The sunset clause was written in to garner votes from Democrats who you seem to forget tried to extend it just before the Summer break so as to not raise taxes.
The sunset clause was written so that they didn’t need votes from Democrats, as it allowed the bill to pass via reconciliation
Here’s the latest Big Mac index. Not a real point in this discussion, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to link to it.
Anyway, what do the numbers look like if you were to eliminate everything but servicing the debt, Social Security, Medicare, and the DoD? Just get rid of it all. Remember that first this will put a whole lot of people out of a job. No Department of Education means that the states will have to pick up the funding for schools, meaning local taxes will have to go up. No Department of Energy means that you’ve now lost a lot of good scientific research and you’ll have to move the nation’s nuclear weapons programs–the stuff they currently do at places like Los Alamos and Sandia–to control under the DoD. Getting rid of the Health and Human Services will remove a lot of funding for science that other institutions would have to pick up, not to mention all the other things we’ll lose, like the CDC and the FDA, and you’ll have to move Medicare out to its own agency like we did with the SSA. No State Department means we’re now crippled in our relationships with other nations. We went a long time with just an AG and no DOJ, so maybe we can make that work again. I’m sure HUD isn’t that important. Keep on going for all the agencies, just take out all those budgets. Have we actually managed to balance the overall budget yet? Here’s the 2010 federal budget, complete with a handy pie chart. Assuming we only keep the four items listed above, that means we’re getting rid of roughly 44% of the total budget and a total of about 1.59 trillion dollars. The deficit overall was 1.42 trillion, so congratulations! We’ve completely gutted the federal government and now can put back 170 billion to make sure we stay balanced. That’ll get you a few departments back.
I could go on, but I’m getting tired of setting up a semi-strawman. Obviously, we’re not going to get rid of everything completely, even if the teabagger candidates often put the whole of the Department of Education and Department of Energy first on the chopping block.
There is a bottom line to what is going on and we have an armchair view of what it will look like in the US. Greece and France are imploding from the reality of overspending.
One way or another we are going to be spending less than we are now. When you talk about cutting back on education that doesn’t mean the children won’t learn, it means we stop building half-billion dollar monuments to fiscal malfeasance. It means parents take back the responsibility of feeding their children and make sure they do their homework.
We WILL be spending less money in the future whether we want to or not.
It sounds like you are talking about earmarks. I thought we had dispelled the notion that we can cut more than a de minimus amount of the budget by eliminating earmarks altogether.
And we’re not talking about state and local, we’re talking about federal.
I don’t see what you are talking about. the median household income is around $50K, I don’t see how taxes go up by much more than $500 for that household (btw I think 3% indexing is kind of high given the year we just had, don’t you?)
I’m fine with keeping a 10% bracket if we want to but we CANNOT balance the budget with cuts alone unless we are willing to cut at least half a trillion dollars out of the military, medicare/medicaid or social security. Social security pays for itself and is solvent for at least 30 years, and the teabaggers don’t want anyone to touch medicare and I don’t get the impression that cutting the military budget in half is what they had in mind either.
Its like saying you’re going to be able to buy a house and move out of your mother’s basement by cutting the premium channels from your cable bill.
People were saying the same thing at the beginning of the 90’s then we had a tax increase and we cut military spending along with a vibrant economy and we had Alan Greenspan publicly concerned about not having enough national debt to keep the financial markets going.
We can do it as long as taxes and the military aren’t sacred cows
You realize that the folks making 250K/year don’t operate on a budget the same way that someone making $50k/year does right?
The civilian federal payroll is about 175 billion dollars. How much of a pay cut do you think we could get away with? How much do you think you can cut a Department of Justice lawyers salary when every last one of them can get a job paying two to three times what they currently earn with VERY little searching.
Do we really want the cheapest bureaucracy money can buy?
The DEMOCRATS tried to extend it and it failed? Did the Republicans block it?
That’s exactly right, they did it the way they did so that they could do it without the Democrats. It was effectively shoved down our throats.
I used the chart showing the ranges and picked the median of each range. In the first range a 5% increase would be $1,751 increase or $33/week. .05*(70,040/2). I agree that 3% indexing sounds high for the bracket changes but if that moves the brackets up and wages remain the same then it works in our favor.
Oh the horror. Where were the protests then and where are the protests now when it was reintroduced?
Nope. They tried to get it passed as it was. Democrats wanted to screw the rich.
So can we conclude that given the current deficit, taxes need to be higher? While at the same time initiatives need to be made to reduce government spending, across the board.
And can we also conclude that the Tea Party has no intention of doing either?
Which makes them nothing for than a populist movement, offering little more than bread and circuses to the gullible (yet angry) masses?
Nobody screws the rich. It is their government and their politicians. The rich could use a good screwing since they have been having their way with us for decades.
The Democratic party tried to restore the tax code except for the upper range. This is not up for debate.
That is not close to screwing them. They have accumulated enormous fortunes. They have a lobsided share of the wealth. That is not screwing. They have had a decade of feeding the greed. Krugman said it is like writing a check for 1.3 million dollars to the top 1200 richest Americans, once a year, every year for a decade. If that is screwing, I could use some. You are correct. it is not a debate. it is a cold hard truth.
Actually , I think the check was 3.4 mill. But they deserved it. They are better than us and deserve it.