Wasn't the surplus created by over-taxing? These guys here make it sound like the Federal Government had reined in the spending. No, the Federal Government took out debt in the past and is now (or was) paying that back. If you charge $2000 on a credit card, then later make an extra $1000, you pay off the debt you incurred. You don't go spend it unless you're irresponsible. If the Fed has not used it, the money should be returned to its rightful owner. Do you actually, truly believe that the Federal government has no responsibility to pay back the $5 trillion dollars it has borrowed? How do you expect that to be accomplished if you never run a surplus? Wow.
No, it did not. Robert Reich, a favorite economist of the left, explains this well- The federal budget process allows politicians to utilize the funds from the so-called “Trust” of Social Security and to move projects “off-budget” so that they can achieve their political goal. The surplus doesn’t exist. This is a load of crap. Bottom line: there was a surplus in the late 1990s that actually, physically reduced the amount of debt the government had outstanding. You can try to mess with the terminology all you want, but over several hundred billion dollars in outstanding debt was paid back during the period, and that is now interest we are no longer paying. The SS "trust" fund is an imaginary thing that doesn't really exist in terms of practical purposes. Byrd knows that the business cycle took its inevitable downturn, and a recession started during Clinton's last year in office. That fact, coupled with the need to defend ourselves against Al Queda in Afghanistan (an operation Byrd supported), took care of the imaginary surplus (which Byrd knows didn't really exist). This, also, is a load of crap as rimrocker pointed out. As it stands, there are projected record deficits by the White House (which tends to give the rosiest view of the future) over the next several years even assuming strong economic growth. Blaming the recession or a few hundred billion in military spending for this drastic shift is ludicrous and blatant bad political spin.
No, the money needs to go pay off the debt that Regean and Bush (along with the Democratic Congress) gave to this country. The Social Security crisis that the babby boomers will cause when they retire will add significantly to the national debt. Paying down the debt now will ease that pain later. This is the conservative, fiscally responsible thing to do. Hold on. Bush will do the same thing with his self directed, individual Social Security accounts. Got anymore superficial, snappy replies?
By the way, I suspect Heath uses Browne's quote masquerading as Reich's quote incorrectly as it probably refers to the Social Security Surplus, not the budget surplus... two totally different things.
So, you are a more credible source than Robert Reich? What a wonderful argument you present to counter my claim- "that is a load of crap." LOL, good job. Also, you are correct that the SS "trust" fund did not exist. What you miss is that the surplus and the SS "trust" fund were products of the exact same accounting games played on us by Congress, the GOP, and the DNC. The surplus, and the trust fund, are the exact same funds that actually go into a general fund for government outlays.
Heath, you used a John Browne quote and pretended it was a Reich quote to suit your twisted ideas of argument. Reich never said it... Browne did. You questioning someone's credibility based on a contrived source is absurd.
Damn I can't type and think today. It should be Harry, not John... guess I was thinking of Harpers Ferry.
No, I have several quotes about the imaginary surplus, and incorrectly mixed them up. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Surplus Silliness Robert B. Reich The Wall Street Journal The Congressional Budget Office, in a report released yesterday, says the government will be forced to take $9 billion from the so-called Social Security surplus in fiscal year 2001 to make ends meet. The news undoubtedly will elicit a new round of fancy-dance explanations from the Bush administration for how it plans to avoid dipping into the Social Security surplus next year, and will add more fuel to the Democrats' charge that the president's tax cut has put Social Security in jeopardy. Expect the decible level to grow when Congress returns to Washington and both sides go to battle over the 2002 budget. Numbers Racket No one ever said political rhetoric over economic policy would edify the public, but we have reached a new low. The plain fact is that the economy has slowed faster than anyone predicted, and so tax receipts are shrinking faster than anyone projected. This is the mirror image of what happened when the economy grew faster than anyone imagined, causing receipts to grow faster than anyone projected. Budget projections are based on historic models of how the economy swings between boom to bust, so no one should be surprised if projections are revised and revised again. The more fundamental oddity is that both parties have grasped so tightly the orthodoxy of fiscal austerity. Republicans who a few months ago proudly proffered the supply-side mantra that the Bush tax cut would spur economic growth over the long term are suddenly squirming over the possibility that their budgets may go into the red in the short term. Democrats who used to celebrate Keynesian deficits as means for stimulating the economy during downturns and simultaneously accomplishing liberal objectives for enhanced public spending are suddenly sounding pious demands that the budget be balanced every year and the Social Security surplus remain untouched. Welcome to the magic world of fiscal constraint as an end in itself. Both parties have bought into the budget numbers racket -- a zero-sum game that confers enormous power on green-eyeshade actuaries in the Congressional Budget Office, the Office of Management and Budget, the Social Security Administration and even the International Monetary Fund. Their assumptions about productivity growth, population growth, levels and rates of immigration (both legal and illegal), and mortality, whirl and click and then spit out budgets that are either balanced (win!) or unbalanced (lose!) over arbitrary periods of time. Meanwhile, the American public -- though confused and bored -- nonetheless has come to accept the premises that the Social Security surplus must not be "raided," that a balance in the remainder of the budget is always better than an imbalance, that revenues should always exceed expenses, and that debt is bad. Politicians, either ignorant or fearful of the truth, play along. Much of the financial press accepts the gospel as given. And thus the gap between public understanding and economic reality widens. Back to basics for a moment. The purpose of fiscal policy is to accomplish two objectives. The first is to complement monetary policy in making full use of the nation's productive capacities. This may mean running deficits when the economy is shrinking and when neither business nor consumer spending is adequate to the task of maintaining adequate aggregate demand. Granted, this is a tricky thing to pull off. Timing is difficult. By the time Congress enacts a tax cut or additional spending and it is put into effect, the economy may already be on the rebound. Mostly by luck, the 2001 tax rebate checks are arriving at about the perfect time to give families a bit of incentive to keep spending -- not as much incentive as they probably need, but a worthwhile complement to monetary easing. The Bush administration should state flatly that it doesn't matter if the so-called Social Security surplus erodes this year, or even next. The Social Security surplus is an accounting fiction. It didn't even exist until about 18 months ago, when some Democratic advisors thought such an invention might be a good bulwark against candidate Bush's proposed tax cut. In light of swelling surpluses, merely to "Save Social Security First" wasn't enough of a defense, so Democrats raised the rhetorical bar to "Save the Social Security Surplus First." Republicans were cowed into agreeing that we should put the surplus some place where it couldn't be touched. This fictional "lock box" was harmless enough when the economy was booming but makes no sense when it's slowing. The White House should be clear with the public: Under current conditions it's perfectly permissible for total government expenses to rise relative to total revenues, including revenues from payroll taxes and current payouts for Social Security. And Democrats should stop their bellyaching about "raids." The second objective of fiscal policy is to help enlarge the nation's productive capacity over the long term. Conservatives believe the best way to do this is to allow people to keep more of the money they earn rather than pay it in taxes. Liberals believe the best way is to spend more money on improving the quality of the nation's "human capital" and infrastructure -- schools, child health care, mass transit, and so on. Both are "supply side" rationales. There is a legitimate debate to be had about which is more correct, and an even more important one about how and under what circumstances tax cuts can best stimulate investment and innovation, and when additional expenditure on schools or other "public investments" can have the largest positive impact. If the administration believes its $1.3 trillion tax cut will generate additional growth of a sort that will reduce deficits (and even public debt) over the long term, it should say so explicitly, and set out its expectations in its budget documents. For example, the "crisis" that the administration's Social Security commission expects to occur several decades from now is premised on very conservative growth projections emanating from the office of the chief actuary of the Social Security Trust Fund. If the White House thinks the supply-side consequences of its tax cut will spur growth, it should provide its own more optimistic growth projections. The fact that surpluses of Social Security revenues over Social Security payments might be utilized in the short term to pay for the tax cut, along with other spending, is irrelevant to this more important discussion. Democrats, likewise, would do well to be clear about their own "supply-side" notions of public investment, and make as compelling a case as they can for why additional dollars put toward human capital and infrastructure will add to the nation's growth. Pious pronouncements about the importance of fiscal rectitude are putting Democrats in the absurd position of saying -- as Richard Gephardt did last week -- that they're willing to cut spending on education, health care, and other programs for the poor and working families in order to avoid dipping into the Social Security surplus. The cynical totem of fiscal orthodoxy has nothing whatever to do with the goals Democrats have fought for for almost a century. The numbers game also obscures some important distributional issues. From a liberal perspective, the problem with the Bush tax cut is not its fiscal profligacy but its regressivity. Most of the $1.3 trillion will go to people who are already very rich. Arguably this makes little sense in a society becoming ever more divided between have-mores and have-lesses, and it's questionable even on Keynesian grounds. Richer people are far less likely to spend extra money they get from the government than poorer people, for the obvious reason that rich people are already spending what they want to spend. Most poor and middle-income people need to, or would like to, spend more. Conservatives may want to argue in response that their assumed supply-side growth outcome will do more to help the poor ascend into the middle class than a tax cut whose benefits were more equitably distributed, and that, even on Keynesian grounds, the additional investments by the rich will do more to stimulate the economy than additional spending by the less well-off. Balanced-Budget Fetish The problem is that we aren't having this debate. We're talking instead about angels on the heads of fiscal pins, fictional Social Security surpluses, and actuarial projections grabbed out of the ether. By making a fetish out of balancing the budget every year and excluding Social Security surpluses, both parties are locking themselves into a rhetorical prison from which there's no easy escape. Worse yet, they're imprisoning the public behind walls that don't exist, making it impossible to understand what's truly at stake.
The projected surpluses were "on-budget", aka the budget surplus, and "off-budget", aka the social security surplus. Since the "on-budget" surplus was not even supposed to grow during Bush's first term, our entire "surplus" last year consisted of "off-budget" supluses. Thus, for the purposes of our discussion, the entire "surplus" (which was really social security money that fed the general fund) was in fact the social security trust fund which is an accounting trick.
I would agree with you, if a surplus actually existed. Now that we are in recession and are finally confronting our enemies abroad, we don't have that decision to make. That is an irrelevant point.
Heath, you use the absence of a surplus to trash the essentially antiwar speech of Byrd's. Good tactic to pick on the very minor budget surplus of the speech. Heath, you cite Reich as a true source. Do you agree that with Reich that the tax essentially went disproportionally to the well-off? Don't you agree that President Bush claimed that there was this big surplus as a justification as to why that he needed to have a tax cut.? Why not then do your typical number on Bush. " Bush is therefore totally IGNORANT or a willful liar." BTW I agree with Reich that it is bs to talk like the budget always has to be in balance. Gov spending or debt is like household spending or debt. Blowing money on p*rnography, booze and eating out is a bad thing if you are heavily in debt. I
Damnit I accidentally posted. (sitting on the couch with a laptop) Damn the no edit function. Damn the small keyboard. Government spending and debt is just like household finance. There is good spending and good debt. Bad spending and bad debt. Borrowing to complete your education and spending the money on tutition is good borrowing and it is good spending. By improving your productivity or future earning power you are actually setting the stage for increased wealth. Spending money on frivolous things will not enhance your household finances. Borrowing money to spend on frivolous things is even more detrimental to your financial condition. In short Reich is right. It is stupid to make a fetish out of a balanced budget. One good reason for liberals to be against this is that the conservatives are deliberately replaying the whole failed supply fraud thing of the Reagan era.. Once they have created a budget deficit, they will then use it to justify no social spending. As we see with Heath, they will always say that we need higher defense spending despite the budget deficit.
Let me dit my first post. ***************************** Heath, you use the absence of a surplus to trash the essentially antiwar speech of Byrd's. Good tactic to pick on the very minor budget surplus aspect of the speech. Heath, you cite Reich as a true source. Do you agree that with Reich that the tax cut essentially went disproportionally to the well-off? Don't you agree that President Bush claimed that there was this big surplus as a justification as to why that he needed to have a tax cut.? Why not then do your typical number on Bush. " Bush is therefore totally IGNORANT or a willful liar." BTW I agree with Reich that it is bs to talk like the budget always has to be in balance. Gov spending or debt is like household spending or debt. edited ignore the first post
Heath-- The Reich article you posted talks about the SS surplus. Byrd mentions the Budget Surplus. They are not the same. To imply they are either in actuality or in "the way Washington works" is to purposefully muddy the issue for a partisan argument.
No Rimrocker, I disagree, for reasons I clearly stated in my previous post. The alledged budget surplus consisted entirely of the alledged social security trust fund surplus when Clinton left office. You can continue this argument if you wish, but we will be arguing semantics.
I think that former Klan recruiter Byrd's credibility is blown the minute he uses lies about the economy to batter a very popular President during a very sensitive time. The veracity of his entire speech should be questioned. Absolutely. Of course, they paid most of the taxes, so it sounds fair to me. Yes. The Republicans and Democrats were both lying to us about the alledged "surplus". Robert Reich from the left, and the Wall Street Journal from the right voiced the truth long ago. Of course, accounting tricks seemed to be a very popular fad recently. I hope the fad is over.
Okay, newboy. If you're gonna pull this crap your "very popular president" will forever more be referred to as "that former cokehead, alcoholic, drunk driving, underachieving, undereducated, failed businessman who had everything handed to him and still managed to sink every business he was given for free, and who became 'very popular' only when he lucked into a presidency for which he got less votes than the other guy and even then only when his daddy's former staff and friends told him exactly what to say and do and even then only after a national tragedy which would have made any American president 'very popular'." You dork. I just can't believe you guys are even falling for this. That speech was amazing. I just read it and I couldn't figure out which was harder to believe: that somebody finally had the balls to say it and say it well or that it really was true that no one else, in our whole ******* free speaking government, had already done so. glynch is right. This speech will go down in history. We haven't begun to feel the bad effects this administration's plain dumb arrogance will bring on this country. Did 9/11 teach us nothing? There is nothing more dangerous to this country than for us to be just plain hated and then to act smug in the face of that hatred. It doesn't take a strong military or WMD to bring us down. It only takes hate. 9/11 should have taught us that. This admin doesn't just ignore that basic truth -- it seems to want to egg it on. Bravado doesn't solve this. If it did, we'd have nuked Bin Laden long ago. When I was reading that speech I was actually looking forward to the two pages of posts discussing it. Silly me.
I always love the use of the word "partisan." It's so pointless. It's almost always, too, used disingenuously by another parisan, engaging in partisan rhetoric. There are all sort of philosophical problems with proclaiming complete objectivity to begin with... but for johnheath to do so is doubly amusing. It was a decent speach. Moving and emotionally well done, but somewhat lacking in factual analysis. It was rather conclusory, which is annoying... but seldom troubles many people on this board. The one point that Bird was completely correct about was the lack of debate in the Senate. It's truly curious that an issue which people disagree about garners so little political debate at higher levels. Everyone knows that most ordinary people (and politicians) favor a coercive exercise against Iraq under certain circumstances. However, their standards differ dramatically. Why is this not discussed more? Bird was also mostly correct about the current administration's general tenency to make derisory remarks concerning other politicians/nations. It's not only embarrassing, but it alienates people who are at least useful, if not necessary.
