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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (39055)	11/25/2009 5:36:06 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Budget Non-Sequiturs 24 Nov 2009 04:19 pm Posting about our coming entitlement problem generates some non-sequiturs masquerading as incisive political commentary. * Conservatives have "no credibility" on budget deficits because George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan ran big deficits You are missing a Republican president in the middle: George H. W. Bush, who bravely enacted a whopping tax hike in order to close the deficit, helping to ensure that he would not be re-elected in 1992; by most metrics, Bush I deserves about as much credit for closing the deficit as Clinton does. But even if this weren't a highly selective misreading of history, so what? Are we going to drive our government over a fiscal cliff because George Bush and the Republicans who enabled them were grossly irresponsible, and some of the commentators were hypocrites? That'll show 'em!!! * You can't talk about deficits in regard to health care spending because the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were really expensive. Item: wars, and stimulus spending, are the kind of thing that are traditionally done on deficit spending, all the way back to the American revolution. That's because they're temporary, and it often makes sense to amortize the cost over a number of years. Item #2: Lumping in Afghanistan, when almost everyone in the country supported that, is pretty silly. Item #3: Entitlements are not supposed to be funded on deficit spending, because they're not temporary. It's the same reason that it's okay to take out some student loans to pay for medical school, and not okay to take out a home equity loan to pay your mortgage. You can say that we should never have gone into Iraq, and I'll agree; it's entirely possible that we should stop spending money there, and in Afghanistan, ASAP. But the problem with our entitlements is not their ten year cost; it's that their costs keep growing and growing. * The deficit can't be that big, because Iraq and Afghanistan are costing $600 billion and counting Umm . . . what? You're comparing a ten year cost to a one year deficit of $700+ billion. * Every other industrialized country has a national health care system Which will fix our structural budget deficit how, exactly? meganmcardle.theatlantic.com Holdfast November 24, 2009 6:23 PM I used to think that Reagan and W ran big deficits, but now I have learned that they were mere pikers. But seriously, we'll give W partial credit for the FY 2009 deficit blowout, at least for everything before Jan 20 (I seem to recall the Dems retaking Congress in 2006, and I think that budgets actually originate in Congress, no?), but the Porkulus is all on Obama - sure he outsourced it to Nancy and Harry, but that was his decision. The problem isn't 2009 or even 2010 - we really did experience a huge fiscal and financial crisis that resulted in unexpected expenses and a huge drop in revenues - the problem is that the picture does not look to get any better in the future. And instead of addressing that, Obama, Reid and Pelosi are determined to ram through a program that will permanently explode the already staggering deficit. It would by hilarious if it weren't so frightening. meganmcardle.theatlantic.com

To: TimF who wrote (39055)	11/25/2009 9:04:39 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

"Structural Versus Cyclical Deficits" Serious STRUCTURAL federal deficits are, of course, what needs to be avoided at almost all cost if we are to maintain the purchasing power of our currency (to say nothing of even worse outcomes then 'losing purchasing power'!) However, a big word of CAUTION needs to be said about the Keynesian principle of running temporary federal deficits during the 'bad times', during the major down portions of business and economic cycles to mitigate against wild extremes and promote and more evenly produce growth.... That can only be a net benefit to the nation's economy IF (and here's the catch!) SURPLUSES are run during the top portions of economic cycles, and credit is withdrawn during the 'good times'. That's the rub.... Never sufficient discipline.

To: TimF who wrote (39055)	12/8/2009 9:12:39 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

My Big Fat Government Takeover Rule by the best and the brightest. By WILLIAM MCGURN DECEMBER 7, 2009, 7:18 P.M. ET. Some mistakes are so big that only smart people are tempted to make them. One is the faith in Big Government. We'll see that in full force today, when Barack Obama gives another major address on the economy. On the generalities, there won't be much real disagreement. But at a time when many claim to see no difference between the two political parties, President Obama and his Democratic allies are making one distinction paramount: their operating assumption that bigger government is better government. Many of the people in the Obama administration, the president included, enjoy all the credentials we associate with the best and the brightest: the right schools, the good grades, the successful careers. Alas, whether it be allocating health care or defining the kind of jobs the economy ought to create, the policies they favor suggest a strong belief that they know what's best not just for themselves, but for everyone else too. Of course, the kind of people who are apt to push for government-imposed solutions are those who are also apt to believe they will be the ones imposing decisions, not the ones who have to live with decisions imposed by others. Sometimes that's because they enjoy the wealth that gives them escape hatches unavailable to the less affluent, such as their ability to ensure that their own children never have to set foot in a public school. Mostly, however, their trust in government reflects their confidence that they have all the answers and that it's government's job to enforce them. What about conservatives? Don't we have confidence in our judgment and abilities? Of course we do. The difference is that we trust free citizens to make decisions about themselves—and are skeptical about government. As someone who worked inside a White House, I say you really believe government should be small when you see your friends running it. Now, I know there are people who believe that George W. Bush was a Big Government Republican. And you can make arguments about spending and so forth. Even so, however, there's simply no comparison with the Obama administration. That's because conservatives believe that even our smartest friend is no match for the collective wisdom of the marketplace. If we were to wake up and find that someone we knew well had been given control over some important part of the economy, the conservative would not likely think, "Everything will be fine now that Harry's in charge." Far more likely we'd be saying to ourselves, "If it weren't for his wife, Harry would be wearing red and purple socks every day—and we're giving him that kind of power?" Mr. Obama and his team appear to be unburdened by such modesty. Detroit is in decline because its automotive giants no longer build the kind of cars Americans want to buy? Let's have the president sack the CEO of General Motors, and then use the bailout money as leverage to appoint a car czar and get GM and Chrysler to build the kind of cars that Washington wants. Wall Street execs are getting sweet bonuses at a time when millions of other Americans are unemployed? Well, instead of encouraging these financial concerns to pay back the Troubled Asset Relief Program monies and get the taxpayers off the hook, send in Ken Feinberg to set their salaries. Health-care spending is inefficient? The answer is obvious: Expand the Department of Health and Human Services and give its secretary more power. Under the bill now before the Senate, for example, Kathleen Sebelius would have the authority to decide what care insurance companies could offer, who could get an abortion under a government-run plan, what prices were fair, and so on. Of course we shouldn't draw any conclusions from an advisory task force that recently created a stir when it suggested women get fewer mammograms—and Ms. Sebelius's disavowal in the face of public heat. She pointed out that the task force does not set government policy. But at some point some government task force will—and there will be fewer ways around it. That's government by the smart. The good news is that it doesn't seem to be selling. According to a recent poll, 57% of Americans believe government is doing things that should be left to business and individuals. Not only do most Americans object, Gallup says the opposition is the "highest such reading in more than a decade." Today Mr. Obama is going to give us more details about the wonderful things all those smart people in Washington are going to do to help us on the economy. Maybe he would do well to take another look at all those bright lights around him. For the more he proposes government will do, the more skeptical Americans seem to be. Write to MainStreet@wsj.com