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[quote="Guest"][quote="Guest"]Mr. Frohbeiter, your beloved George Bush and his ilk caused the trillions of dollars deficit due for the most part to his unjust wars.  If you were a student of history you would also realize that the Wall Street bailout was imperative so that our whole economy would not collapse.  I have read your letters to the editors over the years and am always amazed by the fact that you are only concerned about your own pocketbook and have never made it a point to understand the basic fundamentals of the subjects that you  profess to know so much about.

Scott Siprelle is nothing but a wealthy investor who wants to be President.[/quote]

You are confusing deficit versus debt.  The deficit is the annual gap between what the government collects versus what it spends.  The debt is the cumulative amount owed from all those deficits over the years.  Obama was the first president to have a deficit in excess of a trillion dollars, though in fairness the circumstances were unique.  And you are attributing too much of the total contribution to the cost of the wars and exclusively to latter Bush.  In fact, Reagan and the first Bush also contributed substantially to the debt and it was Reagan who first starting the exponentially mushrooming of national debt, as a matter of policy, when he reduced taxes but increased spending (he famously said our national “debt is good for the economy”).  That has continued ever since, except briefly during the Clinton administration.

But you are certainly correct that we had no justification for invading Iraq, which had absolutely nothing to do with defending against terrorism and in fact made the terrorist threat worse.  And you are correct that most of our debt was created by the big spending, big government Republican administrations.  Obama’s term is certainly making it worse, but he inherited the vast majority of it from Republicans.  (Curious that Republicans against the debt now didn’t have an issue with it then?)

As for the Wall Street bail-out it’s interesting to note, with the hindsight of history, that it will have cost us very little.  We invested over a trillion dollars in those bail-outs but the final tab is in the low tens-of-billions (smaller than many entitlement programs you’ve never heard of) and most of that is the small portion that went not to Wall Street but to the auto industry.  Almost every bank and finance firm that was bailed out will have either paid it back or the government will have made it back by selling shares it received from the bailout.  The profits made off these sales are offsetting most of the rest of the losses from the small percent of banks that still failed.  I think the bank reform didn’t go nearly far enough and Wall Street got off with a minor wrist-slap and is already clearly back to the same risky tricks that could cause this all to happen again.  But it would be inaccurate to say the government or taxpayers lost much in that bail-out.[/quote]

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