I feel like I'm beating a dead horse here, but considering the following: - The US government is the monopoly supplier of a fiat currency in an international freely floating exchange rate system - The US has not been operationally bound by a need to fund its spending since 1971. - The sale of Treasury bonds serves as nothing more than a reserve drain. Primary dealers are required to participate in auctions and buy all the bonds so they can make a secondary market. - The US dollar's status as a reserve currency is a result of the fact foreign corporations are all too willing to accept dollars as payment for goods and services rendered. Even if one day (and it won't happen overnight) we lose reserve currency status, we still have a massive economy and the ability to innovate. Unless we decide to stop producing altogether, demand for dollars isn't going to just disappear. Why is everyone so concerned about the overall size of the national debt? Unless we hop back onto the gold standard or some other pegged system, it's a meaningless number. Instead, we need to be concerned about these two things: 1. Inflation (which IMHO even with increased gas prices, is low enough where the 8.4% unemployment takes precedence) 2. Whether government spending is funding anything productive.
Good point. Why worry about how to solve the problem? Instead let's be adults and try to only make posts with the intention of pissing people off so we can b**** back and forth and solve nothing.
I am fine with cutting out loopholes in the tax code to raise effective rates. I'm for raising some taxes (mainly dividend, muni bond, and long term cap gains all at regular income tax rates) but that doesn't solve the deficit. I also think personal and corporate tax rates should be dropped a few hundred basis points if we eliminate the loopholes. Maybe just completely eliminate the self employment tax too. Why do we even have that tax? It's a pretty damn big tax to someone in the middle class. Legalizing weed is a great idea too. I also think we should dramatically increase legal immigration and the number of naturalized citizens each year. Maybe we can also try the overseas cash repatriation again but force companies to pay a dividend with the cash repatriated. I dunno we need to figure out some way to get that money effectively flowing thru the American economy rather than sitting overseas. There have to be some original ideas out there.
Create more jobs, especially ones that pay proportionally to what is require to truly be middle class in the 21st century which is much higher than it was 20 or even 10 years ago. Not original but its obvious. You can mess around with tax rates all you want but until you actually increase the number people that can actually be taxed and their income levels, you will still have this issue.
