And we’ve already covered this in other threads - preventative care does not save money.
For your surtax to mean that the deficit will not go up, you have to come up with a trillion or so. This is in addition to the $787 billion per year Obama has already spent. IOW, Obama has to cut spending by a trillion a year, and raise taxes by enough to cover another trillion for health care. Plus raise taxes and cut spending by enough to reduce the budget deficit enough to get it almost as low as it was under Bush and a Republican Congress.
I await your cite for anything you have claimed. We already know that your previous estimate was half what it really was.
This is just a round robin of different parties defending their pet projects as the next thing we need to spend money on. The idea of just not spending the money deprives all of you of your new toys. Think of just how unhappy everyone on this board would be if we not only didn’t have the Iraq war, and we deprived the liberal wing of their opportunity to redirect that money.
There is nothing less sexy than just plain not spending the money.
First, I don’t think that all of those"pet projects" are bad things. And second, I think that most of the people who say they want to cut spending are liars. Conservative, corrupt liars who only want to pocket the money for themselves, and push an agenda I despise. Why should I support such people ?
Or, not. Instead, we could have had huge numbers of unemployed, shockwaves across the rest of the economy, and that entrepreneur either wouldn’t exist, or would ruthlessly exploit the desperate people who came to work for him, or would just fail because there’s no market.
Freedom and the free market are not synonyms; the unrestrained free market can just as easily undercut freedom.
At the very least there should be free Valium for all, because in addition to providing for the common defense and promoting the general welfare, the Constitution mentions ensuring domestic tranquility.
As to the first part, yes I would like to pocket the money. I would spend it on productive things like a new laptop for my wife or a nice suit, I would also like to add a couple of people on Kiva.
It would also seem to me that if we have three parties:
One who wants to spend a trillion to make war.
One who wants to spend a trillion for universal healthcare and another trillion to bailout various failed enterprises.
One who doesn’t want to spend the trillion at all.
That third guy would seem to be the one with the least agenda.
No; the “third guy” essentially doesn’t exist. What we have are one guy who wants to spend money on wars and enriching his friends; a second who wants to spend it on the general welfare and enriching his friends; and a “third guy” who is actually the first, but dishonest.
There are a whole bunch of efficiencies like preventative care, comparative effectiveness research and shifting the board that sets Medicare rates from congess to the White House which the CBO projected to save half a trillion dollars. I can’t find where I read it but it’ll be all mentioned again in the media over the next weeks or so so I’ll post it then. And even if it was a trillion dollars for healthcare, that’s the same amount Bush increased Medicare spending by in 2003 and raised no revenues to pay for it, putting the whole thing on the national credit card.
The surtax simply has to raise a hundred billion dollars a year, that’ll fund the trillion dollar spend over ten years. Obama isn’t spending $787 billion every year, it’s a one-off economic stimulus package. Bush inherited a budget surplus and the Republican congress then tore up PAYGO rules the Democrats had brought in that said any new spending had to be matched by revenue increases and went on the biggest unfunded spending spree in history, creating record deficits. The Bush deficits would have been even bigger if revenues hadn’t been artificially raised by the biggest asset bubble in history nor did they include the full costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, something Obama has now fixed.
Ok, let me put it another way. What marginal trillion should not be spent. The tenth? Fiftieth? I have been called a liar and clueless because I would prefer the line be pulled back. Where would you draw it? Or is tax money a magical substance like fairy dust?
The great fear of fiscal conservatives is that the poor and middle class will realize that they can simply redistribute everything from the top 10% of earners and have no personal sacrifice to get what they want. When that happense it becomes incredibly easy to decide that the other guy should give you what they have worked for. I can’t help but wonder how keen we would be to bailout GM and to ‘fix’ healthcare if every American recieved a bill for their share.
At the risk of drawing the wrath of a major SDMB pileon, I don’t think the OP’s premise is valid.
Either the Iraq War was the right thing to do or it was the wrong thing to do. The issue of whether the war was right or wrong will, in the minds of most people, whether or not they’re fiscalkly conservative, trump the cost. If you think the war was stupid and ill-conceived (as, incidentally, I do) then it’s irrelevant what it cost. It’s wrong; it wouldn’t have mattered if the war had turned a profit, as some idiots legitimately believed it would.
If, on the other hand, you believe the war was right, then it’s worth to cost to eliminate such a grave threat to national security. It was hard to type that with a straight face but presumably that’s the thinking.
Unless you’re John McCain, the Iraq War is not going to last forever. In the near future that expense will go away. It’s not a structural change to the way the governmetn spends money. Fiscal conservatives tend to worry about things that will cost money forever, like Bush’s prescription drug plan, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, or national health care; those things cost money now, later, and always.
Let me use a recent Senate vote as an example. S.Amdt. 1469 to S. 1390, on continued funding of the F-22 Raptor. A plane that The Pentagon itself declared it didn’t need anymore! “No” votes are to keep the program going.
I’m counting 15 nays from Democrats, out of 60 in the caucus: 25%. 25 nays from republicans, out of 40: 62%. So 62% of Republicans want to spend 65 billion dollars to manufacture 187 more planes that probably won’t ever be used! “Conservative” my ass! Republicans want to take your money and spend it on implements of war. Democrats take your money and spend it on things that actually help people.
If fiscal conservatives actually existed in any real numbers, they’d have withdrawn from the Republican party and voted Libertarian out of protest.
A) This is not a realistic view of the situation either fiscally (we’re not talking about funding 187 planes - we’re talking about funding the last few planes in a 187 order and keeping the production lines open a bit longer should we deem more necesary) or militarily (it will most certainly be used).
B) Providing for national defense is something the government is actually supposed to do - we’re talking about a fighter plane that has legitimate defense purposes, not a war of aggression.
Well put. And we’re almost there now…with the bottom 50% of taxpayers contributing only 3% to the Federal income-tax purse, and the top 50% contributing 97%.
Once it swings over the 50/50 line, as our current President would love to have it, where does the runaway train stop? How could you ever vote down a tax increase? 51% of the population will be getting something for nothing…or at least they think they will…so why would they vote otherwise?
I don’t know if you are or not, and in fact carefully kept my comments as general as possible.
A slight exaggeration I think. But to the extent it’s true, it’s because the wealthy have taken most of the money in this country for themselves. Any fair tax system is going to get most of its revenue from the wealthy, because they are the ones hogging most of the nation’s money.
True, having almost all the country’s wealth concentrated in a few hands sure does put them in a torturous, unenviable position
I do agree that having the ability to vote yourself the treasury is a peril in a democracy. But their taxation is a result of the extremely skewed distribution of wealth in this country - the money has to come from somewhere.
If taxing the living shit out of the rich might cause them some actual suffering, I might be more charitably inclined. But wealth has gone mad in America, the rich have become grossly rich. Did anyone notice when we started calling them “billionaires” rather than multi-millionaires? When CEO’s began to pull down 1,000 times more per hour than their minions? When exactly did we totally lose our minds about this? Sure, there are people who deserve $20 million a year for their work, they are the ones who don’t want it.
I buy lottery tickets, sure, I’m a mathtard and I love to fantasize. But when I think about it, when I add up every possible form of wildly sybaritic self-indulgence, I realize that I would end up giving the bulk of it away, not because I’m such a great guy, but because I simply couldn’t actually spend the money.
If you refuse to allow a fish to own a bicycle, how has the fish been injured? If a man has more than he can possibly use, what justifies insisting that he keep it? When did property rights become the most important human right, the one that all the other human rights must bow and make obeisance?
Indeed. It will come from the hidden font in El Dorado from which the sole, fixed pie springs forth by Divine Providence and that the ‘rich’ have managed to find and find alone, and hoard the pieces of the fixed pie for themselves.
They get on the ‘rich’ telephone party line each night, and chat on exclusive ‘rich’ blogs and websites, and talk about how they managed to secure the slices of the fixed pie for themselves by luck and skullduggery.
And for this they are thankful.
They can only hope that the good and just forces of government don’t find the means to extract these pieces of the fixed pie from their purse, and redistribute to those unlucky enough to be excluded from the fixed-pie font in Eldorado.
No, they got it by exploiting the work of the rest of the country. By a massive program of redistributing wealth upwards. People in your political subculture aren’t actually against wealth redistribution; you simply want it to only go to the already wealthy.
Actually, they tend to prefer clubs and boardrooms.
Indefinitely; Americans make good serfs. They grovel with great enthusiasm before the rich and powerful.
