Clinton and the Dot Com Bubble

[Narkos]

I'm having one of those droning arguments with one of my libertarian friends who says that Clinton's economic performance was phony since all the increases in federal revenues were from the dot com bubble. I say, that might be true, but at least he had a somewhat balanced budget. Does anyone know what the percentage of revenue from capital gains was from '94-'00 (or where I could find it? He also made the claim that the decreases in revenue after the Bush tax cut were not from the tax cuts but from the bursting of the dot com bubble....any insight on that?

[The Straight Story]

1. It's all Jesus' fault; here's how -

He was supposed to come back in 2000, but got busy. People thought he was on the way and were spending money and trying to look busy, and we wanted one last blow out.

When he didn't come back, it all collapsed.

The end.

[cnk_clark]

2. Recessions happen every 4-7 years or so.

It's just an economic cycle.

Clinton didn't cause the bubble. It was just greed by investors that bought into all the hype on the dot com's. Once they saw that they were buying lots of air and little substance they sold out and the market collapsed.

The interesting thing is that this was a capital recession verses a consumer recession.

The economy is mostly independent of the government unless you are Mugabe who fucked up Zimbabwe in a matter of a few years. Government can trash an economy in a short time with poor decisions and ill thought out policies.

It takes decades to build a good solid economy.

For the most part government should stay out of the economy as much as they can. Politicians know very little about economics and some of their proposals are as stupid as I have ever seen.

The thing that will doom us is Social Security. The US has promised over 35 trillion over the next 30 years to the baby boomers. There is no way we can afford to pay for that. We have waited too long to deal with it and it will require taxes to go sky high to cover the promises the US has made. There will be no money left for anything else.

Politicians have doomed us with promises they can't fund.

Thankfully I will be one of the first baby boomers to retire and will get my money but those retiring in 10-15 years will suffer big time.

[w4rma]

3. Old folks should be set on the curve to be sent off to the furnaces instead of keeping them around.

Old people are a burden on our economy and should killed off instead of allowed to retire. :sarcasm:

[cnk_clark]

4. I figure a good war or a pandemic would do the job.

We are slowly heading towards a serious population problem. History has shown that there are serious pandemics or wars every hundred years or so to keep the population in check.