Watch your pockets and warn your friends!

Playing us for suckers

Who do you think is going to pay for the record deficits Bush is running up?

Do you think the deficit fairy is going to take care of it?

A deficit is a tax increase with interest and penalties. Unless you think the US is going to renege on paying it off. This is why governments love deficit spending. They can go hog wild, and remind the gullible that "we haven't raised taxes."

 

The federal government gets more revenue when taxes are lower. The deficite continues to grow only because the spending continues to increase. Stop the spending completely and pay the bills. The budget gets balanced the fastest and taxes do not get increased.

But communism thrives on taxes. Take from the wealthy who earned their money by...you know working, and give it to those who...sat home.

The Clintons, Kennedys and etc. do not care about the budget, they only care about taking your hard earned money and redistributing it. Because they have a right to it and you dont. It is immoral for you to earn, spend, save and enjoy the fruits of your labor. Unless of course you are one of them.

And before anyone taks about a balanced budget during the Clinton administration, that was a result of the take over of the congress by the republicans in 1994. Clinton didnt sign his own balanced budget bill he signeed the republican created bill.

 

Taxes are lower now. Revenue is not meeting expenses.

Yeah, that's like saying "He's very good at managing his money, except he spends more than he earns."

Can't do it, can we? But we could stop throwing money down ratholes as Bush has done. He got his seniors drug bill, and he made sure it had a provision forbidding the government from buying in bulk to get a discount.

That's just one of many, many extravagant gifts his contributors got. But he did try to cut back a little. He tried to trim back the combat separation pay our troops get for fighting overseas. And he was charging wounded veterans for meals they got while hospitalized. It's not much, but he's trying.

Reagan raised my taxes as a small business owner. I had no idea he was still a communist.

Actually, Clinton got got the deficit down to nothing, and actually went in the black his last year in office.

Horsepucky. I remember that mess. The Republicans in Congress said that they'd shut down the goverment if Clinton didn't do it their way. He was firm, and after a bit, the Republcans caved and gave him the balanced budget he told them to give him.

From 1999:

In 1995, Clinton and the Republicans refused to compromise on appropriations, the government ground to a halt, and voters blamed the GOP. Last year, facing another impasse, the Republicans caved and accepted additional spending demanded by Clinton. This year, DeLay has decided to engineer the showdown so that the GOP will have the upper hand and Clinton will take the blame. The plan is magnificently self-defeating. The party that will lose the showdown is the party that is perceived to have engineered it. And DeLay has just handed Clinton all the evidence he needs.
http://www.slate.com/id/33165/

Clinton's program worked, because increasing taxes and cutting expenses served to reduce government borrowing, which had the federal government competing with businesses for money. Reduced deficits made money easier to get, more startups, more jobs, more tax revenue.

In fact, Clinton later admitted that he would have raised taxes less than he did, so well did the program work. Bush is doing it exactly backwards. You can't spend yourself rich.

 

"More revenue" is not the same as "meeting expenses".

If my spending is double my income, so I get a job that increases my income by 25%, I'm still not meeting my expenses, even though revenue is higher.

When Reagan slashed the tax rate, tax revenue skyrocketed, but the spending skyrocketed even faster.

If you raise taxes now, revenue will fall, and the defecit will only increase faster.

The way to stop defecit spending is to quit spending so much. Cut out the illegal programs, and limit spending to those programs that are legal.

Oh, and the smoke and mirrors that Clinton used to "balance" the budget (pass it along to his successor) was denigrated even by a liberal extremist acquaintance of mine who was a professor of economics ad U of MD.

There has not been an honestly balanced budget since the 50's.

 

Barbarian observes:
Taxes are lower now. Revenue is not meeting expenses.

For Bush, it is. If he can't find a way to increase revenue, he will not meet expenses.

Hmmm.... From the Statistical Abstract of the United States...

http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1988-03.pdf

Take a look. Reagan tried the Keynsian approach; cut taxes, and jack up expenditures, and the economy will revive. And it did. The problem was that Reagan didn't get to the part where Keynes said that it could only be a temporary policy. So, eventually, the deficit shot up even higher than the economy, and it began to decline. Clinton's tax increases corrected that skid.

Yep. But as long as you have this gang of fools in office, it isn't going to happen.

The GAO and CBO used the same system for Reagan and Bush and Clinton. Apples with apples. However, it's true that all of them used the same accounting tricks to make it look better than it was. Clinton's was just better than the others, not great.

 

Clinton replaced long-term loans with short-term loans for a temporary lower rate that was jacked up when the loans were renewed...

I don't recall Reagan doing that.

Oh, and you are still blind to seeing the difference between "more revenue" and "meeting expenses".

What good will it do to lower revenue, as you suggest? How is that going to help the defecit?

 

A liberal (Keynes) first proposed it. It was the means by which Roosevelt engineered the recovery from the depression.

The point that Roosevelt understood (and Clinton understands) that Reagan and Bush cannot understand, is (read carefully now) you cannot do this as a long-term policy. That leads to economic collapse. It is what took down the Soviet Empire.

It can be used as a short-term fix, but once the recovery is underway, you have to ease the economy off of huge deficits. The part that no politicians wants to face is ( read carefully again) eventually someone will have to pay for the deficits.

But Bush and Reagan continued to claim they were giving us a free lunch. And people actually believed them.

Indeed.

 

Why is it that you cannot seem to differentiate between deficit spending and revenue inreases?

When revenue is increased, spending should be decreased.

Tax cuts increase revenue. Period.

If you don't decrease spending, then increased revenue won't make much of a difference in defecit spending.

 

I just explained them to you. I don't know how to make it more simple.

Spending should be decreased whenever possible.

No. It depends entirely on how much, and what the economy is doing at the time. Clinton raised taxes, and revenue increased.

Not much chance of that, until we get someone like Clinton back in the WH. The GOP position is that deficits take care of themselves. This is why Bush has given us record deficits.

 

George H. W. Bush called it "voodoo economics". To his credit, he started the country back into the solvency which Clinton completed. Too bad George Junior squandered it all and drove us deeply into the current deficit.

The Keynesians have noticed that the apparent spurts following tax cuts even more closely follow increases in government spending. I'd like to see the graph on those three factors to judge what the real correlation is.

 

Clinton got good reviews, even from conservatives. Especially from conservatives because he refused to make deficits a permanent policy. He reduced the non-military federal payroll to 1960s levels. And he actually reduced spending in real dollars.

According to George Bush's people, the largest peacetime tax increase (there was a bigger one in 1942) was Ronald Reagan's. According to the Tax Analysis Office of Bush's own Treasury department...

In the period since 1968, the study said, "the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 was the biggest increase." That was the tax increase signed by Ronald Reagan, rescinding some of the effects of his huge tax cut passed the year before.
That 1982 tax increase only slightly exceeded Clinton's in inflation-adjusted dollars ($37 billion a year vs.. $32 billion) but it was much bigger in relation to the size of the economy. The '82 increase amounted to 4.6% of GDP (average for the first two years) while Clinton's was 2.7%.
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/tax-policy/library/ota81.pdf

Imagine that. Reagan the all-time tax increaser.

I remember the issue. The Republicans told him that he'd do it their way or they'd shut down the government. He called their bluff, the American people backed Clinton, the Republicans caved and did what he told them to do.

I can dig that up for you too, if youi'd like to see it again. Meantime, you need to start thinking for yourself. The facts are out there, if you have the stuff to go learn about them.

 

Really?
When?

BiR

 

Sorry. Bush's own people say Reagan's tax increase was the largest in inflation-constant dollars, and by far the largest in terms of percentage of GDP. Didn't you read the link. When a republican admnistration admits it, there isn't a whole lot of wiggle room.

Your guy made a good try, though. What he isn't telling you is that federal revenue went up so much because the economy grew at a rapid pace. He points out that revenue fell in Reagan's time. It fell because real income declined. And so fewer taxes.

Check out the Statistical Abstract of the United States, and look up personal income for those periods (use inflation constant dollars).

Doesn't he know that? Sure he does. But he correctly assumed you didn't.

Anyway you cut it. Reagan was the all-time tax-and-spend champion.

 

Well, I'm glad you finally admitted this.

Now, how about some info from the JEC?

The Reagan Tax Cuts: Lessons for Tax Reform

 

That hasn't been proven. Perhaps a graph would or perhaps it would show that an increase in government spending is what stimulated the economy rather than the counter-intuitive tax cuts. The tax cuts do seem to increase debt.

I think we can agree that that is a given.

I don't know if it will have any effect on government allocations, but at least billions won't be going towards interest.

How much money is China making off us this year in debt funding?