late.
The current economic climate is largely caused by the high price of oil. Is the current admin responsible for that, yes to some extent, but the answer remains largely no. The price of oil has more to do with 7million(and rising quickly) cars being sold in china a year and aging oil fields that have not received the investment they need from state owned oil companies.
You can fault bush and republicans for excessive spending, but that has little to do with the price of oil. But you would be fooling yourself if you think the dems would have done any better on spending, the last budget proves they would not. You can fault him for a weak dollar, but that has positive side effects as well.
You can fault him for the ethanol debacle, but that was popular with both parties.
You cant fault him for trying to increase domestic supply, which has largely been beat down by the democrats.
You can cant fault him for improving cafe standards(twice), you can argue they are too weak, but gas prices are having a far larger impact than cafe ever did.
And in case you missed it, in a recent survey HMOs are now more respected than congress.