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

To: RMF who wrote (43047)	5/3/2010 12:40:45 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 71588

You have to have a BALANCE and you can't have a balance unless there is something on BOTH sides to balance out. "Having to have a balance" isn't a very meaningful statement. Lowering taxes while cutting spending in half is one balance. Doubleing taxes while increasing spending even more than we had planned is another. Both might eliminate the deficit (assuming that doubling the taxes doesn't push us to far to the right on the Laffer curve, which is rather questionable). Finding a balance between the two doesn't mean you have to do both, even if your opinion of the appropriate balance would be to do both. The problem isn't that taxes are too low. If we make no additional changes in tax law, taxes will in the not too distant future be noticeably higher than the modern average in terms of government revenue as a portion of the economy. Tax revenue has not dived (except for short term recessionary effects, and you want tax revenue to go down in a recession, if you raise taxes to keep that from happening you kick the economy when its down). What's happened is that spending has increases, and on top of that we've maid new promises for additional future spending. The cause of the problem is all on the spending side. So the solution should be mostly, or arguably totally from the spending side.