http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?_r=1 Less fear mongering over large borderline irrelevant numbers and more reality.
I just hopes Ron Paul runs as a third party and is not afraid of hurting his friends the GOP and the 1%.
After listening to the GOP debates, I share your lack confidence in the current crop of Republican candidates. However, I believe none of them -- not even Bachman -- could have screwed up a presidency more than Barack Obama. He is a great campaigner and orator, but, beyond that, he lacks even rudimentary leadership and administrative skills. He does, however, know how to bask in the perks of the presidency. BTW, apologies one and all for my hiatus in this thread. I can't miss any doctors' appointments.
Question: Is there anything a President can do . . .that cannot be UNDONE by the next president? Rocket River
Yes, I'm sure that the Republican formula of more tax cuts and more wars would have us sitting pretty today if we had a Republican president instead. LOL!
Ron Paul's position on withdrawal is similar to my own. I started out believing George Bush the Younger had a better approach than his father, but gradually I changed my mind. (View history if you don't believe me). I do believe in tax cuts and elimination of subsidies, but I also believe the nation must increase the tax base. I am not opposed to increasing the tax rate on those with incomes of more than $1M, but that is not nearly enough to cover the interest on our debt. We need to gently raise taxes across the board, and I think that can be accomplished most easily by a graduated flat tax starting at some minimum salary and extended to business revenue.
Perhaps a bunch of lunatics should put on tricorn hats and shout at a president that lowered their taxes to stop raising their taxes. And then throw in for good measure chants about how he should keep his socialist hands off their Medicare. It's a start...
Perhaps a bunch of lunatics should put on masks and burn small businesses, rape and rob their own group, trash parks and other public areas because they quit their jobs to protest not having a job. And then throw in for good measure chants about how Congress should keep their hands off their tuition grants and welfare handouts. It's a start ...
For the love of Pete Thumbs, do not fall for the tricks that the left wants you to think the current GOP crop is useless and Barry is still the answer. We are in serious trouble and it has everything to do with The Clown-in charge and his minions. Barry wants to turn America into socialist Europe and bankrupting us while he's at it. The reason Europe failed is because they have been doing for years what Barry is doing now. The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money_Margaret Thacher. BTW- I just want a new president so when I curse him or her out nobody will call me a racist!
I am under no quandry about Obama. As I have said repeatedly, I am solidly in the ABO (Anybody But Obama) camp.
While I support the idea of a balanced budget amendment, it has some drawbacks we may not want. For example, we will have to create budgets based on the previous year's income, thus impeding decisions on more current problems / solutions occuring in the budget year. The amendment will have to be carefully crafted.
Of course not, thumbs. How could anything top the outbreak of WWII taking unemployment down to 1%? That's not a typo. One percent. No president could hope to come close to that number, however, Roosevelt's New Deal was highly effective in lowering unemployment. Why do people come up with the wrong idea that it was not? Most of the people employed by the New Deal's "workfare" are seen as unemployed, which is absurd. They were employed and paid by the federal government. Read this and continue your education. Unemployment During The New Deal Era By James K. Galbraith - January 21, 2009 The view that the New Deal was too small and accomplished little, that only WWII ended the Depression, is very widely held. But it is not correct. It is based on a mis-reading of reconstructed unemployment statistics from that time, which treat the workers actually employed by the New Deal as though they were unemployed. Which they were not. In fact, the New Deal accomplished a huge amount, both in specific construction projects and in providing employment to the American people. I am going to turn over my microphone, not for the first time, to Marshall Auerback, and quote at great length from his paper entitled "A New New Deal." EXTENDED QUOTATION FROM MARSHALL AUERBACK, "TIME FOR A NEW NEW DEAL" MANUSCRIPT USED WITH PERMISSION. (I'll only quote part of this excellent piece by Auerback, but the entire thing is accessed through the link - Deckard) On Inauguration Day, 1933 (then March 4), there were machine-gun nests at the corners of the great government buildings in Washington, for the only time since the Civil War. All banks in 32 states had been closed sine die. Six other states had closed almost all their banks. In the other 10 states and D.C., withdrawals were limited to 5 per cent of deposits, and in Texas to $10 a day. The New York Stock Exchange and Chicago commodity exchanges had also been closed indefinitely. The financial system had effectively collapsed, and was threatening to take the life savings of millions of people and what was left of the world's financial system with it. In a fever of activity, Roosevelt guaranteed bank deposits, made the federal government a temporary non-voting preferred shareholder in thousands of suddenly under-capitalized banks - more than half the banks in the country - refinanced millions of residential and farm mortgages, tolerated cartels and collective bargaining to raise prices and wages, increased the money supply, effectively departed the gold standard, repealed Prohibition of alcoholic beverages (wrenching one of America's largest industries out of the hands of the underworld), and legislated reduced working hours and improved working conditions for the whole work force. In the next two years, in what became known as the Second New Deal, he set up the Securities and Exchange Commission, created the Social Security system, and broadened the powers of the Federal Reserve to equal those of other national central banks. The Hoover agricultural policy had been to dump surpluses abroad, lend foreign governments the money to buy them, and then pursue them aggressively when the debtor countries defaulted. Roosevelt had farmers vote, by category of what they produced, on agreed production cutbacks, assuring sustainable agricultural prices, and compensated farmers for the production they had curtailed. The more extreme supply-side revisionists now claim that Roosevelt should not have stabilized food prices and financed, through public works projects, flood and drought control and rural electrification, because it would have been better to starve these people off the land and to the cities, where, a generation or more later, they would have had higher standards of living. This is the logic of the so-called Austrian School of Economics, taken to its logical and perverse extreme. Apart from the fact that the resulting human misery would have been morally and politically unacceptable in the U.S., the already militant farm unions would have disrupted the nation's food supply. This policy would have put Roosevelt in the same general category of agrarian reform as Stalin and Mao. The key to evaluating Roosevelt's performance in combating the Depression is the statistical treatment of many millions of unemployed engaged in his massive workfare programs. The government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects that planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York's Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country's entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Even pro-Roosevelt historians such as William Leuchtenburg and Doris Kearns Goodwin have meekly accepted that the millions of people in the New Deal workfare programs were unemployed, while comparable millions of Germans and Japanese, and eventually French and British, who were dragooned into the armed forces and defense production industries in the mid-and late 1930s, were considered to be employed. This made the Roosevelt administration's economic performance appear uncompetitive, but it is fairer to argue that the people employed in government public works and conservation programs were just as authentically (and much more usefully) employed as draftees in what became garrison states, while Roosevelt was rebuilding America at a historic bargain cost. If these workfare Americans are considered to be unemployed, the Roosevelt administration reduced unemployment from 25 per cent in 1933 to 9 per cent in 1936, up to 13 per cent in 1938 (due largely to a reversal of the fiscal activism which had characterized FDR's first term in office), back to less than 10 per cent at the end of 1940, to less than 1 per cent a year later when the U.S. was plunged into the Second World War at the end of 1941. The reasons for the discrepancies in the unemployment data that have historically arisen out of the New Deal are that the current sampling method of estimation for unemployment by the BLS was not developed until 1940, thus unemployment rates prior to this time have to be estimated and this leads to some judgment calls. http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/21/unemployment_statistics_of_the_new_deal_era/
The only inferences I ever glean from this tiresome factoid is that we should have ignored the political impact of the depression or could just fight a war the next time. Or that somehow the bloodiest and most horrific conflict in all of human history shouldn't have been prevented and avoided at all costs. The Great Depression was as big a civic and institutional emergency as it was an economic one. In the 15-20 years before and after, you had the three largest countries in their region implode constitutionally due to economic issues. We had entire sections of the country with no manufacturing and a depressed agricultural sector. Something like 30% of the South had no electric power. If you honestly don't think that economic, educational - heck, civilizational disparity between entire cities and regions wouldn't have boiled over into class, racial or political violence then you're kidding yourself. Stop looking at all the newsreels of runaway teenagers, burned out twenty-somethings or near-indigent urban blacks rioting in the '60s, and imagine all of the middle-aged white men, in an entire town, county or region with no money, no function or purpose, literally no food and all that pride. FDR and the New Deal were the only thing that stabilized this country politically and more or less saved modern capitalism, I don't know why conservatives willingly ignore that.
OK, but that's not what any of the current GOP candidates are proposing. Some of them are proposing flat tax rates, but only ones that will decrease tax revenue. Romney seems to have the most moderate tax plan, but even that one proposes drastically cutting the corporate tax rate. (shocker, I know) Until the Republicans in Washington decide to stop signing stupid tax pledges that appease their brain dead base, nothing will get done to actually fix the deficit.
Why not amendments for stuff that can actually be calculated beforehand, like a maximum military budget or minimum tax rate?
