Budgets past and present, or those who forget the past are condemned to fulfill it!

In the fall of 1994 the new Chrétien Liberal government had been in power just a bit more than a year.

Its big victory in 1993 came about largely on the strength of a “Red Book” platform, the centre piece of which was a promised major infrastructure program to stimulate the sluggish economy and get the unemployed back to work.

But almost immediately after that election the Liberal leadership -- especially Finance Minister Paul Martin -- wanted to pivot, and focus primarily on the government’s debt and year-to-year deficits.

The latest contrived showdown between Congressional Republicans and the White House is over what concessions the GOP will demand in order to increase the federal debt ceiling.

George Zornick of The Nation explains how the shakedown works:

Sunday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of B-movie actor-turned-conservative president, Ronald Wilson Reagan. On the eve of the centennial, economist Yves Smith talked Reaganomics on the Real News Network. Smith argues that Reagan's real legacy is the deregulation of the U.S. economy that set the stage for the economic meltdown of the late 2000s: