Ah! Here we go, higher level economic thinking! sadly--- well then. this tends to be why Austrians run and cry away when math is involved, even if their praxeology of economic logic seems dubious at best too.
You wouldn't give more money to a teenager that has just blown through the family fortune. You close his accounts and put him on an allowance.
So it looks like government has grown about 3% per year, which is the same pace as GDP, more or less. Yet despite a much bigger economy, we're bringing in less revenues than we were 13 years ago. That's seems like a very clear revenue problem.
Thanks for posting this. If we had continued to have surplus budgets circa 2000 and 2001, we would have been completely prepared for the major recession of 2008, but the Bush tax cuts set us up the bomb. That's what the graph says to me.
The question is whether Obama gets off his lazy ass and actually works towards a solution. So far he's outsourced it to Geithner while he's been out doing the only thing he likes to do -- campaign (even after the election has passed) just another reason why Obama is such a terrible leader
Grab some tissues, Texxx. You're going to need to comfort yourself for the next four years. When Obama's presidency is done, history and data will show that your logic was completely flawed. You'll make some sort of bet to disappear from the BBS during the 2016 campaign, and when the Repubs are defeated again, you'll crawl out from under your rock and cry foul all over again. Romney couldn't do any better than my 4 year old nephew.
Most of the country disagrees with you. This country voted and decided they want what Dear Leader is selling. How does that make you feel?
Repubs thinking about a "Doomsday" scenario where they vote "present" for the middle class tax cuts and obstruct everything else.
What constitutes "everything else"? GOP should extend highest tax rate in one bill and all other tax rates in a separate bill. Obama/Reid can ignore the former and pass the latter (who knew Clinton tax rates on the middle class were too high?). It will give them what they claim to want (raise highest rate, extend lower rates). Problem is if they get what they say they want, they are responsible for the consequences. Ideally Dems would like all tax rates to go to Clinton-era levels and have the GOP take the blame in the process.
http://nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com/_new...riendly-fire-from-right?lite&ocid=msnhp&pos=1 Boehner's fiscal cliff offer under friendly fire from right By Michael O’Brien, NBC News As though he needed it, House Speaker John Boehner received yet another reminder Tuesday of his principal challenge of finding a resolution to the fiscal cliff morass without alienating the core of his own party, a position that has been all too familiar in recent years. Shortly after Republican House leaders offered a proposal to avert impending tax hikes and spending cuts, conservatives attacked it as a betrayal of core principles, putting the top GOP lawmaker in a difficult bargaining position against President Barack Obama. "Speaker Boehner's $800 billion tax hike will destroy American jobs and allow politicians in Washington to spend even more, while not reducing our $16 trillion debt by a single penny," Republican Sen. Jim DeMint said Tuesday in a statement. The South Carolina senator – an influential figure among conservatives – was referring to the new revenue projected in the GOP proposal that would come from closing loopholes and deductions in the tax code rather than rate increases. The White House rejected that proposal at first glance, reasoning that Boehner and House Republicans offered no concessions to Obama's central demand that income tax rates be allowed to increase for the wealthiest Americans. In short, Boehner is being pulled in opposite directions by an administration which demands more compromise from Republicans, and by conservatives who expect the speaker to cede no ground. That leaves him with few options to craft a deal. (Boehner allies point, ironically, to some past comments by DeMint suggesting allowing some tax increases might be politically expedient.) Tim Phillips, the president of the Koch Brothers-backed group Americans for Prosperity, said Monday that Boehner's proposal "leaves conservatives wanting." "By placing an $800 billion tax hike on the table, Republican Leaders are engaging in little more than pre-emptive capitulation," Heritage Action -- the political wing of the Heritage Foundation think tank -- said in talking points provided Monday to its followers. "The latest Republican proposal to President Obama is nothing but bad policy and a highly questionable negotiating tactic." This pressure on Boehner from his right flank could have the unintended benefit of signaling to the White House just how narrow his space to negotiate really is. But if Republican leaders do strike a deal with Obama, rank-and-file GOP lawmakers might publicly break with their leaders for fear of alienating constituents and incurring a primary challenge in 2014. That’s a now-familiar dynamic to anyone who closely tracked the fiscal fights which dominated Congress for much of 2011. The government was brought to the brink of shutdown several times as conservatives balked at supporting deals Boehner had struck with Obama and the Democratic-held Senate. This same discord produced that summer’s debt limit deal, which established the automatic spending cuts that make up half of the fiscal cliff. It’s this same cast of characters who must now forge the kind of compromise which has eluded Washington for months. “We're nowhere. We're farther than where we started,” Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, the former GOP vice presidential nominee, said of the negotiations Tuesday on WTMJ radio in Wisconsin. He said that Obama is now demanding higher tax rates than the ones on which he had campaigned. As if to illustrate the delicate balance Boehner must strike, when Oklahoma Republican Rep. Tom Cole suggested last week that Republicans should accede to Obama’s request that Congress authorize extended tax cuts for all but the top 2 percent of earners, the GOP speaker emerged to dismiss it. “I told Tom earlier at our conference meeting that I disagreed with him,” Boehner said. Adding to Republicans’ political headache was a new poll released Tuesday suggesting Republicans would assume the lion’s share of blame from voters if the government were to cross into the fiscal cliff. Fifty-three percent of Americans said Republicans in Congress would be more to blame for a failure to reach consensus in a Nov. 29-Dec. 2 poll conducted by the Pew Research Center and the Washington Post. That’s unchanged from a month ago, despite a messaging barrage by both GOP leaders and the president over the past few weeks. “If you watch the nature of what Republicans have done here, we’ve talked about this and passed legislation last year,” House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., responded on CNBC. “We’ve responded to every presidential proposal. We’ve been first on the mix. The actions don’t hold up to where the polls are, but we want to make sure we solve this problem and that we don’t go over the fiscal cliff.” News reported Monday by NBC that Boehner had moved to strip four GOP lawmakers of plum committee assignments due to disloyal behavior during the past two years has only threatened to exacerbate tensions between Boehner and influential conservatives, too. "The dirty little secret in Congress is that while refusing to kowtow to the wishes of party leaders can sometimes cost you some perks in Washington, the taxpayers back home are grateful," said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola. "This is a clear attempt on the part of Republican leadership to punish those in Washington who vote the way they promised their constituents they would -- on principle -- instead of mindlessly rubber-stamping trillion dollar deficits and the bankrupting of America," added Matt Kibbe, of the Tea Party-oriented group FreedomWorks.
Recent polling here in GA shows Saxby Chambliss would be at risk in his primary due to his willingness to allow taxes to increase in order to get a deal done.
That's what the Dems have been asking for. The Senate has already passed that bill - Obama has asked the GOP House to vote for it and he'll sign it.
Boehner just needs to come out and say that he'd be thrilling to note raise taxes, and that would be possible if the GOP controlled the Senate - but that Senator DeMint cost them the Senate with his stupid candidates and therefore he's not left with that option.
Chambliss in Georgia, Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Shelley Capito in West Virginia, etc.. Hell even Mitch McConnell is vulnerable. They're all liable to getting knocked out in primaries. The only saving grace is I'm almost certain that Karl Rove will dump money into all of those states to defend the establishment candidates. Crossroads GPS really ****ed up in 2012 by not contesting in Republican primaries. They shouldve been out defending Lugar and they should have destroyed Akin in the primary. All the tea party PACs were out spending in the primary but Karl Rove for whatever reason did nothing. I think that'll change this time around and I'm willing to bet that the Republicans will manage to nominate the right candidates in 2014.
So, the way i understand it, the plan put forth by Boehner, Cantor, and Eddie Munster would lower tax rates yet raise $800b through closing loopholes and doing away with deductions. Problem is, they don't say which loopholes or which deductions. Those are all supposed to be determined later. In short, more of the non-serious pretend math we saw in Ryan's big budget plan and Romney's plan. "Lower tax rates even further and then you can come back to us with unpopular and politically suicidal proposals later. Deal?"
They don't specify the loop holes they want to close because they fear losing the votes of the group that benefits them. They want the Dem to get in bed with them and declare those cuts together.
Good article on the absurdity of where we are. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/why-republicans-cant-propose-spending-cuts.html Why Republicans Can’t Propose Spending Cuts "Where are the president’s spending cuts?” asks John Boehner. With Republicans coming to grips with their inability to stop taxes on the rich from rising, the center of the debate has turned to the expenditure side. In the short run, the two parties have run into an absurd standoff, where Republicans demand that President Obama produce an offer of higher spending cuts, and Obama replies that Republicans should say what spending cuts they want, and Republicans insist that Obama should try to guess what kind of spending cuts they would like. Reporters are presenting this as a kind of negotiating problem, based on each side’s desire for the other to stick its neck out first. But it actually reflects a much more fundamental problem than that. Republicans think government spending is huge, but they can’t really identify ways they want to solve that problem, because government spending is not really huge. That is to say, on top of an ideological gulf between the two parties, we have an epistemological gulf. The Republican understanding of government spending is based on hazy, abstract notions that don’t match reality and can’t be translated into a workable program. Let’s unpack this a bit. We all know Republicans want to spend less money. So the construction of the debate appears, on the surface, to be a pretty simple continuum based on policy preferences. Republicans like Mitch McConnell say government spending is “out of control” and would, at least ideally, like to bring it into line with revenue entirely through spending cuts. Democrats like Obama endorse a “balanced” solution with revenue and taxes. Right-thinking centrists, like the CEO community and their publicists like Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, think we should cut deeply into entitlement spending while also raising tax revenue. (VandeHei, in a video accompanying his execrable story, asserts, “There’s money to be cut everywhere.”) There really isn’t money to be cut everywhere. The United States spends way less money on social services than do other advanced countries, and even that low figure is inflated by our sky-high health-care prices. The retirement benefits to programs like Social Security are quite meager. Public infrastructure is grossly underfunded. The Bowles-Simpson “plan” was an earnest and badly needed attempt to reconcile the GOP’s hazy belief that government is enormous with reality. They did everything they could possibly do: They brought in representatives from all sides for long meetings with budget experts, going through all aspects of federal policy in detail, in the hope of reaching an agreement on the proper scope of government and how to pay for it. It failed. The Bowles-Simpson plan wound up punting on all the major questions because it simply couldn’t bridge that gulf between perception and reality. That’s why, in lieu of any ability to identify government functions to eliminate, the plan simply pretended the federal government could have everybody do a lot more work for less pay. The real domestic savings in Bowles-Simpson came from building on Obamacare’s steps to save money by holding down the growth of health-care costs and to cut defense spending by pretty steep levels. But these turned out to be ideas that alienated rather than satisfied Republicans. So basically it turned out to be impossible to find real spending cuts that Republicans wanted. It’s true that Paul Ryan’s budget plan had some deep cuts. But none of those cuts touched Medicare for the next decade or Social Security at all. Ryan just kicked the crap out of the poor. So, that provision aside, if you’re not willing to inflict epic levels of suffering on the very poor, there just aren’t a lot of cuts to be had out there. Republicans and even many centrists like to endorse taking away Medicare benefits from people like Warren Buffett. But even defining “Warren Buffett” at a level way below Warren Buffett’s income level yields pathetically little money. (The very rich have a vastly disproportionate share of income but not a vastly disproportionate share of entitlement benefits, which means taxing them produces way, way more savings than reducing their social spending.) This is why the spending side of the fiscal cliff negotiation is so discouraging. The potential cuts on the table range from fairly painful steps like reducing the Social Security cost-of-living index to even more painful steps like raising the Medicare retirement age, and none of them would save all that much money — certainly not on the scale that Republicans want. When the only cuts on the table would inflict real harm on people with modest incomes and save small amounts of money, that is a sign that there’s just not much money to save. It’s not just that Republicans disagree with this; they don’t seem to understand it. The absence of a Republican spending proposal is not just a negotiating tactic but a howling void where a specific grasp of the role of government ought to be. And negotiating around that void is extremely hard to do. The spending cuts aren’t there because they can’t be found.
