How many times does it need to be answered? They only care about the deficit to criticize liberals. Literally everyone in this thread is saying it, even Shodan (in his own way).
More specifically, it’s a cover story they can tell themselves about why “those people” should not get any benefits, like they do.
I don’t know about “a Republican voter”, but like you, I am also far more likely to vote for someone with a a reasonable fiscal policy, and I also have not decided who to vote for yet.
The trouble is, I don’t think there will be any such candidate, in either the Republican or Democratic primaries, or in the general election.
Whoever wins, it will be terrible because
[ul][li]The deficit is unsustainably high! No fiscal responsibility! Boo! Or [/ul][/li][ul][li]We can’t deal with the deficit because we are in recession, or might go into recession, or the other party won’t let us, or deficits don’t matter, or we have a plan to raise spending this year and make cuts next year, etc.[/ul][/li]And who says which is going to be completely dependent on who wins the White House.
Regards,
Shodan
Except that, as I previously noted and cited, Democrats have been much more responsible and serious than Republicans about actually addressing and reducing deficits, whether they are in the White House or not. Your attempt to dismiss this with bothsidesism rhetoric is simply misrepresenting the facts.
The problem with this is that it isn’t true. Your “cite” is laughable spin.
“Look! In 1990 the Democrats passed a bill raising taxes now so we could get Bush Sr. to break a campaign promise and cutting spending later OK, that never happened, and then the Democrats passed a bill in 1993, and only five years later after they lost control of Congress and the GOP fought back an attempt by Clinton to increase the deficit and despite Clinton vetoing the budget the budget was balanced!”
“Then, evil irresponsible Bush 43 passed tax cuts and then when they came to expire, all we had to do was sit still and let them expire but we voted to extend them and therefore the deficit is ALL REPUBLICANS’ FAULT! Especially under Obama - they had us outnumbered 41-59!”
“So, vote for Biden/Sanders/Warren/a player to be named later, because their massive increases in taxation and even more massive increases in spending will balance the budget!”
Gosh, that’s persuasive. not
Regards,
Shodan
I want to ask you directly about this, because you ignored my previous post on the issue.
Scenario 1
Obama promised to cut the deficit in half during his first term, but according to your story, he failed to do that, and only managed to reduce the deficit by about 36%, or about $500 billion.*****
Scenario 2
Trump promised to reduce the deficit, and in one interview said that he could eliminate it altogether and balance the budget “I think over a five-year period.” He also promised to eliminate the national debt (not the deficit; the debt******) “over a period of eight years.” Deficits have increased by about $300 million per year, and are projected to keep rising. The debt has risen by almost three trillion dollars.
Your quoted comment above suggests that you believe that these two scenarios are equivalent, in terms of honesty and a good faith effort to fulfill promises. Do you actually believe this to be the case?
***** It’s worth noting that the figures in your linked article ($900 billion deficit) were still projections, because the 2013 budget had not been finalized. If we go to the CBO’s own figures (Excel Spreadsheet), we see that they list the actual 2013 deficit at $679.8 billion. If we subtract this from the 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion, it looks like Obama actually did fulfill his promise to halve the deficit in four years.
****** To be fair, it’s not clear to me whether Trump actually understands the difference between the deficit and the debt. He might, in that second interview, have thought that he was promising to eliminate the deficit in eight years, rather than the whole debt.
A good article by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner in economics:
Bullshit.
Democrats weren’t worried about the deficit during Obama because you WANT a high deficit during a economic collapse. The only people bitching about it were Republicans, because, as a great man once said “They only care about the deficit to criticize liberals.”
Democrats are worried now because we have a huge deficit during a time of relative economic stability. Now is NOT the time to have a high deficit, now is the time to reel in the deficit and bank some equity for the next downturn. The only people not bitching about it are Republicans, because, as a great man once said “They only care about the deficit to criticize liberals.”
Although your “B)” is correct from a functional standpoint, I’m not sure it’s a guiding principle. On the right, when it comes to fiscal matters, the only thing that matters is that there are tax cuts. End of story. They don’t care about debt. They don’t care about spending, austerity, or stimulus. They just want to cut taxes, and those tax cuts should occur mostly, or all, within the top 1%.
To answer the OP’s question about where is the Tea Party? They’re out there trying to help Trump get re-elected. The Tea Party never existed as an actual fiscally conservative force. They were astroturf from day one. And most of them voted for Trump, and still like Trump.
More specifically, let former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill explain it:
But that doesn’t hold a patch to Trump’s promise to eliminate not only the deficit, but the debt, in 10 years. How’s that goin’, big fella?
Simple:[ul]
[li][DEL]Trump[/DEL] The US declares bankruptcy[/li][li]The debt goes away.[/li][li]Profit![/li][/ul]I mean, it’s worked for him before, hasn’t it?
Hopefully someone can crunch some math for us:
Realistically, how much **could **Trump have reduced the deficit? If he had put in steep tax increases on the rich and maybe reduced defense spending by $50-100 billion, what would we be looking at right now?
It depends on who you think is “the rich”. If the deficit is $1T, and you cut defense spending by $100B, then another $900B has to come from somewhere. The top 1% paid $538B in income taxes in 2016 so getting it just from them would involve somewhere less than tripling their taxes. The top 10% paid a little over $1T, so their taxes would double. The top 25% paid $1.2T, so somewhat less than double. In 2014, taxes on capital gains totaled almost $1.4T with an average effective rate of 19.4% so I suppose you could tax capital gains as ordinary income as long as you don’t mind fucking the economy up.
The budget should be balanced IMO by a spending cut-to-tax increase ration of closer to 2:1 than 10:1, and “just soak the rich” is a pipe dream.
Regards,
Shodan
So is “let all the poors die”.
Since the Reagan years, Democratic administrations have significantly reduced budget deficits while Republican administrations have significantly raised them. It’s your pretense of “bothsidesism” on deficit issues that is laughable spin.
A quick glance at the chart above tells us that the Democrats have very much been accomplices with the massive budget deficits. The current Democratic house is exploding the budget to the heavens. Please refrain from the most basic of party hackery if possible.
A simple analysis of who is in control of the presidency when deficits are higher is about as basic as you can get. High school standardized test essay response stuff.
Another thing to be considered is which programs are driving the huge spending. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are the big spending hitters and they are Dem programs. The Dems have also bent over backwards to increase spending in every other area of the budget, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Taxes are a red herring. They have consistently bebopped and scatted around 19% of GDP since WWII regardless of marginal tax rates. It seems the govt simply can’t milk more than that from the defiant American taxpayer, so progressive dreams of raising more taxes to lower the deficit and bilking us like they do in Europe are pretty much hopeless.
The inconvenient fact for Dems and Republicans is that Reagan didn’t lower taxes. That is a grand myth. He and his Dem Congress just exploded the budget. That is what sent the govt totally off the rails (abetted by Nixon’s closing of the gold window).
I don’t think we’ve seen the last of the tea party, they’re coming for all social programs started by the dems 100 years ago, even if it’s the republicans who explode the deficit to insane levels(I’m convinced that’s their long game)An 18th century utopia is right around the corner.
Since the tea party didn’t arrive while trillions were being spent on useless wars, but instead arose when a man with excess melanin became President, one might argue that the deficit isn’t what they were really upset about.
For reference, using the White House’s own data, discretionary spending increases over 40% MORE under Republican Presidents than Democrats.
Red Herring my ass. We could have lowered the deficits in the past significantly if one of our parties wasn’t a consistent liar on taxes. We could have lowered the trajectory of our debt in the future if one of our parties wasn’t a consistent liar on taxes.
Since the only consistent position the Republicans ever take is “tax cuts for our cronies pay for themselves”, it’s worth pointing out their rank dishonesty in this area. They used to say that tax cuts paid for themselves and that tax hikes were self-defeating, using the laffer curve. But just about every instance of that has been proven wrong. Take Trump’s tax cut. We’re now heading toward a trillion in the deficit this year, and all of this just so we can get a small bump in growth during half of 2018. It was sold on an increase in business investment, which most economists warned would not happen…and said economists were correct.
By the way, the 19% number is incorrect. They have mostly bounced between 16-18%, including only 16.2% last year. If they were centered around 19%, we’d be in better shape than we are from a fiscal standpoint.