http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/264917/not-tax-cuts-not-wars-and-not-bailouts-kevin-d-williamson
Our deficit is running around $1.6 trillion. If we took all military spending — not just the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but the whole shebang — and cut it to $0.00, we’d save about $664 billion a year. Iraq and Afghanistan will cost about $170 billion combined in FY2011. Ending the Bush tax cuts for “the rich” — for the $250,000-and-up crowd, in Obama’s formulation — would put on average about another $80 billion a year into Treasury coffers. (CBO estimates the ten-year cost of those tax cuts at $800 billion.) The spending on the wars and the forgone revenue from the Bush tax cuts do not add up to much of that $1.6 trillion deficit: a little less than 16 percent. . . .
the war spending and the Bush tax cuts don’t add up to a whole lot in the context of the $1.6 trillion deficit. What does?
The Department of Health and Human Services will see more than $900 billion in outlays in FY2011. About $83 billion of that is discretionary spending on things like the Centers for Disease Control. Almost all of the rest is Medicare and Medicaid — the two programs that President Obama has vowed to shield from substantial reform of the sort envisioned by Rep. Paul Ryan. The other big driver of spending, as the president himself acknowledged yesterday, is Social Security, meaningful reform of which he also promises to resist.
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Response by bjw2103
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 6236
Member since: Jul 2007
What exactly is the myth here? Our health and well being is pretty darn important. These war things? Eh. And tax cuts for the wealthy? Double eh.
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Response by LICComment
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 3610
Member since: Dec 2007
The myth is that we wouldn't have these deficit and debt problems were it not for "tax cuts for the rich" and the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Liberals love the change the subject and point to these things instead of focusing on the main causes of our budget problems.
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Response by bjw2103
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 6236
Member since: Jul 2007
Ok, let me help out then. We'd almost certainly still have a deficit even without tax cuts and the wars. There are other issues. Those are still two pretty big ones, I'd say though. That said, if Congress did absolutely nothing, it seems Congress could do NOTHING for 8 years and balance the budget: http://www.slate.com/id/2291054/
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Response by Socialist
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 2261
Member since: Feb 2010
The best way to balance the budget is for Congress to go home, do NOTHING, and let ALL of the Bush tax cuts to expire. If Congress does ntohing, the budget will automatically be balanced on January 1, 2013.
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Response by alanhart
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 12397
Member since: Feb 2007
What does this original post have to do with NY residential real estate?
Really, these dittoheads should go elsewhere.
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Response by LICComment
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 3610
Member since: Dec 2007
Ross Douthat kills this myth that doing nothing will solve things. Liberals are grasping at anything to continue the welfare state:
All we need to do instead is let taxes rise and keep on rising. This is how the “current law baseline” cuts the deficit: Thanks to inflation and bracket creep, its tax code gradually subjects more and more Americans to rates that now fall only on the wealthy.
Today, for instance, a family of four making the median income — $94,900 — pays 15 percent in federal taxes. By 2035, under the C.B.O. projection, payroll and income taxes would claim 25 percent of that family’s paycheck. The marginal tax rate on labor income would rise from 29 percent to 38 percent. Federal tax revenue, which has averaged 18 percent of G.D.P. since World War II, would hit 23 percent by the 2030s and climb even higher after that.
Such unprecedented levels of taxation would throw up hurdles to entrepreneurship, family formation and upward mobility. (Or as the C.B.O. puts it, in its understated way, they would “tend to discourage some economic activity,” and “harm the economy through the impact on people’s decisions about how much to work and save.”)
They could have ugly political consequences as well. Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working-age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.
The Republican vision for entitlement reform, President Obama said last week, would lead to “a fundamentally different America” than the one we inhabit today. He’s right: asking the elderly to pay more for their health care, as Paul Ryan proposes to do, would transform the American social contract, and cause no small amount of pain.
But what Obama didn’t acknowledge is that the alternative path could lead to a different country as well — a more stagnant and balkanized society, in which our promise to the elderly crowds out the fundamental promise of America itself.
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Response by Socialist
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 2261
Member since: Feb 2010
"Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines."
WHAT? This is the most absurd thing I have ever read. What nonsense.
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Response by Socialist
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 2261
Member since: Feb 2010
ANytime someone has to play the race card, they lose.
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Response by tbontb
almost 15 years ago
Posts: 56
Member since: Dec 2008
Huh? "a family of four making the median income — $94,900"
really?
What exactly is the myth here? Our health and well being is pretty darn important. These war things? Eh. And tax cuts for the wealthy? Double eh.
The myth is that we wouldn't have these deficit and debt problems were it not for "tax cuts for the rich" and the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Liberals love the change the subject and point to these things instead of focusing on the main causes of our budget problems.
Ok, let me help out then. We'd almost certainly still have a deficit even without tax cuts and the wars. There are other issues. Those are still two pretty big ones, I'd say though. That said, if Congress did absolutely nothing, it seems Congress could do NOTHING for 8 years and balance the budget: http://www.slate.com/id/2291054/
The best way to balance the budget is for Congress to go home, do NOTHING, and let ALL of the Bush tax cuts to expire. If Congress does ntohing, the budget will automatically be balanced on January 1, 2013.
What does this original post have to do with NY residential real estate?
Really, these dittoheads should go elsewhere.
Ross Douthat kills this myth that doing nothing will solve things. Liberals are grasping at anything to continue the welfare state:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/opinion/18douthat.html?ref=opinion
All we need to do instead is let taxes rise and keep on rising. This is how the “current law baseline” cuts the deficit: Thanks to inflation and bracket creep, its tax code gradually subjects more and more Americans to rates that now fall only on the wealthy.
Today, for instance, a family of four making the median income — $94,900 — pays 15 percent in federal taxes. By 2035, under the C.B.O. projection, payroll and income taxes would claim 25 percent of that family’s paycheck. The marginal tax rate on labor income would rise from 29 percent to 38 percent. Federal tax revenue, which has averaged 18 percent of G.D.P. since World War II, would hit 23 percent by the 2030s and climb even higher after that.
Such unprecedented levels of taxation would throw up hurdles to entrepreneurship, family formation and upward mobility. (Or as the C.B.O. puts it, in its understated way, they would “tend to discourage some economic activity,” and “harm the economy through the impact on people’s decisions about how much to work and save.”)
They could have ugly political consequences as well. Historically, the most successful welfare states (think Scandinavia) have depended on ethnic solidarity to sustain their tax-and-transfer programs. But the working-age America of the future will be far more diverse than the retired cohort it’s laboring to support. Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines.
The Republican vision for entitlement reform, President Obama said last week, would lead to “a fundamentally different America” than the one we inhabit today. He’s right: asking the elderly to pay more for their health care, as Paul Ryan proposes to do, would transform the American social contract, and cause no small amount of pain.
But what Obama didn’t acknowledge is that the alternative path could lead to a different country as well — a more stagnant and balkanized society, in which our promise to the elderly crowds out the fundamental promise of America itself.
"Asking a population that’s increasingly brown and beige to accept punishing tax rates while white seniors receive roughly $3 in Medicare benefits for every dollar they paid in (the projected ratio in the 2030s) promises to polarize the country along racial as well as generational lines."
WHAT? This is the most absurd thing I have ever read. What nonsense.
ANytime someone has to play the race card, they lose.
Huh? "a family of four making the median income — $94,900"
really?
"apologize" for "confusion":
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/18/a-note-on-median-income/
What an asshole!
"ANytime someone has to play the race card, they lose."
And you wonder why Dems' always talk about race...
The Dems%u2019 Black Doormats
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/204869/dems-black-doormats/deroy-murdock