4 graphs on why we can't go Back to a GOP future

As I've mentioned in the last day since lifetime grifter Paul Ryan was given the VP slot, expect the GOP to complain about the U.S. debt and try to claim that their policies will be the ones to restore a booming U.S. economy. There's one big problem with that claim- there's nothing in the last 30 years of reduced taxes on the rich and the corporate that bear this out.

On online article put all of these stats together about 2 weeks ago. You can go to Daily Kos to check it out if you want, as it's a combination of numerous studies and statstics from government agencies thrown together in one place.

First off, take a look at the $14 trillion national debt, and you'll see it has a whole lot less to do with Obama than it does Reagan/Bush (as usual, click on the graphs to make them bigger).

Add it up and you have:
$9.5 trillion GOP presidents since '80
$3.8 trillion Dem presidents since '80
$1.0 trillion before Reagan.

And notice that the smallest additions since 1980 was during the Clinton years, which were the only years in the group that had 39% top tax rates on the rich. Don't think that's not a coincidence.

The next chart will show the linkage between the lowering of taxes on the rich and corporate and more money moving upward to the rich and away from everyone else. Check out how the share of income going to the bottom 90% of earners was steady at around 65-70% for 40 years once World War II broke out, and going all the way to Reagan's election in 1980. And then watch how it drops.

That's right, by the time the Bush era ended, the top 10% were making about as much in income as the lower 90%. The only other time that happened? 1929, and I think we all know what happened then.

When you have an economy based 70% on consumption, and once you understand that rich people don't consume extra money as much as they hoard profits and send funds into legalized gambling like stocks and real estate speculation, you can see how hard it can be for an economy to have widely-felt growth. And how lowering taxes further on the rich (which Romney-Ryan want to do) will make it more likely for this destructive trend to accelerate, and another inequality-based crash to come.

Lastly, Romney's plan makes our deficit much worse than Obama's plans. Look at this chart, and see how Romney fails, partially due to weak revenues, and partially due to exploding spending on the military. Even the extra, economy-slowing budget cuts of the Ryan plan doesn't do as well as the policies under Obama, because Obama and Dems know that revenues matter when you discuss deficits.

And the last chart is a reprise from last week, as it shows that Obama has created more jobs and presided over more economic growth than Bush's first term.

If the trends of the last 2 years continue, Obama will be president in a time when nearly 5 million private sector jobs will have been added between the start of 2010 and the 2012 elections. It may not be the 20 million jobs created in Clinton's 8 years, but it's a whole lot more than I think a lot of us thought we'd be at this time in 2009, as we found out just how badly this country had been screwed over by the Dubya years (with Paul Ryan approving of every one of Dubya's budgets when the GOP ran Congress from 2001-2007).

Now that you see all of these charts, I got a simple question. Why in the world would we ever go back to the losing strategies of GOP presidents in the '80s, '90s and '00s for the '10s? But that's what the Republicans are running on. Good luck with that in the fact-based world, guys.