Really interesting piece this morning by Kraut in the WaPo, basically trying to get the recalcitrant GOPers to go along with Boehner’s plan.
Here’s the money shot
He had me until he got to “everything is Obama’s fault”.
What bollocks.
Nobody in the GOP caucus reads Kraut. There’s a reason Boehner has spent the past week with Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham; they’re the real influence peddlers in the GOP caucus, and they are still against his plan.
What??? Didn’t you know that the stock and housing market crashes in August 2008 was a DIRECT RESULT of the predictions for the huge Obamastimuluscarefreemoneygiveaway passed by the socialist Keynesian Democrat Congress one year later? Of course it is Obama’s fault that Bush passed tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 that continue to bleed the treasury dry today!
Moreover, what’s with all these high temperatures these days? There’s no GLOBAL warming, it’s just OBAMA’S heat wave that’s killing all those senior citizens!
Just as well. Krauthammer is as much of a lying ideologue as the other two. He’s just a bit smarter.
Technically, aren’t they the Obama tax cuts now, since he re-upped them?
Sure, but we all know the bigger problem is Bush’s Medicare.
Not when you consider the reason he did it was because the Repubs would not bend. These cuts are still hanging over the political theme. The baggers absolutely will not vote for new revenue. You can not cut the deficit away. But they are not bright enough to understand that. They are simple little people with funny hats, signs and shirts. But the mathematics of addition and subtraction seems to be too difficult for them to understand.
Now apparently Boehner is going to add back in the requirement that a BBA be passed before the limit gets raised, praying this gets him the 2 votes he needs. This helps how? There is zero percent chance that will be included in a final compromise bill…
Looks more and more like he passes something with only GOP support (and the bare minimum), Reid kills it in the Senate, replaces it with his plan, and that plan passes the House with Dem and just enough GOP support.
Boehner pretty much has to let the Reid compromise plan come for a vote if it passes the Senate, right? I guess the big question is whether Boehner support the final compromise even though the Tea Party base will scream bloody murder…
My memory isn’t as good as it used to be. Or perhaps it is, and I just don’t remember. When was the last time sour Krauthammer was right about something?
But this: this is so special…
“The nation has a raging economic infection, and Obama wanted to use penicillin. We on the right insisted on a homeopathic dose, which didn’t work. So clearly it is Obama’s fault for using the wrong medicine.”
Gotta wonder, does he really believe it himself, or does he just type it out, turn it in, and get stinking drunk and wonder if he ever really had any integrity, or was just kidding himself.
Out of all the ridiculous stuff I put in that post, this is what you have an issue with?
I’m imagining how Mr Smashy read my last post: “Hmm… Obama responsible for the stock market crash before he was elected, check… Obama responsible for the housing market collapse while he was on the campaign trail, that’s true too… Obama responsible for the heat wave, yep… Obama killing old people, that’s right… Obama responsible for the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 — NOW HOLD ON THERE!!!”
When did it become the presidents job to offer a plan? The debt ceiling has been raised hundreds of times with no plan necessary. Now SMASHY hot off Fox news, declares it Obama’s fault because he did not offer a plan.
Here’s a plan. Raise the debt ceiling. No other provisions needed.
That’s not a plan, that’s a solution! Whatsamatta you?
I just want someone to cut through the crap here and talk to me purely in terms of finance. What are the big beasts contributing to our problems, and what isn’t?
Do we actually need to perform cuts in Medicare and Social Security? What influence do they have over the problems today?
I always hear our defense budget is massive but even cutting that won’t help?
Is the correct solution to tax the rich a bit harder this time around? Is the shrinking middle-class being overburdened or underburdened? I’m getting tired of the smoke and mirrors.
Yes and no, and lots.
Debt servicing, Social Security and Medicare eat up more than half of the overall federal budget. The problem is that medical care is one of the few things that government and the private sector both do that the government does more cheaply- so cutting Medicare and/or Medicaid means pushing medical care costs back onto a private sector that can’t afford them either - and in practice, eliminating access to medical care entirely for a significant segment of the populace.
I’m increasingly certain that a single-payer healthcare system is the only way to fix the federal budget. I’m more certain that it will be 20 years or more before we get one; in terms of the makeup of Congress, we’re farther away today from a proper healthcare system than we were in 2008.
What components currently make up the expenditures vs. inflows? In other words, what can we break down spending into and what can we break down revenue into?
I’m mainly curious about who is paying for what and where the gap is coming from.
The only graph I’ve seen is Policy Changes Under Two Presidents - NYTimes.com which makes it hard for me to believe that Obama can be blamed for “all this spending” at all. How can anyone accuse Obama of this when so much of the new spending came from Bush? Seems like a blatant contradiction to me.
If Corporations And The Rich Paid Taxes At The Same Level As The 1960s, The Debt Would Disappear
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/07/25/277857/corporations-rich-taxes-debt-disappear/
and
*
“I keep hearing that what is holding U.S. businesses back from expanding and hiring is “uncertainty.” Exactly what new types of uncertainty businesses face in the current environment vs. past environments is rarely spelled out. But if, in fact, businesses are paralyzed due to uncertainty, I would not expect them to be stepping up their purchases of capital equipment. After all, capital equipment has a relatively long life. If businesses were unusually uncertain about the long-term outlook, they would be more reluctant to make longer-term commitments, which the purchase of capital equipment is. Rather, if businesses were unusually uncertain about the future, they might be more inclined to hire workers, who, after all, can be dismissed on short notice if conditions were to change suddenly.
But just the opposite seems to be happening. Business hiring remains weak and business capital spending is robust. The capital spending part is illustrated in the chart below showing the 8-quarter annualized growth in shipments of nondefense capital goods deflated by the PPI for capital goods. In the 8 quarters of the current economic recovery/expansion, price-adjusted shipments of nondefense capital goods have increased at an annualized rate of 7.4%. In the prior economic expansion, when, presumably, there was normal or less-than-normal uncertainty, the fastest 8-quarter annualized growth in price-adjusted shipments of nondefense capital goods was 8.6% — in the 8 quarters ended Q1:2006. I would think that if abnormally-high business uncertainty prevailed today, there would have been considerably slower growth in price-adjusted purchases of nondefense capital goods than what has occurred.”*
Yiour thoughts on these two things please. And you could reply to my previous post in this thread too if that’s not too much trouble. It’s here :
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=14074997#post14074997
Well, the Bush tax cuts have now been extended, and even though Obama wasn’t necessarily in favor they still go on his bill, so you’d have to add another trillion dollars to his side of the graph.
I think the “stimulus spending” thing is kind of misleading; I don’t think it includes the total amount appropriated for the stimulus, just the amount spent to date.
Obama’s side also doesn’t include any war costs. You can argue about how fair it is to bill Obama for a war he certainly would not have begun, but it’s almost certain that he would have invaded Afghanistan to capture bin Laden. I don’t know how much of the money accounted to Bush is “and defense”, and why Obama doesn’t have any defense spending tallied. Certainly he won’t be cutting the defense budget by any appreciable amount.
Expenditures can be seen here: http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258
Here is a breakdown of federal revenue by source: http://www.heritage.org/budgetchartbook/federal-revenue-sources
One particularly troubling thing on the revenue side, from my perspective, is how low the Estate and Gift tax is. That used to be a reasonably large chunk, and is our only tax on wealth itself (rather than income or consumption).
Not at all - just making a point. the ‘Bush’ cuts should be blamed, or credited, for whatever they did on his watch. Once Obama decides to go along with extending them (and his tax cuts for payroll taxes), he has to own those decisions.
The only way he gets out of it would be if he vetoed those bills, which he didn’t.
(Note I’m not saying if I’m for or against those tax cuts, and I’m on record here that I favor repealing parts of them… but that’s completely besides the point).