On the recordJune 7, 2011
as I was doing my exercise this morning, I heard on the news the announcement that 10 years ago today, when President Bush--I could hear his voice celebrating the tax cuts for the wealthy--said: I know we have these huge surpluses, but these moneys are the people's money and, therefore, he was going to do something about it. He did that big time. He certainly did away with those huge surpluses we had, which amounted to trillions of dollars. He did it in a number of different ways. We had a program developed during the Clinton years called pay- go. That meant if someone had a new program they wanted to initiate, they had to pay for it either with new revenue or take money from an existing program. It worked extremely well. That is one reason, and one of the main reasons, we were able to develop the huge surpluses we did during the Clinton years. We were paying down the debt in the Clinton years. Some said it was too quickly. Well, another way that the President got rid of that huge surplus was the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq alone now is estimated to be about a $1\1/2\ trillion--all borrowed money. We also know how important it is to create jobs. Now, as a result of the President finding himself in a huge hole as a result of the policies of the Bush administration, he decided that something had to be done. We passed the Economic Recovery Act. It created millions of jobs and saved millions of jobs. Was it enough?…
