Archive for category Deficit
69% of Americans: Let Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich Expire on Schedule
Posted by Richard Warnick in American People, Bush Administration, Deficit, Economic Exploitation, Economy, Federal Budget, National Politics, This Blog, congress on August 21, 2010
Via Raw Story: A new CNN/Opinion Research poll released on Friday indicates that a whopping 69 percent of Americans want the Bush tax cuts for the rich to expire at the end of this year. Eighty-one percent favor extending them for the middle class.
CNN/Opinion Research poll (PDF):
As you may know, the tax cuts passed into law when George W. Bush was president are set to expire this year. Unless a new bill is passed, federal income tax rates will rise to the level they were at when those cuts were enacted. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view:
31% -Those tax cuts should continue for all Americans regardless of how much money they make
51% – Those tax cuts should continue for families that make less than 250 thousand dollars a year, but taxes should rise to the previous level for families who make more than that amount
18% – Taxes should rise to the previous level for all Americans regardless of how much money they make
To avoid ballooning deficits, all the Bush tax cuts will have to be allowed to expire when we recover from Bush’s Great Recession. The Congressional Budget Office calculates that extending the tax cuts for all but the rich would likely boost economic growth in the short-run but could hamper it over the next decade as the deficit would rise to 8 percent of GDP by 2020.
Related One Utah post:
How Long Are We Going to Keep Blaming President Bush for the Results of His Bad Policies? (June 28)
UPDATE: Mitch McConnell’s Con: Cut Social Security to Enable Tax Cuts to the Rich
The Curved World: Redressing Economic Disparity and Maintaining Transparency
Posted by Glenden Brown in Bailout, Deficit, Economy, Poverty, Society, Tax Policy, This Blog, Unemployment on August 17, 2010
David Smick’s The World Is Curved is one of the better books about the financial crisis of 2008. Despite Smick’s tendency to name drop (and it’s difficult to not get the impression Smick is the financial world’s Forrest Gump) the book is a brilliant and incisive analysis of the current state of both politics and economics. Smick tackles a wide array of issues in what is a relatively easy read (330 pages, and it goes quickly). After first laying out the paradoxical history of the massive entrepreneurial experiment of the last 30 years (it has simultaneously lifted millions of people out of poverty but has also led to increasingly disparity), Smick tackles the debacle of the 2008 financial collapse. Reading Smick’s account, it’s impossible to escape the reminder of how close the world came to a complete economic shutdown. From the book’s site, Smick has this to say about the future: Read the rest of this entry »
Milton Friedman’s $8 Trillion Dollar Mistake
Posted by Glenden Brown in Capitalism, Conservative, Deficit, Economic Exploitation, Economy on August 2, 2010
In a lengthy and interesting op-ed, former Reaganite David Stockman covered a lot of ground, but one passage in particular jumped out at me:
The first of these [great deformations of the national economy] started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.
It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves. Just let the free market set currency exchange rates, he said, and trade deficits will self-correct.
It may be true that governments, because they intervene in foreign exchange markets, have never completely allowed their currencies to float freely. But that does not absolve Friedman’s $8 trillion error. Once relieved of the discipline of defending a fixed value for their currencies, politicians the world over were free to cheapen their money and disregard their neighbors.
There’s something epic and mindboggling about those paragraphs. Friedman has been a leading preacher for the doctrine of “free markets fix everything” for decades. Stockman accuses him of misjudgment on a scale so massive it beggars the imagination.
How Can We Stop the Catfood Commission?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Deficit, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment, congress on July 23, 2010
It is absolutely beyond the Republicans’ power to cut Social Security, even if they re-take the House and Senate in November, since Obama will continue to wield veto power. The real impetus for Social Security cuts is from the “Deficit Commission” which Obama created in January by Executive Order, then stacked with people (including its bipartisan co-Chairs) who have long favored slashing the program, and whose recommendations now enjoy the right of an up-or-down vote in Congress after the November election, thanks to the recent maneuvering by Nancy Pelosi. The desire to cut Social Security is fully bipartisan (otherwise it couldn’t happen) and pushed by the billionaire class that controls the Government.
If the Catfood Commission proposes a bill slashing Social Security and Medicare benefits and it comes to the House floor, Republicans and Blue Dog Dems will vote for it. Even if all the progressive-leaning Democrats oppose it on a straight vote, it will probably pass. Millions of retirees will fall out of the middle class into poverty.
Jon Walker on FDL thinks that House progressives can threaten to remove Rep. Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House if she allows such a vote. That does not seem likely. IMHO if they had that kind of cojones then Bush would have been impeached and health care would include a public option.
Here’s the question. How can we stop the Catfood Commission?
Related One Utah post:
Budget Priorities Left to Catfood Commission (July 6)
Budget Priorities Left to Catfood Commission
Posted by Richard Warnick in Deficit, Democrats, Disaster, Economic Exploitation, Economy, National Politics, This Blog, Unemployment on July 6, 2010
The country’s best known Nobel economist, Paul Krugman, put it plainly: “[P]enny-pinching in the midst of a severely depressed economy is no way to deal with our long-run budget problems.”
Democrats aren’t listening to Krugman. The House just passed a “budget enforcement resolution” that didn’t actually contain a budget, but did call for a spending cap of $1.12 trillion. That means $7 billion will probably have to be carved out of existing domestic spending. The bloated Department of Defense budget plus supplemental funding for Iraq and Afghanistan are exempt from cuts.
How do they propose to eliminate $7 billion in non-military spending? The details were left to President Obama’s bipartisan fiscal commission (aka the Catfood Commission), which is supposed to report a long-term budget plan by December.
The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was established with little fanfare last February. It is stacked with prominent advocates of drastic cuts to social programs, including Social Security and Medicare. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky, most people have forgotten President Clinton’s plan to raid the Social Security Trust Fund for the benefit of Wall Street. Now it’s back.
There is no way the Catfood Commission is going to recommend raising taxes on the rich, quickly bringing the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, or creating jobs for 15 million unemployed Americans. Those measures would balance the federal budget, but they wouldn’t benefit Wall Street as much as privatizing Social Security.
Marie Antoinette never said “let ‘em eat catfood.” But she was in favor of balancing the budget on the backs of low-income people, and that’s what the Catfood Commission is all about.
UPDATE: The hand wringing about $7 billion in budget cuts is astounding when you stop to think that’s ONE PERCENT of military spending. Also, the federal government hands out more than $4.5 billion a year to the oil & gas industry in tax subsidies alone (this does not include the federal leases auctioned off at bargain prices).
How Long Are We Going to Keep Blaming President Bush for the Results of His Bad Policies?
Posted by Richard Warnick in Afghanistan, Bush Administration, Deficit, Disaster, Economy, Federal Budget, Hypocrisy, Iraq, National Politics, Republicans, Tea Bag Party, This Blog on June 28, 2010
From The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Message to the Tea Partyers: Iraq, Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts and the Bush Recession are what is driving the U.S. deficit, not stimulus spending.
“The financial crisis has made us permanently poorer”
Posted by Glenden Brown in Bailout, Deficit, Economy, Poverty, Unemployment on May 16, 2010
Paul Krugman responded to the IMF report Navigating the Fiscal Challenges Ahead, arguing that the report is probably too technocratic to be properly understood by the people who need to properly understand it.
It takes careful reading to discover what’s really going on:
The persistence of deficits reflects permanent revenue losses, primarily from a steep decline in potential GDP during the crisis, but also due to the impact of lower asset prices and financial sector profits.
Aha. Most people who look at the IMF report will, I suspect, read it as telling a tale of government profligacy getting us into a hole. But what the report actually says is quite different: it says that the financial crisis has made us permanently poorer, which among other things reduces revenue, and governments have to tighten their belts to make up for that loss.[snip]
Anyway, back to the report and how it reads: my guess is that most readers won’t get, at all, the real story the IMF is telling — because that story is in effect hidden in the fine print. So the report isn’t literally misinformation, but in practice it’s likely have that effect.
New Right-Wing Meme: Bush Added Only $455 Billion to the National Debt
Posted by Richard Warnick in Bush Administration, Deficit, Economy, Federal Budget, Lying, National Politics, Republicans, This Blog on February 15, 2010
President Bush more than doubled our National Debt, but don’t tell that to the right-wingers. In a recent speech, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the Bush administration added a mere $400 billion to the debt. Via Talking Points Memo (emphasis added):
“[I]f you look at the debt level accumulated under George W. Bush, 400 some-odd billion dollars, President Obama in his first year in office accumulated $1.4 trillion, over four times more than that big spending George Bush — and that was after 9/11 and the recessions and all that he had to deal with and the two wars. Over four times,” said Bachmann.
“As a matter of fact, President Obama spent so much money that if you took all the debt that we accumulated from George Washington, every president up until Barack Obama, President Obama accumulated more debt in eight months than all previous presidents combined. Combined. That gives you context for the times we’re living in.”
None of this is remotely true. President Bush added more than $6 trillion to the National Debt during his eight years in office.
Some right-wing bloggers are now claiming that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says Bush added only $455 billion to the National Debt. Actually, the CBO said that the Bush administration ran up a record $455 billion deficit for Fiscal Year 2008 alone.
The CBO also estimated that the FY 2009 deficit was $1.58 trillion, a new record, but less than earlier projections. Most of the FY 2009 spending was obligated by the Bush administration and inherited by President Obama. They now project a deficit of $1.38 trillion for FY 2010, which began on October 1, 2009.
National Debt, FY 2001 = $5.78 trillion
National Debt, FY 2009 = $12.31 trillion
Difference = $6.54 trillion (not $455 billion!)
The Bush administration crashed the U.S. economy and bailed out Wall Street, while doing nothing for Main Street. We are now two years into the biggest postwar recession, which came close to becoming Great Depression 2.0. The middle class is in very serious economic trouble. Consumers are tapped out. State and local governments are cutting back. Only short-term federal deficit spending can save us from a slow, jobless recovery.
I guess I ought to mention that President Obama also inherited the war in Afghanistan and the Iraq occupation from the Bush administration, not to mention the unfinished New Orleans reconstruction, etc.
Republicans: Let’s Get Rid of Social Security and Medicare
Posted by Richard Warnick in 2010 Elections, Conservatives, Deficit, Federal Budget, National Politics, Republicans, This Blog, congress on February 8, 2010
Republicans have been trying to get rid of this country’s social safety net ever since it was first enacted. Now, they have a new proposal to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the working/middle class.
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, recently introduced the Roadmap for America’s Future Act of 2010. In a nutshell, this plan would:
- Privatize Social Security and Medicare for everyone under age 55, and increase the retirement age to 70
- Impose a freeze on non-security discretionary spending from 2010-2019
- Cap the top income tax rate at 25 percent for everyone who makes $50,000 or more
- Eliminate income and payroll tax exclusions for employment-based health insurance starting next year
“The Roadmap would put the federal budget on a sustainable path, generating an annual budget surplus of about 5 percent of GDP by 2080,” the CBO wrote in its analysis. Hey, that’s only 70 years from now! [It turns out that the CBO analysis is actually bogus - see update below]
Ironically, the spending freeze is similar to the one President Obama recently proposed, that Republicans and Democrats immediately denounced.
The House will vote down Rep. Ryan’s proposal, but really I think it deserves a series of town hall meetings. Let’s take this plan to the people and let them express their candid opinions in open forums across the nation!
Michelle Bachmann thinks the Republican Party ought to go all the way with this. Over the weekend she said, “[W]hoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is.”
UPDATE: Josh Marshall speculates on whether the Dems can make this year’s election a choice between Ryan’s ideas and their own.
UPDATE: The CBO analysis of Rep. Ryan’s proposal is bogus. The right-wing fantasy of supply-side benefits resulting from tax cuts for the rich were simply assumed without evidence.
For their analysis Ryan provided CBO with a remarkable assumption: he asked CBO actuaries to assume that the major tax cuts he calls for won’t create any change in federal revenue over the next two decades–at all.
Death by a Thousand Paper (Dollar) Cuts
Posted by shane in Bush Administration, Bush Failures, Deficit, Democracy, Economy, Hypocrisy, Party Politics on February 1, 2010
The moon base, as Richard has pointed out, is history. We just can’t afford it.
As a geek at heart, I feel bad about that, but the truth is that unmanned missions do a better job. I am a geek, but also a Daoist, and frankly many sensitive to the ideas have been advocating sharpening our senses (radio telescopes for example) and sending remote senses (unmanned craft) rather than spending extra time money and effort just to say “Kilroy was here” on other planets for over 60 years now.
A little sad, but not terribly.
Frankly, we have bigger problems.
Read the rest of this entry »
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