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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (168330)	8/8/2011 1:53:45 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 544021

I was going to mention that angle a while ago, I believe all the CBO scoring on future deficits assumes the expiration of the Bush tax cuts. It will be great fun to see all the current "deficit hawks" reverse field on that, and explain how it's all a good thing for the deficit/debt to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Maybe they'll revive Artie Laffer's napkin to show how it will mysteriously increase revenue, all historical evidence and previous abandonment of that rationale notwithstanding. I hope Obama can stand up to that, though I'm sure that in current Republican fashion they'll do everything in their power to force an extension through, by whatever means available. It'd be ironic but not at all unexpected that they'd tie it to the next debt ceiling bill.

To: ChinuSFO who wrote (168330)	8/8/2011 3:43:16 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 544021

S&P noted that its downgrade was partly attributable to its belief Bush-era tax cuts will now not expire at the end of next year, depriving the Treasury of fresh revenue. “We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the [debt ceiling] act,” the agency wrote. The professionals and those that they represent will just ignore the above, and continue to praise the legacy of St. Ron and all that they believe that he represents. They continue to maintain that all we need is "cap, cut and balance," with not only no new taxes but a tax cut to a flat rate. And they actually believe that they are in touch with reality and everyone who disagrees with them is not. Geez, after all, if just ditch foreign aid, we'll cut the budget by 25%. They are being perfectly rational.... American Public Vastly Overestimates Amount of U.S. Foreign Aid November 29, 2010 Questionnaire with Findings, Methodology (PDF) As debates about how to deal with the budget deficit have heated up in recent weeks, a new WorldPublicOpinion.org/Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans continue to vastly overestimate the amount of the federal budget that is devoted to foreign aid. Asked to estimate how much of the federal budget goes to foreign aid the median estimate is 25 percent. Asked how much they thought would be an "appropriate" percentage the median response is 10 percent. In fact just 1 percent of the federal budget goes to foreign aid. Even if one only includes the discretionary part of the federal budget, foreign aid represents only 2.6 percent. This set of questions has been asked repeatedly since the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) first asked them in 1995, and it was subsequently asked by other organizations as well. Over the years the most common median estimate was that foreign aid represented 20 percent of the budget, most recently in a 2004 poll by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. worldpublicopinion.org