heres the news story : MSN
So he made a deal that almost any modern pres would make and the fed can operate until december But the fanatics seem to have expected him to let the government shut down rather than do anything with the dems…
I mean considering in certain parts of the country his supporters are getting assistance of some kind don’t they realize not getting your check sent or grandmas medicine filled because no ones there to press “send” is a bad thing ?
I doubt if it is his personal base of voters who are wanting no deal, as much as those professional conservatives who pulled the same toppling down the pillars stunt under Obama a number of times, both with the Shutdown 2013 and refusing to work with his administration.
This was not totally aimed at ether Obama nor Trump; many revolutionaries have a complete revulsion to government of any sort existing.
This debt ceiling issue always ignores the real questions.
Does “pay as you go” equal a balanced budget? If so, you’ll never see it. When Bush had a surplus, he said the surplus belongs to all of us, there is a free lunch and we’re going to eat it. If we got anywhere near a balanced budget, Republicans would decide that it’s time to cut taxes for the rich.
Why, indeed? Congress sets spending, Congress sets revenues. If deficits are the result, these deficits were implicitly authorized by Congress.
Whatever works. Personally, I’d like to see it such that the percentage of GBP that goes into servicing the debt be constantly decreasing. If GDP goes up, there is less need to constrain deficits.
Of course the debt ceiling is a meaningless artifact. The amount of debt the United States takes on depends on two things: the amount of spending and the amount of taxes. If spending is greater than income, the debt increases by exactly that amount. You can’t lower taxes and increase spending and then refuse to pass a law that increases the debt by the difference, because that’s simple math. It’s like passing a law declaring pi to equal exactly 3.
For many decades the debt ceiling was treated as just a technical limitation and congress quietly and dutifully voted for whatever the difference was every year. Then along came Newt Gingrich who figured that he could use the debt limit vote to extract some extra spending cuts. That didn’t work, but it turned the debt ceiling vote from a pro forma ritual to a constant political battle as every so often the Republicans vote to increase spending and cut taxes but not increase the debt.
Various proposals to declare that by passing a budget and a tax plan the debt ceiling has already been voted on have come to nothing, because the Republicans refuse to go along. And so this ridiculous charade continues.
The realistic limit on deficit spending is for congress to vote to cut spending and raise taxes. But cutting spending and raising taxes is unpopular, so they’d rather raise spending and cut taxes instead. But you can’t do that without increasing the debt, and so the debt increases. I mean, look at the current mess right now. The Republican plan is for massive tax cuts for the rich, and tax increases for everyone else. Hey, that AVERAGES out to a decent tax cut for everyone, since if a billionaire gets a $10,000,000 tax cut and 99 other people get nothing that averages to a $10,000 tax cut per person. That sounds pretty good, right? An average tax cut of $10,000? How could anyone oppose that?
It is true that the Republicans were hoping to pay for some of these tax cuts by cutting health insurance for the poor, that would have saved a lot of money. Except that didn’t happen, and so they have to pass tax cuts for the rich without the cover of cutting spending, which means a massive increase in the debt. But they can’t vote for a massive increase in the debt! It’s socialism! But we have to have tax cuts for the rich! And so Republican heads explode like robots asked to calculate the last digit of pi in a Star Trek episode, which could have been avoided if they had just passed a law declare pi to equal three.
Don’t give them ideas. Science is hard enough for the current crop of Congresscritters - math might be next.
I’m going to disagree that this is realistic. You don’t think that increased revenue will result in even MORE spending (like 110% of the revenue increase)?
Hence the perceived need for a hard spending cap that Congress has the fortitude to stick with even if it means a shutdown, PAYGO, constitutional amendment or something else since both sides of Congress has shown a complete inability to control themselves.
You’re asking for a suicide pact. You can’t tie the nation’s hands like that, there has to be some provision for emergency spending for war, priming the economic pump, whatever.
I support real PAYGO, not the facade we have today, but let’s be clear: PAYGO does NOT mean balanced budget. It simply means that changes to tax or spending policies shouldn’t increase the deficit; it doesn’t mean the deficit has to be decreased.
Because the Constitution requires that Congress control the borrowing of funds on the Nation’s credit. The spending power, the taxing power, and the borrowing powers are separate powers – the exercise of any two of them does not imply a carte blanche for the President to alter the third.
Why is this a spending problem? The Republicans are about to jam through a tax cut to add trillions to the debt, and you keep referring to the need for spending cuts.
We’re the realistic limitation. We tell our elected representatives that we want to pay less taxes but at the same time we tell them we expect to receive the same amount of government services. Our elected officials give us what we want and borrow money to cover the difference between how much we want and how much we’re willing to pay for.
If it takes a government shutdown to achieve significant longer term spending reductions I’d be fine with that. Starve the beast and all that. Of course, that assumes there would be cuts at some point too.
The real benefit of PAYGO is that it addresses how to pay for spending as it is being passed, not what we do now which is spend the money and then run around like it is the end of the world and raise the debt ceiling because we’ll all die horrible deaths if we don’t. In a way the current system is effectively Congress blackmailing themselves so we the voters are OK with them exceeding the debt ceiling.
But that didn’t really answer the question did it. If the debt ceiling is a paper tiger then why even have it? Why not just dispense with it and spend whatever we want? We do anyways.
Because the debt ceiling limits spending … or at least should. If we spend too much then we either need to cut spending or raise taxes but instead we ignore the debt ceiling law.
I don’t think you understand PAYGO.
PAYGO generally pertains to changes in mandatory spending programs (like entitlements) or changes to taxes needing to be offset so that they are deficit neutral over specified time periods. It does not have anything to do with, say, military spending. To the extent that spending overall may be increasing – say, more funds for the military, or the cost of Medicare rising as a natural consequence of Americans getting older, PAYGO doesn’t actually have anything to do with those things.
Because it probably requires a constitutional amendment to do away with it.
The debt limit does not limit spending. It limits debt. The debt itself is a result of both spending generally going up and revenues being generally insufficient – not one or the other.
Let’s be crystal clear about this: tax cuts make the debt higher, and contribute just as much debt to the government as does spending increases. I may be wrong, but you seem to have this idea that only spending causes deficits, when it is the gap between spending and revenues that cause deficits.
I get how Congress works. The debt ceiling limits spending in that spending must be a function of revenue. If you raise revenue you can increase spending and consequently if you want to raise spending by a certain amount over the ceiling you need to raise revenue by a similar amount.
Right now the dichotomy is Congress wants to lower revenue while raising spending. Theoretically that is limited by the debt ceiling but in actuality it is not. My argument against the “just raise taxes” side is that Congress (both sides) tend to raise spending by MORE than the extra revenue. What I want is a system where they are in lockstep. PAYGO was a good start but did not go far enough and can easily be ignored if Congress chooses.
Has this ever worked out for you all? What permanent reduction in spending has been achieved by threatening to shut down the government?
If you all want to cut spending, the time to do that is when you all are voting on spending bills. If you all want to raise taxes, the time to do that is when you all are voting on tax bills.
The deficit is the difference between taxing and spending. You can’t vote for a certain level of taxes, vote for a certain level of spending, and then vote a third time on a certain level of debt, because the amount of debt you agreed to take on was determined when you voted for taxes and spending.
When you buy stuff on your credit card every month, and it’s more than you bring in in salary, you can’t decide to reduce your debt level by refusing to pay your credit card. Your amount of debt was determined by how much you spent and how much you earned.
This is simple math here folks. The debt limit is a charade that means nothing. Why can’t we get rid of it? For the same reason we can’t have lots of other nice things: Republicans.
If Republicans want to decrease the debt, they can vote to decrease spending and increase taxes in whatever proportion they want that will result in a balance budget. Now why is it that Republicans only want to balance the budget when they don’t control the House, the Senate, and the Presidency? I mean, it should be pretty fucking simple to balance the budget this year, what with the party of fiscal responsibility controlling every branch of the Federal government, right?
If the Republicans can’t balance the budget this year, maybe they were lying to you about wanting to balance the budget? Notice how there’s absolutely no talk about balancing the budget, all the talk is about cutting taxes, and all the proposals are about cutting taxes on the rich. Which is more important for Republicans, lower taxes for the rich, or a balanced budget? I think we all know the answer to that question.
It hasn’t worked very well, but it hasn’t been done very seriously either. But sure, cut spending and revenue at the same time! Or just one or the other. Taxes have an intertia to them so any opportunity to cut them should be taken. If that can be used as leverage to force spending cuts all the better.
I don’t speak for Republicans because I’m not one, but I do want a drastically smaller government.
The “Trump Grassroots” does not really understand a fucking thing. At all. It’s amusing to even think that they would understand the term “debt”.
Those statements don’t go together in any way shape or form. The debt limit isn’t a limit on spending. It is just a fact. It is, as a matter of fact, a limit on the government raising money.
No, the debt ceiling is not theoretically supposed to restrict such things. There isn’t really any direct connection between spending; revenue, and borrowing, as they are three distinct powers that in most cases are exercised in entirely different laws (when such laws are altered, which isn’t really a common thing.)
Cite?
Look, I appreciate that you have strong views on this, but you are also harboring some consequential misunderstandings of some of the matters you are talking about. I’m not trying to get you to change your opinion on fiscal responsibility, but I would urge you to listen to corrections of some factual matters that you are not representing correctly.
“Cut taxes! That will force them to cut spending…someday. I mean, eventually. It just stands to reason that if we keep cutting taxes and increasing the deficit every year, year after year after year, someday there’s going to be a pony in the pile of horseshit.”
“Keep eating and eating and eating, as much as you can! The more weight you gain, the more likely it is that you’ll get on that diet plan you’ve always talked about! Think about how much easier it will be to lose weight when you’re 150 pounds over rather than 15!”
Whenver this topic comes up we see confused thinking.
Your questions end with full stops, not question marks. This seems appropriate since they seem to be rhetorical questions.
If I had to guess what your real proposal was I’d go with
Saint Cad wants a firmly applied law (constitutional amendment?) that when the government goes into deficit, an across-the-board spending cut of X% is automatically applied to keep the budget in balance.
… where X is whatever it takes to achieve balance. Did I guess right?
Judging by your ‘Join Date’, you were here the last umpteen times we linked to the 1990’s, the period with a dramatic reversal in deficit growth. I’ve gone beyond the call of duty on that Googling. Saint Cad, I think it’s your turn to Google for “1990s deficit reduction.” Please do so and amend your comment.
The FCC budget is less than $0.4 billion; the SEC budget is $1.6 billion. Assuming these are examples of where you want government drastically smallified than you seem to be conflating deregulation with deficit reduction.
If not, then I guess Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the government functions which you want drastically reduced. Be aware that
when these items are ignored government spending has been trending sharply downward since the Reagan days.
Social security is rightly viewed as a pension plan; workers get out what they put in (some more, some less, Google “Do all people die at the same age?” if you find this unfair). When simple transfers like Social Security are accounted as “government spending” then perhaps the transfer of the tax burden from the super-rich to bond-buyers in countries like China should also be accounted. With this accounting there are four items that sharply dwarf all other U.S. government spending added together.:
[ul][li] Social security[/li][li] Medicare, medicaid[/li][li] Military spending[/li][li] Tax cuts for the rich[/li][/ul]
Can you clarify for us, Bone ? Which of these four big items — the only items that amount to more than rounding errors in the federal budget — do you hope to drastically smallify?