Well, then, for maximum stimulus and multiplier effect, all private property should be confiscated and the government should just support all of us, right?
You have real potential to be on the Bush economic team. It also follows that since the lower taxes spur the economy....If we lowered the tax rates [for corporate and personal] to zero, we would have a booming economy like the world has never seen. Corporations could be competitive in the world markets. Since we can borrow money to run the government, who is to say that we can't run the entire government, indefinitely, on borrowed money. It's not "real" money anyway, we went away from the gold standard many years ago. The large % of money only exists in bits and bytes stored in computers. It's not "real". We can borrow the entire federal budget. Yee-hah.
If one person can dig a grave in 4 hours and two people can dig a grave in 2 hours....how many people will it take to dig your grave in one second?
The Budget Outlook
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that under current policies, the federal deficit will total $477 billion in fiscal year 2004 and then decline to $362 billion in 2005 (see Table 1-1). Although that 2004 deficit would be a record in nominal dollars, it would represent a smaller share of the economy--4.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)--than the deficits recorded in the mid-1980s and early 1990s (see Figure 1-1). For the 10 years from 2005 through 2014, CBO projects that current policies would produce a cumulative deficit of $1.9 trillion, or 1.3 percent of total GDP over that period.
Care to compare what the CBO budget estimate or the Presidents submission back in 2000 was against what really happened?
If you want to tie federal expenditures to the GDP than why don't you tie taxes collected to the GDP. Adjust taxes to a pay as you go system. Also, if your writing about Federal Budget as a percentage of the GDP, the why not show what Federal revenues [taxes] are as a percentage of the GDP. The mathematics are that taxes are at an even lower percentage of the GDP since we are operating at a deficit. If we raise taxes to cover the operating expenses of the government, we're still at historic lows for taxes as a percentage of the GDP.
[My guess is all that was a bit too complicated for you, perhaps you can get some help from KLP]
jttmab |