Android phone, in the dark, at work on graveyard. 
Lower revenue + equal or higher expenses = larger deficit and growing debt. Pretty basic stuff there.
Are you quite sure you want us to believe you’re a tax expert?
Christ EL. You really are trying hard to dethrone gonzomax as the stupidest poster here.
The obvious point I was making is that jackmanii was treating tax cuts as a bad thing because they always and automatically increase the national debt. But that’s not true. Tax cuts would have no effect on the national debt if they were combined with spending cuts. But many liberals take government spending as a given and bemoan tax cuts tat add to the national debt.
You’re absolutely right. Let’s look at slashing the military budget in half. That’ll give us the most gain right off the bat.
I don’t think it’s stupid: it’s perfectly rational to throw out the bums when the economy is weak. It is crude and ill-informed, but not stupid.
Reid had 59 votes because Franken wouldn’t be seated until July 2009. He could coral but one Republican Senator -Olympia Snowe- provided he cut the parts of the package that had the greatest bang for the buck, to the tune of about $100 billion. Republicans broke with hundreds of years of tradition, filibustered everything, put long holds on appointments that they ultimately voted for, sabotaged the recovery and now are reaping the rewards. That’s the way the Senate rules work. OBTW, the fact that economic strength drives elections has solid empirical support.
The Dems had some unforced errors though. Obama should have pressed harder to fill the FOMC with recession opponents. As it were, he only got an agreement to have 2 seated last month. Senate Republicans passed over Diamond, who won a Nobel Prize this month.
In short if you want to win elections, worry less about triangulation and more about juicing the economy during the election year. FOMC appointments are critical, whether or not anybody knows who they are or what they do. (Caveat: the off-year congressional voting model is somewhat noisier than the Presidential model.)
Are you familiar with the balanced budget multiplier? Have you forgotten about it or have you never taken macroeconomics? Or did you just skip over a more detailed treatment?
Did you have any particular spending cuts in mind? Because I see a lot of spending cut advocacy that lacks a certain specificity. When you think about it, that’s pretty craven, as I’m not even subjecting you/them to constraints of political plausibility, merely arithmetic.