Thank you, New York Times!!! My e-mail from you let me know this THREE times, as a news “ALERT”, as the lead in yesterday’s Afternoon Update, and again this morning as the lead in your Today’s Headlines! Thank you so much!!!
Because, you know, we are undertaxed in this country, and those EEEEEVIL Republicans won’t agree to those much needed tax increases. God forbid that any of the trillions in stimulus sops to the unions be in any jeopardy.
In other news, a pound of butter at my local Ralphs has doubled in cost from 1.99 to four dollars in the last six months. Way to manage the currency, you fucking asshat! I guess some more quantitative easing is in order.
Maybe if we can get inflation to Wiemar Germany levels, the stage can be set for what this country really needs, a strong firm father figure to lead us out of our troubles. It would be fun to invade Poland…
At this point I’m more concerned about exclamation mark inflation. You used to get the same effect with three that now requires 53 to achieve (if I counted correctly). Those damn Republicans!!!
Butter has gone up a lot lately. You know what else has gone up a lot? Milk. Everything else at our grocery store has been pretty stable. Gosh, what could be the common denominator?
I’m from a district with a lot of cattle. I’m glad to see some of our inflation heading toward farmers. Yeesh, if we subsidize the farmers people complain about that, if we expect consumers to bear the cost people scream about having to pay what it actually costs. Maybe you should go eat some documentation or a requisition form or something. Or some nice urban concrete.
IIRC, the “trillions” went to banks, and have substantially been repaid. That said, the 2009 stimulus did have the largest tax cut in…a while…and not all of that expires in 2010. And we haven’t sunset the Bush tax cuts (the ones that were set to expire so as not to blow the deficit up further). Therefore we are running in the red just from those. And the Social Security trust fund needs to be repaid, so that requires a tax increase.
So, yeah, we are undertaxed. I propose taking the new revenues out of the [del]hide[/del] income of baby boomers, who voted for all this unsustainable budgeting from the 1980’s on.
We are, compared to expenditures. As this point of taxation it doesn’t matter to me too much whether we raise taxes or lower expenditures or some combination.
Now, to borrow your exuberant punctuation, with regards to your pals plan to lower taxes while simultaneously balancing the budget, HOW’S THAT WORKIN OUT FOR YA???
When it comes to the Bush tax cuts, I always have to wonder: since they were supposed to generate so many jobs and make the economy all unicorns and rainbows … what happened? Did we miss a step between “Steal underpants” and “Full employment/Profit!”? Isn’t repeating the same thing (more tax cuts!) and expecting different results (full retirement accounts for everyone!) the definition of insanity?
I am not an economist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. I do realize a big issue with our current economic troubles is the amount of government spending. But wouldn’t a reasonable approach to balancing the federal budget be a combination of big spending cuts and, you know, reasonable tax increases? Or am I too much of a liberal blockhead to not realize TAXES=BAD!!! SOCIALISTEVILBLEEDINGHEARTJOBKILLER!!!
The Bush tax cuts quite certainly do not account for the enture U.S. federal deficit, as you seem to be suggesting.
The Congressional Budget Office has produced estimates of an annual cost of $300 to $400 billion a year for continuing the Bush tax cuts; by way of comparison, the deficit now stands well north of $1500 billion.
While I don’t know that anyone was actually suggesting what you state they were suggesting, it is correct to say that the Bush tax cuts do not account for the entirety of the US federal debt.
However, they are far and away the largest contributor to the debt, and proportionally grow more significant over time. Please see the chart via the link below, which you’ve probably seen before if you pay attention to the news on this sort of thing:
