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

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (40924)	2/4/2010 1:21:06 AM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

I personally consider "hundreds of billions of Dollars" to be "significant". Hundreds of billions of dollars, likely isn't going to happen, and if it does it will only be over a decade, when the deficit has been over a trillion per year. There is no "bias" built-into any of this structural effort to eliminate deficits. The bias is that spending increases are already planned, as are tax increases. The spending increases aren't counted as increases since they are already planned, so there is no need to "pay for them" according to this plan. The tax increases are an increase, but they are counted as a baseline, so to just keep taxes the same you need something to compensate. And not all spending is counted in the plan, but all taxes are. So what you get is increase spending by a large amount - No problem, no need to "pay for it". Keep taxes the same, or even increase them a bit - You need to "pay for" the "cuts". That's a massive bias to tax increases. To be neutral today's spending and taxes should be used as a baseline. Spend one extra dollar on Social Security, or Medicare or anything else and then it has to be paid for. Cut taxes - Same thing you have to "pay for it" (in quotes because a tax cut isn't actually an expense, but that's the language that gets used), but keep taxes the same and no "payment" is needed.