PUBLIC OPINION > Insourcing Could Bring Back Jobs

But we also had a balanced budget, a budget surplus, and more jobs created under Clinton, so outsourcing was not the broblem it is now, or was under Reagan.
Statistics can prove any point, just change the wording.

You seem to confuse the idea of outsourcing with the NAFTA agreement. Outsourcing started long before Clinton and NAFTA.

"Here is the most annoying fact: it was Reagan who legitimized deficit spending. It is under Reagan’s watch that the US deficit ballooned from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion dollars — more than all prior presidents combined. It is preposterous to ignore the origins of the issue and blame the sorry state of affairs on Democrats."

How Reagan Sold The United States Piece By Piece
February 8, 2012 by Harry Deshpande

One thing that the libertarians are extremely good at is channeling the anger at Democrats for the Republican misdeeds. The methodology is rather simple and this is how it works.
1.Take any action where the government made a big boo-boo!
2.Keep talking about the mistake and how that mistake would not have happened if there was no government.
3.The job is almost done when (2) is established since it is well known that every Libertine and a large section of Republicans are against government interference.
4.Convert people’s mistrust of government into support for Republicans.

Take the recent racist super bowl ad; this advertisement is an excellent example of Republicans selling their country and blaming it on Democrats. No one denies that there is some truth behind the accusations; Americans jobs are getting outsourced, it is not a fair competition, and some countries are getting richer at America’s expense. The question is why blame it on Democrats? After all, was it not Ronald Reagan who started the process of selling this country?

It was Reagan who echoed Ayn Rand‘s philosophy that one who is poor is also lazy and one who is lazy is poor as well. Unemployment rates reached double digits during his presidency. The gap between rich and poor increased under his watch and it was his policies that essentially led to the stock market crash of 1987. While rightly complaining that excessive government interference leads to misallocation of resources, Reaganomics conveniently forgets that excessive reliance on private markets leads to misallocation in the form of large scale speculations. Speculations and get rich quick schemes become the way of life — exactly how the excesses of Wall Street we see today began under Reagan.

It is not a coincidence that China’s progress started during Reagan presidency. It was Reagan who started the process of deregulation that ultimately resulted in American jobs being outsourced all over the world and, a by the end of his era, there was a large increase in crappy jobs for Americans.

It’s not only China; when I look back on my child hood in India, I remember wealth flowing into the country at a rapid pace after 1980. From more than a dozen people living in three rooms, my extended family went to an apartment per family member within 20 years. Imagine this, and we are not even rich, we are still middle class. This growth was certainly not reciprocated in United States?

Here is the most annoying fact: it was Reagan who legitimized deficit spending. It is under Reagan’s watch that the US deficit ballooned from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion dollars — more than all prior presidents combined. It is preposterous to ignore the origins of the issue and blame the sorry state of affairs on Democrats.

I am not confused in the least.

You, however, need to go back to school and learn how to properly quote. It is not enough to cite an article written my someone else and leave off the quotes, perhaps, in the hopes that someone or everyone will think at some point you are voicing your opinion. To do less than quote another's work properly is plagiarism and against the T & C of Sodahead. Go back and read the rules again.

In addition, you must think that many people can not remember back to Clinton's rein. Was it not enough that he defiled the Office with his disgusting behavior and lies? Now you want to serve Wild Willy up as a saint just because he is a Democrat... You do make me laugh.

Here are the undisputed facts of who did what...

"President Party change in deficit years in office avg. change in deficit
B.H.Obama D ($329,164,144,030) 2 ($164,582,072,015)
G.W.Bush R $803,424,990,821 8 $100,428,123,853
G.W.Bush R $397,130,927,169 7 $56,732,989,596
1st 7 years
W.J.Clinton D ($164,787,361,848) 8 ($20,598,420,231)
G.H.W.Bush R $34,326,854,936 4 $8,581,713,734
R.Reagan R $106,541,043,476 8 $13,317,630,435
J.Carter D ($4,328,272,827) 4 ($1,082,068,207)
G.Ford R $69,190,733,924 3 $23,063,577,975
R.M.Nixon R $17,581,577,773 5 $2,930,262,962
L.B.Johnson D ($2,146,225,006) 5 ($429,245,001)
J.F.Kennedy D $10,051,478,109 3 $3,350,492,703"

http://home.adelphi.edu/sbloc...

We do not need more government mis-management. We need less government PERIOD. Or, let me re-phrase that... We need less crooked government. We do not need government involved in teaching our children, managing our money or forcing us to purchase goods that they refuse to purchase themselves.

I prefer NOT to deal with your opinions, but rather, the facts... just the facts...

Let me stop now... you might be deaf... so are you hearing me yet?

Every tax cut has led to recession. The money that was NOT collected (as the tax was cut) is a LOSS of revenue (just as uncollected taxes are).

"Tax cuts from Reagan: The tax cuts came in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. The administration's plan slashed corporate and individual income tax rates, with the biggest cut in the top rate. The Reagan team promised that their tax cuts would jolt the economy back to life because, as the Wall Street Journal's editors put it, "high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive." And the true believers went so far as to suggest that the economy would grow fast enough that tax revenues would actually rise, making the tax cuts painless.
The results never came close to measuring up to the supply-side rhetoric. For starters, the tax cuts busted the federal budget. The federal deficit ballooned from 2.7% of GDP in 1980 to 6% of GDP in 1983, the largest peacetime deficit in history, and was still 5% of GDP in 1986. Tax revenues did pick up, especially after the 1983 payroll tax increase kicked in, reducing the deficit somewhat. Still, tax revenues grew far more slowly over than the 1980s business cycle (2.5% from 1979 to 1989) than they did in the 1990s business cycle (4.1% from 1989 to 2000)."

The LONG term effects of massive tax cuts, or trickle down economics, has never been good for the country as a whole.
The liberal policies FDR fixed the result of the conservative economic blunders of 1920-1931, and the next 45 years (with a top tax rate above 75% and most of the time at 90%) were economically sound and created the American middle class with a viable economy.
The conservative economic policies of Reagan started our down hill slide, and going back to that is just lunacy.

"Reagan instead of creating a strong free market economy created rampant inflation, false growth with no monetary backing, increased foreign support, a huge wealth gap between the rich and poor, farmers being paid not to farm, and of course the biggest recession since the nineteen twenties." (until Bush's recession that we are still in)
Conservative economic policies DO NOT WORK!!!

You fail to look at all the facts.

Fact - When Reagan took office the unemployment rate was near 10%.
Fact - The prime lending rate was at 20%
Fact - lowering taxes caused the unemployment rate to fall like a rock as businesses were finally encouraged to try to grow their businesses.
Fact - lending rates also fell
Fact - more people were back to work and the government received a glut of money to spend on their programs as always happens when taxes are reduced.
Fact - no recession yet / the economy boomed.
Fact - Even with all the additional money coming into the government the congress, controlled by democrats as it had been for decades, couldn't stop at spending what they had.
Fact - The democrats in congress spent 169% of the money they received.
Fact - The democrats in congress borrowed more and more money which at the time was more than ever.
Fact - The out of control spending and borrowing threw the brakes on a booming economy and caused recession.
Fact - Congress raised the debt ceiling 18 times during this period even though they had more revenue than ever before.
Fact - Obama and he other liberal cronies in the congress are now wanting to raise the debt limit yet again.
Fact - The actions of continuously borrowing shackles the efforts of economic recovery.
Fact - Te democrats have learned nothing from their failures.
Fact - Their economic polices failed miserably under Jimmy Carter and they have failed under Barack Obama.
Fact - No matter how much democrats get of other people's money they always demand more.
Fact - Liberal economic policies have failed everywhere in the world they've been tried yet liberals keep wanting to continue the. They think we just haven't spent enough.
Fact - Liberals always fail to included facts that prove their failures.

What you have posted are facts, but you still are missing the other "facts", the ones that show the LONG TERM effects of the Reagan presidency, and what he did not do to make America better for most of the people.

Debunking the Reagan Myth
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: January 21, 2008
"Historical narratives matter. That’s why conservatives are still writing books denouncing F.D.R. and trying to re write the history of the New Deal; they understand that the way Americans perceive bygone eras, even eras from the seemingly distant past, affects politics today.
The fact is that how we talk about the Reagan era still matters immensely for American politics.
Bill Clinton knew that in 1991, when he began his presidential campaign. “The Reagan-Bush years,” he declared, “have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect.”
Reaganomics failed. The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little or no sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.
When the inevitable recession arrived, people felt betrayed — a sense of betrayal that Mr. Clinton was able to ride into the White House.
Some good things did eventually happen to the U.S. economy — but not on Reagan’s watch.
For example, productivity and growth, there wasn’t any resurgence in the Reagan years. Eventually productivity did take off — but even the Bush administration’s own Council of Economic Advisers dates the beginning of that takeoff to 1995.
Similarly, if a sense of entrepreneurship means having confidence in the talents of American business leaders, that didn’t happen in the 1980s, when all the business books seemed to have samurai warriors on their covers. Like productivity, American business prestige didn’t stage a comeback until the mid-1990s, when the U.S. began to reassert its technological and economic leadership.
I understand why conservatives want to rewrite history and pretend that these good things happened while a Republican was in office — or claim, implausibly, that the 1981 Reagan tax cut somehow deserves credit for positive economic developments that didn’t happen until 14 or more years had passed. (Does Richard Nixon get credit for “Morning in America”?)
Nothing lends credibility to this rewriting of history — particularly right now, when Reaganomics has just failed all over again?
Like Ronald Reagan, President Bush began his term in office with big tax cuts for the rich and promises that the benefits would trickle down to the middle class. Like Reagan, he also began his term with an economic slump, then claimed that the recovery from that slump proved the success of his policies.
And like Reaganomics — but more quickly — Bushonomics has ended in grief. The public mood today is as grim as it was in 1992. Wages are lagging behind inflation. Employment growth in the Bush years has been pathetic compared with job creation in the Clinton era. The odds now are that we will have a full blown recession.
This is, in short, a time when progressives ought to be driving home the idea that the right’s ideas don’t work, and never have."

The first of two:

Ronald Reagan's Legacy
His destructive economic policies do not deserve the press's praise.
by John Miller
Dollars and Sense magazine, July / August 2004
"Two days after his death, the Wall Street journal ran a lengthy editorial tribute to Ronald Reagan, in the editors' estimation the most important president since FDR. In their paean to the fortieth president, Reagan gets credit for everything from winning the Cold War to renewing a sense of optimism at home. Oh, and he gets extra kudos for doing it all with that famously sunny disposition.
On economic policy, as the journal tells the story, by tying the hands of meddlesome government bureaucrats and cutting taxes, Reaganomics ignited an episode of miraculous economic growth that restored prosperity to the U.S. economy. But like much of what Reagan had to say while he was president, what the journal offers is just so much happy talk that masks a mean-spirited, economically unsound, and socially destructive policy agenda.
First off, claims that Reagan's economic agenda restored prosperity are overblown. The so-called Reagan boom was in fact a rather middling episode of economic growth. Shorter than either the 1960s and 1990s expansions, the 1980s economic expansion was still the third longest on record. But it was hardly robust. The economy grew much more slowly in the 1980s than during the 1960s, more slowly than the postwar average of 3.6% annual growth, and no faster than in the 1970s or the 1990s. Nor did Reagan administration regulatory rollbacks unleash a productivity boom. Productivity gains in the 1980s failed to match those in the decades before and after, and couldn't hold a candle to the productivity gains of the 1960s boom.
The Reagan years showed mixed results on a number of other economic measures. The "great American jobs machine," missing in action since George W. Bush took office, was up and running during the Reagan administration. The rate of job growth was higher in the 1980s than in the 1990s-but lower than in either the 1960s or the 1970s.
In addition, unemployment rates remained quite high throughout the decade: 5.2% at the boom's end in 1989, well above the 3.5% and 4.1% rates achieved at the end of the 1960s and 1990s booms. The 1980s economy did more to improve the purchasing power of the median family than the 1990s boom. But again, those gains were extremely modest compared to what the 1960s boom did for that representative family.
None of this speaks to the lopsided distribution of the benefits of Reagan era economic growth. Investors made out during the 1980s, while workers lost out. After seeing their investments lose value during the 1970s, shareholders enjoyed real returns (i.e., adjusted for inflation) in the 1980s that rivaled those of the next decade's stock market bubble and far outdistanced the returns of the 1960s. Real weekly wages for nonsupervisory workers, on the other hand, took a beating, declining even more quickly than they had during the 1970s. Today, the average real earnings of nonsupervisory workers remain far below those of 30 years ago, despite healthy wage gains in the second half of the 1990s expansion, when unemployment rates dropped toward 4%.
Nor did Reagan era growth do much to alleviate poverty. The poverty rate in 1989 at the end of Reagan's two terms was still 12.8%. That was just one percentage point lower than at beginning of his administration. In contrast, the 1990s boom knocked three percentage points off the nation's poverty rate, while the 1960s boom nearly cut it in half.
Reagan administration economic policies did not result in a 1960s-style prosperity, when workers' real wages went up in tandem with the value of stock holdings-just the opposite. Since 1980, the gains from U.S. economic growth have gone overwhelmingly to the well-to-do, and economic inequality has steadily worsened. By 2000, the ratio of the family income of the top 5% to that of the bottom 20% stood at 19.1, a dramatic rise over the 1979 ratio of 11.4. Reagan's economic policies ushered in the return of levels of inequality unseen since the eve of the Great Depression.
In one area the 1980s boom did post genuinely outstanding numbers: reducing inflation. But Federal Reserve Board chair Paul Volcker, not the Reagan administration, administered the fight against inflation. Voicker's tight monetary policy induced the 1982 recession and helped keep a lid on wage growth. Thus the credit for breaking inflation goes more properly to the workers who endured a decade of declining purchasing power administered in the name of price stability.
But what about the particulars of Reaganomics (or supply-side economics), which in practice meant large tax cuts targeted at the rich, a military buildup, and slashing social spending? That too is a disturbing story.
The tax cuts came in 1981, Reagan's first year in office. The administration's plan slashed corporate and individual income tax rates, with the biggest cut in the top rate. The Reagan team promised that their tax cuts would jolt the economy back to life because, as the Wall Street Journal's editors put it, "high taxes interfere with natural human creativity and drive." And the true believers went so far as to suggest that the economy would grow fast enough that tax revenues would actually rise, making the tax cuts painless.
The results never came close to measuring up to the supply-side rhetoric. For starters, the tax cuts busted the federal budget. The federal deficit ballooned from 2.7% of GDP in 1980 to 6% of GDP in 1983, the largest peacetime deficit in history, and was still 5% of GDP in 1986. Tax revenues did pick up, especially after the 1983 payroll tax increase kicked in, reducing the deficit somewhat. Still, tax revenues grew far more slowly over than the 1980s business cycle (2.5% from 1979 to 1989) than they did in the 1990s business cycle (4.1% from 1989 to 2000).
Nor did the claim that tax cuts would encourage work effort, savings, and investment, the central premise of Reaganomics, hold up. When mainstream economists, such as Barry Bosworth and Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, checked out the effects of the 1981 tax cut, they found that something quite different had happened. After the tax cut, men didn't work much more at all; although women did work longer hours, their earnings failed to improve. And relative to the size of the economy, net investment declined and savings plummeted. The Economic Policy Institute, a labor-funded think tank, reports that the annual increase in real investment in the 1980s business cycle (2.5% per year) was less than half of that during the 1990s business cycle (5.9% per year).
Worse yet, most low-income taxpayers missed out on the Reagan tax cuts. The bottom 40% of households paid out more of their income in federal taxes in 1988 than they had in 1980. Increases in the payroll taxes that finance Social Security and Medicare, which made up a far higher portion of their federal tax bill than income taxes, swamped what little benefit these taxpayers received from lower income tax rates. For the richest 1%, on the other hand, the Reagan tax cuts were pure elixir. This group saw their effective federal tax rate drop from 34.6% to 29.7%, according to a recent study conducted by the Congressional Budget Office. As these numbers suggest, Reagan left a far less progressive federal tax code than he found.
While the Reagan military buildup kept overall government spending from shrinking, Reagan's budgets slashed social spending. Domestic discretionary spending, which includes just about all non-defense spending outside of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, was the special target of Reagan's budget cutting. Relative to the size of the economy, one-third of domestic discretionary spending disappeared: it fell from 4.7% of GDP in 1980 to 3.1% in 1988. Hardest hit were programs for low-income Americans, which in real terms suffered a withering 54% cut in federal spending from 1981 to 1988. After correcting for inflation, subsidized housing lost 80.7% of its support, training and employment services 68.3%, and housing assistance for the elderly 47.1%. These programs have never returned to their pre-Reagan spending levels. In fact, under the Clinton administration spending on domestic discretionary programs continued to decline relative to the size of the economy.
Reagan's economic legacy endures. Government continues to turn its back on social spending for the poor in favor of ineffectual tax giveaways for the rich, at same time that it finds unlimited monies for military adventures. Lopsided economic growth showers benefits on stock investors while doing precious little for workers or-not an entirely separate group-the poor. And today's Depression-level inequality is not mitigated as much as it once was by the tax code
Ronald Reagan did profoundly alter the economic policy agenda of our nation. But the Reagan legacy ought to be condemned, not celebrated. And we continue to do battle with its crippling effects."

It was Bush who ignored the situation: "Much of the unprecedented wealth destruction in 2007 and 2008 can be traced back to failed economic policies under President George W. Bush, when opportunities to put the economy and the labor market on the right track were ignored."

The Consequences of Conservatism
Loss of Wealth Stunning During Great Recession

The 2012 presidential primary season is already upon us and the Grand Old Party is, not surprisingly, engaged in a grand old opportunity to rewrite history about the causes and consequences of the Great Recession. So it’s time, once again, to set the record straight.
The Great Recession was so great not just because of very sharp unemployment increases but also due to an unprecedented decline in wealth—as the Federal Reserve detailed in a report released this week. That wealth destruction is key to understanding the Great Recession since massive house price drops led to a foreclosure crisis that then fueled massive layoffs. Much of the unprecedented wealth destruction in 2007 and 2008 can be traced back to failed economic policies under President George W. Bush, when opportunities to put the economy and the labor market on the right track were ignored.
Incoming President Barack Obama’s hand was thus forced to first pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 to save the economy from sliding deeper into an economic hole amid rising job losses, and to then tackle the problems that had been ailing the economy and American families—low incomes and rapidly rising prices for health care and energy—for the previous eight years.
Wealth destruction probably doesn’t adequately capture what happened in the early stages of the crisis. Wealth was vaporized at a breathtaking, eye-popping speed. American families lost a total of $19.4 trillion (in 2010 dollars) in household wealth from June 2007 to March 2009, when the stimulus started to take hold. First it was the housing market, and then it was the housing and the stock market together that tanked. American families lost $6.4 trillion in home value during this period.
Trillions of dollars are sometimes hard to grasp, so think of it this way: One complete house (at 2008 prices) was lost every 1.7 seconds during the Great Wealth Destruction. And this doesn’t even count what happened to American families’ rainy day funds and retirement savings.
The story of the Great Recession unfolded very quickly after that. The drop in home values meant that fewer people wanted to build and buy new homes, putting a lot of construction workers out of work. And the drop in home values put many borrowers underwater, meaning they owed more on their mortgage than their house was worth, precipitating a massive wave in foreclosures. This ultimately threatened to bring down the entire U.S. financial system but it also tightened credit such that businesses couldn’t expand, even if they wanted to. Jobs disappeared across all industries, not just in construction, leading to the highest unemployment rate in almost 30 years.
This crisis did not fall from the sky. We saw it coming. My colleague Scott Lilly and I pointed out in 2004 that the economic trends that ailed the economy and led to the sharp rise in household debt were unsustainable. American workers lived through the weakest labor market since the Great Depression after the previous recession ended in November 2001. Yet prices for key household items such as health care, energy, transportation, food, and housing rose, often at runaway speed. American families only managed to pay their bills by borrowing on their credit cards, for large consumer items and on their homes. The massive debt boom was a reflection of the economic squeeze American families were in during the 2000s.
The sad part is that the Great Recession could have been prevented. The George W. Bush administration had several opportunities to seriously address the unfolding crisis.
There were several chances to promote faster growth. The first opportunity came early in 2001 when Congress negotiated a tax bill pushed for by the newly inaugurated president. Rather than shovel enormous amounts of money to the top income earners with a tax bill that cost well more than $1 trillion in the first 10 years, the money could have been used to stimulate economic growth by giving middle-class families a boost and by investing in needed infrastructure such as new energy sources.
OK, so policymakers missed the boat on this one. But Congress had another chance to address the looming crisis when President Bush pushed for another tax bill in 2003. This one was intended to stimulate growth through cuts in taxes for dividends and capital gains, among other things. The bill was derided by many economists as a woefully ineffective way to turn the economy around and to bring stronger job growth to American families. And true to this prediction, the years after the bill’s passage were marked with job growth that was about one-third below its long-term average.
And there were opportunities to start to tackle high costs, particularly in health care and energy. The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, a key piece of the Bush policy agenda, which added prescription drug benefits to Medicare, explicitly excluded two mechanisms that could have helped lower costs—allowing drug reimportation from other, cheaper countries such as Canada, and permitting Medicare to use its market power to negotiate lower drug prices.
In addition, several versions of an energy bill that would have brought more alternative fuels and promoted greater energy efficiency were negotiated but never passed—in large measure because President Bush either did not make energy reform his priority or because he directly opposed the upfront costs necessary to invest in the country’s energy future.
We are now climbing out of the hole that the failed economic policies of the Bush administration created. That’s why the more proper name for the Great Recession should be the Bush Recession.
Indeed, President Obama took office and led the economy out of recession in June 2009, though much more remains to be done. Household wealth has been growing, at least outside of housing wealth, because the stock market has been doing OK. American families are now down only $12.8 trillion from where they were in June 2007. Job growth has come back for more than a year but we still have more than 7 million fewer jobs than at the start of the recession in December 2007. And the unemployment rate has been gradually declining from a high of 10 percent at the end of 2009.
Wealth would be much lower and unemployment much higher without the constant policy attention of the Obama administration. The administration took massive quick steps necessary to prevent another Great Depression with the passage of the stimulus packet in early 2009. It also paid constant attention to economic growth and the labor market with support for small businesses that couldn’t get credit; with a health insurance bill that promises to lower health care inflation; with a financial regulatory reform bill that will shine some lights on the shadier players in the financial market; with a push for an energy bill that would have promoted alternative fuels and increased energy savings; and with extended unemployment benefits for those caught in the mess due to no fault of their own.
As bad as the Great Recession was, it could have been much worse, even though that seems hard to believe. Remember that when conservatives try to run from the record of the Bush administration’s failed economic policies while also trying to reintroduce the very same failed policies. The consequences of conservatism were dire then and would be again.