Re: Excellent News - Bush Approval Slumps

In article <cDQ4f.21522$MG.8859@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
TheLetterK <theletterk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[...]

>> This is an exceedingly silly claim. The government can certainly pay
>> down debt, both internal and external, through higher taxation. Please
>> explain what mechanism prevents this.
>Internal national debt is gauged by a negative deficit in services
>claimed to be provided through money gained by taxes and other
>money-gathering ventures undertaken by the federal government.
>Increasing the amount of services provided for your tax dollars is the
>only reasonable way to pay off an internal national debt. You cannot pay
>"money owed to the people" by taking more money from the people.
>
>In other words, you have to increase governmental efficiency to 'pay
>off' the 'internal' portion of the national debt. How large the national
>debt really is, is also questionable. Do you gauge national debt by
>adding together decades of budget deficits and applying interest? Well,
>you can, but national economics are a bit more complex than personal
>economics.

You've way oversimplified it. The "badness" of the fed's internal
deficit/debt depends on how they move the money around. Where they get
it vs. where they spend it. At the present, the federal government is
taking a larger proportion of its income from the poor (meaning in this
context the half of the income spectrum opposite the side called rich)
due to a series of tax cuts that have benefitted mostly the wealthy.
Simultaneously, they've been structuring policies and laws so that
the bulk of the money is spent on large entities, like the contractors
in Iraq, the military's other various contractors, and bonds sales to
overseas nations like China.
So you wind up with a situation where money is actually pushed by the
federal government up the income ladder. That's bad because every
economy that has a huge spread between rich and poor with little or no
middle class is either dysfunctional now, or has already failed.
Our current government tops that by also pumping a good fraction of
that cash overseas.
OTOH, the federal government has in the past done the opposite on a
short-term basis with public works projects like the Hoover Dam.
Capital gains and estate taxes coupled with medicare and similar
programs were also designed to actively push money down the economy to
keep it balanced.
Among the possible solutions is, as you say, increasing the bang for
the buck from federal programs. Also among the possible solutions would
be returning the tax and spending structure to where it was a decade
ago. Because that was working just fine.

--
B.B. --I am not a goat! thegoat4 at airmail dot net
movies.crooksandliars.com/Countdown-Timeline-Katrina.mov
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