Originally Posted by
ShadeHonestus
But to state that republicans as a whole haven't been fiscally conservative is disingenuous.
O RLY?
O RLY 2: When Nature Calls.
Night of the Living O RLY.
Mighty Morphin' Power O RLY.
The results are astonishing, Republican Administrations have accrued, more than 3 fold, the debt that Democrats have. This demonstrates that the self-applied rubric of "fiscal conservative" is not true for Republican Administration’s unless we invert the accepted meaning of these words.
What about inflation? Will the varying value of the dollar (downward sadly) skew these results unfavorably? Since I am using Fed data, I will use another government statistic to gauge inflation, the consumer price index (CPI). The basis year is 1967 as 100, which is close enough, for my argument to 1966. The data I used found 1966 at 97, and 1998 at 475. I will be generous and blame Bill Clinton for another 125 points to be tacked onto the Bush years since 2001 to total 600 (a nice Rovian touch). Thus the initial Democratic debt in 1966, in 2006 dollars is 1.8 trillion which when added to the unadjusted since 1966 dollars totals 3.6 trillion. This is still a long way short of the Republican debt of 6.4 trillion dollars of just six Republican Administrations (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II).
These results demonstrate the mendacious nature of the assertion of Republican Fiscal Conservatism. What does this bode for the republic? I cannot tell since I am not clairvoyant; however, in the known history of the world a debt this large has never been paid off.
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