Eric Byler, co-founder of the Coffee Party USA movement wrote a very prescient blog post on the budget deficit and debt ceiling dilemma we are currently going through. Unfortunately much of the information that is being promoted by the media is either misleading, lacking, or outright wrong.

Many want to place the blame solely on Right Wing media. Unfortunately the mainstream media has not given those stoked by the Right’s volume of misinformation a place to go that they can trust. Most have not attempted to assume that the average American as an intelligent being could analyze the information and come to the correct conclusion.

Instead Americans that get their information from Right Wing or Mainstream Media and radio are left with arguments mostly ideological and not based on factual assessments. Eric’s blog along with his cited links present an excellent starting point that can be corroborated by various irrefutable sources. Read it and make up your own mind. It is important that Americans take the responsibility to do their own research. Fed research can always be manipulated for an ideology whose implementation can negatively affect your economic well being. So are you wondering how you free yourself of your debt? You can find more at debtconsolidationusa.com.

$14 trillion in debt — ever wonder how we got there?

by Eric Byler

Egberto Willies’ first blog for Coffee Party USA set our on-line community ablaze by pointing out something few of us realized: Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 after telling the nation we had a debt crisis (when our federal debt was less than $1 trillion). He then proceeded to triple that debt during his 8 years in office, which suggests to me that those who encourage concern over our national debt during election season are not always serious about reducing it.

Now that electioneering has become the primary focus, if not only focus of our Congress, perhaps we should be even more skeptical of politicians who claim that reducing the debt is their chief concern.  For, it now looks as if Sen. Mitch “My-only-goal-is-to-make-Barack-Obama-a-one-term-president” McConnell’s “plan B” is the only option that will allow us to avoid the world’s first Great Depression On-Purpose. This compromise will be 95% electioneering, and 5% debt reduction — wait and see.

So, given that “debt demagoguery” is to become a central electioneering strategy for the foreseeable future, let’s delve a little deeper into what created the national debt, and made such a strategy possible.

This article, by Lori Montgomery of The Washington Post, interviews many of the main players during a crucial decision point in the early years of the second Bush administration.  It had to do with the federal surpluses achieved during the Clinton administration (notice that tragically too short yellow line in the chart above, when the debt as a percentage of GDP was going down during the late 1990’s).

One thing I learned from the article was that Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, resigned when it was decided that the Clinton era surpluses should be obliterated by huge spending increases coupled with huge tax cuts.  The article quotes O’Neill as saying, “I believed we needed the money to facilitate fundamental tax reform and begin working on unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare.”

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$14 trillion in debt — ever wonder how we got there? | Coffee Party