I’m all for this. The only thing I hate more than massive irresponsible government spending is massive irresponsible government spending on credit. The current Republican notion that you can increase spending but never dare touch taxes is insane - I would like to see both spending and taxes cut, but you can’t increase spending while cutting taxes in the long term. It’s just poor planning and greed - “let’s get ours now, and screw whoever comes after us”.
So if the democrats are going to spend like crazy too, I very much like the idea of proposing that you actually fund it with revenue and not debt. Endless borrowing sets us up with the idea that we can have what we want without paying for it, like an irresponsible kid who took their parents credit card. We need to come to realize that if we want to spend, we have to actually give up something else, whether it be a lower tax rate or spending elsewhere.
Yeah - already we’re screwing ourselves by setting a corporate tax rate that is way too high to be competitive. We should be able to cut that without monkeying around with very much else - especially as this is the sort of cut that should pay for itself many times over with increased economic activity.
So wait … he submits a budget with epic, massive, debt of a heretofore unseen scale, driven almost entirely by increased spending; debt not merely for a year or two but in projections as far as the eye can see.
Then a couple months later, he turns around and suddenly announces that – gasp – deficits are bad! Who knew! And we’re gonna have to raise taxes to pay for them! Shocking, yes, but what’s to be done? (And oh by the way, we can never lower net taxes ever again.)
This is how to bullshit, people. Bush and Clinton got nothing on this guy.
What Obama really said is that needs to have taxes raised. Anyone with a half a brain knows that this congress (and most previous ones) will never cut anything.
I mean, come on. Who takes this kind of shit seriously? At least when Bush and the Dems blew the lid off the budget, they had some chance of getting some of it back. Then Obama spends another $800 billion on top of that - how in the blinding blue blazes of hell are we going to pay for that kind of pork?
He took out a loan that everyone knew was too big. He did it saying that he wasn’t going to raise taxes.
When fiscal conservatives warned that an Obama administration would mean vastly higher taxes, it was greeted with derision.
There are only 2 real possibilities here.
He changed his mind. Two months ago, the thought that running massive deficits well into the mid-2010s was fine, but now he thinks it’s a bad idea. If this is true, he’s an idiot.
He knew that selling a massive tax hike would be hard … so he sold a massive spending hike, and then decided to cast himself as a “living within our means” fiscal moderate and act as if the tax hikes were something he really didn’t want to do all along. If this is true, he’s a master bullshitter.
I don’t think he’s an idiot.
Actually more like "we can afford these twentysix Lamborghinis if we just cut back on groceries. We can also afford to buy sixteen more next year, and the year after that.
As opposed to “I’ll just put it on the credit card”?
The faux indignation from the Republican paritsans here (not you) is silly. They were defending massive spending at the same time as cutting taxes not long ago, and suddenly massive spending with at least an attempt to pay for them is comical. Both situations suck - at least the latter is attempting some degree of responsibility, but the response seems to be “hahaha you can’t try to act responsible when you’re doing massive spending! (which both sides do”.
His proposal would be better of course if it applied to discretionary spending. In which case it would be “okay, we can buy a lamborghini, but we’re going to have to move into a smaller house and spend most of our paycheck on it” rather than “hey, let’s buy it, and put it on our credit card, and get our kids to be cosigners… then we can have fun with this lamborghini and hope we die before we face the consequencess”
So, aside from the comments about Obama, do the economic conservatives here support or oppose PAYGO?
Other than SenorBeef’s comment about discretionary spending, I’m seeing nothing but Rush Limbaugh style ad hominem. (Not that I’m saying he’s an economic conservative, it was just the only insightful comment I saw on the issue.)
I’m an economic conservative, and I definitely support the idea of NOT spending beyond revenues. Haven’t read all the details of “PAYGO” so I won’t tie my opinion to that particular proposal…TRM
You might cynically point out that it has been a rule in the House since the Democrats retook Congress in 2006, and ask why you should expect it to lead to smaller deficits once it is a law.
You would be right to ask the question. But beyond that, you ought to note that PayGo doesn’t even apply to one major category of spending: discretionary spending. It applies only to direct spending (ie, entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare). And Obama has also specifically asked for 4 exceptions to the rule. As a result, the new ‘PayGo’ has more holes in it than swiss cheese.
In addition, doesn’t this sound like a way to stealthily raise taxes “as part of the system,” rather than having to publicly announce tax increases and face public opposition? If we only hear about the shiny new stuff we’re getting, and the tax increases are stealthed, it makes it much harder to oppose government spending when we don’t have this intermediate stage about complaining about the deficits.
A brief outline of Obama’s proposal can be found here.
Perhaps many of the criticisms are ad hominem in nature, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are unwarranted. I don’t think many sane people advocate a policy whereby the government should just continue to run substantial deficits forever, so balancing budgets over the long run is desirable. But then, why limit pay-as-you-go rules to mandatory spending only rather than the entire budget in aggregate (or alternatively, treat mandatory spending and discretionary spending separately, but require that they both conform to pay-as-you-go rules)? As furt points out, why is this only being brought up now, at a time when the White House is coming under heavy criticism for running up large deficits? Where was Obama’s discussion of pay-as-you-go budget balancing in the context of the the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? It gives me the impression that, okay, now that Obama has gotten his big stimulus bill passed, and now that he’s taking some heat, now we all can start talking about fiscal responsibility, as if fiscal responsibility only started to matter recently.
Sure, I support balanced budgets, and I support pay-as-you-go rules as one step towards achieving balanced budgets. But I support real pay-as-you-go rules, not false half-measures that allow government to circumvent the restrictions through increased discretionary spending.
As a principle, I support it. I don’t support it when used as a political weapon to defend the kind of deficit spending you want, or as a figleaf to cover up continued prolifigacy.
And I don’t see any ad hominem at all; I see people pointing out the massive disconnect with what’s being said now with what was being said two months ago. If Obama had embraced pay-as-you-go prior to his massive budget increases being put in place, I would have a very different opinion about what is being done here. Of course, if he had done that, he wouldn’t have gotten his massive budget increases … which is the point.
Cite?
AFAIK, the only partisan Republicans here are Mr. Moto and Shodan, and I’m pretty sure Moto was not a fan of Bush’s spending.