The sluggish U.S. economy and the cost of this year's economic stimulus package will push the federal budget deficit into record territory in fiscal year 2009, the White House said Monday.The Office of Management and Budget said it expects next year's budget gap to soar to $482 billion, $75 billion higher than its previous estimate. The deficit for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, is projected to come in at $389 billion, $21 billion lower than the administration's February forecast.
To be sure, the OMB is believed to bias its estimates upward, so that it can have the joy of a downward adjustment at the mid-session budget review. Nonetheless, this sends a rather clear message: danger, Will Robinson!
As luck would have it, I was on a conference call with the McCain campaign this morning while they talked about their plans to make American jobs grow. As such things go, relieving the deadweight loss of income taxes is not a terrible strategy. The devil, however, is in the details. Particularly the details about where the money is coming from to pay for the tax cuts.
The majority of the federal budget is spent on a few things: entitlements, defense, and interest on the national debt. Which of these, I asked, as so many have before, is McCain going to cut? Well, erm, none. Not needed. We'll get there by attacking wasteful spending. Then sometime in the comfortably distant future, we'll reform social security and draw down spending in Iraq. It's all in The Plan. The problem is, they can't find an independant institution to sign off on the coherence of The Plan.
Not that Barack Obama impresses me all that much more--HIS plans rely on some rather heroic assumptions about health care costs. Either way, we're in for a bumpy ride. Can America get a second job?
Money fairies will solve all our fiscal problems.
Gee, politicians from both parties promising us a free lunch. Obama's lying; McCain may not be smart enough to know it's fantasy. Great choice.
This is such fucking bullshit. Megan, you need to call these lying scumbags out. Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses, record job growth, and record market growth. Bush, Cheney, and McCain and Co. destroyed this country.
We should have secured the Iraqi oil fields first and used the oil to help offset the costs of the war instead of just letting the Iraqis have it. But logic /= politically correct.
Entitlements are a great place to cut spending. I'm not sure how to do that and still get re-elected though. Means testing might work... if you have over a million in assets or over 100k in gross income (including non-earned income) you don't get a government check. The problem, as always, is unintended consequences.
Hmm... one simple way to increase taxes is eliminate deductions. Not politically easy, but it seems fair.
John McCain: More of the Same:
Don't forget that Clinton did that while raising taxes!!! The Horror!! And before some Republicans here get their panties in a twist, just remember that Ray-gun, for all his blathering, raised taxes as well.
Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses, record job growth, and record market growth.
Given that Clinton can't run again, what we need to know is: which of his policies were responsible for these happy developments? Because naturally we would want to implement those policies again, given how well they apparently worked.
You're all absolutely right. We should raise taxes on EVERYTHING and be just like the British. $4.00/gallon gas......what are you crying about. Let's kick it right up to $8.00/gallon. Heck, if they can pay for it and still be our partner in the war on terror, well, it's obvious that we don't know what WE'RE doing....sheesh
Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses
Wow, Clinton did that, did he? Are you sure it didn't have anything to do with globalization, technology, the economic cycle, or the actions of congress?
Let's not forget the collapse, in 1991, of the primary reason for the size of the DOD budget.
Pass the 1986 tax bill again, and cut entitlement defense spending, until the budget is balanced. No, I dodn't think I'll be elected to any political office anytime soon.
The lesson I took from the '90s was that gridlock stalled the growth of the federal government. Since it seems unlikely that there will be a Republican controlled Congress, the best was to get gridlock is to vote for McCain.
Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses, record job growth, and record market growth. Bush, Cheney, and McCain and Co. destroyed this country.
According to child psychologists, children aquire the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality at around five years' age IIRC. A somewhat lesser known fact is that some adults immediately forfeit it again after becoming political partisans.
Maybe we need a large deficit to make up for the slow economy? If consumers aren't spending, someone has to or we'll have increased unemployment.
And if the interest payments are such a problem, why not eliminate the longer term treasury securities. Aren't the short term securities closer to the Fed Funds rate? Which is pretty low right now.
Cutting entitlement spending will never fly. And higher taxes won't help the sluggish economy.
The best system for fiscal responsibility seems to be a president from one party and Congress in the hands of the other. That's what we had in the 1990s after the 1994 Republican landslide in Congress.
In terms of the deficit, the 40-year average deficit is 2.2% of GDP. That would be a bit over $300 billion right now. At roughly $500 billion, we're not in crazy territory, just above average. Also, remember that the $180 billion economic stimulus package is included. Assuming that's a one-shot event, we're not that bad.
What to do? Grow the economy. With growth, we have more tax revenues automatically. No need to raise taxes at all. Just figure out how to help the economy grow.
And higher taxes won't help the sluggish economy.
That was a major talking point in 1993 when Clinton got the not-ironically named Deficit Reduction Act (a progressive tax hike) passed with zero (0) Republican votes in the Senate. The Wall Street Journal and the rest of the Right Wing Noise Machine predicted a widespread financial diasater. Anyone remember what happened? Among other things, massive investment in the U.S., the rich got righer, but the rest of the country did well too. And the budget got balanced with a tidy sum left over for a rainy day. Did the WSJ and the rest of the choir (Megan, admit it, you were one of Them) ever apologize for getting it wrong wrong wrong? Of course not.
Obama's calling for a similar progressive tax hike, which will no doubt piss off the ultra rich, but they've done quite well under Bush (no one else has), and someone's going to have to pay for Cheney's disastrous war, let alone ignoring the August 6 PDB (and a crapload of other warnings).
Megan likes to hem and haw, pretending to be a conservative libertarian, but the massive, regressive tax cuts were a bad idea with Bush, Jr. (just ask Alan Greenspan---now, I mean), and they're an even worse idea under McCain. As with the Iraq Invasion, Megan eventually came around on the idea that extending the Bush Jr.'s regressive and massive tax cuts wouldn't be prudent (indeed, disastrous), but I wonder if she'll still endorse that idea rather than risk having access to McCain conference calls and what have you. One is curious.
I think we are a bit too rosy on the Clinton years. His heart was in the right place, but the budget was balanced on the back of a bubble: the dot.com bubble.
For example, Schwab, the broker, hired like crazy in 1998, 1999, 2000 in order to have enough brokers to serve their dot.com crazy clients. But what happened tail end of 2000? They froze hiring, and then in 2001 reversed course by firing the thousands they had just hired.
That happened across the economy, and part of our current bubble is from the low rates imposed to battle the collapse of the last bubble.
So you can't view Clinton's achievements in isolation because the following years unwound a lot of the false jobs, salaries and tax revenue created during his administration.
All of this is to say that things will be more complicated than merely duplicating what has occurred in the past. We are in a situation with no adequate model. But the last thing we probably need is someone who does not promise to make real changes, and we certainly need someone committed to working toward a real balanced budget so we can eventually be freed from so much going toward interest on the national debt.
I do like that Obama was meeting with people like Buffet, Volker, and others. At least he is getting feedback from many sources.
Gosh, maybe the fact that Obama's less likely to blunder us into another two trillion dollar war might be worth mentioning here?
Possibly, just possibly if Bush had not reduced taxes and gotten us involved in the Iraq debacle we would have had a couple of years of surpluses and this year's deficit wouldn't be so large. It's not that in bad financial times we ran deficits, but that we ran huge deficits during the good times as well.
The idea that we need to combat this with another round of huge tax cuts that benefit the rich and increased defense spending is ludicrous.
"...will push the federal budget deficit into record territory in fiscal year 2009 ... $482 billion."
Oh, come on. That's nowhere near record territory, and we all know it, it's projected at 3.3% of GDP. Deficits averaged more than that over the 20-year straight period from the mid-70s to mid-90s, often going over 5%.
Bush's deficits actually have been very modest, a lot smaller than his dad's for instance. Last year's was a piddling 1.2%.
It's not the current deficits that matter -- 3.x% could be run forever without increasing the national debt in real terms, since that's how fast the economy grows. So let's get *off* of talking about that, eh?
What MATTERS is the $2.1 trillion, with a "t", in entitlement liabilities that are being added each year to the $40 trillion present value that are already there.
Which CBO says is going to require a 50%-across-the-board income tax increase just by 2030 to only keep even with them, or else. In GDP terms that's bigger than all the tax increases after Pearl Harbor to fight WWII. And 2030 ain't 75 years away.
You like tax increases? Consider that.
Let's get the candidates talking about THAT. And let's get the press members who participate in budget conference calls talking about THAT.
There are five and only five things that really matter to the fiscal health of the US: Medicare, Medicare, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, and how they are going to get paid for.
All the rest is worrying about if you have too much ice in your drink while sailing on the Titanic.
"Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses, record job growth, and record market growth."
In the run-up debate to the 1995-1996 government shutdowns, in how many years did Newt Gingrich want to balance the budget, in how many years did Bill Clinton want to balance it, and how many years did it actually take (if you don't count "non-discretionary spending")? I think the actual record shows that neither one had anything to do with it.
That was a major talking point in 1993 when Clinton got the not-ironically named Deficit Reduction Act (a progressive tax hike) passed with zero (0) Republican votes in the Senate. The Wall Street Journal and the rest of the Right Wing Noise Machine predicted a widespread financial diasater. Anyone remember what happened? Among other things, massive investment in the U.S., the rich got righer, but the rest of the country did well too. And the budget got balanced with a tidy sum left over for a rainy day. Did the WSJ and the rest of the choir (Megan, admit it, you were one of Them) ever apologize for getting it wrong wrong wrong? Of course not.
What, specifically, did they "get wrong"?
On the economic side, Clinton's entire administration would have been the budget sinkhole of the century if HillaryCare (defeated in August 1994, midway into Clinton's first term) had been implemented. That aside, Clinton still would not have been able to claim surplus or balanced budget if the dot-com bubble had not arrived almost simultaneously with the collapse of cold war, and if he hadn't been gridlocked against Congressional republicans starting from the second half of his first term. Much of the economic growth was destroyed by the United States' second largest economic recession after the Great Depression, the warning signs of which were present in late 2000, well before Clinton left office in January 2001.
On the domestic policy side, Clinton and Gingrich fought each other all the way to a government shutdown over whether or not the budget should be balanced, and if so, over what spending limitations. The much-ballyhooed and largely successful welfare reform bill was a product of Congress, not Clinton. Clinton's DoJ was responsible for the botched Waco raid and likewise the removal of Elian Gonzales from US relations and territory with heavily-armed federal agents.
On the foreign policy side, WTC1 was attempted early in Clinton's first term (one month after his innaguration), and the terrorists were so appeased by his moderated, law-enforcement oriented foreign policy response in the subsequent eight years that they spent most of them planning and executing the groundwork for 9/11.
This is all recent history, accessible at fingertip with the same technology that allows all of us to post here. And just to preempt the next red herring, note that the above data is factually relevant information without any reference to Clinton's sexual indiscretions and subsequent Starr witch hunt. So: What's your excuse for not knowing it?
As to Clintonomics, let's remember...
[] He was elected after promising "middle class tax cut" throughout his campaign. That ended the day he got elected.
(Well, FDR ran in 1932 promising to balance the budget by cutting the federal payroll, and in 1940 promising "over and over" that he'd keep America's sons out of foreign wars. So why anyone takes seriously what politicians promise or don't promise in an election campaign is beyond me ... they are only going to say what helps them get elected. What else can they do? Any inconvenient truths they mutter will be entirely by mistake.)
[] Clinton's own budget projections were for worsening deficits forever, even after his big tax increase. He and his own people never believed for a moment that they were shrinking the deficit, look at their own published statements and numbers from the time -- it came as a shock to them.
Clinton was simply in the boat in when the flood tide came in -- and he and his partisans have been taking credit for raising the water level ever since. He was the reverse-Hoover, who was unlucky enough to be in the boat when the flood tide went out, and was blamed for it ever after even though he had nothing to do with it.
Presidents have precious damn little to do with the business cycle, in spite of all the credit they take for it when it's good and blame that's thrown at them over it when it's bad.
[] When Clinton and the Dems in Congress reigned toghether for his first two years they were big spenders with big spending plans. Remember, oh, national health care?
[] After Clinton's amazing political bungling handed the House to the Repubs in '94, to Newt's admitted shock, an era of relatively responsible govt spending returned, as he blocked the Repubs' worst pork and logrolling spending schemes, and they blocked his. (Much as when Bush the Elder had to deal with a Dem Congress.) It became the era of big social initiatives like "Midnight Basketball", remember?
Fiscal responsibility, thy name is "Divided Government".
[] When the tax revenue flood came surging in creating the surplus, it was a shock to everyone, as mentioned above.
But immediately upon the budget hitting surplus, all the paygo rules and spending caps that had been in place since Bush I came right off, and Bill and Newt began shoveling out the money as fast as they could agree to. "$5 billion for you, $5 billion for me..." Rudy Penner, then head of CBO, has talked about this.
Of course, the leaders of two parties can't agree to blow through money nearly as fast as the leaders of one party, as Bush the Younger and the Repubs proved when they took sole control of the surplus.
Lessons going forward:
[] If you want fiscal responsibility, vote for McCain. Period. It doesn't matter what his stands on the issues are. Fiscal responsibility, thy name is "Divided Government". It's that simple.
[] The tax increases needed by 2030 to fund Medicare and SS are more than seven times larger than the 1993 increase that Clinton managed to get through a Democratic House by one vote, and a Democratic Senate on a tie-breaker.
As I mentioned above, in GDP terms this is bigger than all the tax increases after Pearl Harbor to fight WWII, and they go up from there forevermore.
Without that increase or comparable-sized spending cuts, S&P projects that the credit rating of the US starts falling in 2017 and hits "junk" in 2027, and CBO projects that interest-compounded deficits cause US GDP to start falling in the 2040s, until "the end" comes about two-thirds of the way through the 75-year projection.
If your issue is fiscal responsibility ... 2017, 2027 and 2030 aren't so far away. This is the issue. And 95% of what matters for this is Medicare, Medicare, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
"According to child psychologists, children aquire the ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality at around five years' age IIRC. A somewhat lesser known fact is that some adults immediately forfeit it again after becoming political partisans."
Good old ad hominem in place of an argument.
Jim Glass has it exactly correct. If you really care about fiscal responsibility, vote for McCain. McCain's proposals on tax cuts and other taxing/spending issues is completely irrelevant- with a Democratic House and Senate, his proposals are dead on arrival.
The worst presidential vote I ever made was voting for Bush in 2000. If I could change one thing in the last 10 years, I would add 500 votes to Al Gore's total in Florida. Divided government is the only remedy.
Yancey,
Don't forget the correlary, which is that it is imperative to vote for Democratic congressmen.
What a shock that neither nominee has a good plan for getting the Federal Government books in order! I seem to recall there was a candidate poo-pooed by our hostess who was a LOT more hawkish in his fiscal prescriptions. I think his name started with an 'R' and ended with an 'on Paul.'
But what do I know? I'm just a silly Gen-X/Yer who gets to look forward to paying nearly confiscatory taxes for massive entitlements for the rest of my life.
I dunno, Yancy, I'm pretty happy with Bush's SCOTUS picks; he did better than most Republican presidents, and a lot better than Gore...
Rob,
In my opinion, that was his only plus, and one can certainly argue that plus will pay off for years and years to come, I suppose.
"Fiscal responsibility, thy name is "Divided Government".
The last 2 years of growing deficits should say there's more to it than this.
"Good old ad hominem in place of an argument."
Because the original "argument" was so scintillating it could not be debunked in any way.
Childish posts deserve child-like responses.
For the morons who think Clinton 'generated' a surplus, the credit goes to Gingrich, not Clinton.
Plus, Clinton slashed scientific research, which Bush restored, as per this official chart. Leftists are very anti-science.
Re: "Particularly the details about where the money is coming from to pay for the tax cuts."
Where does the money come from to pay for your salary cuts? You don't spend as much! Or, you go more into debt because of your profligate spending. Behavior that treats spending as a constant or an ever-increasing fixture is simply imprudent at best.
"The last 2 years of growing deficits should say there's more to it than this."
Well, that would be assuming facts not in evidence - like Bush is a Republican, for instance.
I would suggest that the argument for divided government only works best when the Democrats control the White House, and the Republicans control Congress, or at least that is a much more historically accurate portrayal. I would add that while it sounds like a good idea, it alone will not produce a balanced budget and those who think otherwise are deluding themselves to the point of sheer idiocy. What is needed for a balanced budget is to have that divided government have a Congress that believes in a balanced budget as the Republicans did when they first gained control in the nineties and before they decided to try to bribe their way to continued power with spending for all. Even better would be to have both the executive and legislative branches believe in a balanced budget. Since I see no reason to believe that those running for office--from either party--believe in balancing the budget, I don't expect one, but I would agree that electing McCain would likely produce less growth in the budget deficits than electing Obama assuming that the Democrats retain control of Congress.
In short, if you want a balanced budget elect people who promise one and then kick them out if they don't deliver on their promises, no exceptions. Don't expect a balanced budget from those who promise such things as universal healthcare, or fixing the infrastructure, or any of those other promises both parties are making. To do otherwise simply shows you are either not serious or that you are delusional.
Give me peace, a fast-growing economy, and a congress disinclined to create new entitlements and I'll give you a surplus in five years. Guaranteed. All other methods will fail.
From the US Treasury website here are the deficit numbers at the end of the government fiscal year going back to 1993. Please forgive any roundoff errors.
Year - Deficit($B) - Increase($B)
1993 - 4,411 - -
1994 - 4,693 - 281
1995 - 4,974 - 281
1996 - 5,225 - 251
1997 - 5,413 - 188
1998 - 5,526 - 113
1999 - 5,656 - 130
2000 - 5,674 - 18
2001 - 5,807 - 133
2002 - 6,228 - 421
2003 - 6,783 - 555
2004 - 7,379 - 596
2005 - 7,933 - 554
2006 - 8,507 - 574
2007 - 9,008 - 501
2008 - 9,537 - 530
2008 is to July 28.
Obviously a huge bounce during the Bush years but contrary to some earlier posts there never was a surplus under Clinton. It was only projected. Also, the 2001 numbers, given that Bush had been in office only 9 months can't really be considered his fault and the number had already risen to the 1999 level.
After 9/11 there was a substantial recession and of course Katrina. Also, don't forget the record revenues that started in 2005. I wouldn have expected the numbers to bounce around more. They really don't. Where's the bump up for the Iraq war and where's the drop now that Democrats control both houses and write the spending bills?
Thanks to Glass for restoring reason to this thread. Not that authoritarians of either stripe will heed it, but there we are. Love that two-party system.
McArdle, why is it so spectacularly difficult for writers to grasp a broader perspective on what's really going on? Ultimately, this has not a damn thing to do with either the annual budget deficit or the goofball who signs it with the presidential pen. The real problem is systemic and that takes a functioning Congress to repair.
I think you can see the problem there.
This has everything to do with major change (ironically. Hi Obamessiah!) Major change as is embodied in just a few basic points:
1. The US's fractional reserve system simply cannot cope with a radical shift in manufacturing bases (and global cultural differences): We're spending based on printing a nearly exponential money supply and there's literally no way to pay it back -- it's 100% debt. So, pay down the national debt plus entitlement obligation totaling some sixty trillion? Forget about it. To your point, we're adding to the debt at record levels -- check the recent Freddie and Fannie bailouts.
2. Add to that the simple fact that the manufacturing Chinese (and others) save, while the US spends itself literally into more debt than the world has ever seen because by now we cannot do otherwise and still, somehow, call it "economic progress". Which we do, straightfacedly. That's right, America has gone from richest and most productive to debtors of record-level proportions in only about a half century. We collectively owe more than the rest of the planet combined. We do so because we milked every last dime out of a paper dollar, and also called that "economic progress".
3. Factor in (no pun) a trillion and a half dollars in vanishing real estate and other credit market "wealth". Perfect storm, anyone?
4. Position a visibly panicked Fed in a position to get Congress to give it, the origination of these serious issues, vast new powers over Wall Street (and then have Congress give the IRS the new power to monitor every credit card transaction made.)
5. Selectively bail out your Congressional pals, the Banks We Can't Allow to Fail. Put it all on the taxpayer. Create a terribly artificial economic environment that actually creates incentives to abuse the credit markets and disincentives to pay your bills.
So, how could any of this be solved by either candidate? And why does core-level analysis of what's really going on never make these discussions?
"Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses, record job growth, and record market growth."
All that record growth happened after republicans took control of congress. No one on this site has made an effective argument that the largesse of the late 1990’s was due to the actions of Clinton. Remember which branch of government passes laws and budgets.
Jim Glass posted the best comment on this article so far arguing that the combination of a democratic president and a republican congress helped the economy surge in the late 1990’s.
Many have also pointed out that much of the economic surge was the result of the internet bubble, and consequently, was fake economic growth that we paid for the by recession of 2000 – 2002.
My take:
I believe that some of the growth of the late 1990’s was real and that the primary reason for the growth was vastly increased productivity due to networking and internet technology advances (although the arguments Jim made probably played their part). The second half of the 1990s is when most stores and businesses went online and when company wide intranets with central storage for shared data instantly accessible to anyone in the company become ubiquitous (network drives). Technology was primarily responsible for the surplus income of the US government in the second half of the 1990’s.
Breakthroughs in technology will continue to be the main reason the economy grows in the coming decades. Key advances in energy technology for both solar panels, biological generation of bio-diesel, and maybe nuclear power will be what put the US economy back on a path of ‘late 90’s’ like growth. I predict will start seeing growth like that again in 2012 or 2013 when the current avenues of solar and bio-diesel research mature and become marketable.
Ten makes some good points too. All the technology in the world is unlikely to bail us out of the amount of debt we are in if we continue going in the way we are. This debt won’t destroy out country, but it will, eventually, result in another 1930’s era great depression and possibly WWIII as other nations try to force the United States to make good on impossibly huge debts sometime in the next century.
One of the reasons I’m learning Chinese is so that I have a country to flee to and work in if/when this second Great Depression occurs.
RE: Clinton took record deficits and turned them into record surpluses...
You credit the wrong person; it was Bill Gates who was most responsible for the surpluses of the 90's. That's when the marriage of Windows and the Internet stormed down the isle of Wall Street.
Now a new reality has set in, the existence of two opposing forces; those who can operate a computer, and those who can't. Congress, for example, is securely ensconced in the latter group. So too the government bureaucracies.
And until they're completely removed, we're stuck with the old time politics - and wild stories about the fiscal genius of Bill Clinton.
If anything, it was his slowness to regulate the new economy, to fetter it with typical, draconian regulations - that allowed the creation of wealth during his administration. Thanks to the blinding speed of Bill Gates/Microsoft.
We can use the Zimbabwe method. I hear it can work to elimnate debt by making the value of money worthless.
When the Republicans took control of Congress in the 1990s they noted s very simple fact: If Federal spending growth, with entitlements, were restrained to the CPI the deficit would shrink to nothing in just a few years. That's because in non-recession years GDP grows faster than inflation and to have a recession you have to do something stupid like raise taxes.
Clinton started off claiming they couldn't balance the budget in 100 years, then he backed down to 15 years, then 10 years, then 5 years, and he ended his term in the White House taking personal credit for balancing the budget. The budget wasn't *really* balanced: Bubba played games with the numbers and put off military expenditures to make it seem balanced, but it was well on the road to being balanced when the dot com bust caused a recession in early 2000.
People - usually Democrat shills or misguided GOP ultra conservatives - like to say that after 1998 the Republicans started spending like drunken sailors but please to note that it wasn't until 2006 and the return of the Democrats to power that all the budget rules enacted during the GOP tenure were swept away and deficit *really* started exploding. So much more could have been done if the Senate Democrats hadn't filibustered every budget constraining measure to death from 1998 on.
I'm seeing a lot of people doubting the power of the O to make it all better. Don't you get it!?! HOPE and CHANGE will make money fall from the sky--paper money, so no one gets hurt. What is an O? It's a circle, and if we have hope, we will follow that circle back to the beginning, before Bush, back when Iraq was peaceful and happy, and we were all smoking dot-com stock from golden bongs filled with Champagne! What is money? It's large denominations of CHANGE! Think about it.
Obama/Jesus '08
$2T for the Iraq war? A baragin I say. Think of the lost capital, jobs, lives we would have sustained from a continued war with terrorists in America.
The Left who want the rest of us to consider the feelings, humanity, and motives of our attackers never afford the same consideration to our current administration.
The mistake Bush makes is not insisting upon Americans accepting their fair share of the cost. No, he wants this war to be all but transperent on the home front.
These clinton "surpluses" of which some here speak, when did they happen? Let's talk reality here, not rosy-scenario projections.
Jim, that was sarcasm, right? Like Megan, I don't have a sense of humor or the ability to identify sarcasm, so I need to be sure.
Erm, The President is not in charge of domestic policy, the Congress is. As it happens, I'm none too happy about the prospect of a Senator vs. Senator Presidential race, but I have no problem whatsoever distinguishing between the presumptive candidates on the basis of national defense and foreign policy. I don't really care what they say, I look at their track records. What do you do?