I am still amazed that since Reagan and all the Repubs that followed, that people are still dumb enough to believe the Repubs represent fiscal responsibility. How much evidence is required to make them see the truth. Bush and Cheney said, “deficits don’t matter, Reagan proved it”. What the hell does it take?
With due respect, how often do you follow congressional votes? Do you have an adequate sample such that you not remembering a small number of voters means it is in fact unusual?
Why exactly are we treating increasing taxes and decreasing spending as equally valid courses to cutting the debt?
Oh. I’d thought you’d be on about how there’s not a supermajority.
To be fair, it was just Cheney that said that.
He did not live in a vacuum. He was a huge part of the policy direction of the Repubs. By the way, he said it to Bush.
The DEms balanced the budget not so long ago. The Repubs completely fucked it up. You can dance around all you want, but the unavoidable fact is huge tax cuts while started 2 unfunded wars put us in a huge hole. That was followed by a banking meltdown fed by deregulation and stupid fiscal policies.
We have not been able to fix that mess yet, because the fiscally ignorant, bought off Repubs got control of the House.
This is the most sensible thing that’s been said so far in this thread.
As someone of a more liberal bent, I’d urge that the U.S. government take advantage of low interest rates and cheap labor to spend money on infrastructure upgrades* that we’ll need to make sooner or later anyway, and goose the economy more quickly back up to the level where we’d have that 18-19% tax revenue level. As a conservative, Sam, you’d probably disagree, and say we should just wait until the economy finds its way back to normal by itself. But that’s the range where the debate should be taking place, in terms of fixing 50% of our medium-term deficit problem.
Either way, it increases revenue enough, once we’re back to normal, to take care of 50% of the problem without hiking anyone’s tax rates. This should be good news from all political perspectives: if you’re a conservative, you say we can do the other 50% by spending cuts without having to increase tax rates at all because we’ve already got 50% from revenue expansion; if you’re a liberal, you might say the other 50% can come from letting the Bush tax cuts lapse, since you’ve still got that in reserve. If you’re somewhere in the middle, you might say 25% from each - but that’s a hell of a lot better than 50% from each. What’s not to like?
*And I’m not even thinking of sexy but controversial stuff like SUPERTRAINS here, but ancient water and sewer systems, deteriorating highway bridges, substantial gaps in our freight rail network, stuff like that. We’ll have to spend this money eventually. Why not spend it now, when we can get the most bang for the buck in terms of labor costs, borrowing costs, and the effect on the economy? If we wait until the economy’s booming again, money and labor will both cost more because we’ll be running into the crowding-out effect, and for that same reason, it won’t help the economy much either: at that point, we’d be substituting public spending for private spending, rather than using money and labor that’s currently on the sidelines.
That 3-1 ratio is more salesmanship than reality. First of all, they expect 1/4 of the savings to come in the form of reduced interest payments on the national debt, as a result of implementing the tax increases and spending cuts that take care of the other 3/4. So it’s really more like 2:1:1 of spending cuts to tax hikes to interest savings, just for starters.
And my understanding is that the Administration included the reduction or elimination of a bunch of tax expenditures as “spending cuts.” While there’s what I see as a strong argument for categorizing tax deductions and credits as “spending,” it certainly isn’t standard nomenclature as things stand. So IIRC, Obama’s plan is actually fairly close to evenly balanced between things we’d regard as spending cuts and things we’d regard as tax hikes.
If conditions change during that 10 years shouldn’t we be free to take that into account?
(If China started a (nuke-free) WWIII, I’d think we might just want to make some radical changes in tax rates and spending priorities, maybe that’s just me.)
CMC fnord!
By that rationale you can’t hope for any enduring concensus about what is good for the country. What the Republicans need to do is explain to us why medicare needs to be cut and why some of the savings from those cuts need to go back into the economy in the form of tax cuts at the highest brackets. What Democrats need to do is explain to us why taxes need to be increased and more progressive while explaining to us how we are going to pay for medicare over the long term without cuts.
Ryan is correct, we need medicare reform and the Democrats are right we need to increase revenue so that the medicare reform doesn’t leave old people deciding between cat food and heart medicine.
This graph tells me that 18-19% is the high point of revenue during the real estate bubble.
So we are assuming that we will have a perpetual bubble?
You realize that his last year was October 2008 to September 2009, right?
Not that I doubt you but where does it say that?
The problem with your suggestion is that the part over which we have the most control of the budget (the non-military discretionary part) is not the part that is driving the long term deficit. Over the short term, we can shore up our deficit with tax increases and over the long term we need to deal with medicare/medicaid.
:: pulls out hair ::
I hate it when Republicans equate “ending tax cuts” with “tax rate increase”. Not the same thing.
Think about it. When you pay your taxes every paycheck, you’re just giving the government an interest-free loan (most of the time). Yah, sometimes we end up we do our paperwork correctly and still end up with extra deductibles, but come on.
Republicans LOVE to tout personal responsibility, yet somehow no one is going to pony up? How is that logical?
End the cuts. It’s not doing anything.
And if I hear ONE MORE person say, “Well my tax dollars go to…” and that person is making less than bank every year, I swear. I’m going to punch them.
pshaw, bizzle. your tax dollars get recycled back into your pocket.
I understand the importance of framing in politics, but nothing gets me more than hearing tax relief. As if the government is reaching into your pocket. :rolleyes:
If you really want to help fix the budget, then stop letting money go down the drain in poorly operated ‘social’ programs. (Social Security, public schooling, Medicaid?) If you can’t finance it, it won’t work right. That puts stress on everything. It’s like renting an apt. your whole life - affordable for now, but not saving you anything in the long wrong.
How about “effective tax rate increase”?
If you step back and say, will a given policy result in my having more money in my pocket at the end of the year, then it should be clear if it is a “cut” or an “increase.”
Now the *exact *same concept holds true for changing Medicare for those under 55. That would *effectively *raise living expenses on the whole, which roughly equates to “raising Medicare taxes” on those under 55.
the Republicans have a talent for taking what should be a serious discussion and getting it sidelined on some semantic bullshit like “eliminating the tax break is a tax increase you librul snot” and then stepping back and watching the fireworks that detract from the real discussion.
Social Security ,poorly run? Do you do anything but swallow conservative talking points?
Social Security is run on 1.5 percent of the budget. Healthcare companies filter 35 percent out but disguise it is book keeping.
Social Security not only has kept a bottom under the most vulnerable but helps the economy out with permitting low income people to still participate in the economy. They buy food and goods. That is demand. Demand is what makes the economy go.
Pick up your eyes, super glue your hair back and open your mind to the facts.
You want to see something run financially corruptly? Try the Republican National Committee. Try TARP and TALF.Try the military which seems to have misplaced 11 billion dollars in Iraq. Try the military contractors whose shoddy work electrocuted soldiers, while overcharging the hell out of American tax payers.
you’re kidding, right? You think Social Security will be there or mean anything for you by the time I’m 55? I’m putting in money for something that I won’t see.
You?
How is that a Republican talking point? :rolleyes:
SS going away IS a Republican talking point.
Let’s try and play the hypothetical.
Nathan Newman’s National Budget Simulation
Clicking on that link brings you to a page wherein you can tinker with the budget, both on the spending and revenue side. Each of you go take a shot at realistically cutting $750MM from the budget. I thought I was draconian on some things and cut a lot of items by at least 10% and I only got to about $325MM.
It’ll be interesting to see how you do.
My first crack at it cut a trillion dollars.
Eliminate the Dept of Education and the Dept of Energy. Dramatically scale back the Dept of Commerce. Get rid of ag subsidies and tax breaks for housing. Cut a whole bunch of tax credits for corporations and individuals. Get rid of local community assistance programs, which should be done by local communities and states. Cut the military budget by 20%, and Iraq and Iran appropriations by 20%. Wind back about half of the 2001-2003 tax cuts.
I cut so much that I got a warning that I was creating a 600 billion dollar surplus, and that this was a very bad thing. Of course, no one could possibly want to actually reduce the debt, right? I think the bias of the author is showing.