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This Whole Debt Limit Thing

Who has been the most unreasonable on this whole debt limit thing?

  • Congressional Democrats

    Votes: 11 6.2%

  • Congressional Republicans

    Votes: 139 78.1%

  • Obama

    Votes: 10 5.6%

  • They have all been equally unreasonable.

    Votes: 18 10.1%
  • Total voters
    178
  • Poll closed .
I really wonder whether or not the people will truly make the government pay for putting our nation in default and downgrading our very important credit-rating.

We are no longer the America of the 1960s and 1970s. We no longer pour into the streets in the hundreds of thousands to proclaim our grievances & our displeasure with our leaders.

We are no longer like our brothers & sisters across the pond in Spain, France, Greece, and England.

In essence, we have become good little lemmings.
 
BenBurch said:
Last time I looked, we outnumber the rich...
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That is why President Obama only wants to raise taxes on the rich instead of those making a good middle class living. Too many middle class voters and few really rich ones.
 
eeyore1954 said:
Why did the midterm elections go the way they did?
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If you notice, the new GOP house is dead set against tax increases for the rich. Budget problems are to be solved by taking away from the poor and middle class. Programs to create jobs for the unemployed are not even being discussed.
 
Kestrel said:
If you notice, the new GOP house is dead set against tax increases for the rich....
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They also now appear to be dead-set against closing tax-loopholes often used by the wealthy.

It appears that to the Tea-Party, fixing the tax-code so that wealthy Americans pay their due of income taxes is now the same as raising their income-tax rate.
 
Dayan81 said:
They also now appear to be dead-set against closing tax-loopholes often used by the wealthy.

It appears that to the Tea-Party, fixing the tax-code so that wealthy Americans pay their due of income taxes is now the same as raising their income-tax rate.
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The Statue of Liberty has a new motto:

Screw the tired and the poor.
Give us your hedge fund mangers yearning to live tax free.
 
Dayan81 said:
Those results are likely to be reversed if the GOP insists on stearing this big ship we call America into the abyss.
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I agree they are hurting their chances by refusing to consider any tax increases on the wealthy
 
BeAChooser said:
The lesson is clear. No matter what you do to tax rates, you are not going to get sustained revenues above 18%, much less 20%. But all of a sudden, you and your so-called *experts* have it all figured out and think you'll defy 65 years of history and drive revenues well over 20% of GDP and keep them there … for decades. You and they live in a FANTASY world, Bri. :D
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So I did a little research on the "phenomenon" you referred to, usually known as "Hauser's Law" (the proposition was first put forward in 1993 by William Kurt Hauser). And I could find very few people who actually put much stock in it (including conservative economists) other than conservatives trying to convince themselves that raising taxes don't increase revenues, and apparently the Heritage Foundation.

Hauser's Law was usually framed in terms of revenues not being able to exceed 19% of GDP until they went above that when Clinton raised taxes.

One problem is that in order for the numbers to work, individual tax rates are usually compared with overall tax revenues. If you pull out corporate taxes it changes the results. More importantly, if you pull out taxes from social insurance programs like Social Security, the results change dramatically. There is also a simple scale problem -- graphs typically used to illustrate Hauser's Law show the revenue on a 100-point scale, but the difference between 14% of GDP and 21% of GDP is actually quite large in terms of revenue. At the proper scale, you can also see the correlation between tax increases and increased revenue and tax decreases and decreased revenue. There are lots of other reasons why Houser's Law isn't really as interesting as it first seems, which you can read in some of the articles about it below.

Some articles on the subject:

http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/odd-numbers/2008/05/20/lying-with-charts-wsj-edition/
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/79495/lying-chart-the-day-classic-edition
http://www.angrybearblog.com/2010/11/hausers-law-is-extremely-misleading.html
http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2008/05/21/the_wsj_ran_an_opinion/
http://www.dailyrecordnews.com/opin...cle_3c15337a-1f64-11e0-b34b-001cc4c002e0.html
http://etedeschi.com/2010/05/20/a-word-about-hausers-law/

And here's PolitiFact's take on variation of Houser's Law by Mike Pence:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...pence-says-raising-taxes-lowers-tax-revenues/


-Bri
 
BeAChooser said:
How about a sensible plan (rather than a radical one)?

How about the Paul Ryan plan?
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President Ronald Reagan's former budget director, David Stockman, disagrees:

I think both parties are delusional in thinking that this is a long-run problem. The Ryan plan gets the balanced budget in 2030, the fiscal hereafter. We have a here-and-now problem. Now, what does Ryan do in the next two or three years? Nothing. He cuts $600 (billion) or $700 billion of spending, mostly from a small part of the budget, discretionary and the safety net, leaves Medicare totally untouched for three years, leaves Social Security totally untouched for 10 years, leaves defense totally untouched for the next three years, and then, after cutting that small amount, gives it all back by extending all the Bush tax cuts that we can't afford. ... In three years, he does not cut one dime from the debt.​

According to the CBO, Ryan's proposal reduces deficits but it does not eliminate them until 2040, 29 years from now. Under the Ryan plan, the debt limit would go from it's current level of $14.3 trillion to $16.2 trillion in 2012 to $23.1 trillion in 2021 to even higher before the budget gets balanced.

That's a lot of debt ceiling increases.

-Bri
 
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BeAChooser said:
How about a sensible plan (rather than a radical one)?
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Again, feel free to specify where you would have made some $2 trillion in cuts that would have been necessary in order to make expenses equal revenues in the 2010 fiscal year if no additional revenues were raised. (One way would be to make a 50% cut in the spending of all departments across the board. Does that sound like a realistic possibility?)
 
I think we should cut the military back to an officer corps and reserves. mothball much of the Navy, and put the Air Force on "proficiency only" flight status. In addition we cancel all new weapons programs. That should fill the budget gap...
 
BeAChooser said:
Well has it?

The Stimulus failed (and may even have pushed us into a depression now). *
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And that alone shows how easy it would be to balance the budget, and the only problem is all the people on the take who object to not getting their free stuff.

All you need to do is slash ridiculous stuff that has no useful real world effect.

If it was hard to do that, an easy measure would be to cut all departments' funding by a graduated percentage, say 5% first year, 10% next year, and so on.

Folks, the S&P requests to not downgrade the credit rating of the US requested a 4T cut over 10 years. Seems like it's one political party who stands opposed to that.
 
keale said:
Looks like this stupidity is going down to the wire
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And now the bankers have weighed in- default OR downgrade will be an economic disaster. They say it will raise all consumer debt that is variable rate including mortgages and credit cards.

I know how I would run against the GOP next year; "Have your credit card payments gone up? You can thank a Republican Congressman."
 
mhaze said:
If it was hard to do that, an easy measure would be to cut all departments' funding by a graduated percentage, say 5% first year, 10% next year, and so on.
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I think that would be a bad idea. All those folks collecting their pension will be devastated to find out what is happening to them.

Cutting military spending when there's a war on will be very difficult indeed.

Never mind homeland security spending and so on.....


Oversimplifying the position like that doesn't help at all
 
BenBurch said:
And now the bankers have weighed in- default OR downgrade will be an economic disaster. They say it will raise all consumer debt that is variable rate including mortgages and credit cards.
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Add to that the increased unemployment from further downsizing in the public sector. . .


I hope at the very least these compromise plans that would cut a trillion or so from federal spending over 10 years have postponed most of the cuts at least a year or 2.

Too bad the GOP has a dogmatic object to increasing revenues or letting the Bush tax cuts ever expire.
 
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