<iframe width="853" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/jwDai5NtXa0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> and I'll echo comments from twitter: Damn you Paul Ryan, damn you for not running.
Paul Ryan is a congressman who I truly believe has the best intentions for this country. Unfortunately, he's working off of economic theories that should've gone in the trash the moment the Bretton-Woods system ended. People need to stop worrying about US insolvency and refocus their efforts on growing the economy's productive output.
Reagan insider: "How my G.O.P. destroyed the U.S. economy." Four Deformations of the Apocalypse David Stockman, a director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, is working on a book about the financial crisis.
The House Budget now has a trailer? And it's one of those crappy trailers that don't even tell you what the movie is going to be about.
Excellent article. Thank you for posting mc mark. I would love to hear a rebuttal from our conservative colleagues on this BBS.
i'd like to hear why it's relevant to the discussion at hand. we are where we are. we can't erase the past 3 years, much less the past 30. what do we do going forward?
I don't really consider myself a conservative, but I'll take a shot at a rebuttal. I don't agree with most of the article simply because the U.S. is not operationally bound by a need to fund its spending. There isn't a single economist that would dispute this fact: New Keynsian Paul Krugman, Neo-classical Richard Koo, Chartalist/MMT Warren Mosler, even the Austrians. They mostly argue about how prolonged deficits affect the money supply. I'm perfectly willing to listen to any and all arguments as to why fiscal austerity is necessary. However, I've never heard a convincing argument that the U.S. government should not continue to spend (or cut taxes) as long as money supply growth corresponds with a growth in productive output. This is especially true during a balance-sheet recession when our greatest resource (our workforce) is idle and the private sector is desperately deleveraging. Most people hate wasteful spending but applaud budget surpluses. It's all about sectoral balances. I hate wasteful spending too, but at the very least the money ends up back in the hands of the private sector. When the U.S. government runs a surplus, it's basically draining the private sector of net financial assets. Unless the economy is running WAY too hot or there's been a supply shock that severely reduces economic output, there's absolutely no reason to do that.
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Of course, the Republicans will deregulate everything, and somewhere along the future, either a stagflation crisis caused by peak oil, or a banking crisis caused by playing with some new advanced derivatives will sink GDP (a flawed economic metric anyways) to the cradle of civilization. so I laugh at projecting anything to 2080, especially as that graph has no way of indicating GDP growth, and other various factors. We can barely even project 2013. though, one can only imagine--- "No, we don't believe that GoldmanJPMorganChaseStanley's bankruptcy is bringing Wall Street v2 down." "The ******* Sanghilii bankruptcy administrator froze all of GoldmanJPMorganChaseStanley's customer accounts. You didn't square it with the alien bastards before you did this?" "A surprise? No. GoldmanJPMorganChaseStanley has been struggling for six months now." "If people don't trust GoldmanJPMorganChaseStanley, why would they trust us at CitiWachoviaMerrillBank of America? No one will do business with us! There will be a run on our banks."
This isn't necessarily true. If the money is spent abroad, it may not end up in the hands of private sector. And that money has to be borrowed from the private sector - though some of that is foreign so it does drive money into the US. The opposite of the above is also the case here. If the US government runs a surplus, it frees up private sector capital that would otherwise be buying up US debt. That lowers interest rates for other debt or frees up capital for other productive uses.
I'm curious how the CBO scored this plan, given that they have yet to specify any of the specific tax changes. For example, no word on the actual dollar levels of the two tax rates (10% or 25%), or which exemptions would be maintained. It's easy to make up scores for a budget when you don't have to put any specifics to it.
