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

To: Road Walker who wrote (357261)	11/6/2007 4:56:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1573973

As I said the budget balance is far from the only concern with massive government spending. So "not a problem for the budget", doesn't mean "not a problem". I think even you agree with this point. If we had an Iraq war tax, you wouldn't stop arguing against the war, or even limit yourself to concerns other than its financial cost or impact on the budget. You would probably (and correctly), conclude that if we could afford to pay the "Iraq tax", we could afford to pay the same amount of general taxes, and we could pull out of Iraq and continue to pay the tax. I also think you would be likely to (again correctly) assume that even if the tax pays all the costs of Iraq plus a bit more, and even if you somehow couldn't have that level of taxation without the war, so that ending the war would hurt our fiscal balance, we would still as a country save money (at least in a direct sense, indirect costs and benefits are hard to impossible to calculate) by ending the war. -- Even if your only considering the budget balance - You could have the program without the taxes, or the taxes without the program. Tomorrow congress could decide that starting the next fiscal year it would raise income taxes to cover SS, and drop the payroll tax. If done right the net fiscal balance impact could be zero. I'm not necessarily suggesting this (I'd have to think about it a lot before I'd decide whether to support the change), but it does show how the program and the associated tax are not the same thing, and that you can have one without the other. A secondary point is that the mortgage in your example represents debt, or money already spent. Upcoming payments to SS beneficiaries isn't paying back debt, its new spending. And SS, unlike the rental property with a mortgage, isn't an investment, its just spending. I've used another example (that unfortunately also includes paying down debt but isn't supposing an investment with a real return but rather just spending. A car. If I buy a car, that has payments of $500/month, and I get a part time job that pays $600 a month at the same time, specifically because I bought the car. Than I found out that I was spending $100/month more than my income, the new car would still be something that was increasing my personal deficit. Unless I'm way underwater on the car, I could sell it and buy a used one and my fiscal position would be better.