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

To: i-node who wrote (686894)	12/2/2012 3:36:23 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1582684

December 2, 2012, 10:02 am The Full McConnell In his interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mitch McConnell finally mentioned a few sort-of specifics about what spending cuts the GOP wants: raising the Medicare age, charging higher premiums to affluent Medicare recipients, and changing the price indexing of Social Security. But how much does all this amount to? I’ve already noted that the CBO has estimated the fiscal savings from raising the Medicare age at $113 billion over the next decade. A study of health care options (pdf) from a few years ago put the savings from expanded premiums at $20 billion (Option 91) – that number would be somewhat higher now, but still small. I haven’t found a 10-year estimate of the Social Security indexing idea, but we can roll our own. The idea is to replace the CPI with a “chained” measure that typically rises about 0.3 percentage points less per year. Apply this to the CBO projections of Social Security spending under current policy and I get 10-year savings of $186 billion. So, if we take all of McConnell’s ideas together, we get a bit more than $300 billion. Getting this would, by the way, impose substantial hardship – seniors would be forced into inferior private insurance, and there are good reasons to believe that the true inflation rate facing seniors is actually higher, not lower, than the CPI. Still, what we’re looking at overall is a saving equal to only about one-fifth of what Obama is proposing to raise by higher taxes. And that’s it; has anyone heard even a peep from the GOP about what else they’d like to cut? This is pathetic – and these people are definitely not serious. krugman.blogs.nytimes.com

To: i-node who wrote (686894)	12/2/2012 6:53:50 PM
From: Taro	4 Recommendations Respond to of 1582684

Very good, really. But way over the intellectual level of CJ and his peers. /Taro

To: i-node who wrote (686894)	12/4/2012 7:05:21 AM
From: Alighieri	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1582684

there is simply no way revenues should have gone up when the tax cuts went into effect. They didn't...stop saying that they did. Al

To: i-node who wrote (686894)	12/4/2012 11:23:17 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1582684

I would argue, correctly, that the fact GWB was president when the economy collapsed in no way suggests causation (the cause was, of course, Clinton policy that happened to take several years to manifest itself). Yet, most of the liberals, and many others, in this country today believe GWB CAUSED the collapse because he happened to be there. Are you really that foolish? Argue all you want but most people know and accept the truth.......winger types on Wall Street and in the banks had a field day under Bush. The evidence is so strong that your party insists that GW be kept hidden down in TX and that word is GW is back to drinking. Yeah, you are a silly, partisan man who suffers from a bad case of bad ideology.

To: i-node who wrote (686894)	12/4/2012 11:25:50 AM
From: tejek	1 Recommendation Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1582684

To: i-node who wrote (686894)	12/5/2012 8:37:23 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1582684

Did he cause the collapse? No. It was decades in the making. Starting in the late 1970s, given a big push forward with the Reagan administration. All that Smirk did was to stomp on the accelerator even more. It could have been headed off, even at that late of a date, but that would have been smart. I am not all over the map on the issue of causation. But after you eliminate all of the other likely factors and are left with one likely factor and a bunch of unlikely ones, it is a decent bet that the remaining likely factor is the cause. Unlike you who throws out any factor that doesn't align with your partisanship and then magnify the ones that do until you can craft an answer that you wanted in the first place. If, as the Left has suggested, GWB's tax cuts CAUSED deficits, there is simply no way revenues should have gone up when the tax cuts went into effect And here is the perfect example. See, there is something that happens at the end of a recession. It is called a recovery. Which, unless the recession is caused by structural reasons like the last one, very soon boosts things above the previous peak. See, the population has grown in that intervening time period. Now there is some boost due to the tax cut, but it never is enough to actually pay for that cut. And then, when you do like Bush did, and throw a massive party with huge deficits, well there goes your debt on a skyward trajectory. I suppose your argument is that revenue would have gone up WITH or WITHOUT the tax cuts, except for the fact that they had not in the previous two years. Well, let us examine the actual facts. For one, it wasn't really a recession in the US. There never was 2 quarters of negative growth. But, in many other countries did get a real recession, so let us say it counts. The first tax cut was in 2001. Our economy has slowed at that point, even gone a little negative once and was headed for a second when the bill was passed. It went up a little and then went into the longest period of low activity since it started. By the time the second cut was passed it was just starting to climb back up again. To my eye, it looks like if tax cuts make a difference, it is a small one. Which is the conclusion that the CRS study came to. The covariant factor you ignore is that tax cuts are almost always passed towards the end of a recession. Usually when things are starting to approve. Now you will want to latch on that as proof, but you would have to ignore the fact that not every recession has a tax cut and the recovery profile of those is very similar to the recessions that have a tax cut. Again, if there is any effect it is small. Now at what point do you go "Damn, I guess voodoo doesn't really work"?