Why, exactly?
kimstu, tax increases alone will not allow us to deal with the ever-increasing cost of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Today, it would probably be possible to tax our way out of the deficit. Sure, these tax increases would probably slow down the economy and produce much less revenue than anticipated, but we could probably do it. It would be much more fiscally responsible to cut spending, but either way. However, raising taxes can’t provide us with enough money to deal with entitlement spending down the line.
As far as Social Security, the Democrats were so effective in stopping consideration of any reform plan that we were never able to see what they proposed or what Bush’s cost-savings measure proposed. His one cost savings measure, to readjust the rate of increase, was blasted by Harry Reid and many others for “slashing” the program, when in reality it would merely slow the rate of increase. Not very fiscally responsible (or honest).
It’s very frustrating to read these same assertions over and over about the Democrats and fiscal responsibility. I’ve cited eRiposte’s pages over and over, which have a wide array of economic stats over the past half century or so, all of which are more favorable under Democratic presidents than under Republicans.
So, rather than reading and debating them, someone will just come by and say “Yes, that’s under Presidents, but it’s the control of congress that matters!” So we had another thread, and someone posted several charts of federal spending by year since 1960 and whether the House, Senate and White House were under control of the Democrats, Republicans or were mixed. And it turns out that when all three were controlled by Democrats, year to year federal spending went down about half the time, and did so about as often as when control of the government was mixed. When Republicans control of all three, federal spending has skyrocketed.
I’d find the links, but nobody ever pays attention to these things or remembers them later. It’s really terribly frustrating, because it isn’t just people like Renob, who you’d expect might not be interested in listening to the data on the matter, but it’s people like John Mace and liberals as well. These labels of “fiscally responsible Republicans” and “tax and spend Democrats” are so engrained, we fight them out as if their was ever any validity to them. The truth is that they are OPPOSITE of the facts.
See, now you made me go all-caps, in boldface no less.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
:rolleyes: I hope you will not argue it’s fiscally irresponsible to complain about that!
Yes, and dishonest, too. “Fully funding” the act is a red herring. When the bill was passed it contained authorized levels of funding. This means that Congress is authorized to spend up to that amount of money on the programs in the bill. Those are caps, not goals and certain not promises. However, Democrats say that the Act is not “fully funded” unless these authorized levels are met. Pure crap. Very few bills’ authorized levels of funding are ever met. These authorized levels are not meant to be met. Claiming otherwise is dishonest.
You also ask why we want a reduction in spending. The simple answer is the federal government is wasting too much money. Many conservatives/libertarians don’t think that the answer to all of life’s problems can be solved with a government program. So by increasing spending, all the government is doing is wasting taxpayer dollars on programs that produce no benefit. Also, federal spending, especially on entitlement programs, is unsustainable and it needs to be dealt with.
Hentor, those nice little charts are all fine and good, but I could care less what the Democrats of the JFK, LBJ, Carter or Reagan eras did. I care about what the Democrats of today are doing. As I’ve said all along, I’m dissatisfied with Bush, but I see nothing coming from the Democrats as to why they are better. I see Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi saying they will raise taxes. I don’t see them saying they will cut spending. If someone could produce a plan by them or the DNC outlining their federal budget plans that contains some spending cuts, then we’ll talk. Until then, I’ll believe what I hear Reid, Pelosi, et. al., saying, which is that they want to raise taxes and that Bush is not spending enough.
So you don’t care that the Republicans have never actually been fiscally responsible, you just don’t want to vote for a Democrat.
I’d ask for quotes from Reid and Pelosi saying anything remotely like what you propose they’ve said, but I’m just so completely convinced it will never ever make any difference. Sorry to be so cynical in an optimistic thread about people changing for rational reasons.
If you want to start discussing the shifts in the parties’ positions during the past half-century and go through budgets year by year and discuss funding levels, perhaps we should save that for a thread on the history of the past fifty years. Right now I’m concerned about what the Democrats in Congress are proposing and what the Republicans have done. As I’ve said, the GOP is not being fiscally responsible. The Democrats, however, have yet to show me their proposals are anything except raise taxes and increase spending.
Quick quote from a Harry Reid press release on the signing of the Deficit Reduction Act: “President Bush may want to call the bill he signed today the Deficit Reduction Act but the truth is his budget will increase the deficit. While cutting student aid, health care and other benefits for ordinary Americans, the President wants to spend billions more on tax breaks for special interests and multi-millionaires.”
As I interpret this, he’s blasting Bush for cutting spending (in reality, no spending was cut – future increases in spending were slowed) and for cutting taxes. That leads me to believe if he had his way spending would go up along with taxes.
On what planet does no spending cut coupled with tax cuts amount to a Deficit Reduction Act?
One, the DRA didn’t have tax cuts in it. Two, the DRA shaved a small percentage of the growth of certain entitlement programs. These programs are essentially on autopilot in terms of spending money unless Congress and the President pass a bill affecting their growth rate. They are unlike other programs that must be funded year after year with appropriations from Congress. So by reducing the growth rate of these programs you also reduce the projected deficit.
It certainly didn’t go far enough but it was a baby step in the right direction. And even though it was a very small amount of money, the Democrats screamed to high heaven.
There is a certain charming nostalgia to arguing about whether the Dems are all about tax and spend, fiscal wildmen running amok with the Treasury. Meanwhile, the standard bearers for the calm and reasonable Pubbies are flinging the public purse away like it were infected.
I suppose that if we were to remove the issue of blazing incompetence from the table, a reasonable man might decide the Pubbies were a better choice, for the calm and prudent sort who think of a nation as a very large spreadsheet. I suppose.
Can you point specifically to what I’ve said in this thread that you’re talking about? All I’ve said is that if you go back far enough, the labels fit. It was FDR, a Democrat, who really started the ball rolling in terms of the types of big government we think of as “normal” today. I’ve been arguing against **Renob **the whole time wrt the current situation. 
[shrug] Shorthand. The Bush plan would have partially privatized (and invested in the stock market) personal retirement accounts while maintaining SS as a public program funded by payroll taxes; that limited “privatization” was the only element that would have made any change to the status quo.
You don’t have to hate him to want his administration vigorously investigated. Not all Pubs have lost their sense of smell.
I cited you only as an example of a thoughtful person about such issues who nevertheless perpetuates these labels, when the data suggest that they do not fit. I understand that you differ with Renob, and I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise. Look, even elucidator suggests that a reasonable person might choose the Republicans as the better choice, even if only in a spreadsheet sort of way (unless I’m missing his point).
My point is that it just is not true that Democrats have any sort of history to suggest that they are any more likely to increase spending than Republicans or anyone else. Similarly, there is no evidence to suggest that Republicans have ever been “fiscally responsible” in any sort of fashion. This is true whether you are speaking of today, the 90’s or any time since any measures have been available (that I’ve seen, anyways). Further, single party control by the Democrats has been associated with reductions in spending as often or more often than increases.
I’m not going to cop to optimism, but since posting what I did above, I actually did try to find the thread in which we discussed these data. I couldn’t turn it up for some reason, or I would point, yet again, to the figures I’m talking about.
Well, I appreciate the compliment, but I still don’t believe I’ve perpetuated that label-- certainly not in this thread. In fact, if you look at the link in my post #20, I think you’ll find one of those charts you referred to earlier. But if you can show me where I have perpetuated that label incorrectly, then perhaps I can address that issue directly. As it is, I’m at a loss to respond…
I honestly do think the label of “tax and spend” is a tired old bromide used by hypocrtical Republicans. Whether someone thinks it was Clinton or the Congress that got spending under control in the 90s, Clinton at least made an honest effort to slow the growth of government. Bush and the current crop of Republicans (as a whole) have made no such effort at all.
Fair nuff. Abbreviated to “Bush’s SSPP plan”, if that’s okay with you.
Nonsense. If Bush had wanted to show us the details of his SSPP plan, he could have done so. He deliberately chose to keep them vague, apparently because he knew they’d make the plan even more unpopular than it was. Remember, as I noted above, it wasn’t just Dems who hated Bush’s SSPP plan. Plenty of Republicans were distancing themselves from it too. In fact, Bush could have got his plan passed if more of his own party’s legislators had supported him, but his plan stunk so bad he couldn’t even persuade them.
Huh? The indexing change that Bush’s plan proposed (price indexing versus wage indexing) would indeed have slashed—i.e., drastically reduced—future SS benefits from what they would have been if the current form of indexing were maintained.
Say, under the current system, projected benefit levels ten years down the road would be $x, while under the proposed new plan, the same benefit levels are projected to be only, say, 60% of $x. In other words, the new plan would slash the benefits that future retirees could expect to receive. That sounds like a perfectly fair use of the term “slashed” to me, when comparing the projected effects of two competing policies. And that slashing of benefits is one of the things many Dem and Pub politicians alike opposed in Bush’s plan.
Sure they could. Even if left completely unchecked, the cost increases of SS, M and M under the current system would not eat up the entire federal budget in the foreseeable future. They’d eat up an unacceptably large part of it IMO, and they’d require some truly hellacious tax increases to cope with them, but it’s untrue to say that tax increases alone are incapable of balancing the budget.
Mind you, I don’t think that we ought to rely on tax increases alone to balance the budget. But merely in terms of financial arithmetic, it’s perfectly possible.
Aha! Here’s the post I’ve been thinking of: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=7221377&postcount=95
This is what I said about some charts that Jonathan Chance had brought to the table:
I’ve taken the liberty of fixing one of my typical coding errors and adding some bolding.
[QUOTE=Renob]
Bullshit. If the Act mandates state education systems to do things without providing federal funding for the added costs, the Act is not fully funded, period. It is also dishonest – shifts the funding burden to the states while giving the appearance the federal government is doing something.
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How do we even know how much money the government is wasting? (Defining “wasting” as losing money through inefficiency, as opposed to spending it on things you might not think are government’s business in the first place.)
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In purely economic terms, massive taxing-and-spending is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Under many circumstances it’s the best thing for a national economy – even with deficits. Keynes figured that out more than 70 years ago. Remember, whatever taxpayer dollars are spent on, they are not “wasted”; they are pumped right back into the private-sector economy the moment they are spent, stimulating the economy and creating markets and jobs. That’s something else Keynes figured out – government spending can get the wheels turning, can move money through the economy at times when it might otherwise sit idle. In economic terms, government is not simply some kind of parasitic organism on the private economy; the relationship is a symbiotic one.
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As for “programs that produce no benefit,” what programs can you name that are demonstrably completely ineffectual in achieving their intended benefits? Even the most inefficient government programs generally get things done. Pre-Clinton AFDC might have perpetuated a cycle of welfare dependency, but at least it met the intended goal of shielding poor families from starvation.
Cite? (For the sweeping big-picture assessment you are making, not for the sustainability of any particular program such as SS.)
Not quite. The indexing plan would have merely reduced the rate of increase. So while the payout in 30 years would have been x(today’s rate) plus 3% per year (let’s say), the indexing plan would have made it X plus 2.2% (let’s say). That’s hardly a cut. That’s a slower rate of increase. It also makes perfect fiscal sense. So of course Democrats screamed about it.
Fine, while it may be theoretically possible to raise tax rates to 70% or 80% to pay for these programs, it’s not politically or economically wise. That’s what I’m talking about.
One, the Act mandates nothing. The Act says that if a state receives federal funds it must comply with certain stipulations. If these stipulations are too expensive, the state can always forgo the federal funds.
Two, education spending has increased by 50% under Bush.
Three, “fully funded” is a phrase without a definition. States have given no indication of the amount of money they would need to be satisfied.
I think that spending money on things that aren’t the government’s business is wasteful, and by that measure there are billions of dollars in waste just hanging around.
No, the government takes money that is being put to a productive use and diverts it into programs and areas that are not productive. It essentially takes money from people who are working and creating jobs and moves it into areas not based on the best use of these dollars (the market determines this) but on who is politically connected. Sure, the money gets spent, but in a very unefficient way.
Let’s see, FEMA isn’t doing a very good job, welfare didn’t fight poverty (it merely subsidized it), our foreign policy probably makes us more unsafe than we would be without the variety of military interventions abroad, TSA is doing a worse (or just as bad) job than private air security at a much higher cost, Social Security and Medicare pay benefits to a lot of rich old people who don’t need it, etc.
Here is the cite you wanted:
The study can be found here: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Budget/bg1897.cfm
Excuse me while I hesitate to accept a study from the Heritage Foundation as the unvarnished truth.