I wouldn’t freeze it in a day. The U.S. Budget doesn’t turn on a dime. We didn’t get into this situation in a day, and we won’t get out of it that way, either. I am interested in seeing which way the trends are going. The deficit doesn’t have to be zero next year, but (absent any big shocks to the system) it should be lower than this year. And lower again the year after that. Keep the pressure and the discipline going, for decades if necessary. How long do we all hope this country will last; another one-hundred, two-hundred years? It’s like paying off a thirty-year mortgage; we’ve got time to do this right.
During my political lifetime, one party has done that when they’ve had the chance. And one party passed tax cuts and free drugs for seniors with no attempt to pay for them.
Oh my. At some point willful ignorance ceases to amuse. Tell us what you see in this graph. Or this graph which plots debt as a percent of GDP. (We don’t need your bragging about your friends at the FRB; just raise your hand if you understand the rationale for measuring debt this way.)
And at some point your snarkiness and sarcasm is almost equal to that of the politicians that you want to emulate. God forbid we have a substantive, thoughtful discussion without insults. So please continue to trot out graphs that show that the just the mean, bad Republicans are to blame for the countries woes.
I’ll continue to realize that both parties have caused this and both parties will have to work to get us out of this, but it will only work when we as taxpayers vote for leaders who are willing to take a hard stand on these issues.
And this is the nut of it. I may not know what your narrative is spifflog, but I do know that for the last 8 years conservatives bitched about the deficit and the debt every chance they got just as they did during the Clinton years. As soon as a conservative is in the White House (whether Bush or Trump), the bitching stops and the deficits go up. I also know that Democrats (both Clinton and Obama) have tried to raise taxes as they were concerned with the deficit. This “both sides are the problem” thing may be technically true, but to fiscally conservative me one side is clearly more of a problem than the other.
Substantive and thoughtful, hunh? I wasn’t going to post again, but this tickled my phony bone!
As others have mentioned, that graph has limited utility. (For starters, do SocSec payouts depend much on party in power?) But I want to ask you about truthfulpolitics.com . Where did you even hear of this site? Even Google has barely heard of it, though it does take me to a website ranker which shows:
$789 ! (I think this estimate is related to traffic.) I don’t want to brag but my own little personal hobbyist website is worth seven times as much.
I already addressed this in post #17. As a Democrat who’s sick and tired of his party having to clean up after the damned elephants every time we get back into control of the government, I’d be interested in your reply.
Fiscal conservatives ≠ fiscally responsible. Shit, I called myself fiscally conservative until I found out it meant raising spending like a drunken sailor and cutting taxes, or else it meant “nuh uh, no way no how can we raise spending during a recession 'cause that would be like a housewife trying to balance her checkbook” Sarah palin bullshit. Nope, now “infrastructure spending” actually means crony capitalism instead of actually building the infrastructure.
Well, that’s not really responsive to my argument.
I’m arguing that, in the United States, it is impossible to effectively cut entitlements. Doing so will result in the party leading that charge being thrown out in less than two years. Therefore, the ‘Starve the Beast’ line of reasoning is, and always has been, invalid.
However, because some leaders and policymakers are deluded about their ability to do so, the continue to push the concept by raising federal indebtedness. However, the most likely outcome of this policy is not the overall shrinking of the federal government due to inability to pay for it. Rather, the most likely outcome is political paralysis - as most politicians have survival instincts and know that they’ll be out looking for work if they truly cut entitlements - and the inflation of the dollar as a means to make it easier to pay off the federal debt. This will, downstream, raise interest rates - perhaps quite a bit - and make the overall economy slower and more sluggish than it would otherwise be.
Both houses of Congress, and President Trump, approved a spending measure that would raise defense spending to over $700 billion for two years (not sure if that’s 2018 and 2019, or 2019 and 2020.) But, apparently, a lot of that is for overseas war expenditures, and isn’t baseline defense spending………unless it really all is baseline?
Reducing total spending is not the goal of ‘Starve the Beast.’ And cutting entitlements is important to the GOP only if it leads to a “privatised” SocSec boondoggle.
The purpose of the ‘Starve the Beast’ strategy is not to use the huge and growing deficit as a reason to cut hundreds of billions from Medicare and SocSec. It’s to use that deficit as a “reason” to cut a few billion from financial regulation, environmental protection, etc.
