I know lots of people are really football-starved at this time of the year, but I really can't stand all the hype that pre-season football gets right now.
This is BASEBALL SEASON!!! We are getting into the playoffs with the World Series just around the corner. I could care less about these meaningless pre-season football games!!
Yet the news media is sooooo intent on telling me everything about pre-seaon football - even broadcasting entire games as if it mattered -- Heck! Even rebroadcasting replays of meaningless pre-season games -- all to the exclusion of baseball.
Quit pre-empting my baseball games to show me these stupid pre-season football contests and maybe I would be a bit less grumpy. But as it is I want to throw things everytime I see the local sports newscast leading with football stories in the midst of the baseball playoffs.
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Jackie Calmes of the New York Times
had a great piece in the New York Times on Sunday about what makes up the national deficit.
What is most striking about it (as shown in the graph) is how little of it is made up of the extra spending that Obama pushed for in the budget. You can see way at the bottom of the graph are too itty bitty boxes, one for the non-defense discretionary spending and the other for the energy investments that Obama requested.
Republicans screamed to high heaven about this extra spending and acted like it makes up the entire deficit alone.
Not hardly. In fact, when looked at in context, it is almost inconsequential. Furthermore, as the article notes, it is completely paid for and then some by additional revenues and cuts that Obama made in the budget.
So the real fault for the deficit can be summed up in two ways (or maybe three) The fiscally irresponsible tax cuts that Bush & Co. pushed through in 2000 combined with the increased spending on Medicare and Social Security as health costs continued to spiral out of control during eight years of Republican mismanagement; Throw in all the money that Bush & Co. flushed away in Iraq and all the spending that had to be done to bailout the financial industry and the auto industry after Bush and the Republicans ran the nation's economy into the ground and Voila! We have a massive deficit when - under Clinton - we were supposed to have big surpluses.
Here is another good graph that illustrates the same thing:
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