Its just a treasure trove of valid information

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/23/facebook-posts/viral-facebook-post-says-barack-obama-has-lowest-s/

Brendan wrote:

“Obama has pushed for lowering college costs and freezing student loan interest rates, but at what cost to our future? Such measures will only hurt the economy as more and more banks go under (and get bailed out with taxpayer dollars). Obviously, someone has to pay the tab.”

The government can only control the rates of federally student loans. These are the only rates Obama can freeze. Private loans are at the discretion of the market. Since federally loans are direct from the Government to the student, no bank can possibly go bankrupt making these loans, since no bank makes the loans.

I left out important statistics because I didn’t feel like spending more than a little awhile on this piece. Given more time, I would have analyzed those.

The point I was trying to make, was that using statistic and logic, you can show that Reagan was in no way a fiscal conservative. Brendan claims to follows these ideas, and used them hammer home his points, but he doesn’t. This becomes especially apparent if you read his article every week, like I do. That’s why I told him to stop lying, because every week he says things that are demonstrably false.

There’s a difference between being dishonest and being incomplete. Brendan writes things that are false. I didn’t have time to do a complete analysis. That’s a big difference.

One of Brendan’s point was that Obama is bad for students and Republicans/Conservatives are good. It’s not a childish statement to say that “conservatives (Republicans) don’t care about students”, in light of their voting record. The continually voting to hurt students. Most recently 100% of them voted to raise students loan debt rates. So yes, they don’t care about students.

Human capital is one component of GDP. Education is that factory that improves human capital. Tell people to get less education hurts human capital.

There’s a difference between Unregulated and Free. If a government regulation prevents deceptions or abuse and creates a more open market, it’s creates a free-er market. Most free market supporters are actually championing unregulated markets, which would be much worse.

There’s truth that easy money enables inflation. Easy to get student loans allows colleges, especially unscrupulous “For Profit” ones, to jack up tuition every year. If students couldn’t borrow the money then colleges couldn’t raise their tuition. But then you have to analyze the productivity rates between having a less educated human capital and more educated human capital and does the loss/gain in productivity (and salary) justify lending the money. How productive and competitive would America be if our population had the educational opportunities of a third world country? Perhaps you want to take on this analysis?

Mike, you left out important statistics too. You didn’t adjust for inflation. So lets do that.

To help everyone “get the the picture”, let’s adjust Reagan’s deficit for inflation.

There’s a handy tool on the Bureau of Labor Statistic website we can use:
http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/histdebt/histdebt.htm

I’m going to use these tables. They run 10/1 – 9/30, but it won’t make too much of a difference in the final analysis. (But, I figured I should post that before someone says, ha-ha look you didn’t use the right numbers, without themselves posting another set.)

The tool doesn’t like big numbers, but just reduce things by a few decimal places and then restore them after the calculation if you use scientific notation. Isn’t scientific notation fun? I divided by a billion, then multiplied it back when I used the BLS tool. So there’s sound round errors in the 6 decimal. But whats a few million when you are talking trillions of dollars?

Reagan’s Budget deficit:

Nominal Dollars / Real Dollars (2012)

1981: $997,855 / $2,525,770
1982: $1,142,034 / $2,722,950
1983: $1,377,210 / $3,181,480
1984: $1,572,266 / $3,481,760
1985: $1,823,103 / $3,898,410
1986: $2,125,303 / $4,461,680
1987: $2,350,277 / $4,760,240
1988: $2,602,337 / $5,061,360

These are in Millions of dollars, rounded appropriately. Add 6 zeros after every one (10^6). Or better yet, use the actually numbers if you have a good calculator or Excel handy.

Reagan’s total deficit 1981-1989, nominal dollars was $1.754 trillion. In real terms, in 2012 dollars that’s, $3.410 trillion. Double. So you get the picture. Obama has accrued a bigger debt that Reagan? Why?

If you read the crap that comes out of the Heritage Foundation, they call Obama’s current budget “unprecedented”. (http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/budget-create-deficits) Well actually it’s not. Unprecedented means its never happened before. The last time America had deficits in excess of GDP we were fighting two wars against the Japanese and the Germans. What do you know, we’re fighting two wars now, too. And Obama killed the main bad guy (same day he released his long form birth certificate too) How many boots on the ground wars was Reagan fighting?

One thing about borrowing money. If you are going to borrow money, do it when the interest rate is low.

Here’s the historical interest rates for Reagan and Obama. I using 10 year t-bills.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/data.htm

1981 13.92%
1982 13.01%
1983 11.10%
1984 12.46%
1985 10.62%
1986 7.67%
1987 8.39%
1988 8.85%
1989 8.49%

2009 3.26%
2010 3.22%
2011 2.78%
2012 3.25% (current rate 5/22/12 as in the WSJ)

Only a fool borrows money when the interest rate is the highest it’s been in a generation. The wise man borrows when it’s the lowest it’s been since 1955.

Reagan was borrowing as much money as possible when the rates were the highest they had been since WWII.

Do Fiscal Conservatives borrow money when the interest rate is the highest it’s been since World War II? or when it’s the lowest it’s been in over 50 years?

Reagan was not a fiscal conservative.

And didn’t Boehner and he’s cronies play chicken with the debt ceiling last summer, and as a result the US credit rating was lowered from AAA to AA+? If current Republicans really cared about the deficit, the last thing that would do would to behave in a way that worsens our credit rating and making our deficit payments more. But, that’s another article.

I’m going to leave for someone else to figure out how much the US has paid to service Reagan’s debt in the generation since he left office.

To summarize:

1) Yes, my analysis could have gone further, but you didn’t go further either, completely leaving off the inflation adjustments.

2) Reagan demonstrably was not a Fiscal Conservative

3) Compounding interests is a bitch.

a) not having a preview or edit tool to post comments sucks.

Under Obama’s term as of today, just under 3.5 years, he has accrued ~$5.1 billion in debt compared to Reagan’s $1.754 over a period of 8 years. There should be adjustment for inflation but you get the picture.

As a percent of GDP, budgets under Obama have ran deficits of 9.9%, 10%, 9.2%, and 5.6%. Under Reagan, deficits as a percent of GDP were 4%, 6%, 4.8%, 5.1%, 5%, 3.2%.

It’s funny that you ask Brendan to stop lying. Why weren’t you honest in exploring other aspects of deficit spending and debt? And why do you make childish statements like “conservatives don’t care about students?” Perhaps free market supporters don’t want to provide artificially low interest rates so that the higher education bubble can continue to inflate and mis-allocate our human capital, while further pushing students and the public into debt?

Brendan gets one week to write an article and this is what he churns out? a bunch of made up statistics worded to form lies?

Give Mr. Cody Brendan’s current salary and I will double that just so I get the chance to read something that makes me feel like i’m in college every once in a while.

From the beginning of his term, to the end, after 8 years, Reagan increased the national debt 189% at an Average Annual Rate of 23.6%. No president since WWII, even comes close.

On 12/31/1980, at the end of Carter’s term, the National Debt was $930,210,000,000. By 12/31/1988 it was $2,684,392,000,000. Do the math. Divide the second number by the first and you 2.88579138, subtract a 1 keeping everything the same, multiply by 100 and you get 189% increase in the debt. The notion that Reagan was fiscally conservative is in no way born by the facts. No wonder people think conservatives live in an alternate universe. Up is down, austerity is good, deficits don’t matter, Reagan was fiscally conservative, Jesus wants you to get rich and keep it, screw the poor.

You are out of your mind.

Let’s compare apples to apples. At the end of Reagan’s 3rd year (12/31/1983) he had exploded the debt to 1,410,702,000,000. Again, divide the second by the first, subtract one, multiply by 100, and you get 52% increase.

For Obama, the numbers are $12,311,349,677,512 and $15,125,898,976,397. Doing the math, you get a 22% increase in the debt.

Obama is 30% more fiscally conservative than Reagan.

I leave everyone with this one fact to drive the point home. Last week, the Murdock owned, conservative Wall Street Journal, 100% of Republicans voted to blocked consideration of a Democratic measure to keep the interest rate on new subsidized federal student loans from doubling.

100% of Republicans want your student loan rates to double. Republicans and conservatives don’t care about students.

Brendan, stop lying to the people to make your point.

I feel bad telling a senior at CalPoly how to do basic math, but since you obviously can’t do it, I am compelled.

Keith Cody
MBA student – Orfalea College of Business
BA Economics – UCSB

Source:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

I demand that the Mustang Daily require this abonination to the Cal Poly name to add citations to all the bullshit he is spewing out. Just because this is an opinion piece does not mean he has the right to publish clearly unsupported arguments and pass them as fact. Just because this poof has a weekly column does not give him the right regurgitate the ignorant views his parents passed on to him in between episodes of Bill O’reilly and the 700 club.

In my eyes the Mustang Daily is no better than a high school news paper as long as this guy is still on board (as well as his editor).

“the GOP tends to use solid statistics to hammer its points.” Come on man. If by solid statistics you mean statistics pulled out of thin air, then yes this quote is true.