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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Scumbria who wrote (129875)	12/20/2000 10:15:51 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570320

Scumbria, I would like to pay down some of the national debt but I don't know about paying it all off right now.(maybe over a long period of time). I don't think that if taxes are maintained at current rates politicians will use the money to pay down the debt. They will find new ways to spend it, new programs that have new constituencies and will be hard to cut if they later prove to be too expensive. (either because they cost more then planned or because tax, which is normally the case, or because tax revenues are lower then expectations.) One problem with paying the idea of paying down the national debt is that we are really doing no such thing. The debt is being shifted from being owned by the private sector to being owned by the so called "Social Security Trust Fund" (I say so called because it amounts to the government giving itself IOUs rather then a true trust fund). Now look what happens if we do pay back all the debt except the debt to social security. If social security has a surplus for that year by law it has to be lent to the government. But if the government has been paying back the debt that means the government has had a surplus. IF the government budget is in surplus or in balance then it doesn't need to borrow any money. What happens to that money? Will it be given back in a rebate to taxpayers? Probably not, the government might cut back taxes for the next year but they are unlikely to just mail everyone a check. Would (and could) the government just make the money disapear. That would be unusual, perhaps unprecedented. It would also be deflationary. At the right time a delfationary push might be good, but I'm not so sure the government would get the timing right on this, or for that matter even want to do this. What would happen instead is the government would be sitting on money and it would spend it. It could even be argued that it would have to spend it. What's your take on this posibility? Remember how many round trips to the sun you can pave with $5 trillion in dollar bills? Yes its a big number. So is the US economy and so is the US federal budget. Talking about how many round trips to the sun you can make is an interesting rhetorical device but is not logically relevant to the issue. I do agree it would probably be good if the debt was cut back but I think this should be done by shrinking the size of the government (or at a minimum restraining its growth), rather then keeping these too high tax rates. Why are Republicans so incredibly dense about this? Why is everyone who disagree with you on something you feel strongly, dense, and idiot, or deluded? Tim