At least one of them has already been canned.
It seems laissez faire capitalism is on hiatus for a while. Here’s hoping cronyism works better.
Enjoy,
Steven
Heh. That’s exactly the link I was referring to when I said “I have heard arguments that since the debt still increased during those years there was no surplus, but that was due entirely to automatic intergovernmental debt related to the Social Security surpluses.” Do you honestly think that is an accurate representation of what most people (including the CBO) mean when they refer to budget deficits and surpluses? Or are you just trying to knock down the annoying fact that the only budget surpluses since I’ve been alive have come under a Democratic administration?
No, I’m trying to knock down the annoying fact that no matter how I jiggle the numbers between my various bank accounts, if I owe money I owe money. If increasing the actual amount owed is called a surplus, why, every company on Wall Street right now is running a surplus.
If you owe money to yourself, you in fact do not owe money.
Excellent. It’s good to know that we have neither a Social Security nor a Medicare crisis, because we only owe ourselves money and it doesn’t count. For that matter, I have a very small cut in AIG, but as a taxpayer I don’t feel any obligation to pay it back because I’ll just be paying myself.
Shall we take this further, or do you recognize yet the inherent absurdity in that line of reasoning?
At the risk of injecting a bit of rationality into your domestic dispute, there is a difference between running a current surplus or deficit and the issue of the stock of debt.
If you wish to be simplistic - and I should say that using personal finances analogies to high finance is, well, rather unfortunate and often leads to illiterate errors - it’s rather like saying you are say 100 K in debt - your stock of debt - but you’ve gone from running a yearly operating deficit (adding more debt to the stock) to a operating surplus, that is no longer adding debt to the stock and in fact paying down.
Without taking any partisan position, these are clearly two rather significant differences. You seem to be unable to distinguish the two. To the extent whatever past Administration (I haven’t been following your admins maths so this is purely theoretical) has gone surplus on the yearly budgets, that is in fact positive as your opponent noted, and a significant difference to layering on more debt.
That is, you’re in debt, there is a non trivial difference between pissing away yet more money mate, and starting to pay off. At least get that straight, maybe you all would get things straightened out, yeah?
Look at it this way, if your going to count borrowing from the SS fund as an expenditure, then why are we also counting payments made by SS this year as an expenditure (the chart I linked to earlier does indeed include SS payments, btw). Extend this out to the era when the fund is being drawn down to make SS payments (2012 or so) and you’ll see it doesn’t make sense. But if we don’t count those payments as expenditures (on the order of 500billion/yr or so) then the late 90’s surpluses become larger rather then disappearing, even using the larger deficit numbers from your earlier cite.
Not sure this is relevant, but saying “the tax payer” now owns part of AIG doesn’t really mean anything. You and I as individuals own none of it, the gov’t owns all of it (well, 79% of it, so controlling interest anyways). Presumably if they decide not to repay the debt to the public fund that would be an option (abeit not a very politically tenable one).
We don’t have a Social Security or Medicare crisis. A crisis is an impending disaster, not a theoretical disaster 30 years out. The political crowd that has been predicting these “crises” has been doing so since Social Security and Medicare were first proposed. According to them it was never going to work because they don’t want it to work and they’d rather force that money into their under regulated securities market.
Cool, just what I wanted for my birthday!
(Damn Feds, last year it was the toe socks, the year before that ugly vase that I KNOW was a recycled gift, and now a share in a worthless and bankrupt insurance company - at least a pet rock could have been tossed when they weren’t looking - this I’m stuck with!)
Ironic that a club loaded down with ridiculous amounts of debts is sponsored by an institution with the same.
You use a blog as a cite? :dubious: Why not quote Rush Limbaugh? Use one of the links in your own cite, AD, & see what happens to the national debt during the Clinton years vs. the Bush years. :smack:
That’s… kind of a dumb of way of looking at this.
Look, let’s go with a wild hypothetical situation and postulate, just for the sake of argument, that I put a little money aside for sweet sweet pornography every month. For the purposes of this entirely imaginary scenario, let’s say that I put 30% of my income in the porny-bank every paycheck.
Ooops! I’m so terrible at budgeting the rest of my money that I have a shortfall in my regular account. It turns out that I can’t afford groceries and rent. So what do I do? I find to my great surprise that I didn’t actually spend all the money in the porny-bank. In fact, I have quite a lot of cash left in there. Awesome! But then the chilling question: what if I need a whole lot of porn in the future? It’d be nice to build up a fat reserve so that when I enter my dotage and am less charming with the ladies, and thus will be in more need of self-stimulation, I’ll still be ass-deep in money shots.
So instead of just cracking open my porny-bank and ganking the funds, I’ve decided to “loan” myself the money. I take it out and write myself an IOU saying: “Dear me: I promise to put this money back some day, with interest. Love, me.” So am I in debt because of that IOU? Well, sort of. If my porn addiction is absolutely positively going to need funds in the future, then obviously, I’ll need to be careful with my budgeting so that I’ll have the money when I need the money.
But the future “payment” to myself does not, I repeat, does not have to come from my other account. As long as I’ve budgeted carefully enough overall, considering both accounts, I will be able to pay my bills at both the grocery store and the adult store. The payment I made to myself, even with the interest added, is ultimately not important. If I stop the silly charade of loaning myself money, then this “debt” can be paid from either account, and after it’s “paid”, the income can then be transferred to either account. It truly doesn’t matter.
All the US government has to say is, fuck, that FICA taxation doesn’t have to be exclusively used for social security payments. We can, if we so want, use FICA revenues to pay off debt owed to the Social Security Administration by the treasury. Write a law and this is done. Now, we definitely want to be careful, but our concern will always and forever be the overall budget situation, not the stupid IOUs that the government is writing to itself.
As long as we’re consistent with our measurements year to year (and we are), then it’s just fine to say that Clinton had a surplus. It’s accurate in all the ways that matter.
Man Utd. would be loving this, actually. AIG are sponsoring Man U to the tune of 14 million a year. If they break the terms of that contract Man U can pull the plug and renegotiate a new sponsor for the start of the next season. they’ll laugh all the way to the bank, unless their bank is owned by AIG.
I have advanced “socialistic” views for some time now, but admit I never considered this bold, innovative approach.
My understanding of the intergovernmental debt is that whenever Social Security runs a profit, they buy government bonds, and when they run a deficit, they cash the bonds to pay for it. But if they didn’t have any bonds to cash, they would presumably have to ask Congress for more money. Congress will almost have to give out the money to pay the amount promised to seniors. This might be a spur to cut benefits or raise taxes, but the debt doesn’t really mean that Social Security is drawing more money than it would without the debt.
The other possible problematic situation is that Social Security is running at such a heavy deficit that Congress wouldn’t give them the money, even if it means they won’t get a vote from anyone over 50 again, but Social Security has enough debt to weather the storm. Surely, congress has projections as to what kind of profit/loss that Social Security will post for the year. Any year that Social Security will cash in a crippling amount of debt, Congress can pull the plug, or cut benefits or raise taxes.
The debt will certainly increase the money that Social Security gets, as it would be politically easier to deny Social Security money that is has to ask for than to deny it money it is “owed,” but $1 owed to Social Security doesn’t mean that $1 will come out of government coffers that would otherwise not go to Social Security because Congress would give Social Security the money to cover a small deficit, and can take action to prevent an onerous deficit (or cut and run if it fails to take action).