Future taxes lower? Why not lower taxes now, if there’s a surplus, and raise them in the future if need be? That would tend to reduce unnecessary expenditures and the frittering away of revenues.
I am reminded of the couple who has $5,800 in credit card debts. They buy a lottery ticket and win fifteen dollars.
They argue about whether or not to spend it on dinner, or save it for a rainy day.
Geez, manhattan, two more posts from me and you’ll be reduced to ad hominen attacks. 
That’s exactly why I didn’t say “all”, now did I? Heck, look at Walter Mondale, who was one of the few guys gutsy enough to say we needed a tax increase. But promising the populace tax cuts is one of the oldest tricks in the election book.
As I recall, a lot of the Democrats jumped on board the tax rebate bandwagon once it was apparent they couldn’t stop Congressional Republicans from passing it. That’s a big difference, however, from saying “George W. didn’t want the tax rebate at all, but those meanies up in Congress forced him to go with it.”
From where I’m sitting, Dubya certainly seemed quick-n-eager to take the credit for the rebate just last month – so why can’t we pin the blame on him now that the rebate has f’d up the surplus?
I’d say it would be to prevent/reduce future jumps in the tax rate. I’m an engineer, and having a moderately-consistent tax rate from year-to-year appeals to me more than big leaps one year and big cuts the next.
Do you mean ad hominen like “‘President’ Bush,” “not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” and “bribe the voters?”
Not to beat up on you, but you just can’t use language like that and then say, “Oh, I was just simplifying” and add a smiley. You were wrong. Entirely. Your facts were wrong, and your interpretation of them was wrong.
And that Clinton feller. He ran on an increase, albeit followed by a later decrease that never seemed to materialize.
Why do you imagine that might be? Do you suppose that many people would actually like taxes to be lower? How, precisely, does actually fulfilling one’s explicit promise equal “bribing” voters? I thought we’d all like it better if politicians routinely delivered on their promises. (Well, except for that whole health care thing.)
Your recollection of the facts here is mostly right. I don’t claim that Bush fought it; in fact, as soon as the Dems thought it up, he was on it like white on rice. But to spin it as a “bribe” when the whole idea came from the opposing party is just plain incorrect. Do you understand this? And the reasons that we don’t “pin the blame on him” are a) the Democrats wanted to front-load the tax bill even more than what finally was done, b) the year ain’t over yet, and we may still make the revenue numbers and c) changing revenue is not the only way to balance a budget. If my income went down, I might trim some of my expenses to match.
Think of this as an opportunity to get something done that we probably agree on – less revenue may mean less money on that dopey missile defense thing.
Thank you, Sofa King. pldennison, there may be an argument that the government should never run a surplus (an argument I slightly disagree with - a government shouldn’t run a surplus over the business cycle - the surpluses run in boom years should cancel out debts run in recession years), but that ain’t what’s facing the U.S. now. The U.S. has been running a current-account surplus the past few years, but we still have $5.7 trillion in outstanding debt of which $2.8 trillion is owed to the public. So we are by no measure in a net surplus.
Sua
The problem with this analogy is that we’ve been borrowing money for those groceries for the last 20 years. One of these days, the grocer is going to get pissed and demand that we pay him back.
As of about 5pm Eastern time on August 29, 2001, the national debt of the United states is just over 5.7 TRILLION dollars. That comes out to about $22,800 for every man, woman and child in this country.
Here’s a National Debt Clock online: http://www.worldnewsstand.net/history/your_debt.htm
Balancing the budget is one thing- we’d finally gotten a handle on that before Bush came along with his modern-day version of bread and circuses. It’s simply insane to cut taxes when we have that crushing load of debt hanging over our heads.
It’s really even worse. This figure doesn’t include the unfunded liability in Social Security, which is several trillion dollars. Also, Medicare is now starting to run a deficit, which will grow to become very large.
I don’t think we’d really gotten a handle on balancing the budget; I think we were lucky. We balanced the budget because a mean SOB was Speaker of the House and because a fantastic economic expansion produced unexpected tax revenue. Note that the Gore campaign promised a budget surplus, but he also promised a host of programs that would have put us in deficit. Had he won, I don’t know what would have happened.
Congress and Clinton took a big step to deficit by raising spending 8% last year. I believe the Bush budget will be another 6% this year.
We will have to either cut spending or raise taxes to pay off this huge deficit. But, we can only raise taxes so much, because the tax money has to come out of the general economy. Unfortunately, Congress and the President seem unwilling to cut spending or even to hold the growth in government spending to the same rate as the growth in the economy.
Where’s Newt when we need him?
Here’s the problem, as I and a lot of other conservatives see it:
Government is horribly irresponsible with our money. Every year, with the exception of the last few years, they have spent every nickel of revenue they have gotten, plus whatever amount of deficit spending was politically feasible.
If congress had 1 trillion dollars lying around, do you think they are honestly going to save it for a rainy day? Or are they going to find all kinds of ‘pressing needs’, new entitlements, and pork projects to spend it on?
I think the obvious answer is that the money would be spent. Congress spends wildly - the only reason there was a surplus at all in the first place is that economic growth outpaced projections by so much that they were caught unprepared. But give them time and lots of money, and they’ll spend it.
So the question isn’t whether or not a tax cut is irresponsible - it’s whether the government would be EVEN MORE irresponsible if the money stayed in Washington.
Let’s take our couple with the $5800 debt as a good example. Let’s say the wife wins $200 from a lottery ticket. Is it more responsible to pay down the debt, or buy clothes for the kids? Now let’s say that she’s married to a drunk who takes every cent they have and blows it on whiskey. So now the equation is changed - she can either spend the money on clothes for the kids, or watch hubby blow it all on a bender.
THAT’s the real equation. Give the money back to the people, or spend it on new government programs. The third option of ‘saving for a rainy day’ was never a serious possibility.
Indirectly, we do base condo fees on residents’ income. The fee is a function of the square footage of the resident’s unit. So if you can afford (by virtue of a large income) that 2000 ft² top floor penthouse with the rooftop deck, you’ll consequently be paying the biggest condo fee in the building. Where the condo analogy fails is when you get laid off and have no income- you still have to pay your mortgage & condo fees.
I don’t see what is so horrible about slightly overestimating taxes and building up a little surplus. After all it is our government If government, and if we decree that one of government’s functions is to maintain a surplus, then ipso facto that makes it right & proper. If services end up costing a little more than expected, or some kind of emergency spending measure comes up, then these are things that we’ll end up having to pay for anyway probably via tax hikes. Although Sam’s point (that the money won’t sit around very long waiting for that emergency to arise) is well taken. I guess I just wish that government could take a lesson from business and actually have to answer to shareholders more often than every two years.
The massive, wasteful inefficiency is even more appalling at the local level. For example, if every last cent of highway funds given to the state by Congress isn’t used, the state has a really hard time justifying the same $ amount the following year. So of course, every cent does get spent, and roads get ripped up & repaved whether they need it or not.
Also, I don’t think that holders of treasury bonds and bills are particularly clamoring to have them paid back right now. So it’s probably kind of silly to put every cent we can trim towards paying off the debt. I certainly wouldn’t object to increasing the amount we spend on financing the debt, but it’s not exactly the same situation as a family with enormous credit card debt (for one thing, the interest rates are vastly different, as the US government is a far lower risk investment than some random family).
Then again, were it up to me, I’d trim tens of billions from spending, increase debt maintenance, and lower taxes. But then again, it’s not up to me.
Here’s my question: Is there any reason to believe that Congress will spend less just because they don’t have money in the bank? The government ran a deficit for decades, and they didn’t really seem interested in stopping it. Now that we’ve sent the projected surplus back to the people as a tax cut, what’s to stop Congress from just going back to deficit spending? Is there any evidence that Congress will actually trim spending in order to avoid a deficit?
Well, based on the squealing and whining they’ve been doing lately, yes. I don’t think it’s as politically acceptable to spend your way into deficits now, so most spending programs will at least get scrutiny, and it’ll be harder for a politician to sneak a few billion in funding here or there for pet projects.
But it won’t *seriously curtail spending - nothing seems to be able to do that. As you point out, even back when deficits were in the hundreds of billions of dollars, Congress still managed to turn in irresponsible budgets with spending increases higher than inflation.
Unless you’re George W. Bush under a really clever alias, what’s that got to do with anything? I was simply exercising my Constitutional right and expressing my opinion about the person currently sitting in the White House. If I were to actually debate George personally, you can be sure I’d leave the name-calling aside and use substantive points to back up my arguments to him.
For the same reason communism failed – because people are selfish, greedy, bastards.
Speaking strictly for myself, but I would not want my taxes to be zero. I’d rather it be enough to pay for my share of whatever expenses the government incurs while performing its duties. I’d like it to be lower because of increased efficiency, but not because I want to weasel out more for myself.
Waitasecond … didn’t you say earlier that the rebate (not the cut, but the rebate checks) were not Bush’s idea (at least not on the campaign trail)? If so, how’s that “fulfilling one’s explicit promise”?
Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, to the layman, Bush has been taking all of the credit for the recent rebate checks. So now that the surplus has vanished because of those selfsame rebates, doesn’t it follow that Bush will get – and deserves – the blame for it as well?
And now it looks like Bush’s campaign tax cuts were whacked up to begin with:
The Democrats (and the Republicans, let’s not forget) may have floated the initial idea, but IIRC it was Bush who pushed to make the rebates even bigger than initially proposed.
Bottom line – any way you slice it, we’re in a (deeper) hole now, and should be looking for a way to get out. I find the Administration’s efforts to simultaneously (a)encourage people to spend money and take credit for the rebate checks and (b)chide Congress for spending money irresponsibly to be hypocritical and unwise.
I’ll agree to that, though I won’t hold my breath waiting for it.
I would use different terminology. I think he should get CREDIT and not blame for getting all that money out of Washington. So yeah, Bush is responsible for the surplus vanishing - and that’s a good thing. Way to go, Mr. Bush. You managed to enact the single most powerful check on government spending you possibly could have.