Pay off our debt

[The Rabbi]

If the economy grew at historical averages and we were able to rein in spending we wouldn't be having this discussion.

We already have the perfect model...

Yes, the Reagan years, sans a Democratic controlled Congress that could not rein in spending.

 

[Bfgrn]

If the economy grew at historical averages and we were able to rein in spending we wouldn't be having this discussion.

We already have the perfect model...

Yes, the Reagan years, sans a Democratic controlled Congress that could not rein in spending.

Not true Rabbi...

Congress: Not Democratic, and Not to Blame

Conservatives are embarrassed by the way Reagan and the Bush's ran the debt up and out of control. So they have invented a cover story: The Democratic Congress did it. I have run into this lie dozens of times. So, I dug deep to set the record straight.

As the figure shows, Reagan and Bush senior got almost exactly the budgest they request in each of their 12 budget years.

Reagan:
The first budget — passed by all Republicans and a few conservative Southern Democrats.
This increased the debt by $144 Billion.
The next 5 budgets — passed by the Republican Senate and signed by Reagan.
The last 2 budgets — passed by a Democratic Congress
Totalled slightly less than Reagan requested.
G. H. W. Bush:
Democratic Congresses under Bush passed smaller budgets than he requested in 3 out of 4 years.
These four Democratic budgets totalled $14.6 Billion less than Bush requested.
G. W. Bush:
The first two budgets — Senate was split 50/50 and the House was Democratic.
Bipartisan and totalled $20 Billion less than Bush requested.
The biggest cause of deficits was Bush's enormous tax cut, mainly for the rich.
The next 4 budgets — the Congress was solid Republican.
The last 2 budgets — Bush vetoed modest Democratic attempts at spending.

In summary: Democrats controlled Congress during 8 out the 20 years. During 4 of those years, Democrats decreased the budgets proposed by the Republican presidents. Their total effect during those 8 years was to reduce Republican budgets by $17 Billion (which is only 0.2%).

 

[The Rabbi]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.

 

[Full-Auto]

A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde

Every other major industrialized country has three distinctions.

1) Health care that cost less than HALF per capita than America.

2) Better outcomes, lower infant mortality rates, and lower adult mortality rates.

3) There is one factor common to the top 15 industrialized countries. They all have strong state funding of single-payer universal health care, instead of insurance based health care tied to employment. The bottom four countries – Germany, USA, Portugal and Switzerland – all depend more heavily on profit-based, private health insurance provided primarily through the employer/employee relationship.

American life expectancy at birth ranks 30th in the world. We remain 30th for the rest of our lives -- until we reach 65. Then, our rank rises until we reach 14th at 80. We can thank the remarkable access to health care provided by Medicare.

All those countries also share something else: Exploding health care costs that are bankrupting the state. I dont think we really want to emulate that.

America is the land of exploding health care costs that are bankrupting the state.

So the dem solution was to add additional freebees. Which meant increased costs.

The results are trickling in.........IT COSTS MORE. Hey, you can always have the dems cut a deal with big pharma and insurance...............WAIT.................You guys did.

 

[The Rabbi]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.

Are you disputing that Democrats were in control of the House, which passes spending bills, during this time?

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.

Are you disputing that Democrats were in control of the House, which passes spending bills, during this time?

Why don't you read what I said:

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.[/

If you can find me "disputing that Democrats were in control of the House" in that statement - then the answer is yes - if you can't find it - then the answer is no. If you can't figure it out - then you can't understand English.

 

[Bfgrn]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

United States federal budget

The Budget of the United States Government is the President's proposal to the U.S. Congress which recommends funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1.

Each year, the President of the United States submits his budget request to Congress for the following fiscal year as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.

 

[The Rabbi]

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.

Are you disputing that Democrats were in control of the House, which passes spending bills, during this time?

Why don't you read what I said:

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.[/

If you can find me "disputing that Democrats were in control of the House" in that statement - then the answer is yes - if you can't find it - then the answer is no. If you can't figure it out - then you can't understand English.

So you're disputing that Democrats controlled the spending process in the House during those years?

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Are you disputing that Democrats were in control of the House, which passes spending bills, during this time?

Why don't you read what I said:

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.[/

If you can find me "disputing that Democrats were in control of the House" in that statement - then the answer is yes - if you can't find it - then the answer is no. If you can't figure it out - then you can't understand English.

So you're disputing that Democrats controlled the spending process in the House during those years?

See the last sentence of my most recent post to you before this one.

 

[The Rabbi]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

United States federal budget

The Budget of the United States Government is the President's proposal to the U.S. Congress which recommends funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1.

Each year, the President of the United States submits his budget request to Congress for the following fiscal year as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.

are you disputing that the final budget was the product of Democrats in the House?
Reagan Sends $1 Trillion Budget to Congress, and Battle Is Joined - NYTimes.com

Among Mr. Reagan's proposals are sharp cuts in farm programs and student loans and curbs on Medicare and Medicaid, along with a new plan to spend nearly a billion dollars to help retrain displaced workers for new careers.

But even Republican leaders of Congress said Mr. Reagan's budget would be substantially reworked. Such a reworking has come to typify the budget process. The President's budget is both a political statement and an economic manifesto, and in recent years it has been altered so much by Congress that the final product bears little resemblance to what the President proposed.

 

[Bfgrn]

Are you disputing that Democrats were in control of the House, which passes spending bills, during this time?

Why don't you read what I said:

That doesn't mean they propose it. By the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921, the President proposes the budget.[/

If you can find me "disputing that Democrats were in control of the House" in that statement - then the answer is yes - if you can't find it - then the answer is no. If you can't figure it out - then you can't understand English.

So you're disputing that Democrats controlled the spending process in the House during those years?

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Seriously Rabbi, you are ignoring the facts. The chart clearly shows the spending Reagan and Bush proposed in their budgets and how Congress responded to their spending proposals.

 

[The Rabbi]

Why don't you read what I said:



If you can find me "disputing that Democrats were in control of the House" in that statement - then the answer is yes - if you can't find it - then the answer is no. If you can't figure it out - then you can't understand English.

So you're disputing that Democrats controlled the spending process in the House during those years?

See the last sentence of my most recent post to you before this one.

If you don't dispute it, then why do you post irrelevant information?

 

[OohPooPahDoo]

Democrats were the majority in the House of Representatives, which originates all spending bills, for every year Reagan and Bush were in office. Do you dispute this?

United States federal budget

The Budget of the United States Government is the President's proposal to the U.S. Congress which recommends funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1.

Each year, the President of the United States submits his budget request to Congress for the following fiscal year as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.

are you disputing that the final budget was the product of Democrats in the House?
Reagan Sends $1 Trillion Budget to Congress, and Battle Is Joined - NYTimes.com

Among Mr. Reagan's proposals are sharp cuts in farm programs and student loans and curbs on Medicare and Medicaid, along with a new plan to spend nearly a billion dollars to help retrain displaced workers for new careers.

But even Republican leaders of Congress said Mr. Reagan's budget would be substantially reworked. Such a reworking has come to typify the budget process. The President's budget is both a political statement and an economic manifesto, and in recent years it has been altered so much by Congress that the final product bears little resemblance to what the President proposed.

Your own quote reveals it was a bi-partisan effort.

 

[The Rabbi]

Why don't you read what I said:



If you can find me "disputing that Democrats were in control of the House" in that statement - then the answer is yes - if you can't find it - then the answer is no. If you can't figure it out - then you can't understand English.

So you're disputing that Democrats controlled the spending process in the House during those years?

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Seriously Rabbi, you are ignoring the facts. The chart clearly shows the spending Reagan and Bush proposed in their budgets and how Congress responded to their spending proposals.

Sorry, an irrelevatn graph by a biased source doesnt prove much.
Are you disputing that the budget was passed by Democrats in the House?

 

[The Rabbi]

United States federal budget

The Budget of the United States Government is the President's proposal to the U.S. Congress which recommends funding levels for the next fiscal year, beginning October 1.

Each year, the President of the United States submits his budget request to Congress for the following fiscal year as required by the Budget and Accounting Act of 1921.

are you disputing that the final budget was the product of Democrats in the House?
Reagan Sends $1 Trillion Budget to Congress, and Battle Is Joined - NYTimes.com

Among Mr. Reagan's proposals are sharp cuts in farm programs and student loans and curbs on Medicare and Medicaid, along with a new plan to spend nearly a billion dollars to help retrain displaced workers for new careers.

But even Republican leaders of Congress said Mr. Reagan's budget would be substantially reworked. Such a reworking has come to typify the budget process. The President's budget is both a political statement and an economic manifesto, and in recent years it has been altered so much by Congress that the final product bears little resemblance to what the President proposed.

Your own quote reveals it was a bi-partisan effort.

The Democrats controlled the House.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

You didn’t defend your position, you linked to someone else doing it. That is not defending. That is saying ‘see look, someone else says that’s a good idea.’

Further, your ‘cite’ fails to deal with the problem of locally held debt and makes asinine claims like it is impossible to pay down the debt. Of course it is possible. Hell, it’s not like it needs to be paid off now. We can take 100 years to pay it off, as long as it’s going in the right direction. See, the debt is not the problem, the deficit is. The deficit would not be a problem if the debt was not already there. That is the single largest reason that we need to get the debt under control anyway. The government needs to spend more money than it takes in during some periods of economic or military hardships. With a debt as large as ours is now, there is little room left to borrow.

I linked to Rothbard's piece to flesh out my own position. Nobody is coming up with any original economic thoughts here, I believe somebody said we're all slaves to some defunct economist.

Regardless, how do you propose we pay off this debt? Clearly we'd have to cut our military spending drastically, along with all of our social welfare programs as well. Only then could we even begin to make a dent. There's absolutely zero political incentive for that to happen, thus it will not happen until it's too late. I'd love to hear your theories, however.

You summarized it rather well. I would:

1 - Pull almost all out international forces back and close most bases leaving a single base in Germany, Italy and Japan. Current standing forces at those locations would be cut to a minimum (we are talking hundreds here instead of the current tens of thousands that are at each location not counting the hundreds of other bases overseas).

2 - Make other DoD cuts to include reworking the entire contracting process

3 - Rework the corporate tax structure, essentially eliminating corporate taxes but also eliminating corporate welfare projects. ZERO federal funds would go to private companies unless the government was purchasing something directly from them.

4 - Bump the age requirements for both SS and Meicare in addition to much needed reform in those programs. I would like to see a private option for SS with limited control.

5 - Drastically reduce the DOE and return most of that back to the states. What is the federal government getting involved in that for anyway.

6 - Welfare, food stamps etc. all need reform. For starters, they need to be combined and administered as a single program and should be run much close to the way WIC is handled. The more local we can get the administration, the better. Ideally, the federal part of those programs would disappear entirely so the state can set up their own programs. Such would need to be phased in unilaterally though.

7 - Eliminate ALL tax credits. That is not what taxes are for.

8 - Eliminate most tax write offs and essentially simplify the tax code to a tiered flat tax. Here is where the ‘rich’ might see some tax raises.

9 - Tax raises are inevitable. That needs to be looked at AFTER spending is reigned in.

10 - Do away with ‘free’ trade with countries who are not trading with us on equal grounds. Such trading partners would be subject to import taxes.

11 - Eliminate redundant federal bureaucracies and unnecessary ones altogether. There is a lot that the federal government creates bureaucracies for that are totally unnecessary.

12 - drastically reduce the regulations on businesses. We need to get back to simply protecting the customers and leaving the rest up to the people. This ties in closely with 11.

Well that’s a start. Just off the top of my head. There is a lot more that we need to do but all of this would take time and a voting populous that actually cared. Unfortunately, we are missing that part. The most important one.

Well I was more interested in how you plan to get these policies implemented, not so much the specifics. As I said, there's no political incentive to do any of that, and, as you said, that's because the voters are vehemently opposed to doing any of that. Since that's the case, and since this is just a start as you said, I'd say it seems extremely unlikely that anything will ever be done until we're forced to default.

 

[Bfgrn]

So you're disputing that Democrats controlled the spending process in the House during those years?

Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Seriously Rabbi, you are ignoring the facts. The chart clearly shows the spending Reagan and Bush proposed in their budgets and how Congress responded to their spending proposals.

Sorry, an irrelevatn graph by a biased source doesnt prove much.
Are you disputing that the budget was passed by Democrats in the House?

Don't like that source? How about this one Rabbi?

The Myths of Reaganomics

Mises Daily: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 by Murray N. Rothbard

Government Spending. How well did Reagan succeed in cutting government spending, surely a critical ingredient in any plan to reduce the role of government in everyone's life? In 1980, the last year of free-spending Jimmy Carter the federal government spent $591 billion. In 1986, the last recorded year of the Reagan administration, the federal government spent $990 billion, an increase of 68%. Whatever this is, it is emphatically not reducing government expenditures.

Sophisticated economists say that these absolute numbers are an unfair comparison, that we should compare federal spending in these two years as percentage of gross national product. But this strikes me as unfair in the opposite direction, because the greater the amount of inflation generated by the federal government, the higher will be the GNP. We might then be complimenting the government on a lower percentage of spending achieved by the government's generating inflation by creating more money. But even taking these percentages of GNP figures, we get federal spending as percent of GNP in 1980 as 21.6%, and after six years of Reagan, 24.3%. A better comparison would be percentage of federal spending to net private product, that is, production of the private sector. That percentage was 31.1% in 1980, and a shocking 34.3% in 1986. So even using percentages, the Reagan administration has brought us a substantial increase in government spending.

Also, the excuse cannot be used that Congress massively increased Reagan's budget proposals. On the contrary, there was never much difference between Reagan's and Congress's budgets, and despite propaganda to the contrary, Reagan never proposed a cut in the total budget.

Deficits. The next, and admittedly the most embarrassing, failure of Reaganomic goals is the deficit. Jimmy Carter habitually ran deficits of $40-50 billion and, by the end, up to $74 billion; but by 1984, when Reagan had promised to achieve a balanced budget, the deficit had settled down comfortably to about $200 billion, a level that seems to be permanent, despite desperate attempts to cook the figures in one-shot reductions.

This is by far the largest budget deficit in American history. It is true that the $50 billion deficits in World War II were a much higher percentage of the GNP; but the point is that that was a temporary, one-shot situation, the product of war finance. But the war was over in a few years; and the current federal deficits now seem to be a recent, but still permanent part of the American heritage.

One of the most curious, and least edifying, sights in the Reagan era was to see the Reaganites completely change their tune of a lifetime. At the very beginning of the Reagan administration, the conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives, convinced that deficits would disappear immediately, received a terrific shock when they were asked by the Reagan administration to vote for the usual annual increase in the statutory debt limit. These Republicans, some literally with tears in their eyes, protested that never in their lives had they voted for an increase in the national debt limit, but they were doing it just this one time because they "trusted Ronald Reagan" to balance the budget from then on. The rest, alas, is history, and the conservative Republicans never saw fit to cry again. Instead, they found themselves adjusting rather easily to the new era of huge permanent deficits. The Gramm-Rudman law, allegedly designed to eradicate deficits in a few years, has now unsurprisingly bogged down in enduring confusion.

The Myths of Reaganomics - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily

 

[FA_Q2]

Well I was more interested in how you plan to get these policies implemented, not so much the specifics. As I said, there's no political incentive to do any of that, and, as you said, that's because the voters are vehemently opposed to doing any of that. Since that's the case, and since this is just a start as you said, I'd say it seems extremely unlikely that anything will ever be done until we're forced to default.

That is NOT what you said. You said that default was the moral and ONLY option. I would agree that it is unlikely to be taken care of but that does not mean we should make that our goal. As a matter of fact, that is the problem in the first place - voters that simply give up and see such things as ‘inevitable.’ I certainly don’t see default as inevitable and even see it as unlikely. What is more likely IMHO, is that we will come to terms in a decade when there is going to be extreme pains in righting the ship.

For me, I will do the only thing that I can do: vote for the politicians that reflect the direction I wan tto see the country go in. I suggest more people do the same.

 

[Againsheila]

Okay, how about first we stop spending money in other countries? Bring our soldiers home and let them guard our own borders?