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

To: RetiredNow who wrote (553328)	3/5/2010 12:47:38 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574470

Equally true for passing large structural tax cuts that put us into semi-permanent deficits. No, making tax cuts harder would be a very bad thing. We already have too much pushing us towards larger government, we don't need any barriers against smaller government. Any such measure (esp. if it doesn't also apply to any tax increase) would be a lever towards bigger government. Big government is the problem more than large deficits. If we had small government with fairly large deficits, we could increase the existing very low taxes without creating a large burden on the economy. Taxes to cover all the current and projected additional spending are unsustainable, the total tax tax has only been that high compared to GDP in times of major war, and then only temporarily (wars end, entitlements persist), and even for that temporary period caused harm (but with the harm justified by the necessity of doing things like defeating the Nazis) Also tax rates are not structural, they are easy to change, and change with almost every administration (often more than once per administration). If we need extra revenue at some point a tax increase can happen. If we need to cut spending, and entitlement or even major non-entitlement program getting eliminated, or slashed, is unlikely. And the specific tax increase in question was even less "structural" than the norm, since it included a sunset date. To bad most federal programs have no such date, but instead tend to continue forever. And the extra spending is what put us towards deficits not the tax changes. If you want to contain that with super-majority rules or outright bans, then ban new spending that doesn't include the revenue to cover it, if its projected to put us in to deficits. I don't think I'd actually support the move. Its to easy to get around with manipulated estimates, or even to rely on honest seemingly reasonable estimates that turn out very wrong like all the estimates for Medicare and Medicaid before and shortly after they where passed. So it won't be very effective. And also sometimes running a deficit might not be a bad idea (clearly when where in a major war maybe for other extreme national emergencies, arguably when where in a serious recession); and even outside of such cases, deficits that are small compared to the economy, that increase the debt slower than the long term growth rate of the economy are indefinitely sustainable, not a really good thing, but not something requiring extreme measures to prevent.