...I guess if I follow the logic of the Republicans on Capitol Hill, how do you explain last month's unemployment figures? Current tax rates, 550,000 jobs -- what happened?

Q This is a unique moment. (Laughter.)

MR. GIBBS: Apparently, it always is.

I was having an argument with a conservative colleague today, who was upset that Obama wants to make a cut in the mortgage interest deduction for high-earners.  Apparently raising any tax at all is the end of the world.

"But haven't I heard you admit that the mortgage deduction is bad policy and should be eliminated altogether?" I said.  "That it artificially subsidizes homeownership way beyond natural levels and that's a bad thing?"

"Right, right," he replied, "but now is not the time!"

There's something to what he says, of course.  But the problem is, when the time IS right, there never seems to be the political will to do the right thing.  Look at the 2000 election, where we could have made a fiscally responsible choice and continued working on the national debt.  No, no, said the electorate (well, roughly half of it), we'd rather just have a tax cut!

Thats 66.7 billion a year.

"... the war (in Iraq) will cost approximately $12 billion a month, ..., Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

They were wrong.  In spades.  And Democrats and the White House should shove it down their throats every time they bring up spending and taxes.

Howard Dean was right about at least one thing:  "You can't trust Republicans with your money!"

Right.  Debt piled on debt, theft and corruption and now it's up to the Democrats to pay the damn bills the Republicans ran up by charging everything they didn't privatize, including two ongoing wars.

There were also other factors at play as well: Peace Dividend, Tech Boom, Dot Com bubble, cheap labor (i.e. outsourcing) becoming more prominent as the fall of the Eastern Bloc, etc...

In other words, the Clinton tax hikes may or may not have been the primary factor in everything that happened. Not to mention deficit reduction instead of expansion.

I'm not saying that Clinton was bad or good, just saying that causation and correlation are different animals.

sheesh.....

Everyone has their own theories about Bill Clinton's term as President. About the only thing we know for certain is that a snapshot of his last day in office would show that the country, at that moment, was substantially better off than a snapshot of his first day would show. Now, how much of that success should be credited directly to actions Clinton took is how he should be judged. Similarly, some of the bad things that occurred in GWB's term found their genesis during Clinton's term.

And therein lies the problem; we like to argue our positions by pointing at snapshots. The Republicans have mastered that technique; it constitutes their  entire "philosophy. But the Democrats aren't far behind.

Yes, Clinton had the wind of the tech-boom at his back. But, Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt had great wars. Would they have been "Great Presidents" sans the wars? Who knows.

Many people like to point out that GWB inherited trade policies (Nafta, for example)that haven't worked out so great for some workers. But, since a President only gets, at most, eight years, who know what changes Clinton might have made as those policies worked themselves out.

From his latest column in the NY Times:

that is one difference from 1991.

also--- don't forget that after 1993, the Republicans controlled Congress and actually put the appropriations bills together for Clinton to sign...