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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RetiredNow who wrote (6348)	3/19/2009 4:47:21 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86350

As such, I believe that in good times, you need to be responsible and try as best you can to run surpluses to pay down debt. I'm perhaps not quite the fiscal conservative that you are by the definition you probably use. I think real fiscal conservatism is also about limiting the growth of the size of government not just its debt levels. I don't think you need to not have debt increase over time, as long as it increases slower than the long run rate of economic growth. But IMO you should usually, at least have roughly balanced budgets during good times, at the peaks of a strong up cycle cycle it would make sense to have at least a small surplus. But more than surpluses during good times, I would avoid totally crazy deficits during bad times. A couple of hundred billion isn't crazy. It could even be argued, that facing the recent problems a half a trillion might not be crazy, but pushing two trillion certainly is. The AIG bonuses come to mind when I say this. The AIG bonuses are insignificant on the scale we are discussing. Also there is probably a positive return from some of them. The AIG situation would be worse if AIG couldn't retain any of the good people it has. Some of the AIG bonuses are apparently rather outrageous, but even those, are a case of meeting contractual obligations, and having the government just arbitrarily cancel the contracts, or make some sort of targeted tax increase (a borderline "bill of attainder") to get the money back would be even more outrageous. Others, like some of the retention bonuses, for people winding down the the "toxic" businesses, esp. the smaller bonuses in this area, or bonuses that where just deferred compensation, where employees or retirees would have gotten the money a few years ago, but agreed to defer it, are for the most part fairly reasonable.