Re: Is Anyone In This Group Enthusiastic About Any Candidate?


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:423do31tnvrd6g58p2c4i5t5409r3s1sif@xxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 13:04:44 -0600, "John Galt"
<whoisjohngalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:91oco3pfln90inuo6hknbo14lg222u0ed0@xxxxxxxxxx
On Thu, 10 Jan 2008 10:45:29 -0600, "John Galt"


<snip>


Haven't you noticed? The economy is already FUBAB,
thanks to the borrow-and-spend "economic philosophy".

I've noticed. Things can always get worse, and quite easily, for example
by
ignoring Medicare funding for a couple more terms.



Yep, things can get worse, especially if we continue to
elect the party that not merely allowed things to get this.
bad, but actively worked to get them this bad.

This is simply the idiocy of partisanship. **At this moment in time**,
the
GOP are the the big spenders and the ones who are most accountable for the
economic difficulties we are facing. Granted. Fast forward a decade and a
half. If nothing is done about Medicare by then, the imbalance of Medicare
will swamp the paltry 10T that the two parties (not all of that is GOP --
a
majority, but not all) have given us.


Yeah. It's going to be harder to do anything about medicaid
now that the country is an economic basket case though.

We have to raise taxes.

You can't -- you're bordering on a recession. If you notice, the Dems are
now discussing tax cuts of their own:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080111/ap_on_go_co/economy_stimulus;_ylt=Atslb0B6eBfYJGe0l8DsuohI2ocA

.....meaning that there are precisely zero people in Washington who aren't
supply siders, albeit not all are "trickle-downers".

< Granted, that won't bring in as much
money as it did when the USA was still producing most of its
own stuff, but we can't keep going on the way we have been.
We have to stop the flow of blood to survive, and we have to
start paying down the debt to do anything more than just
survive.

All you have to do is flatline the budget for three years and you're in
balance -- probably less.

Reagan and the Bushes were GOP. Almost all the debt is
theirs.

No, about 2/3. Here's a log chart of the debt increases, so as to take out
the effects of compounding, which is misleading:

http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/us_debt_log.png

You can see that the debt has been around since WW2. Truman and Eisenhower
kept it relatively flat, and were the last presidents to do so. Kennedy
began a slight slope up, but that slope up was increased by Johnson and
Nixon. Under Ford, the slope increased again, and the slope was relatively
constant until 1/3 through the Clinton admin, after which the slope
flattened for the first time since Eisenhower. The slope of Bush's increase
has been slightly less than the Ford to Clinton term 1 slope.

Reality is that this is a bipartisan issue. Every POTUS since Truman has
been looking and a debt and failed to address it. That's 5 Democrats and 6
Republicans. Nobody held a gun to Tip ONeill's head and said "pass the
Reagan budget". The Dems had the House, he obviously failed in his oversight
function, a single glance at this graph tells us. Clinton raised taxes, but
then TRIED to pass a hugely expensive government health care plan which I;m
sure you supported. Had he passed it, his slope would have been just as
large as Reagan's, perhaps more; then, he presided over the dot-com boom.
Simply put, Clinton got lucky twice in this regard, first because his health
care initiative failed, and second because of the dot-com bubble. Switch
either of those two, and he's no different from Reagan and Bush. (IOW, he
TRIED to increase debt at Reagan rates, but Gingrich succeeded where ONeill
failed.)

This country has a low tolererance for taxation, which is why precisely NO
candidates are suggesting tax increases on anybody making less than 200K,
oftentimes more. That's the way it is, Reagan exposed that low tolerance,
now the only thing to do is the thing that politicians hate most -- take
things away. Explain to the Pentagon that they don't get ALL the new toys
they want. Accept that we cant afford to keep A THOUSAND military bases
overseas, which is about what we have. Tell the farmers theyll have to go it
along without ag subsidies. Use the very clear statistics that show that
Head Start is a failure, and kill it. Give up on this damnable "war on
drugs" and move to decriminalize. Freeze federal hiring for three years, and
use contract employees until the budget is in balance.

Clinton added some, but proportionately much less,
and the debt burden was starting to turn around at the end
of his administration until Bush II came in and blew everything
all to hell again. This disaster *IS* *IS* *IS* a Republican
disaster.

As you can see from the graph, Clinton never "turned it around". He just
flattened the slope. There was never a Clinton year that debt was not added,
due to the use of off-budget gimmickry.

If $10T is paltry, we should be able to pay it off.

It's not paltry at all -- it's just paltry in comparison to Medicare's
fiscal imbalance. You can't pay it off, it's five times the current annual
tax receipts, and the Dems are about to become Santa Claus and send everyone
a post-Christmas rebate to stimulate the economy. All you can really do is
*require* a balanced budget and an end to off-budget gimmicks, and pay it
off over time. Most of that debt would be gone in 10 years.

Just
collect $40,000 from every person in the US.

Great idea. Send my dunning letter to the Caymans. I can't think of a faster
way to cause capital flight.

The schools
and kindergartens will be easy, because the kids are all
collected in the same place, so we can just confiscate
$40,000 from each of the kids' lunch money.
Abracadabra, problem solved! It was only a paltry ten
trillion dollars, no big whoop.

We could just have a bake sale. We're one of the fattest countries in the
world. Can't we sell 10 Trillion cookies? Heck, we just have bake sales in
all the embassies and get the rest of the world to pay our debt instead of
adding to it. Maybe the ambassadors can get some of those ice cream trucks
that play music and drive around the third world and sell red, white, and
blue popsicles.

Or, maybe the government ought to sell Amway.

JG







I'll leave it to you to figure out which party gave us Medicare. Suffice
to
say that the argument reverses. It's already in the cards, we're just
waiting for the next hand to be dealt.

The obivous conclusion is that economic screwup is a bipartisan effort.

There ain't no free lunch. You can't cut taxes and also
continue not merely to spend, but spend harder and harder.
If you do that, what happens? What happens is what we
have now. I never heard of Friedman saying how utterly
stupid this policy was, but I don't know, maybe he did.
Did he? If he didn't, then you already know what I think
of his Nobel prize.

He wasn't much impressed by you, either.


I don't remember meeting him. I never read anything he wrote,
and I haven't written anything. I do see what the people have
done who claimed to be guided by him. If it's true that they were
legitimately so guided, then I have every right not to be
impressed by his ideas about economics.



JG



It seems that even a chipmunk should
have known perfectly well all along that this was an utterly
stupid way to run one's finances, even an ordinary
chipmunk that never won a Nobel prize.











.

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