CBO: $1.08 trillion deficit, 8.9 percent jobless rate in 2012

not if you do it the supply-side way. unless you want to leave your children with a barren unregulated desert, that is.

 

The EPA is a problem, but not the only problem. The Congress and the DoE drove the incandescent bulb manufacturing plants out of business with the light bulb regs. The USDA's new lunch policy is going to cost districts twice a much money for food the kids will not eat. Regulations are necessary. However, that must also be common sense. Part of the problem (in both left and right leaning administrations) is that you have a single partisan hack making these rules. There is almost no oversight and no requirements to take economic factors into account. When Congress does actually get involved, they tend to make the problem worse for both consumers and producers.

I guess what I'm really saying is that one of the major problems right now with economic growth is that there is no certainty. People aren't spending because they don't know if they are going to have a job next week. Companies aren't hiring because people aren't spending and they don't know what regulations are coming down the pipe tomorrow. It's a vicious cycle.

Also, for those of you who love to say that government regulation is no big deal, I have four letters for you...

SOPA

 

oh god, he's one of those light bulb freaks.

.

The light bulb regulations were part of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, approved by a bipartisan majority and signed into law by George W. Bush.

It's good law - it will make everybody better off in the end.

 

I was just pointing out one instance where a government regulation (albeit a Congressionally initiated one) had very unintended consequences. The mercury vapor required to manufacture CF bulbs was high enough that EPA compliance costs made it too expensive to manufacture the bulbs in the US. Nearly every CFL in circulation today is manufactured in China. So we lost the American light bulb factories (because incandescent are bad for the environment) in favor of Chinese light bulb factories that pollute the environment at much greater level.

I've had the CFLs in my house since long before the ban. I just think it's a good example of unintended consequences.

 

Complete red herring. We "lost" the american light bulb factories because it's inefficient to pay people 8 dollars an hour to do it, and because the ENTIRE WORLD has legislated its way into better technology, including China itself.

 

This isn't necessarily true. Wages in China are rising, and combined with shipping costs, it's starting to become more and more cost effective to move factories back to the US. It's not happening on a large scale right now, but Obama's absurd goal of doubling US manufacturing over 5 years actually is looking like at least a possibility now, though the actual numbers are misleading since they bottomed in a deep recession. Our manufacturing sector has been growing fairly well recently though.

 

i know its that freaking easy. man we got to get obama out of there. it seems any of us could do it when you put it that way

 

fixed

 

Repped!

BTW- Do you guys think Barry rang up more than 4 triilions in 4 years is not by design? Presidents take credit and blame for the economy and deficits unfairly but in the case of Barry, everyone of those trillions is by design. Barry is hellbent on destroying America either on purpose or sheer incompetence or both. You want a balance budget and a strong economy? Just close your eyes and imagine Barry is an Idol contestant instead of a president and your wish is granted!

 

Motive?

 

Talking about real spending without mention defense = massive fail. At least Medicare and SS have dedicated funding sources. Defense does not.

True tax reform would be a reversion back to Clinton levels and a balanced budget. We tried trickle down/supply side/voodoo economics twice now folks. It doesn't work. The rich don't hire more people or pay them higher wages. But they do reap all of the benefits.

You fix SS by taxing ALL salary not just up to $106,800 which is so fing rediculous it's not worth talking about. Phasing out Medicare....good lord.... I wish we could do that for about a year...Medicaid too. Just turn off the spigot. After a year anyone who even mentions the word Republican would be tarred and feathered. Is it really so hard to understand what would happen?

As for tort reform every state already has it and it does nothing to keep down costs because lawsuits are not what is increasing healthcare costs. Overuse of testing and procedures that have no benefit is the problem.

Demand creates jobs and regulations are not stifling anything. How many times must we learn. Deregulate = Destroy. See the removal of Glass Steagall and the Great Recession.

 

According to the CBO, Defense spending will stay constant at about $700 billion a year for the next 10 years. That assumes we stay in Afghanistan into perpetuity. Both Medicare and SS will be significantly more than that THIS year. Medicaid reaches that level when the ACA goes into full effect. The difference is that spending on those three accelerate.

The rich currently pay nearly 40% of all income taxes brought into the treasury this year. The CBO also scored the Top 1% as having an effective rate of about 31% on average. Yes there are exceptions to the average, but that's why I propose to eliminate corporate taxes and roll capital gains into revenue. You eliminate the double taxation nature of capital gains while increasing overall revenue. The tax reform I proposed would bring in additional revenue across the board while eliminating the compliance cost of the tax code.

I guess you just ignored the part about eliminating the payroll tax and making SS a direct appropriation. That means that SS would be able to draw on ALL FEDERAL REVENUE, not just the payroll tax revenue. No one has proposed to completely end Medicare, but the fact of the matter is that right now we have a choice: We can fix it, or we can continue to ignore the problem. Ignoring the problem will end Medicare because it will be the most expensive item on the budget by 2037 (When the CBO's models crash on the alternative scenario and public debt to GDP reaches greater then 200%). To put that in perspective, if our public debt to GDP were 200% today, our debt would be about $36 trillion. The biggest piece of the pie is always the first place governments look to solve budget problems (see Education and Texas, although Healthcare will be Texas' biggest spending item once the ACA goes into effect. You think the education cuts were bad this time around, you ain't seen nothing yet.)

What part of small part of the solution did you not understand? As far as unnecessary procedures, you ended fee for service and combined it with tort reform, that problem would go away over night.

Glass-Steagall repeal was a band-aid to fix the poison that government regulation was injecting into the mortgage industry. It provided temporary relief from the over-burden that the CRA was placing on lenders without actually solving the CRA problems. The end result was a Great Recession, and we still haven't fixed the problem. In fact, I think overall it would have been better for the country as a whole to not bailout the failed companies and taken the harder economic hit. The ethical banks would have stepped up and the economy would have come back stronger.

 

You are ignoring what I said, Medicare may be accelerating faster than defense spending but at least Medicare has a revenue source which defense does not. The PPACA is deficit neutral because of cuts in Medicare reimbursement rates and cuts to the Part C subsidies. This allows for the increase in Medicaid participants.

As a % of income the poor pay more in taxes than the rich, this is inexcusable. The tax cuts over the last decade have far and beyond favored the wealthy while contributing to the debt and doing nothing in terms of increased employment, average wage, or median family income. I've seen scenarios of a consumption tax that I might be able to support as long as there are appropriate exclusions.

Um you mentioned completely eliminating Medicare when you said you would phase it out. Allowing SS to draw on all federal revenue just exacerbates the problem by not creating new revenue. Eliminating the SS cap fixes the revenue problem. Also as I already explained tort reform is already in place and has done NOTHING to curb healthcare costs because lawsuits are not the problem. Doctors cry that they have to perform defensive medicine but that isn't the issue either. What's the issue is we need evidence based care with accountability for results. FFS and managed care do nothing to address this problem.

Lol are conservatives still trying to blame the CRA? What a joke that argument was debunked years ago.

http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html

Also it is beyond asinine to think the invisible hand would have just swooped in and fixed everything after the failure of AIG, CITI, Merril Lynch, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Lehman, etc. Do you honestly think allowing all of those firms to fail within weeks of each other would not have caused an economic meltdown the likes of which we may never have recovered from?

 

How in the hell does this myth still exist?

The CRA had NOTHING to do with 2008.

http://bbs.clutchcity.net/showthread.php?p=6425133

Post 39. I'm tired of constantly reposting it.

as for your second point, there were no ethical banks, and NONE of them would have survived. The regulated depository system did not fail in 2008, but among the investment banks, I think you have to realize, ALL of them stood to fail. Under that shock, it would not have been surprising to see even the regulated depository system fail.

Literally, we were 2 steps away from AIG failing, then Merrill Lynch failing, then Goldman failing, then who knows? GE had trouble financing at the time. A LOT of American businesses would have been punished for no ******* good reason.

Now, were the bailouts badly designed? Yes. Is it a disgrace that we still have people pushing for deregulation, instead of fixing a system that almost killed us? Yes. But the essantial fact remains that at the time, if the United States did not act, there would be close to nothing to act on.

I am highly angry that there have not been more substantial regulations and punishments (including jail time) handed out to make sure that this socialized loss was not repeated, but the fact remains that at the time, it was the right call under the circumstances.

 

Let everything fail!

 

Please stop replying to the many incarnations of trader jorge

 

Good grief. All of these arguments are so pitiful and out-of-date it hurts. Turn off FoxNews dude.

 

In short: the CBO numbers are a worst case scenario...which is very unlikely

The deficit might go up a bit, but I don't see the unemployment rate going back up to 9%