Why do some liberals measure success by how much money they can borrow?

Without using other people's money they would have nothing. Separate New York and California from the USA and they could not stand on their own. Not enough energy or food to sustain themselves. So they beat their chests about how great they are [as long as they have your money].

Cheers for Mommanuke! She nailed this one.

Simon Johnson, a former IMF chief economist, and James Kwak, a corporate consultant, both are "deficit hawks," and argue that the growing US national debt really does need to be controlled. They explain ways to do this in their book "White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, the National Debt and Why It Matters Today."

However, Johnson & Kwak point out that RIGHTWING REPUBLICANS, in hopes of bankrupting the Keynsian regulatory state and making Democratic liberal spending programs impossible, have been deliberately running up the US national debt since Reagan's election in 1980.

Ronald Reagan's former budget director, the libertarian-leaning ex-Congressman from Michigan, David Stockman, has written the same thing in his book "The Triumph of Politics."

Along with several other libertarian conservatives including the late Jack Kemp, Stockman confesses in "The Triumph of Politics," he backed Ronald Reagan's candidacy in hopes that Reagan would force a majority of Americans to give up on popular government spending programs like Medicare and Social Security, not to mention welfare payments to the poor. The group of libertarian zealots around Reagan also wanted to force Congress to cut wasteful government subsidies for big corporations and embrace a true "free market" economy, Stockman writes.

Therefore, they spearheaded Reagan's successful effort to make huge tax cuts in the 1980s for the benefit of the corporations, the rich, and also the people at large -- to some extent. But Reagan and Congress didn't have the guts to cut the social programs as planned, and the result was huge debts.

Read Stockman's book -- it's an eye -opener.

-- democratic socialist

Actually, it's Republicans who favor Borrow and Spend policies.

Ask Dick Cheney, Ronald Reagan, and the rest.

Same reasons conservatives do, I guess. Or did you think liberals alone borrowed all that money? Liberals like Ron Reagan, GHW Bush, and Bush2. The national debt existed before Obama, you know, or are you one of those people who thinks American History started on January 20, 2009?

The debt was there under Bush but Cheney put it off the books. Obama being honest put it back on the books and voila, a huge debt. But you listen to Fox and have no idea of reality. Sad how low this country is sinking. Fox makes ISIS look like amateurs.

Why are some Conservatives pedophiles? Because they're Catholic Priests! Blah blah blah...if one of you fools ever makes a valid point based on actual facts and then receives responses that aren't idiotic rants it would be a shock. Instead your're just a bunch of retarded trolls.

Because they don't think that it is their money. What they don't realize is that it they will be paying for it in 10 years, in 20 years so will their children and then their grand children in 50 more years.

it's become monopoly money and all a game as such we have lost touch with reality sadly life is not a game the day of reckoning awaits they sneeze we all catch the cold

That's what they teach in Universities these days

LOL, I think being in debt is not associated political affiliation, most Americans indulge themselves in debt