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

To: RMF who wrote (49318)	2/21/2012 9:39:08 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

There were reasons the debt increased during tax cuts. Democrats negotiated higher spending as a cost of cutting taxes during President Reagan's terms. Democrats just spent like drunken sailors were fiscally prudent during President Bush 41's term. The "balanced budget" during Clinton's Presidency were a result of economic growth from the Reagan tax cuts finally hitting stride plus the gimmick tax prepayments from Roth IRA conversions. President Bush 43 and Congress during that time was a fiscal train wreck. However Obama has made that excessive spending look relatively tame. There's NO WAY to balance budgets simply by "cutting" stuff. There isn't enough stuff to cut. I disagree. The size of government has been doubling every five to ten years or so. Simply reenact the last budget that was passed and government would be cut by a third. That would be a start. Government spending does not create any wealth, it does not help the economy. It never will. Government spending has a crowding out effect. The money has to be stolen by governments from some productive use. When government increases taxes money economic growth slows. When government spends and borrows economic growth slows. When the free hand of the market dictates how money is spent and invested economic growth increases. These are simply truths. Defense spending has been going UP and that so-called cold war dividend has disappeared. Yes defense spending has grown. President Bush 43 played games with defense spending. He hid the cost of the War On Terror in supplemental spending bills rather than adding it to the defense authorization. Obama if he had ever signed a a budget would have combined it into the defense department authorization. Whether you call the War On Terror the War On Terror or Overseas Contingency Operations they are expensive. We could return all US troops home unless paid for local financing like Ron Paul suggests. It would save most of the defense budget. Our population is growing older and health care costs are growing faster than anything else. You are exactly correct. The problem here is a vestige of WW II wage controls. Employers started adding health benefits since they couldn't increase wages. What spiraled out of that is a health insurance marketplace where the consumer is completely insulated from any cost concerns. There are two ways to address this problem. One way is to institute death panels like ObamaCare does. The other way is to remove government mandates and let people decide what level of health insurance they can afford and let the invisible hand of the market fix the problem. That's NOT to say that I like how this government is being run. We need to CUT and cut BIG. I think it's obscene that government employees are now making MORE than their private sector counterparts. And there are way way way TOO MANY government employees. We don't need a gazillion people working in the Federal Government. We need to cut the Federal Government by AT LEAST 1/3rd, Scott Walker is addressing this in Wisconsin. Mitt Romney addressed this less effectively in Massachusetts. Unions are trying to undo the measures that almost eliminated the massive budgetary overruns in Wisconsin.\ Do we need a federal bankruptcy to force an implosion in the size of the government? also get rid of all these tax loopholes and raise enough taxes through that and higher rates to get the country back to at least a balanced budget and hopefully SURPLUSES once again. Our first (and greatest) President thought that debt and deficits were one of the worst things a government could inflict on its citizens. For right now I would be delighted to see a budget that claimed to have a surplus enough that the year was actually a zero deficit budget year. Europe is finally coming to grips with this stuff and the American people need to also. IMHO Europe is not really dealing with the problem. They are doing a better job than the US is, but not what they need to do to fix it. Most politicians are content to kick the problem into the next term for the next politician to not deal with.

To: RMF who wrote (49318)	2/21/2012 5:21:55 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

There's NO WAY to balance budgets simply by "cutting" stuff. There isn't enough stuff to cut. There is also no way to balance the budget by cutting defense. There just isn't enough to cut. That's true litterally, cut the defense budget to zero and still the budget would not be balanced. Its also true in the broader sense that defense isn't driving the deficits. Entitlement spending is. Defense has strongly declined over time as a portion of the economy, and esp. as a percentage of government spending. Entitlements just the opposite, and unless they are seriously reformed its going to get much worse. I keep hearing that raising taxes will CUT our economic growth, but if you look at the result of tax cuts in the last 30 years on our DEBT you see a different story. Reagan cut taxes in 1980 and our debt TRIPLED in 8 years Your argument has a serious logical flaw. Your arguing against "A causes B", by saying "after C came D". Increased debt, and slower economic growth, are not the same thing. Raising taxes does not equal cutting taxes. Even if you where arguing against something like "tax cuts don't increase the deficits" (a much more reasonable target to attack, since in fact tax cuts can often increase deficits), your argument would only be solid if you accounted for other variables. Your talking about changes from 1980, well then you have to deal with the increase in interest rates, which squashed the inflation problem, but (esp. with the resultant recession) had a big effect on government budgets. Also the percentage of increase of the debt is a lousy measure of the increase of the problem. If the debt was a dollar, and it tripped, who would care about a debt of three dollars. But if its $10 trillion, and it goes up 25% in a couple of years, thats a big problem. The burden of debt and deficits in a country are best measured as a percentage of GDP. The deficits when Reagan was president where bad by that measure, a new post-WWII high at the time. But Obama's deficits are close to twice as big (as a portion of a larger economy, after a recession of similar depth, although lower duration). We need to CUT and cut BIG. If cut is defined as spending less than planned, I totally agree. If cut is defined as a nominal dollar decrease, not so much. Not that I would object to a big nominal dollar cut, but it isn't strictly necessary in order to get deficits under control.